wetranscripts | Entries tagged with fight scenes

Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-40-an-interview-on-tension-with-p-djeli-clark

Key Points: Multiple influences. Make it a people story. Food is an unsung hero of worldbuilding. People live in color. Relax with a meal, then a monster comes. Fight scenes in places that shouldn't have fights, like schools, hospitals, playground, kitchens. Clues and seeds in the beginning, then bring them out later. Tell a story that sings to people and can change them. Write something for yourself. Absurdity, trauma, and horror.

[Season 19, Episode 40]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 19, Episode 40]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we are joined by our special guest, P. Djèlí Clark. We hope that you've been reading along and listening as we've been talking about this phenomenal book, Ring Shout. We've brought him on to talk to us about the ways in which he tortured us through the tension. Phenderson, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?

[Phenderson] Sure thing. Thanks for having me here. I'm Phenderson Djèlí Clark, people probably know me as P. Djèlí Clark. I write stuff. Mostly science fiction when I can. Apart from my day job, where I'm an academic historian. So, this is how I attempt to let off steam. Thanks for having me.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much. So this was… I've talked about this with the listeners before, that this was a really difficult read for me, because you do crank up the tension quite a bit. There's a number of scenes that we will… We will discuss. But one of the things that I'm wondering about, when you sat down to work on this, were you thinking about, like, the historical era, or were you thinking about how can I make people super uncomfortable? Like, what kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What drove you?

[Phenderson] Yeah, that's a great question. I think perhaps a little bit of both, one subconsciously, one consciously. Certainly, I was thinking about the historical era. As I said, I'm an academic historian, and one of the classes I teach is Slavery in Film. So I've gotten to know Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the 1915 film where the Klan are heroes, quite well. I was trying to figure out a way to bring that story to people in the genre I love. So, Ring Shout came about from that central focus, as well as, as we can talk about, a lot of other little interesting ideas from ex-slave narratives that I've read, from stories that I've liked when I was younger, people may catch some Miss Whoozits, Miss Whatzits, what have you, from A Wrinkle in Time, down to the aesthetics of Beyonce's Formation Review.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] There were multiple inspirations that I threw into this big pot of gumbo and hoped that it would work.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] Absolutely. I love that. Like… I will say, I did not catch all of that, or most of it, probably. But I remember when I… The Birth of a Nation comes really early, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see what he's doing. He did this thing, he did this other thing, it's and he puts them together into this thing." It really made me feel good. It made me feel like, okay, like, all the time that I've spent, like, watching like, sad narrative slavery [garbled twenties] and all those eyes on the pride where my parents were saying, like, it's all [garbled] like, paying off, which I thought it was a really, really fun thing. But I have to wonder, like, does that… I mean, does it ever feel like too much? Do you ever feel like I'm trying to juggle all these influences and not get overwhelmed by them?

[Phenderson] it's Well, yeah. When I was… To answer your question, when I was doing this, when I finished it, I was, like, well, this is a mess. I was like, this is just way too much going on here. I want to just throw some space aliens in here while I'm at it. Right? There's just so much going on. I didn't know if this thing would work. I always say, as writers, sometimes you create something that… I didn't have a full genre for it. I was like, this is all over the place. I didn't know how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even, at times, that you guys liked this. Okay. Great. So, it's one of these things where you take scotch tape and you put together this giant thing, you don't know if it's going to work, and it did. I don't even know if I could re-create it again. Because it was such a in the moment type of creation.

[Howard] Say, you're looking at your editor, you're like, "Wait. You took a heat gun to the scotch tape? No, are we supposed to fix that?"

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] So, I have to ask this question, did you still feel like it was a mess when it went to print?

[Phenderson] Again, luckily, so many people had read it and given it all these great… I was like, "Oh. It worked. Pshew." I guess what I was going for worked. I was so surprised, I still am surprised, at how many people like it. How much it's liked. All the countries that people have read it. When it was something that I wrote kind of as a stopgap. For my first novel. [Garbled] remember, hey, this guy's a writer.

[Howard] Okay. I'm here to tell you that whatever that gap was…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] You stopped it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.

[Phenderson] So it worked. I'm happy. Right? I… Certainly, anything, I think, of any writer, you certainly have these deeper meetings. But I didn't know if anybody would get them. Like, Erin was saying. I didn't know if people would be able to latch onto those things. People really did. I'm just grateful.

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things that we talked about when we were… Earlier, when we were discussing the idea of the narrative versus contextual tension. That there's the tension that happens on the page in the story, and then there's the tension that the reader brings to it, the contextual tension, that the reader brings to it by what they know about history…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] And what they know about the larger world. You do a really good job, I think, of making sure that there is narrative tension there even for people who do not have a deep understanding of the contextual tension. I think that's why it works when you go to another country that is not as familiar with the history of American slavery and oppression. Were you thinking about that? Like… When you were structuring scenes, that you were like, oh, I need to make sure that there's something here for people who are a little clueless?

[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] I mean… I could hold forth and have a very long discussion, like Max Gladstone on how things work. I wish that I had, like… That I had that ability. But really so much of my writing is from the fact that I love reading, I love listening to storytellers, I come… My mother was an excellent storyteller. My mother could give you directions and it was riveting.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Right? She would build up tension… You're like, oh, man, I got it, which Lane I'm supposed to switch into. That's amazing. So I think I've brought some of that to this. It's just… I mean, I want to tell the largest story. Like you said, about ideas of oppression, about being in slavery and everything else, but I also want to make it a people story. I wanted the characters to shine. I wanted it to have their own lived experiences and how I would imagine people dealing with everyday life. Having a love life. Not getting along with the people in your little monster fighting group. How you would butt heads with people that you have to work with. I wanted to bring all of that to the story as well. In some ways, to make it more human, so people could relate to it. Also, to show that in the midst of this oppression, people still go to a juke joint. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] People still talk about sex and all these other things in life. That it's not just fighting the oppression, it's people living their lives. I wanted to make sure I got that across as well.

[Erin] Oh, my God. I…

[Howard] There was a lot of joy in that book for me.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I… Gosh, I can't remember which scene it was. I remember which scene it wasn't. It wasn't the scene in the butcher shop.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]

[Howard] But there was a scene where I literally had to go make some jambalaya. Because you made me hungry for…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] The food of my people.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.

[Phenderson] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think food is one of the unsung heroes of worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] There's a way that I think food can evoke things. I've been in moods before where people like show a plate and I can hear people behind me going, "Mmm. Mmm."

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] I heard someone's stomach growl once in a film. I think it was in the movie Soul Food. Somebody's stomach growled in reaction. You know what I'm talking about, Erin, when they show that one plate…

[Erin] Yes.

[Phenderson] And I'm like… They're like, "Mmm. Mmm." I always thought it was ironic, though, the very plot of this movie is that food kills. Anyway.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] People do love their food. So I think there's a way that… I'm glad you said that, that… I know that… I think I know the scene you're talking about, like, when they're sitting down to eat. Because I just wanted to show that that communal experience of eating and enjoying these things after having a hard-fought battle… What's better than sitting down… Like, in the first Avengers movie. You go and you have some [garbled]. Right? There's something about that that is just very real. I… So, yeah. I think food is the unsung hero. I tell that to writers all the time. Don't neglect your food.

[Erin] If the food is bad, that tells you something too.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] You get out there, with [garbled vibration] plate after [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] It's not a good thing.

[Phenderson] Exactly.

[Erin] [garbled] When you were talking about oppression versus the real life, it may be think of one of my favorite things to do is to look at old black-and-white photos where they actually colorize it. Because I think people forget, like, people were living in color. You know what I mean? Like, well, instead they like put them on the wall, like they're not…

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Erin] Real. When you see them, like, I just think I saw one the other day, I think it was like Martin Luther King looking…

[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?

[Erin] Yes!

[Phenderson] They've re-announced it. People are like, "Whoo, they was fly." [Garbled]

[Erin] It was…

[Phenderson] Did you think they dressed in black and white? I think that's so true, is a historian, how people think of the past. It's hard sometimes for people to think of the past as these were people. Right? All of these events were happening, but they were still people, living their lives, bickering, getting along, joking. They were just people, and yes, they dressed in color. They matched the things. [Garbled] it was just, I guess, my gray drab suit. My other drab suit, now. No. It was… But there is something about that, how it brings it to life. I'm so glad you brought that up. I saw that effect in this. [Garbled] I understand that. It's still… It's something human about seeing those colors that makes you understand, like, yeah, these are people.

[Howard] When you… Coming back to tension for a moment, being able to sit down to a meal. That's a relief. That is a…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Relaxing thing. If you let your leader… Your leader? Your reader relax…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Into some food that they are imagining and you're describing it and they're getting the smells and the tastes…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] And the sounds and all that. And then you spring a monster on them later. It's going to be even sharper. It's going to work even better.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I loved that. I don't know if you were doing it deliberately, but as I had gone upstairs eating the jambalaya, I was thinking, I may have walked into a trap here.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I may have walked right into a trap. I'm letting my guard down. Something terrible's going to happen very next.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I think that's good points you're making. I don't even know if I do it deliberately, but I think, like, I'll tell you, there's some stories I read and there's so much action and, like, do people stop and go to the bathroom? Right, you gotta stop someplace. Give me a pause. Right? I'm really big into if I'm reading a story, I want to pause. I want people to [garbled] I want people to stop. I think… It's okay if they don't have a big scene, I want a pause. Nothing like that communal, like you said, this way that people let their guard down when they're eating, especially if they feel they're in a safe place here for people. Then there's also still a time… That was my time to let people… For Sadie and Maurice to still have their little bickering bit. All right? But also to show that they're closer than people know. Right? Also, the juke joint, right? I could have easily made this a weird mean girls thing where they just don't get along, but I wanted to show that, no, underneath all that, they absolutely love each other. Right? That Sadie will tear down this world for Maurice even if they also bicker. I think there were those scenes that allowed me to do that. I really liked it… Like I… When I started the story, for instance, starting there, that conversation. I didn't worry, because you know we're taught, like, oh, the story should start. Don't have them… Don't have people in conversation. I was like, no, I want this conversation. I want this convo in the very beginning to start the story off. I thought there I could build a little tension between this group, and then the tension explodes, and, oh, there's a monster.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!

[Erin] I also think in real life, I think we talked about this on the episode, like, we all are much more, like, going to have tension in our conversations than because monsters attack us. Like, that's a kind of tension we understand. Like… I don't know what you all do in your spare time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] But, in general, so it's like it feels so real, and then you're like and it goes to 11. It's sort of… I was thinking about, Howard, what you said about the food. When you read a food scene, it's like your nose opens up. Like you suddenly think about how things smell. Then, if the next thing you smell is like monster, like, you are… You're taking that in with a soul whiff, you know. Because you're in that moment.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] You're ready for it, and all your senses are already being engaged, versus, like, sometimes when you know tension is happening. As a reader, like, you'll tense up. Your hands will curl, you won't take in full breaths because you're in the moment. So I kind of like the idea that there's enough slowdown, that we're just chillin', laying back, and then [crunch].

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I… It's one of my favorite things also that… The… Making the reader feel like, oh, no, you're safe now. Everything's all fine. All fine… Then very not. Very, very not. I actually… Since we were talking about that first scene, I had a question as well. That kind of… I been thinking about it while I was reading it, but then when Howard said, oh, no, this is a trap… There are potential narrative traps as a writer in some of this… In some of the things… Any time we're writing. One of the things that I was… When I was reading it, I was waiting for the parade to turn on them. Because that's something that I would have seen in cinema or…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In the hands of another writer. You take us a very different place.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With, hello monsters, and then going into the warehouse, which, like, is full and should not be full, and, like… So you keep ratcheting up the tension, but you avoid the obvious one. Did you avoid that because you were just not interested in writing it, because it was a little bit of a trap, or… I realize that's asking someone to tell us… Tell us what you were thinking when you were writing this however many years it is after you wrote the book is like monumentally unfair, and yet I'm still asking.

[Phenderson] Well, you know, as a writer, it's also like a ret con. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Like, people are always asking you to figure out why you did the thing you did. I end up coming up with an answer, and I'm like, "Is that true? Or am I…"

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Just [garbled] like, am I imagining that was what I was thinking at the time? So, I know that's interesting that you say that, that you thought the crowd was going to turn on them. Right? Because they're in this dangerous place, that certainly was a Klan march. Right? So I don't think I ever thought of the crowd turning on them. I knew that they were going to be doing something away from what most people could see, only because what they have to do is so wild that everyone can't see this. Right? It has to be like this is the secret underground world. Like Blade. Like, nobody knows I'm fighting vampires. Right? This is what I do. This is the… What does he say in the movie? There's the candy coated world, and there's the one underneath. Right? I wanted to get that idea of, like, there's this underneath world that most people are simply unaware of. For that, to me, it had to happen away from the main crowd. It had to happen away from the main block of people for them to be able to have this open warfare. So, yeah. The warehouse came to me, I mean, this is where I literally had a… I've been to Macon, Georgia, but I had a map and I had a warehouse that was actually there. That's from an actual warehouse. It was… I have photos of it. It was actually used to house cotton. So it gave me the… It gave me something from the landscape to look down upon. Then I would be, like, I want a fight in a warehouse. That's a great thought. All right. So I like having fights in places that you just shouldn't be having fights in, right? Like in schools, hospitals, warehouses. It's just like that's not what this is for. But this is what we're going to going to turn it into. [Garbled] So, yeah. That's how that came about.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Now I'm sitting here going what is for having battles in…?

[Erin] I was just like… I was like playgrounds, playgrounds are really…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] That's a top place.

[Phenderson] Some of the best fight scenes, right?

[Howard] There really isn't a good place to have [garbled] battles

[Phenderson] If you like Star Wars, like, they're constantly having fight scenes in industrial centers. Hey, we're working here. [Garbled] with light sabers running around. They're just trying to get this work done.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.

[Howard] We are on a space station. If you break that, everyone dies.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Does ownership know what you guys are doing right now?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Every time there's a battle, a fight scene, that runs through a kitchen and the cooks just keep on cooking while they're going through…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, what? How does that…

[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Table 17 needs…

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] They're more scared of the chefs than they are…

[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.

[Howard] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Basically.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of interrupting things when fights come running through, we're going to interrupt right here and be back in just a minute to talk a little bit more about tension.

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[Phenderson] My thing of the week is… I am always late on TV shows. I say this to everybody. We live in a golden era of television. There's more fantastic TV that has ever existed in my lifetime. I no longer have to choose between the A-Team, Knight Rider, and Auto Man. That was like a weird show about a guy who turned into a car. Very ridiculous. In the eighties, eighties was a wild time. But now there's so much TV. But I'm always late. So what I've decided to watch this week is something that came out in 2019. It's a series, a short series, called The Terror. It is on Netflix. It's about these two British ships, the Erebus and I think it's the Terror, trying to find a way to the Northwest passage, and, whoo boy, these strange things begin to happen. I've long wanted to watch this film, then it went away. Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix, it's returned. I'm able to watch it. When this is over, I'm going to enjoy another episode. As I do constantly. So, yeah. That's my thing. Some of you have seen it. If you haven't, The Terror. Watch it at night.

[Erin] No.

[Mary Robinette] Making mental notes, do not take Phenderson's advice.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Here we are, back on the other side. The heroes have fought their way through our kitchen, and we have to talk about some more ingredients of tension. So, I was so pleased with myself for that metaphor, it's not really great.

[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. I appreciate you. Some of the other things that we talked about were things like anticipation and resolution. There's a bunch of stuff that you set up early on that then has a nice payoff later. For instance, talking about the film that's going to be on Stone Mountain. You talk about that right at the beginning of the book, and then it comes back and plays… It continues to play a larger and larger role as we move through the book. Did you always have, like, and we're gonna go to Stone Mountain?

[Phenderson] Yeah. I always knew we were going to Stone Mountain. We were always going to Stone Mountain, because part of the origin of this entire thing is the fact that in real life, the second Klan has its origins on Stone Mountain. Right? And literally is created after D. W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is where the Klan arose. By this time, the first Klan is mostly died out, because they got what they wanted. They've taken over… They've instituted Jim Crow. The second Klan comes about really based on the film. The film so inspires this guy, Al Simmons, in Georgia that he decides to create the second Klan. The second Klan now has… It's still hates black people, but it has a larger enemies list. Now it doesn't like Catholics, it doesn't like German immigrants. It really doesn't like Jews. In fact is the killing of Leo Frank, the murder of Leo Frank is very much tied up with the second Klan being born in Georgia. He goes to Stone Mountain and they do a ritual. The ritual is based heavily on the film, the Birth of a Nation.

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

[Phenderson]'s It would almost… I mean, the group is not a terror group. It would almost be funny to call the movie Klan. Because the way they do many of the rituals they do are based more on the film Birth of a Nation than the first Klan that comes about. Right? This second Klan, of course, is much more massive. Where is the first Klan was maybe tens of thousands, this Klan rises to some four and a half million. Where is the first Klan was mostly in the South, and also in California where they're harassing the Chinese, the second Klan is everywhere. It swallows up the Midwest. It's in Maine, it's in Connecticut. It's everywhere. They're running people for office. They're not even wearing masks, because everyone can be a member of the Klan. Right? So I always knew I was going to Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain was that symbol. To this day, Stone Mountain is still a place where Klan and white supremacists meet. It has these giant reliefs on their, actually, of Confederate generals like Lee and others. Right? So it's still this place, this tension. So I always knew I wanted to go there, and, yeah, I definitely seeded it in the beginning. Because I'm a believer that if you give somebody something late in the story, I want to see it later on, but don't just put it there. I like people… I like to give people clues so that they can know that it's coming. Like, when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan… What's the movie with Bruce Willis? In the…

[Howard] Sixth Sense.

[Phenderson] Sixth Sense. I love the fact that when we figure it out, we're like, oh, the clues were always there. Right? We just saw it differently. So I like to make certain that I've seeded things so that when they do happen, people aren't like, whoa, what are you doing on Stone Mountain? I want them to get these little hints before, and then take them back now. See, I gotta do it, I'm an academic historian, so if you ask me things, I have to plug the history.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] I was right there with you. I spent a lot of time in Atlanta, and as you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was… Went to Atlanta for a job and was picked up by his boss at the airport. His boss took him, the first stop they made on the way from the airport to the job was at Stone Mountain.

[Phenderson] Okay. It's good that people go. It's beautiful scenery.

[Mary Robinette] Well, yeah. Contextually, a little more challenging when the person who's showing up for the job is a young black man and it's an older white guy who takes him there.

[Phenderson] It's not the best place. Especially if you know the history of, like… Why are we here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, those are questions that are still being asked.

[Howard] So, one of the things that I love the most about Ring Shout… I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up in Florida. I have zero childhood knowledge of the history that you're talking about. That was all completely obscured from me. I… It's just been the last 10 years that I've been looking back and realizing, oh, wow. I know nothing. Well. Less than 50 percent of what was happening in that time. In that area. The way you wrote the novel, I was able just contextually to tell immediately, okay, this is P. Djèlí Clark creating fiction and this is P. Djèlí Clark telling me history.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] That dance that you did between the fantastic that you wove through your story in order to create a mythos that was brilliant and wonderful and horrific and full of scary meat versus…

[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.

[Howard] Versus the history which is… I am ashamed for not knowing it sooner. But that dance you did was wonderful. I loved the book for that.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Unfortunately, in Florida, they're trying to make it so that people will not know about these things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I just think that there is this way that I think you're hitting on the head, there are these aspects of American history that just aren't spoken of. I think about when HBO re-did Watchmen and they decided to do it from a perspective of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma is something that I've known about since I was a kid, because in black spaces, it's just talked about. Even if people don't know everything, they've heard of black Wall Street. They know what happened there. People just bring it up. My parents are from the Caribbean. So they didn't come here and tell like the late sixties, early seventies. They knew about it. I heard about it in a barbershop somewhere. This is just something I knew. But most people, even the show runner for that show. He was a 40 something-year-old black male. He had never heard of it. Right? Until, like a few years before. It fascinated him. He went to look for it. Therefore he knew he had to put this into the film. That night that it premiered, I think Google almost broke because people were googling what is Tulsa Oklahoma? What happened there? Now it's just become something that everyone knows, but there is this way that there are a lot of things that the national narrative doesn't like to talk about. That doesn't make us feel good. So these kind of things become knowledge to like a few people where it's just known in the black community, like this thing happened, but in the larger community, it's just completely unheard of. So, yeah, I wrote… Part of what I was doing as the historian in me, I'm trying to bring these things out by using fiction. Right? What inspired me, for a lot of this, what inspired the story, were actually the ex-slave narratives taken from the last generation of enslaved people who were living in the 1920s continuing into the 1930s, during the depression, the WPA narratives. They talk about this first Klan. They described them as monsters. When I first… I was like, whoa. That's amazing. Now they know they're not monsters. But they're using this notion of describing the Klan as haints, saying that they have horns, that they could drink tons of water, do these supernatural acts, that they have chains, and they would blacken their faces I always had this idea that the using this idea of storytelling to talk about the trauma that they were faced with. Right? Turning these people… Who they knew who they were. They're like, yeah, that's Judge so and so. I know who he is. He owned me, or I worked for him. But he dresses up and he comes and he terrorizes us. What better way to talk about your trauma then using horror? Which is what the scholar Kinitra Brooks, she always says this is what horror is. Right? It's about us trying to find a way to talk about trauma. So, all this to say, I took my cue from these former slaves using folklore to talk about this history, and saying, what if I did that as well. It was just me trying to… Constantly trying to make it not get to historical, so that people like, oh, no, it's history, I'm running away. But yet, imbuing it with the fiction enough to keep people there in the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think you just did a great job of walking that line. I also enjoy writing historical fiction.

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The tension…

[Phenderson] Very well.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. The tension that you can put on things by inviting the reader into…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like when you use real history, you are making space for the reader, because your engaging their curiosity.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In a way that is harder, I think with some other forms of fiction. One of the things…

[Erin] Oh, sorry.

[Mary Robinette] That you did…

[Howard] This might be a little on the nose, but I feel like our listeners at this point really need to be able to draw a line between the way Birth of a Nation as a medium, as a story, was so incredibly destructive… I mean, it was very influential on culture, but it was very, very destructive. And the stories that we tell now that attempt to correct that can be so corrective. Writing is important, and getting it right is important. Telling a story that will sing to people and can change them is important. This is a good work that you did, that we want to do. It is a good work.

[Phenderson] Thank you. Thank you. That's great to hear. I mean, so much of… Yeah, I can't say I didn't write this in a sense of this is a corrective or for my own catharsis. You know? People hunting Klan members? Yeah, it's cathartic. So, thank you, that's great to hear. I… Like I said, when I say I wrote this with the idea that a few people might like it, I still had this idea this is what I want people to get from it, and that people come away with this notion of it's a corrective, but also this… Giving them this inspiration to go, I want to find out more. As a historian. Of course, I want you to find out more, I want you to be able to look and say, oh, wow. This was a real part of history. This is a fictional part, like you said, these things actually happened. So, thank you very much. That's… You make me want to go write.

[Erin] Please do.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Please do write more. One of the things that I just wanted to draw a line under that Phenderson is talking about that Howard has mentioned is that Phenderson wrote this for himself. We talked about the idea of writing for… Of having a story that's written for an in group, a group that has a shared common experience. Then, knowing that people who are outgroup are also going to read it and engage with it. I want you to understand… I want you to bear in mind that this is something that he wrote for himself, and it is… When you are sitting down to write something, the thing that you can do to make it most true and most interesting is to write something for yourself.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think not be apologetic about it. You know what I mean? I think that there are… The world will tell you, like, oh, you need to approach this really carefully and you need to… It's not to say that you can just do whatever you want, but, especially when you're talking about things that are about what you know, what you grew up with, and things that your family talked about, things that are part of your history. I think it's what I really liked about this book is that it's bold. You know what I mean? It's not shirking from engaging the past. It's going all the way in. This is going to… I'm going to take a complete 90 degrees turn here for no reason other than I can.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Don't try to stop me! Which is that I also think tone is so interesting and important, because one of the things I always… I was about to say one of the things I always loved about the Klan, not an actual thing, but…

[Laughter]

[Erin] My favorite part is that one of the things that undercut them was when comic books started mocking them, that actually it was these are ridiculous people who took hate in the weird movie and decided to like cosplay evil. When that was being made fun of by like old-school comics, they were like, oh, we can't recruit as much because it turns out that our stuff… Like, we aren't able to get the recruitment. It's not scary anymore.

[Phenderson] Right.

[Erin] It just feels silly. So I think there's so many different tones, and I'm curious, like, what made you decide to go, like, all the way on horror? Because there's something ridiculous about it, but also something horrifying.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I thought that's a great… That's interesting. Thinking about recent happenings in politics, the notion that when you can make hatemongers and fascists, you make them feel weird and simply laugh at them, how much power does that rob from them? Right? The fact that you can do that. So that's an interesting point that you're making their. In this case, again, I was taking my cue so much from those ex-slave… To a great… You're… I mean, I should point this out, that I first read those narratives when I was doing a Masters degree. 10 years before I would sit down to write Ring Shout. Those ideas, I was introduced to those ideas there, I was introduced to the night doctor in those narratives. I kind of sat… I know, like I said, I want to do something with this. I didn't know what. So, it took me 10 years before I was, like, okay, I'm ready to actually approach this. So I want to say that I was really trying to honor… The fact that they gave me these wonderful ideas and trying to be truthful to it. Yeah, like, so much of it was I wanted to show the horror of it. Some of it's also absurd. Right? Like Butcher Clyde is absurd. But he's also terrible. I wanted to have that bridge between absurdities, but also it's frightening. Right? I just wanted to get that down. The notion that, you know, there's a point where Nana Jean says, like, "The Klan members we haven't turned yet," and she calls them, like fools. Right? I wanted to get this idea that they're dressing up and they're clowns. They're fools…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Right? But if they let that hate consume them, they can become this monstrous danger, that can destroy others. But she says of the ones who aren't, she just says, they're fools. Right? She said… She makes this distinction between the fools are the ones who turned. But I wanted to get that across. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, you just… I think you walked those lines really nicely. On the subject of the narratives, the slave narratives, you've got a bunch of the sections that are transliterated from the Gullah.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And… I loved… Like, I got… They're just so juicy, and I love them all. But I'm looking at notation 25 in particular, the shout Eve and Adam tell about them to that wicked snake and the fruit from the forbidden tree. That one, it's interesting to me the way it is talking about the shout and how you wind up using the shout later. So I'm curious again, like, having… There's so many decisions that go into making these kinds of interludes. There is the where you place it. There's the content. There's the tone of it. There is the… Like… How many of these are you jumping straight off of something that you had read, how many of them are you are completely riffing on your own? Tell us… I don't have a question there, I just want you to talk about them.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Because I don't get asked about [garbled] those parts are so important to me, because I thought they set the tone for each chapter, they set… They were able to say so much in their… In between interludes. I actually pulled a lot of that from, first of all, I looked at actual shouts. I wanted to know what the shouts were about. So each one is pulled from an actual different shout. I thought the shouts were so fascinating because I said this is philosophy. People are giving phil… And I even have something in their where somebody says how many intellectual philosophers were lost to the droning work of slavery, and so forth. How many did you lose? How many minds that could have thought up these fascinating things? I thought when I was… So I… There were the shouts themselves, and I read people who were interpreting the shouts. Some of these were Lomax and others who were first doing interviews. Later there are books that talk about shouts where people say, well, this is what the shout is about. As I'm listening to people, I'm like, this is philosophical. They're talking about how humans think about themselves and their place in the universe and how… It was all of that. Right? It's as deep as Kant and anybody else. That's what I wanted to get across here in these shouts by… So some of it comes from quotes that I've read, and I'm also adding my own take to it, and my own riffing of it, and trying to give an interpretation, but trying to let their voices come through there. I have this transliterated because if anybody noticed that supposed to be [garbled] not memory for name… Our favorite Jewish radical who's a member of the monster fighting crew. If anybody knows, those are her initials, she is the one who supposedly a hero throughout this. So I'm putting a little bit in there. I kind of have her as a Lomax or something, like, using that the way that they would write about what they saw. So it's a bit of that. But, yeah, each one was important, each one was supposed to be kind of linked to the chapter that was coming. And you should know that I also had little quotes that I wanted from the slave narratives themselves, direct quotes. They ended up having to go, because I think, like you said, if people were like, okay. You have the interludes, then you have the little narrative parts…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Phenderson] Of the chapter, it's too much. So it was one of those things, okay, it hurt, but I had to cut them all out. But I kept one. That is in the very… In my acknowledgments. The one about Oma. It was like the Klan came into her house and she whooped them one at a time. That's an actual quote. I love that. Because here she's talking about her mama's like… I mean, just fantastical that her mother's just… It's so Paul Bunyan, John Henry. Klan members came in, I'm home with the baby, I'm just beating each Klan member one at a time. I said, that's… I have to have… I have to keep this quote in here. So there were a lot of quotes like that, I wanted to get these voices of these ex-slaves. But I definitely kept that one about Ma. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome.

[Erin] I love the way you were thinking about… As you were talking about the shouts in the stories and the narratives, because so much of the way I took some of this actual story is that it's about the stories we tell ourselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's about the stories we allow ourselves to tell, the ones that we hold back, the ones we are afraid of, the ones we should fear. So, so much of it being rooted in you wanting to tell people's stories.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think is just really cool and deep and like an extra level, knowing that that was part of what went into it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When you said that the shouts were philosophy and about thinking about their place in the universe, I'm like, that is what this entire book is, Maurice trying to figure out her place in the universe.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, well done.

[Howard] This episode is titled discussing tension, and the real tension I'm seeing here is your tension that is relieved by writing this book.

[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.

[Howard] So, this was done and it was out and you told that story.

[Phenderson] I wrote this book in a few weeks because it was one of those things you know, as writers, you have this idea. I pitched the idea months before. It was due, like, in August. I hadn't written a thing. This is when I had the idea in my head. I'd been percolating this story for several years. But I just hadn't let it flow out. When it flowed out, like, I think it was like two or three weeks, I just wrote it. Let's get it all out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, this is where one writer says to another in a friendly collegial way, "You ass hole."

[Phenderson] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] There's something, again…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] wrote this award-winning book in just a couple of weeks.

[Phenderson] [garbled] The idea for it, like I'd taken this stuff like a decade before. It was sometime around… I would say around 2015 or so, I really started thinking about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I was on a fellowship. My last fellowship. I was working on my dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania, literally nowhere Pennsylvania. My wife came to visit me one time there, when she was living in DC. She's like, "I'm not going back again." I saw tractor pulls and people chasing greased pigs at a fair.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Okay, at a fair. So I would drive almost every weekend back to DC, several hour drive. I'd be driving through this misty mountain, I don't know if anybody listens to Old Gods of Appalachia, but it was that. Right? I was… So, while I'm driving, I'm listening to some shouts. I'm listening to these songs sometimes I'm just imagining. So there was a way where some of my built-up tension, I had so much of it in me, that when it came out, it just all poured out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Because it was something I'd been spinning with for so long that when I finally came to write it, I could just write it.

[Howard] So what I'm hearing is if you want to write a book in three weeks, think the book for a decade.

[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Erin] I find that reassuring. There are several things I've been thinking about for a decade, so, like, I feel like any day now…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I have… I've had things that I've had to sit on for a while. That's a question that we get a lot from listeners or early career writers who are like, "I have this idea, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice." I'm like, it's okay to sit on it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's okay to sit on it and think about it and noodle on it until…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And write other things while you're leveling up.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of leveling up, and writing other things, I think it's time for us to give some homework. Phenderson, I think you have homework for us?

[Phenderson] Yes. If anyone is really interested in building tension and storytelling over a short amount of time, I have something that you can go watch. If you seen it already, go to Netflix, I want you to find somebody else's Netflix if you need to, and I want you to watch Midnight Mass. I want you to watch a show that builds so many different areas of tension that by the time it all hits, you will have realized I haven't slept in 12 hours watching this show. And you are a balled up knot of tension watching and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. It's an amazing show. Midnight Mass if you haven't seen it yet. By Howard's face, Howard has seen it.

[Howard] That's awesome homework.

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Now go turn into a balled up knot.

[chuckles]

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/04/17-49-bodies-are-magical/

Key points: There's a common trope where a disability becomes a superpower. This also often makes the character super useful. And depersonalizes them, too. Be careful of plot relevant abilities. Write your people as people. Do your world building so that your characters can have agency without their abilities becoming a plot point.

MICE: In a milieu story, often people will have someone live in somebody else's body or have a temporary disability, which makes the disability exotic and the person non-human. Idea stories often focus on "What's wrong with this person?" This often reveals an invisible disability, and shows that we are better people for knowing about it. It also makes the person non-human, again. Character stories often mean the person is trying to solve themselves, and focus on dissatisfaction with self. Very inhuman! Event stories often start with a diagnosis that disrupts the status quo, and looks for a cure that either restores the status quo or sets a new status quo. Q.E.D., try to avoid making the disability a plot point, a driver for the story.

Superhero comics often focus on what happens when A and B fight. This is not a good model for exploring abilities or other characteristics.

Final summations:

Chelsea: As speculative writers, try to imagine environments that remove barriers for people with disabilities.

Fran: If you have a disability, or acquire one, write your experience, write your story.

[Season 17, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies Are Magical.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we're going to be talking about bodies are magical. This is the thing where someone with a disability, suddenly, that disability becomes a superpower. Which is not necessarily the way things work.

[Nope, nope, nope]

[Mary Robinette] As we've discussed, there are times when the modifications that you have in the ways you've adapted, that those can be useful, but the disability itself… The classic one that people point at is, of course, Daredevil. Where losing his eyesight gives him magical powers on multiple axes, because all of his other senses have become heightened.

[Fran] Elsa Sjunneson, who we've talked about before, with her book Being Seen, but also online in different essays, has some great breakdowns of the Daredevil problem, by the way. You can Google those, they're amazing, we should probably have a link to that. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] But it is a very, very common trope that you'll see. Sometimes it's also a thing that people will do as a form of overkill. That they're like, "Oh, I don't want the person with the disability to be weak, so I'm going to give them these extra things."

[Chelsea] What I find is that when you have that character with the disability who has the disability, but then they have something that makes them super extra ultra powerful, it also conveniently makes them super extra useful to the narrator and other characters. It de-persons them in a lot of cases.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Fran] Plot relevant disability and plot relevant superpowers both have that same icky feel to them. One of the things that I tend to do is I have a lot of disabled characters in my fiction, but people don't notice them, because they're doing things on the page like protagonizing and antagonizing and making things and breaking things. Their disability doesn't necessarily have to jive with that or be part of the plot, it's just part of who they are. Having that sort of superpower that's utterly convenient to the plot or, unfortunately, sometimes the disability that is plot relevant, really does… It de-personalizes, like Chelsea was saying. What we have been talking about this entire series is seeing people as people and writing people as people and finding places for empathy rather than any other approach towards writing people.

[Mary Robinette] So, these things, let's unpack what we mean about it not being a plot point. What we're talking about is, like, it will absolutely affect the way the character moves through the world. Just the same way that the fact that I am 5'7" affects the way I move through the world. Fran is…

[Fran] 4'10".

[Mary Robinette] 4'10" and one of the things…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That she said to me when we saw each other in person for the first time is that one of the nice things about masks for her was that she could no longer see people's nose hair.

[Fran] Please, please trim. Anyway…

[Mary Robinette] But that is… Like, that's not a plot point. As Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Strokes his mustache. That is a mustache. But the point is, like, that affects the way we move through the world. We see different things, we experience different things, but it is, someone's nose hair or lack thereof is not, like, a plot point. I hope. I mean, maybe. Go for it. If you feel the urge.

[Howard] To use an example that is perhaps less abled in nature, someone with very long hair on a windy day without a hairband, the hair gets in their face. That doesn't mean they're Rapunzel.

[No]

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Fran] On the other hand, just to use the height thing for a different reason, one thing that impacts me directly is when I'm at a stand up cocktail party. Most of the conversation happens directly over my head. I will miss things because people are talking above me. If I have everyone sit down, which I tend to do, then everybody's talking out my level, which is, like, the same thing with Zoom. It was great. Except that people now insist on coming up to me and saying, "I had no idea you were so little. You seemed so…" They want to use the word normal. I'm glad that they stop themselves. I'm really proud of people who stop themselves from using that word. But the aspect of… Like, Zoom is a great leveler for lots of people, but not for others. None of these things are necessarily a plot point, but you can use them as a way to express how you move through the world.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, an example of this… Turning this height thing into a superpower…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Would be… A superpower plot point, would be that if Fran is at a cocktail party and discovers a special clue that only she could discover because she happens to be the right height to look under the table without anyone…

[Fran] Exactly the right height.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly the right height. That's the kind of thing where… I can hear people going, "But sometimes you do need a character who's smaller." It's like, yes. But that can't be their only purpose in the plot. That can't be… Like, every time there's a problem, it's like, "Let's get the small person in."

[Howard] A bomb could also be discovered by the horrible creeper who has a mirror taped to his shoe.

[Fran] Eew! Okay. Eew.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks for that, Howard. Thank you.

[Fran] I'm uncomfortable now.

[Howard] I'm sorry. Hey. You know what. I'm 5'6". I traveled a lot on business. It really did feel like a superpower that I could be comfortable flying coach.

[Mary Robinette] I mean… Those chairs. But at the same time, those… The headrests on those chairs are not built for someone with a short torso.

[Chuckles]

[Fran] To go back to the phrasing that you used, Mary Robinette, where you said, "But you sometimes need someone who is smaller as a character." That idea of, "Oh, I need a person who is like this so that the plot can do X," has… There are points at which that thought process is useful, but when you are constructing fully rounded characters without bias, taking a look at why you feel like you need them for this is an interesting exercise in self examination.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment and pause for the book of the week, and then I… When we come back, we have more to say about this. Our book of the week is…

[Fran] Is not a book!

[Howard] Not a book.

[Mary Robinette] It is not a book, it is something that Fran has been wanting to talk about the entire time we've been recording.

[Fran] Yep. This is the TV series Killjoys. It came on the air in 2015, 2016, and ran for three or four seasons. A couple of those seasons get a little nebulous and a little weird, but then it brought itself back. What I want to talk about with Killjoys is that the premise in definitely season two, especially with an episode called Dutch and the Real Girl, is sort of what we've been talking about. This is an episode with a character who has been hack modded into something where her arm is a gun. But, also, she's got lots of other mods and things, and there is a whole discussion in there about being human, but also having a different role to play in both the series and in society. One of the things that I love about Killjoys, and there's a lot to love about Killjoys… It's got some cyberpunk elements. Victoria Modesta, the model that I mentioned with the prism for one of her legs, is in the show as a special guest for season two. The hack mods are part of a marginalized community group that is a long running theme through this show, Killjoys. One of the things that Killjoys did with this is they hired actual disabled people to play the hack mods. So you've got this amazing… I think Killjoys hired more disabled people to play roles on the show then all of Hollywood at that point. It was amazing to see. It's fantastic to see these actors operating with just the plot points that they have, playing lots of different characters. It's a great show. Especially Dutch and the Real Girl, that's one of my favorite episodes of all time.

[Mary Robinette] So. This is Killjoys, which apparently everyone needs to go watch. As you were talking

[garbled]

[Fran] It was actually produced in Canada, as many good things are. It did run for five seasons, started 2015. Hannah John-Kamen plays the lead in that. She's also in the second Antman as Ghost. So she's all over the place.

[Howard] Cool.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking about that, I'm going to take us a little bit off topic and then bring us back. The… You made me think about discovery. I'm doing a rewatch of parts of it, but in season two, there's some good disability wrapped in that. There's just [background characters]… Just, like, you're watching and somebody just rolls through in a chair, there's… It's really great. None of these are main characters. None of these are main characters, and also, when you look at the bridge, it has steps just built into it.

[Fran] Yep.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So this is a world in which…

[Fran] Also, all of the chairs are fixed. So that character that rolls by can never actually sit at the bridge.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep. That's a great point which I had not thought about.

[Mary Robinette] So part of what we're talking about here when were thinking about bodies are magical and not being plot points, is also, like, the world building that you're doing so that your character can move through this world. So that whatever it is that you have, however you have designed this character, that they can have agency in this story without becoming a plot point. So. I do want to dive in a little bit into what I talk about, about what I mean personally when I'm talking about having it become a plot point. People who are longtime listeners know me and my fondness for talking about the MICE quotient. So, here, the MICE quotient is this organizational structure, right. So, in a milieu story, it begins when you enter a place, and ends when you leave it. Often what you'll see is that you'll see someone have a character… They want to explore disability by having someone live in somebody else's body or they'll have a disability that is a temporary disability. That, basically has the problem of making that disability exotic and it's very, very othering. The idea structure which begins when you ask a question and ends when you answer it is like, "What is wrong with that person?" That's another plot point that you can see… Sometimes see where people will have someone who has like an invisible disability and it's all about, "Oh, now we discover it. Oh, we're better people because we know the answer to this question now."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Again, it's othering because it becomes… That person's the character. Character stories begin when the character is unhappy with their role, some aspect of themselves, and it ends when the character becomes happy with the role, which then means that they are having to… The problem that they are trying to solve is themselves. Which is, again, it is setting a very specific form of normal and having somebody be dissatisfied with who they are. As a plot point, that can be, again, very othering. Then, events begins with a disruption of the status quo, which is often diagnosis. It ends with restoration of the status quo, or the establishment of a new status quo, which means that you're always looking at a cure.

[Howard] Can I just say that I love that in a minute and a half, you've taken the MICE quotient and used it to explain how to do everything wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep.

[Howard] This is beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Thank you. So this is why when you've got a character with a disability, you actually don't want it to be a plot point. You don't want it to be a driver, because if you do… Or, if you do, you have to know that that is the story that you're telling. You're telling one of those versions of stories. You don't want to do it. If you're going to do it, you don't want to do it unintentionally, for certain. But if you want a character and you don't want them to be like, "Hello. I have this magical superpower. I am here because I am useful." Then, it needs to be decoupled from the plot and just affect the way they move through the world. Which is different than these are the story questions that we're trying to solve and answer.

[Howard] It's… While we are chewing on that amazing deconstruction, which I'm again going to say that I love, it's worth pointing out that a lot of where we see disability as superpower done wrong is in comics. One of the tropes of comics, and you see this in especially the ensemble MCU movies, is that at some point there is an idea milieu element which is what happens when Hulk and Thor fight? What happens when Thor and Iron Man fight? What happens when Iron Man and Capt. America fight? Comic book writers… This trope, everybody at some point has to fight everybody else, that is not a great model in which to explore ability, disability, age, old age, youth, whatever, because it is going to be inherently othering for a large portion of the audience.

[Fran] This is where I get to shout out to Marieke Nijkamp who wrote the Oracle Code, which is the story of Barbara Gordon. It's a graphic novel. It was published in 2020, before the rest of things happened. It's fantastic. Marieke is an amazing advocate for disability and disabled writers. Just wonderful to talk about. But if you get a chance to check out The Oracle Code, it is worth your time and does exactly the opposite of what Howard is talking about.

[Howard] To be sure, or to be clear, I say comics. What I mean is the superhero genre. Obviously, comics are a medium which can be used to tell all kinds of stories.

[Mary Robinette] Well, we are approaching the end of our time together. So, before we go into our homework, I just want to check to see if Chelsea or Fran, as our guests for this series, if either of you have any big takeaways that you want our listeners to carry with them before we give them their homework.

[Chelsea] I mean, I think the thing that I've been talking about mostly in all of these episodes is how very much I want us as speculative writers to take the opportunity to imagine environments that are… That basically take away barriers to people with disabilities. Because they're… Well, I'm just going to be opinionated about this… Designed properly.

[Fran] I'm going to direct my comments to those listeners who have a disability, as well as those who may, in the future, have a disability, and just say, "Write your experience. Write your story. In whatever way you want to tell it. If you have the opportunity to reach for empathy, go for it." This is a really important thing, but find… Finding ways to put your story down is actually a wonderful way to just feel present in a way that doesn't mean you're educating people, it's just you're telling a story, you're doing a thing. It's… Please, please write. I would love to see everything you write.

[Mary Robinette] Well, with that, we come to our homework. For your homework assignment, we've had this conversation that at some point, everyone is going to be disabled. So, look at your cast of characters for your work in progress and decide what disabilities your characters have. Some of them will be visible. Some of them will be in visible. Some of them will be things that the characters themselves don't recognize as a disability. Decide what those are, and then make sure that none of them are a plot point. That these are characters who just get to exist and have adventures the same way all of the other characters do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/25/17-39-writing-bodies-and-intimacy-with-k-m-szpara/

Key points: Content warning. Bodies and intimacy, without euphemisms. The intimacy of what you and your partner call body parts is rich with knowing yourself and/or character growth. Communication is key, and the growth of trust. Think about how the context of the scene changes the action. Think of intimate scenes as fight scenes or conversations. Or as dances? Metaphoric language, fade to black, or simple direct descriptions?

[Season 17, Episode 39]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with special guest, K. M. Szpara.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon Song.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Howard] I'm Howard Tayler.

[Mary Robinette] We are here live on the Writing Excuses cruise with a live audience of writers.

[Applause]

[Mary Robinette] Also, our special guest, K. M. Szpara. Kellan, say hello.

[Kellan] Hi. This is my first Writing Excuses cruise. I am the author of books such as Docile as K. M. Szpara, and I write a lot about like sex and vampires and blood.

[Mary Robinette] So, we are going to actually give you a content warning for this particular episode. We're going to be talking about bodies and intimacy, and we're not going to be using euphemisms. We're going to be talking about adult acts that adults do with actual adult bodies. Adult bodies run in a full range.

[Kellan] Yes. Which is to say that as somebody who writes queer and trans bodies a lot, if this episode might trigger you on any of those axes, please take care of yourself.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So with that, let's dive into the actual content. So you pitched this episode to us, Kellan. What are some of the things that you think about when you're thinking about like writing bodies and intimacy? What are some important aspects of that?

[Kellan] Sure. I mean, for me, it's so important to show especially queer and trans bodies. There's such a mystery sort of around us, even to our own selves sometimes. We do a lot of manifesting of our own bodies when we are alone with others. I have sat down and struggled with what do I call these character's genitals that makes me feel okay and makes the character feel okay and makes the character's partner feel okay. Or what conflict does that bring up. So, for me, like settling on that intimacy between one or more people and being alone or with others with your body is so rich with your inner external conflict tension, but also a sense of knowing yourself and/or character growth.

[Piper] I love that. Because communication is so key. You can really see that in the development of the relationships through the course of the book, because you can find during different moments through the story that they're more likely to trust, and there is a building of trust over time as they feel more comfortable communicating with each other and also being self-aware. Like you said. Just aware of themselves and what they need.

[Kellan] Yeah. It's funny because I was talking earlier on this retreat with my agent, actually, and I brought up how when I first started writing, I learned to sort of like the meat and then there's unresolved sexual tension for the entire book and they kiss at the end and that's the prize for the reader and the characters. That was real bad for me. I've instead fallen into the thing which I think is very queer, which is very queer not applicable to everyone all the time, but, for me and many other people, which is that there's sex first. Intimate moments first. Then, sort of like dealing with the emotional and/or communications that lead right up to it. Also the falling out, and how that manifests over the course of the rest of the novel or story.

[Piper] Oh, yeah. Definitely. Because I know that we think of romance in particular as being rather structured in the order, and I have even taught how there is often a progression of intimacy that happens. But once you know what that progression kind of is expected, you can also explore how it happens not quite in that order, and what that does to the character, that reaction time, and that thinking about it and exploring what works for them. I love that.

[Kellan] For me, in real life, there is no order. Right? So we do different things with different people at different times. It's really important to me that characters feel like emotionally true. So, yeah. I mean, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that as you're talking about this, as emotional truth, I'm thinking about some of the scenes in Docile and the way the context of the scene changes the action. You want to talk a little bit about how you communicate context and safety or not safety?

[Kellan] Sure. The context is interesting because my first thought was like where is the sex happening.

[Chuckles]

[Kellan] Sometimes it happens in your like executive office at work, which I guess you're allowed to do if you're the CEO. But I think the actual context is who are you having sex with, what kind of sex you're having, what are the power dynamics between you. So, for example, even though there are many sex scenes in Docile, there's the blow job scene, there's, as my editor has once said, one ass-eating scene per book as mandated by God.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Only one? Are we like limited to one or is it at least one?

[Kellan] No, it just happens that way.

[Piper] Okay.

[Kellan] So. But the point of that is the sort of context is… It is, for Elijah, the protagonist, it is I am being asked to do something versus something is being done to me, and, do you feel like more of a willing participant if you are doing the thing, which presents a whole different struggle emotionally than lying back and having something happen to you. Then, later on in the novel, he gets to have his first like real consensual sexual experience and navigates that with a totally different context using language she'd never had access to before, feeling emotions he's never felt, trying to deal with how to go about having some of the same experiences physically that you had the first time, but with somebody who is being very respectful about it.

[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about some tools that we can use to do this well? Like, one of the most useful frameworks that I was given when I was first writing the kind of intimate scenes that I do, which frequently resolve into fade to black, but was to think of them as either a conversation or a fight scene. That with a fight scene, I have to think about the geography and things that human bodies will actually do. And that with a conversation, that there is something that each person is trying to communicate to the other through the physical actions of their body.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think a lot about fight scenes when it sort of comes to these kinds of moments in books. In part because we live in a society that can be very prudent… Not prudent, prudish and prurient about bodies and about sex and about intimacy. But we're a society that also glorifies violence. We have lots of scenes in movies that have very extreme explicit details about what happens to a body when violence happens to it. So, so much of fiction is already engaging with the collision of bodies in these high intensity emotional moments. We're just only allowed to talk about certain kinds of that versus what is a scene of intimacy versus a scene of violence. Functionally, in the narrative, they often perform a similar thing where two characters enter a scene with different goals, different emotional states, and they exit that scene having resolved some aspects of that, or evolved into a different emotional state. So there's a way in which I think of these functionally as performing the same thing in the narrative, hopefully with different outcomes, hopefully one of them's not dead by the end of it. But I think there is a way in which that, from a high level, mechanically they can be very, very similar. It really comes down to how we, as a society, can think about and interact with bodies in that way.

[Piper] Actually, I want to provide a contrasting approach. Because I'm really well known for fight scenes, especially in my romantic suspense, and body count, especially a lot of my other work. But I write romance. One of the things is while I have combat scenes and fight scenes in my stories, I often think about moments of intimacy as dance. It's one of those things that I didn't do on purpose, but because I was a dancer, and I was in dance from age 3 to 28 actively, and also, it's a part of my meet cute with my partner, Matthew J. Drake, that we danced together and we both enjoyed West Coast swing and blues fusion, that I often think of intimacy scenes and how I choreograph them as dance. Whether that's horizontal or standing up…

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Or a little bit of both and also the logistics of lifts. Right? Like it actually translates better for me. If it involves more than two partners, also, choreography helps a lot for that because what bodies can do. Right? Like, one person may be very bendy and one person may not be very bendy, and also, like, what are the logistics of actually being able to lift two people. Like a lot more of that actually translates better in my head to dance choreography. So that's another alternative.

[Dongwon] I think of fight scenes is also being about dance, right? It's about that movement and control and… In part, I love martial arts movies. I know we're wondering further off-topic at this point.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But I do think dance is a really useful thing to think about in terms of that interaction and that give-and-take in that interplay of power and connection and emotion are all things that flow back and forth in this.

[Howard] Let me circle this back real quick. One of my favorite MCU fight scenes is the one in Civil War where Falcon says to Spidey, "Have you ever been in a fight before? Usually there's not this much talking." Conversation during intimacy to me is one of the most wonderful things to read. I don't just want the choreography, I want dialogue. I want… It's a conversation. It's much more than just blocking. Much more than that.

[Kellan] I am also somebody who's deeply in love with a first-person present point of view. I can get away with it as much as I can. But I feel like not everyone chooses it and uses it to their full advantage. So, for me, like being in a different first-person point of view for a sex scene, and then flopping the points of view for the next sex scene, like, you are not just getting the… You, the reader, gets to see the conversation between the two people, but then you get to see later how the other character might have experienced that sex or contact totally different from the other character. I had a story out with two trends boyfriends. They both had different physical needs when it came to sex. So you really got to live in their heads and in the dialogue.

[Piper] Yeah. I think the progression is also important through the course of the story, because, again, we're also seeing the progression of how they work together. To come back to the point about communication as well, and dialogue, I think it's amazing and awesome, and I love it. I'm so into it. It's also really hot, I think, in romance that there is consent not just upfront, but repeatedly through each step of that interaction, and, if there's not, what are the reactions to it.

[Mary Robinette] These are, I think, wonderful points. Let's take a moment to pause for our book of the week, which is actually by Kellan.

[Kellan] Wow, what a surprise.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] That book would be First Become Ashes. It is a novel whose pitch I did not practice before this. It takes place in a cult. In the first chapter, they are all liberated from the cold against their wills. They were raised to believe that you could do magic. So when the FBI says you cannot do magic, and also, everything you believe is fake, one of them, Lark, spends the rest of the novel sort of unraveling what that means for him as a person, grappling with beliefs and his own body, especially since he took sort of like a sacred chastity vow with a literal chastity device. So, there's some really interesting sex that comes out on the other end of that.

[Mary Robinette] That sounds very exciting. It's called First Become Ashes by K. M. Szpara.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's move on to one of my favorite things, which is talking about how things can go terribly wrong. So let's talk about some tropes and euphemisms and ways of discussing this that are maybe not the most intimate. For instance, I had to narrate a book that literally had the line, "She released his love snake from its denim prison."

[Laughter]

[Piper] Purple prose.

[Kellan] I mean, if you say that during sex and the other person doesn't laugh and then you will have a great time… That would be a cool scene.

[Piper] I mean, yeah. Or is it monster f-ing? I would drop in f-bombs. We are going adult. All right. So, monster fucking is a thing. It is a very… It's rising in popularity right now. I know of at least two books with a prehensile penis going on. So, love snake would be applicable.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Yeah. I mean, people ask me this a lot, like, how do you keep writing so many sex scenes? Does the language get stale? How do you… Like, I name this very bluntly. I usually use cock in sexual situations, but then you'll see that I use dick when someone's just like alone thinking about their bodies. I… One ass eating per book. It's like does butt sound sexy enough? Like, I do want it to be hot, right? So, like, sex is both about characters and tension and intimacy, but also butts. So, like, for me, it's picking these words that titillate not just for the reader but for you as the author. I mean, I am…

[Garbled]

[Kellan] Be turned on by what you write, is, like, sort of a mantra that I think.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think that's true with any emotion that you're trying to provoke in a reader, that you are your own first reader. So I think that's a very natural thing. Not something that people should be ashamed of even though we are constantly told by different forms of media, especially anything that is remotely off of mainstream, that you shouldn't do that thing and should somehow be ashamed of it.

[Kellan] I actually thought I was a little bit odd because I have… I don't like to write the word butt because it's not pretty to me. So I like bum or behind or ass better as like a hotter thing when I'm writing. I'll actually have an editor call me up, and be like, "Do you have a problem with butt?" I'm like, "No. It just… I don't like the way the word looks."

[Mary Robinette] It is not a pretty word on the page. Like with the Regency, I get a lot… It's buttocks.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Yeah, buttocks is almost hotter to me. Or bum is more hot, hotter to me. Behind can be really hot, but then it gets confusing.

[Howard] I've found great uses for it, but they haven't been intimate uses.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Well, the words I struggle with are always like what do we call testicles. Balls, which is also not like a super sexy word. Then, like, apple, which makes me sound like you're saying you're an apple.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Weird side note. In Icelandic, a euphemism, or a term of endearment, for like when you're looking at a little baby and it's like, "Oh, how cute you are. Aren't you a little ass hole? What a cute little ass hole you are. What a little raisin ass hole."

[Wow]

[Piper] Yeah. The visual that I just had.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah.

[Kellan] Quite…

[Mary Robinette] My gift to you. My gift.

[Dongwon] One thing I was thinking about is something you touched on very briefly before, Kellan. I think there's a way in which… There's a demand and hunger for queer stories, but a lot of times, those queer stories elide over queer bodies. Right? I am also trans and queer myself, and one of the things that I become frustrated with is somehow… Sometimes that metaphoric language, sometimes that fade to black, sometimes being a little bit more clever about how you're describing certain body parts can kind of unintentionally erase the bodies of the people who are being presented on the page. Right? So, how much do you find that that directness is useful or not? I mean, because there's also kind of things where sometimes there are inevitably gender valences attached to certain body parts. That's become complicated.

[Kellan] I got you. I mean, one of the reasons I keep writing very explicit sex scenes, especially for my trans characters and my queer characters, there is this air of like are you exploiting bodies that are already exploited a lot. Like, us trans people, it's very much like the what's in your pants question. I answer that repeatedly because I want these characters to have agency over their bodies. Like, for example, in the novelette I wrote, Small Changes over Long Periods of Time, we have a trans character who… He's a trans man, he calls his clit a clit, he calls it… At one point, like, engorged like a swollen tick. Which is, like, not necessarily something that's like superhot, but, like, is the vibe for him right now. It's like sometimes our bodies, like, do feel like hot, but also kind of weird and gross at the same time. I have this agenda, which is not simply to write sex scenes because I think they're hot, but also because I want other people to think that I'm hot. I want other people to think that people like me are hot, and know that we are having good sex. Like, queer and trans sex is experimental in that we don't learn about it growing up necessarily. We are putting ourselves on the map as we go. I feel so honored to be part of that conversation.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's wonderful. I also think that that segues us really nicely into our homework assignment.

[Kellan] Yes. So, for homework, I would like you to write a character undressing, either alone or with others.

[Mary Robinette] So, you're going to do a little bit of exploration.

[Wolf whistle]

[Whee!]

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/07/11/16-28-common-first-page-mistakes/

Key Points: Don't start with a character waking up. These little moments of life don't really tell us what the book is about, or even much about the character. Your opening should ground the reader and orient them. Don't start with dialogue. We don't know who the person is or where they are. Be aware, readers take your beginning literally, so avoid wild metaphors. Keep our readers going forward as fast as possible. Make your opening a trail of breadcrumbs. What kind of questions do you want the reader asking? Don't start with a fight. We don't know what the stakes are, or what's going on. We don't care about the character yet. Action is only exciting if there is real tension to it, a real threat to it.

[Season 16, Episode 28]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Common First-Page Mistakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] Okay. This week, we are talking about some of the most common mistakes that we all see in first pages of books. So, there's a few things that are sort of talked about a lot in workshops, among agents, among a lot of the writing advisors. But we wanted to break down a little bit why these are… Why these don't work as places to start your book, even though they are sort of natural places that you think might be a good way to open. So, I think the first one is a really classic comment that you hear a lot, which is, "Don't start your story with a character waking up." We see this a lot of a character coming out of sleep, waking up in bed, and again, it's this thing of starting the story at the beginning because you think, "Oh. My character's going to have a big, exciting day. I should start where the day starts." Which is them getting out of bed, seeing themselves in the mirror, so that they can describe themselves, get a cup of coffee, drive to work. These are all natural things, because it's what we think about as a person's life. Because a lot of a person's life is these little moments. The problem is, as a reader, you don't know anything about what the story is. By the time you're done with that scene, you have no information about the book. You may know a little bit about the character. But these also aren't moments that are really defining who a character is and what they care about under pressure.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Because one of the things that you're dealing with in the morning is that you're disoriented. Right? Part of your goal in that opening is to ground your reader and to help them feel oriented. But a character's natural state… I mean, your natural state in the morning is disoriented. The things that you're thinking about are not the things that are most important to you through the day. They're just like, "Where are my pants?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's not… I mean, I'm sure that there is out there somewhere someone who will write a really compelling story about where are my pants…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But that's…

[Dan] But it's not you.

[Mary Robinette] It's not…

[Dan] I mean, I do so many chapter critiques, and I teach so many classes, I am astonished at the sheer number of people who will tell me to my face, "Yes, I know that we're not supposed to do this. But I'm doing it differently." No, you're not. Like, that's why we tell people not to do this. The odds of you, on your very first novel, being the one who cracks the code and is able to do this cliché in a brilliant and innovative way… It's just safer to stay away from these kinds of things.

[Dongwon] Of course, the problem with any kind of writing advice is there is someone out there…

[Dan] Yes.

[Dongwon] Who did do it and it's great.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Odds are, it's not you. Maybe it is. You can try. But then don't be frustrated when it doesn't work.

[Mary Robinette] So, like, for instance, there's a book that's just come out, which is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. His character literally… It starts with his character waking up in a literal white room. But he has reasons for doing that. Like, this is one of the things, it's like when you do something like that, you are buying a thing. He's buying something very specific with that. He is buying a character who has been in a medically induced coma in spaceflight. Most of the fun of the book is figuring out… Like, all of the book, really, the fun of it is him figuring out what's going on. So, he's buying a specific thing. However, I'm also pretty darned convinced that if that manuscript landed on an average agent's desk, that they would bounce off of that. You have to buy trust from the reader in some way. Starting with something that… Something like that on your first go round is just not safe. Like, Andy Weir has bought trust because he's Andy Weir. Not because of the actual writing on the page. Which is not fair, but it's true.

[Howard] The first lines, the first page of The Martian were outstanding. They grabbed me straight out of the gate. The book convinced me that I am… I am willing to pick up more Andy Weir books and read well beyond the first page before making decisions.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That is a luxury that debut authors simply don't have.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that he's using all of the other tool. He's using voice and he's created an unusual setting that the character is waking up in.

[Mary Robinette] But there are other mistakes, too. It's not just waking up. There's starting with dialogue. This is another example of a thing that I see a lot of people do. You can do it. Like, the book that I started… I mentioned last week starts with a line of dialogue. The problem with starting with a line of dialogue is that we do not hear a voice without attaching things to it in the real world. It's incredibly rare to hear a voice and have no sense of who the person is. But when you start with a line of unattributed dialogue, you have no sense of who that person is, you don't know where you are. So…

[Dongwon] The thing that I… Oh, I'm sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Go on. Oh. What I was going to say was that the reason that it works in The Last Watch and then also Ender's Game begins with just straight dialogue. No dialogue tags at all. Very, very short. But what it is telling you is that these characters are not important. The subject of the conversation is the thing that is important. In J. S. Dewes's, the subject of the conversation was the main character. In Ender's Game, the subject of the conversation was Ender. It's very, very fast and it gets you on and it launches you. What were you going to say, Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Oh, the thing that I notice most of the time is that when it does start with that line of dialogue, I immediately forget what that line was. It's almost invisible to me. Nine times out of 10, because I have… There's nothing for me to attach it to. Right? The important thing to remember is you have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours thinking about those characters, this world, your plot, all these elements. I, as reader, coming to your story for the first time, know exactly zero things about the book that you're giving me. I have nothing to attach anything to. So anything you present to me, A, I'm going to take it very literally, so be careful of wild metaphors in your first paragraph, because I will take them as real actual things that you are saying. Like, if you say this person is a duck, I'm going to think that person is a dock, even if what you meant was metaphorically, this person walks and talks like a duck. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For instance, Gregor Samsa? Not actually a cockroach.

[Dongwon] Debatable.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Dongwon] But, yeah, so starting with a line of dialogue with nothing to attach it to in terms of character or setting or story… It just vanishes. It disappears into some recess of my brain, never to be seen again. So I have to go back to that later to get context for wait, why are they talking about this? Oh, right. Somebody said something before. The last thing you ever want your reader doing on the first page is having to go back to the top again.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] You want them going forward as fast as you can make them.

[Dan] Let me give an example of this. Sometimes… So, like in the example that Mary Robinette gave last time, I think the first line of dialogue was "Spread your legs and bend over." Right? Which by itself is very eye-catching, it is very compelling, because it's shocking. That kind of gives it a pass and makes it work, because it makes it more memorable. But… So, consider one of my very favorite first lines of all time, which is Paradise by Toni Morrison. It's narration. The narrator says, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." It's incredibly shocking. It's compelling. But because it's narration, it's easy to understand. If you take that exact same line, they shoot the white girl first, and you put it in quotation marks, what you're doing is adding a bunch of extra layers on top of it that the reader doesn't understand. We don't know who's saying it. We don't know why they're saying it. We don't know who they're saying it to or in what situation. Which means we understand it far less then if it was just the exact same words, but as narration.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great example. Speaking of first lines, let me use this to segue to our book of the week, which is something I'm going to talk about. This is a literary magazine that I think you all should pick up a copy of. This is the place that I made my first couple of sales. It is called, literally, The First-Line. thefirstline.com The premise of the magazine, it's a quarterly. They… Each issue of the magazine, every story in that issue has the exact same first-line. Because their premise is that if you hand call me Ishmael to Mark Twain, you do not get Moby Dick. You get something totally, totally different. So it's a really good example of what a first-line… Like, how important a first-line is, but also how much the rest of the story comes from the specific author. Like, the first-line is incredibly important, and also, not important at all.

[Mary Robinette] To segue us out of that, I'm going to talk about a literary horror story, which is that my second novel, Glamour in Glass, when it came out, they accidentally omitted the opening line of the novel.

[Ooo]

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that we… I had done all of the things. I had gone back… I labored. I am not kidding. There is a handwritten page that is just me rewriting that first-line over and over again to get exactly all of the beats that I wanted. They left it out. For reasons, not on purpose, it was a… For reasons. We'll just leave it at that.

[Dan] Where did you bury the bodies?

[Mary Robinette] You know, we have 12 acres.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And there's a gully. So…

[Dongwon] I feel that story in my bones every time I hear it. Goof.

[Mary Robinette] But the thing is, if you don't know that first line is missing, the book actually plays just fine. It breaks me inside, because I labored over it, and also because my closing line is an intentional mirror of the opening line. But one of the things that I did as kind of part of that how do we deal with this was that I posted a thing on my website of the second line to books and asked people to guess which book this came from. People were able to guess. So the thing to understand, I think, about openings is that it is a series of breadcrumbs. The mistake that a lot of authors will make is that that first thing that they put down on the page isn't a breadcrumb leading to the next thing. There's no logical causal progression. They're just trying for I'm going to try to catch… I'm going to hook the reader with the shocking thing, and then we don't go on from there.

[Dongwon] I think that's really the argument with dialogue is it doesn't give you a base to build off of. It will connect at some point, but in the example were talking about, in terms of The Last Watch, it connects so cleanly to the next line that you do get that breadcrumb effect. The way I think about it is you have a first-line that leads to the first paragraph which leads to the first page which leads to the first scene. If you can get them past that threshold, you have them, at least for the first chunk of your book. You've got them into your book at that point. So if you think about that progression as sort of a clean step up into where you want to get to, I think that can be really helpful.

[Howard] I also like thinking about it in terms of the kinds of questions I want the reader to be asking themselves. Even if they're not consciously articulating those questions. And how swiftly and satisfactorily I can answer those questions. If the first line of the book is dialogue, the reader's question to my mind should be something along the lines of, "Why would someone say that?" Then I immediately am told why that is being said, and it is an answer that raises another question. "Oh, that makes perfect sense. But what's going to happen to…" And now I'm hooked. So the first line of dialogue can work that way. But, yeah, if the first line of dialogue, if the question I'm asking is "Uh. Who is talking? What's even going on?" That is way too broad a question. I want that first line to ask me a narrower question, ask the reader a narrower question, so that I can answer it specifically.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm going to talk about, just to segue us a little bit away from verbal dialogue, is also physical dialogue. Wesley Chu talks about combat as being nonverbal dialogue, that it is a conversation. So when you start with a fight scene without telling us why we are in the fight scene, it's like coming in on two people having a conversation without understanding what any of the stakes are. So another very common mistake that you will see is, again, you want to start… You want to start with the action, so you start with people having a fight. The reason that James Bond films can start with a cold open of Bond doing the things is because we know that we're in a James Bond film. Bond is already an established character.

[Howard] And the cold open is the… dun dada dun dun... dun dun dun... The music that tells us why we are here. It's…

[Mary Robinette] Yes…

[Howard] That opening romp isn't quite that cold.

[Dongwon] I think one of the challenges of starting with a fight scene… People think, "Oh, I need to start in media res, and that's going to be exciting." But we don't know the character yet, we don't care about the character yet, so if this character dies, I genuinely don't care. Or if they get shot, I'm like, "Okay. Cool. What's this book about?" Right? So, I think you need to give us something that we really care about in some way to attach to the character and really pull us into the story that way. So I think people think action is a great way to start because it's exciting, but action's only exciting if there's real tension to it, if there's real threat to it. There's no threat if there is no character that we know yet. So I think it can be a really tricky place to do it I think with all three of these examples, as we're talking about it, it's sort of become clear as we talk about it and when we get in-depth with it, is that these aren't fatal errors, but they are starting a book on hard [mode]. Right? It is possible to do these things, but you've set yourself a very high threshold that you need to clear in terms of your need to communicate to the reader knowingly… You kind of need that wink, wink, nudge, nudge, in those opening pages of I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I'm doing it anyways, and you're going to trust me, because I'm so competent at doing this thing. So it's all about building that trust in the reader in that opening scene.

[Mary Robinette]

[Dongwon] Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, building trust is what we're going to be talking about next week. So, before we… Because I can feel myself wanting to talk about how to do that, right now. But why don't we give them homework, which is a very simple assignment this time.

[Dongwon] Your homework is make sure you haven't done these. Go back to your first page and consider where you're opening. Go back to that first scene and consider am I doing these mistakes. Maybe not necessarily one of these specific things. But think about the principles we started to talk about here in terms of making sure we have a character we can attach to. Making sure we have context, and that we're not coming into the story disoriented and confused. Really examine that first page and see am I making these mistakes. If not, then how do I make sure that we're moving forward from here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It really is my character… Have I given the audience something to orient? Have I given them a breadcrumb about what the future story is going to be like? We'll talk next week about how to build trust with your reader. But right now… You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.21: Player Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/23/16-21-player-characters/

Key points: Games give players choices between characters and choices in how the character develops. Focus is important, one or two abilities per character type, so characters are unique and different. This also lets players replay the game with different characters, to get a different experience. Be aware that while some power gamers love lots of stats, others like a simple way to establish their characters. Remember that the character creation system creates an experience for the players. Constraining the character's abilities also gives the writer more freedom to create challenges. Remember the three pillars, when characters confront a challenge, they can solve it by fighting it, talking to it, or sneaking past it. Limiting or changing attributes can change the style of play completely. Make sure you think about both where characters start and how they change or advance over time. If players know they are advancing, unlocking new things, they will keep playing.

[Season 16, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Player Characters.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And I'm an NPC.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] Somebody should give me a name.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No. You're a nameless NPC. So…

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to call you Bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] If we name the NPC Bunny, the players will adopt him.

[James] True.

[Mary Robinette] Who doesn't want to adopt Bunny?

[Dan] So, when we're talking about interactive fiction, one of the core concepts of that in most cases is that the player is a story. The reader or the audience is a part of the story. That's where we get to player characters. So, Cass, what do we need to know about player characters in order to write for them?

[Cassandra] I think James is opening this one.

[James] Sure. Yeah. I'll jump in on it. So, yeah, player characters really applies to games where you have a choice between characters or a choice in how your character develops. That can mean picking a particular character at the start. You don't have a choice in Super Mario Brothers, the original one, because you're Mario. But in later ones, you can be Mario, you can be Luigi, you can be Princess Peach, etc. Or it can be a game like something like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons where you are literally building a character from the ground up and choosing how they develop over time. So, for me, when I'm thinking about how I want a character to develop in a game or how to build a player character development option, I feel like focus is really important. I think it's important to find one or two cool abilities per character type and really lean into them. That's for a couple of reasons. One, it makes each character unique. You want to have your wizard character be different than your fighter character. It also gives players a reason to replay the game with a different character, because they can have a different experience in the story by having a different character. It lets… different characters can occupy different roles in a group. It can make it easier, that focus, to choose what you're going to do each turn. If every character can do everything, it can be really intimidating to a new player. Whereas if they know that the thief's go-to move is to stab somebody in the back, then they have a sense of how to play that character. You can strengthen the character's theme. But, I'm curious, Cass, how do you think about developing a character?

[Cassandra] It's very similar to what he said. There, I think, needs to be a very strong sense of narrative resonance. What you do should also reflect a list of player archetypes that might pick the characters. So, if, let's say, you have a rogue, he should also have like stealth and deception skills, things that allow them to do things that are not necessarily combat related, but are kind of fun and thematically in line with the character. I, personally, write games where there are a million little stats for you to kind of tweak and turn and poke around. Then, next, my favorite thing in the world to do is to make a game master incredibly unhappy with me, he has to spend 20 minutes stacking seemingly nonrelated skills together to create a ridiculous power boost. Yes, I am quaint. But while…

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Some players really want those millions of choices, I don't think that is true for everyone. Even if you want to present that option to terrible power gamers like me. But there should still be a number of clear competitive default choices. Sometimes you play a game, it should be a preset way of establishing stats or just general guidance.

[Dan] Yeah. I recently had the experience with a role-playing game on computer that I was so excited to get it, I downloaded it on Steam and I opened it up and for whatever reason, having to choose my attributes, put actual number points into the different attributes, completely turned me off. Which is weird, because I have played games like this before, but in that instance, something about it was kind of an overwhelming choice. I thought I am not ready to deal with this right now. Having the option of auto creation or random creation or even just removing the need for it all together can be really valuable for a lot of players.

[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that Alan and I did with Planet Mercenary, we scrapped the game engine twice in the building process because we realized each time that the stuff we'd been building at the lower level was being abstracted up to the next level in a way that the players were making all of their decisions a level up and didn't need those lower-level numbers at all. We actually abstracted clear up to the skill and proficiency level where everything you do is about, well, you choose. Do you want to be good at stealing things? Do you want to be good at shooting things? Do you want to be good at talking to people? Well, that's fine. We have character backgrounds and proficiencies and whatever else, but at no point did you have to look under the covers and see, well, what is my strength? What is my intelligence? What are these numbers? Now I get that there are people and there are game systems where those numbers are critically important, because you can change them later on. That's not the way we built it, because we wanted to focus on what the different player types were rather than the physics simulation.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the games that I play on a daily basis is Habitica, which turns your to do list into a role-playing game. I love it very much. One of the things that I deeply, deeply appreciate about the way they have it structured is that you do not have the option to adjust your player attributes until you're a couple of levels in. So that you have a chance to understand how the game works, so that you can make good decisions. Then you have two choices. You can either go in and tweak them individually, or you can just hit a button that will assign it for you. I love that they have thought about the fact that there are two types of players, essentially. There are players who really enjoy sitting there and fiddling with the numbers, and there are people who are like, "This is going to stop me from using the thing."

[Dan] Yeah. On top of that, I would layer the idea that there is different kinds of games. Howard kind of hit on this a little bit, that the character creation system you're dealing with, it creates an experience. You can choose what experience you want to give your players. So, for example, one of the player character systems that I immensely love is Stardew Valley. Every choice you make in character creation is purely cosmetic. There are no numbers, there are no stats, there's no attributes. It's just what color do you want your hair to be, do you like cats or dogs, like all of these kind of meaningless things. But because those are the choices you make, they become meaningful. So as you're replaying the game, it's not which powers am I going to have this time. It's well, which of the townspeople do I want to romance, what kind of person do I want to be romancing them this time? It becomes all about relationships rather than about stats. It creates a different experience. So you kind of choose what you want to give to your players.

[James] Well, I think that ties into like one of the reasons why I really like narrowly themed characters is that I feel like it gives you a chance to really play with that character in a different way. Right? Where, think about in Portal, the character only really has one ability. Or, like, think about the X-Men. The X-Men are not nearly as interesting if Cyclops also has Wolverine's claws and Storm's weather abilities. What makes those characters interesting is their limitations and the fact that, then if you're telling a Cyclops story, you can explore all the different ways that Cyclops could use his powers. Right? Like, oh, he could use his eyes to blast open that door and to make toast and to do a bat signal into the sky…

[Chuckles]

[James] To some of the others. So you want to give yourself a narrow enough set of abilities that you actually let the players figure out all the interesting uses of that ability.

[Dan] Let's pause here for our game of the week, which is coming from Cass.

[Cassandra] The game of the week is A Dark Room. It is an [inaudible idle, older] game and it opens on a white screen with just one option. It asks you to light a fire. Slowly, as time progresses and the fire begins to dwindle, you can stoke the fire. It sounds very minimalist, but [garbled as it?] progresses, it just builds and builds and builds. It's an old game, but I'm not willing to spoil it, because it is an amazing experience to discover on your own.

[James] All right. I also want to throw out really quick that the reason to constrain your character's abilities aren't just for the players enjoyment. It's also for you as the writer.

[Chuckles]

[James] By constraining a character's abilities, you leave yourself a lot more freedom to create challenges. One of the first… When I first started working on Dungeons & Dragons back when I was editing Dungeon Magazine, the first rule they taught me is that as soon as it's possible for any character in the party to fly magically or otherwise, you have to design your dungeons totally differently. Because suddenly every trap that relies on gravity is potentially broken. The thing about tabletop is you don't get to select what characters people are going to play. So you don't know if the group is going to run that with a wizard who has levitate or a fighter who doesn't. So you need to plan for every possibility that any character could have when designing an adventure. So by limiting what powers people have options… The option to choose, you give yourself a lot more freedom to create interesting challenges.

[Dan] Yeah. When I write RPG adventures and scenarios, I try to remember what I call the three pillars. This is something I learned from a writer named Lou Agresta who works in role-playing games. The three pillars of game writing are when characters confront a challenge, they should be able to solve it by fighting it, by talking to it, or by sneaking past it. If I just keep those three simple things in mind, and it helps me remember, oh, we're going to have a lot of different kinds of players, different kinds of characters. I don't know who is going to be going through this dungeon or talking to this shopkeeper or whoever. So as long as I have presented entertaining options for all three of those pillars, then every player has something that they love that they can do that will be effective.

[Howard] In the TypeCast RPG games, the sessions that Dan runs, I'm one of the players. The previous campaign, I played a bard cleric with high wisdom and high charisma. In many situations, we ended up with me being the person who knows what probably the wisest course of action is and me being the person who has to communicate that to NPC's. Because I'm the one who's most likely to succeed in the charisma check. The new game, I have an even higher wisdom. I'm playing a flying magical karate bird…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because [garbled]

[Love it]

[Howard] And hates flying characters, and I'm a bad person. I have a high wisdom and a really low charisma. What's changed for me as a player is the realization that, well, I have great ideas, and I know perhaps what the wisest course of action is, but now I have to convince the other players, some of whom are dumb, to communicate that to the NPC's. I've gone from being the face man to being that advisor who sits in the background. It's all about the limitations of attributes. It changes the play style completely.

[Mary Robinette] You've just reminded me of this game… It was a D&D one shot. This is David Seers again. He set it all up as… It was a Snow White retelling. We had all been assigned characters, but he didn't tell us that we were doing a Snow White retelling. We just all knew that there were seven of us and that we were all playing dwarves.

[Ha ha]

[Mary Robinette] Each of us had a tic. So you knew what your tic was and you knew what your trigger was. If the trigger happened, you had to roll… To save against it. Mine was that I would attempt to make friends with any sentient creature.

[Nice]

[Mary Robinette] So… He knew that, going in. But what he didn't know was how it was going to manifest, right? So I… We roll in and there are these giant apple trolls. I roll a natural one. I'm just like, "Hello, friends!" and run towards them. He's like, "Didn't see that coming,"…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And had to completely change everything on the spot, because I'm attempting to make friends. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not, very badly.

[James] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] It was so much fun. Somebody else had narcolepsy. It was ridiculous. I was happy. It was great. But by giving this very specific constraint, the entire game was so much fun.

[James] One other thing that I want to throw out is to think about not just where characters start, but how they're going to advance. If you're running… One of the great things about role-playing games is that characters can develop over time. That can mean both in terms of their personality, but also in terms of their mechanics, their attributes, what they're able to do. So one thing you can do to make your game a lot more addictive is to make sure that players always feel themselves advancing, feel themselves on the cusp of unlocking something new. So maybe as they go on, they get new gear or new abilities as they gain experience. That idea of, oh, I'm almost to the next level, will keep people playing and give them something to look forward to.

[Dan] The Diablo series is absolutely intravenous crack for this kind of carrot method of getting you to stick with something because you're constantly on the verge of a new level that will give you new power. Or you know that you're going to find a new piece of equipment that will give you a new power.

[Cassandra] It reminds me of my experience with Baldur's Gate 3. I was going to play it with my cousin, we went through one of the earlier builds, and we were like, "Okay, we're going to leave this alone and not touch it until the game releases." But then the developers released the Druids. I think it was at level five, you could turn into a bear. We basically just spent a weekend just rushing to be a bear. The sheer joy of knowing what was waiting for us. Of course, I then spent the entire time as a cat, because my friends [let me]

[chuckles]

[Dan] I love it. Well, I think that it is time for us to end our episode. But, James, you have some homework for us.

[James] Yeah. So I want you to go through the character creation process of a role-playing game. Any role-playing game, on your computer, on your phone, and a tabletop version. But pay attention to which parts of character creation are fun, and also what attracts you to the different classes, creature types, etc. Look at your options and the ones that you get excited about, identify why you're excited about that. What makes the different character builds unique and appealing?

[Dan] Cool. That sounds like fun. I am notorious for creating endless characters in role-playing games that I will never play. So this is a really fun thing. Anyway, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.17: Elemental Adventure Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/04/24/11-17-elemental-adventure-qa/

Q&A Summary:
Q: In an adventure story, what is more liked by readers? If protagonists go through many different incidents and locations, or a fewer number of incidents and locations, but that are similar to each other and have a theme?
A: Do them both! It depends. Big globetrotting tale, more cool exotic locations are better. Smaller scale, more focused. Adventure stories need lots of exotic settings, using the element of adventure to enhance may not need that.
Q: What lessons can we take from your favorite adventure games for writing adventure fiction?
A: Multiple levels of terrain and that environment you can interact with are more interesting. Different characters, different strengths; so include different kinds of adventure, chase scenes, fight scenes, talking scenes. Make sure there is something personal at risk for the character.
Q: With all the superhero franchises around, what are some tips on writing adventure stories outside of fight scenes and world ending consequences?
A: Exotic locations don't have to include a fight scene. Great adventures don't even need villains. Use accelerated timebombs – escaping the burning building, getting out of the path of the avalanche, getting to the hospital. Two different people trying to get the same thing in an exotic location makes an adventure!
Q: Are there tropes that have been overdone need to be avoided in regards to adventure fiction?
A: Tropes are ingredients, not inherently bad. What you do with it and the ingredients you combine it with make the difference. If adventure is the only thing a scene is doing, that may be a problem. Advance the plot, reveal stuff about characters, mix in other ingredients. Make your adventure scenes complications that change the story or the characters, not just obstacles in the way.
Q: Do you have any suggestions for non-Western, nontraditional styles of adventure that could provide variety or a fresh take on things for readers?
A: Grab a bunch of books and read them. Consider the kung fu final fight where the bad guy faces a whole group of heroes.
Q: How do you make the journey exciting? Do you have to include all the details to it? If you skip a bunch of it, how do you get across to the reader the character moments that I have taken place during the parts that you skip of the journey?
A: Think about what you're trying to accomplish. Different stories focus more or less on the journey. Skip the boring parts, trust the reader to fill in between the high points. If you can find a way to make the journey not boring, put it in.

( A fight, a chase, an ambulance racing to the hospital... It's an adventure! )
[Brandon] I'm going to have to shut it down here. I'm sorry for all of you that put questions. There were 54 responses and we answered like seven of them, if that many. But we thank you very much for listening. We're going to point you at some homework for next time, for our next elemental genre. So I want you for your homework to make a list of set pieces, really cool places that people could visit. I then want you to go a step further, and I want you to say, "How does my main character entering this place, interacting this place, change who they are?" We don't want you to just go to cool places, we want those cool places to change your story and change your characters in interesting ways. That is what I think will make adventure fiction kind of go up a level for you. Now, as I said, we'll be moving on to horror next week. We want you to brace yourselves for that. Dan's going to make you afraid. But until then, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.16: Adventure as a Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/04/17/11-16-adventure-as-a-subgenre/

Key Points: Don't just be a cook, following a list of ingredients, be a chef who knows what each ingredient does and how to add spice to your stories! Adventure adds a sense of wish fulfillment, of everyman victory, of the normal person doing great things. Adventure takes us to exotic locations, and lets us accomplish things. Adventure gives you external adversity. It also gives you "oh, awesome" moments that come from action, from derring-do, from swashbuckling! Why do people like adventure? Wish fulfillment. Stand-up-and-cheer moments! Creative fulfillment -- how are they going to do this? The "We did it" moment at the peak of the mountain. The expectation of success. The moment of triumph. Using adventure as a subgenre? Consider the chase scene embedded in heist stories and others. Adventure can raise tension, or relieve it. Adventure lets the reader have fun! Chase scenes, fight scenes, other adventure scenes need to have bits pulled in that are important elsewhere, that the characters care about. You can use adventure as the glue, to keep it interesting and provide an external motivation to push characters together. Adventure also is a good setting for banter, to illuminate character. Show who people are under stress by adding adventure.

( And they're off on a chase... )
[Brandon] But it's time for some homework. Mary is going to give us our homework this week.
[Mary] All right. So we're talking about you using adventure as a spice. So I want you to do is I want you to grab your favorite piece of media. But not an adventure film. Not something where adventure is the main ingredient. Grab a romance, grab whatever. I want you to watch it, and I want you to note the moments when they are using the adventure as a subgenre. Also note why. Look at the transitions into the adventure, look at the transitions out of it. Think about what it is doing and what would happen if it was removed from the plot at that moment.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go on an adventure.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 21: Fight Scenes

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/03/01/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-21-fight-scenes/

Key Points: Fight scenes in novels aren't just bad knockoffs of movie fight scenes -- show the emotions, thoughts, and motivations. Focus on pinnacles and nadirs. Make sure the reader knows where things are and what is going on -- do your setup work. Goals can make the actions sing. Consider your character's expertise, your reader's expertise, and the moral ramifications, then decide whether to go for blow-by-blow, abstract, beautiful writing, showing the cost, and what else goes into your fight scene -- or gets left out.
( blow-by-blow )
[Brandon] All right. Writing Prompt? Write a fight between two people who have never been in a fight before.
[Dan] And have to use their environment cleverly.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thanks for listening.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with fight scenes

Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara

Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes

Writing Excuses 16.21: Player Characters

Writing Excuses 11.17: Elemental Adventure Q&A

Writing Excuses 11.16: Adventure as a Subgenre

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 21: Fight Scenes

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