Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-04-metaphor-1-puppetry

 

Key points: Puppetry as a metaphor for writing. Focus, breath, muscle, meaningful movement. Voice means different things. Puppetry has mechanical style, aesthetic style, and personal style. Genre! Meat actors and puppet actors. Lots of styles of puppets, lots of genres and subgenres and mashups. Space opera, horse opera, and horses can't sing! Building a puppet. What kind of puppet? Some key questions, what size is the audience, what's the budget? Then do a drawing, a rough sketch, a thumbnail sketch, what is the vibe? Work in layers. Pitches. Found object puppets. Focus for thoughts, what is your character looking at. Breath, emotion, pacing. Muscle, internal motivation. What is driving your character? Meaningful movement, actions and body language. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 04]

 

[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 20, Episode 04]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Puppetry as a writing metaphor. 

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about my favorite subject, puppetry. So the idea that we've got for you with this, and we're going to be doing this all season, is that the lived experience that we all have affects the way we think about writing. You've heard me talk about puppetry for basically 17 seasons now, since I first appeared on season 3, episode 14. But I wanted to do kind of a deeper dive into actually thinking about it as a metaphor, as a way for you to also begin thinking about things in your own life you can use as writing metaphors. So. This is going to be a lot of me talking, but...

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Everybody else is going to chime in at some point.

[Dan] Eventually.

[Mary Robinette] Eventually. So, in season 13… Season three, episode 14, I talk about the four principles of puppetry. Focus, breath, muscle, and meaningful movement. I talked about those as a way to think about character. What I also want to talk about is the way to think about puppetry as thinking about… How it informs the way I think about genre, how it informs the way I think about the lens that the… The voice with which we write. So I actually want to start by talking about voice. Since we're talking about lenses. I think that there's this wonderful thing in puppetry that writers can use. So you've heard people say, oh, it's very important to develop your voice, and, don't worry about developing your voice, your voice will come naturally. I love the voice of this. So we use the word voice to mean three different things. When you're talking about puppetry, you talk about the style of puppetry and that means three different things. There's the mechanical style, there's the aesthetic style, and then there's the personal style. So, the mechanical style is literally are you using a marionette? Are you using a hand puppet? Is it a giant body puppet? With writing, that mechanical style would be the like first person third person, YA, which has a different mechanical style… Middle grade, in particular, has a different mechanical style than adult. Gaming has a different mechanical style than prose. So what style of writing are you doing? Then, aesthetic is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like something that's handcarved from Appalachia? Does it… What does it look like? For writing, that is… Does it sound like it's Jane Austen? Does it sound like it is from the Bronx? Does it sound like…

[DongWon] Elmo Leonard.

[Mary Robinette] Elmo Leonard. Then, the personal is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why when Steve… After Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over Kermit the frog, everybody kind of freaked out. Because there are just subtle differences, even though it's obviously hitting the same mechanical and aesthetic, because there's these subtle differences that affect the choices that the performer makes. That… That is the same thing that means you as a writer are the only person who can write the book that you're writing.

[DongWon] Which is such an important thing to remember. Because we all kind of tend to freak out with this horrible burden of influence that we feel from other authors and other versions of stories that we've read. But my Kermit is going to be different from your Kermit. My monomyth coming-of-age story is going to be very different from your monomyth coming-of-age story. Or whatever it is that we're writing. So, remembering that you are an important ingredient in your work I think is really vital.

[Howard] There's a flipside to this. The fear that people are going to read what you're writing and just hear you. If you've ever watched a puppeteer on stage sitting visibly right next to the puppet and performing the puppet. They vanish. They vanish completely. It's surprisingly easy for us, as writers, to vanish into our prose. It doesn't make our voice go away. But we can disappear.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about having your own personal voice. Right? The thing that is really intrinsic to how you write, how you think, how you speak, is… There's a term called anxiety of influence. Right? This is when you are so concerned of, like, oh, no, I've replicated a plot from Star Wars. I've replicated a beat from this, or a worldbuilding element from Tolkien or whatever it is. The reason why it's okay to do that, the reason why… Not just because it's impossible not to, because you absorbed the things you've read and there's only so many stories and so many things, but because it's all going to be filtered through your natural voice. It will be transformed into something that feels different. Right? So when we say that you want to lean into and enhance your voice, this is the [thing] we're talking about, this natural style that you have that will… Everything will be rendered through it and therefore feel different if you allow yourself that kind of distinctiveness of the way you think and write.

[Dan] So, bringing this back to puppetry, I just watched a documentary about Jim Henson called Idea Man, which was wonderful. One of the interesting things in there is when they were talking about how he and his wife were just barely getting started. The reason that Kermit as a character took off was in part because the hand was so visible inside the puppet. Not only did it make it more malleable and you could do a lot of facial expressions, but the… You watched those early things and you can see the fingers inside of Kermit's head. That was something that they liked about it. That it made the puppet so particularly expressive of the puppeteer, that that personal style came through really strongly.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that it… It's difficult to remember now, because all of us have grown up with Sesame Street and with the moving mouth, hand and rod style being the predominant style. But when they started doing that, the predominant style was marionettes. The huge puppeteer at that time was Bill Baird, who was a marionette-ist. You've seen his work if you've seen Sound of Music. He built those marionettes, although the children did actually do the performance. But the… That look was the look that everyone was influenced by and mimicking. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, those were also these rigid, rigid figures. Then Jim Henson comes along with these incredibly malleable figures, and almost all of puppetry you see now on television is moving mouth puppets. But you can see the difference between, even though they're all using the same mechanical style now, and they're all… Everybody has been influenced by Henson, you can see the difference in different designers as they're working. I think that that's really exciting, like, when we get so wrapped up in the idea of the original idea. It's not that, it's the execution of it.

[DongWon] Well, what's interesting there is you have an intersection of mechanical voice and sort of your natural voice. Right? Because the mechanical voice in this case is allowing for different emphases on natural voice.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] You can see the performer in a different way than you can in marionettes. I mean, in marionettes, you will still have that natural voice, I'm assuming. But, as you're saying, in terms of being able to see the hand in the puppet… Very unsettling way to put that, by the way… Letting the mechanical enhance the natural, I think is a really wonderful way to do it. So, when we talk about fiction being voice-y, it is because you have this intersection of these two elements.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, all of these things are one of the reasons that I love using puppetry as a metaphor. So, now we're going to talk about a different aspect of puppetry to use as a metaphor. That's talking about the genre. So, for puppetry… Puppetry and science fiction and fantasy I feel like have a lot in common, in that we are both sort of the redheaded stepchild of our parent genre. So, puppetry is a form of theater. Puppet actors are actors. We think about ourselves as actors. The disparaging thing we talk about people who are not using puppets is that they are meat actors.

[Dan] Nice.

[Mary Robinette] Because we're performing with puppets, they're performing with meat. But the thing is that underneath that, there's this umbrella. So, there's this umbrella of puppetry, like we have an umbrella of science fiction and fantasy. Then, within puppetry, we have hand puppets… And these are all the mechanical style that you used to move the puppet. So you have hand puppets, you have rod puppets, you have shadow puppets, you have body puppets, and you have string puppets. Hand puppets, Kermit the frog.

[Howard] The Muppets are hand… Mostly hand puppets.

[Mary Robinette] The Muppets are hand puppets. But so are the puppets on Mr. Rogers. Those are also hand puppets. So anything you put your hand inside. Rod puppets are any puppets that's worked with a stick. That goes from Sicily and rod marionettes to [way angolek?] You guys can look these things up.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] They're amazing and beautiful. But the one you've probably seen, Slimy the Worm on Sesame Street. And also Rizzo the rat. Those are both controlled with a literal stick up their ass.

[Dan] And you thought I was making…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Bad metaphors here.

[Howard] Oh, Rizzo, I'm so sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Anyone did not deserve it, it would be Rizzo. Then you've got shadow puppets. Or screen puppets, they're sometimes called. That's anything where the… You've got… You're looking at an image on the screen. If you…

[DongWon] [Parawalkers?] is one example.

[Mary Robinette] Perfect. If you've got… You've probably done a shadow puppet where you've done the dog with your hand. It's one of the oldest forms of puppetry, but you can also do it with overhead projectors. There's a… So, like, within each of these, you get to drill down again. Then we got string puppets, which are marionettes, but they can also be cable control, for instance, in the original Little Shop of Horrors, the giant puppet is a cable controlled puppet. Those are mechanical cables that people are actually moving. That's also a string puppet. Then, body puppet is any puppet you put your entire body inside.

[Howard] Jack not name, Jack job.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Big Bird, Snuffy. So, within all of those, again, you can drill down further. It's the same thing with science fiction and fantasy, where you have science fiction, but then you also have space opera, you have near future, you have far future. What's interesting is the mash ups. So, we just mentioned Kermit the frog. Kermit the frog is actually a mashup that had never happened before. It is a mashup… Well… Shouldn't say never happened before. But it's the mashup of two styles that are not commonly mixed. Which is hand puppet and rod puppet. Rod puppets did not exist in the European vocabulary of puppetry until the early 1900s. That… They were brought over from Asia, from specifically Javanese puppets. Without that, that mingling of, that conversation between these two different cultures, these two different styles of puppetry, we would not have Kermit the frog, we wouldn't have the type of puppetry that we experience today. I think it's the same thing when we're talking about science fiction and fantasy. Like, steampunk. Is steampunk fantasy or science fiction?

[DongWon] Um… Who cares?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly. It's a mashup.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is the Swedish chef a hand puppet or hands? Because he's got a pair of human hands.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] He's got a pair of human hands.

[Howard] And… Who cares?

[Chorus of yeah]

[Howard] I just want to watch him.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But it's also… What I love is you talk about the lineages of puppetry too, as you're talking about new genres. Right? If where the rod puppetry comes from and it goes back to… Space opera. The reason it's called space opera is it comes out of a genre called horse opera, which is a type of Western. Right? So, the dominance of westerns as pulp fiction in the early twentieth century then transitions into spaceships and ray guns as technology evolves, as we enter slowly the atomic era, and then the horse opera becomes space opera.

[Howard] My brain… Oh, my gosh. You said horse opera, and the first thing I thought was that's ridiculous, horses can't sing.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And space can?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Anne McCaffrey made it happen. Yeah, we've got The Spaceship Who Sang. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But, that goes farther back into opera tradition. Right? It literally was called horse opera because it was taking the high stakes and melodrama from opera, translating it into the American West, and all of this. So, all of this is… Genre is about legacy and tradition as well, and the ways you can combine them is so novel and exciting.

[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a good opportunity for us to pause. When we come back, we're going to talk more puppets.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Do we want to move on to more puppet things.

[Yes!]

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So we're going to…

[DongWon] I just want to pause and say this is so delightful and so fun to dig deep into this topic. I mean, it… You brought this up over and over again throughout the show, but, like, to get it all in one place, I'm finding very delicious to go through one of the host's minds and how they think about it and approach it and all these things.

[Howard] The thing that's missing from the whole legend, the whole mythos of Writing Excuses, is video of Brandon, Dan, and Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Slack-jawed as Mary Robinette who we'd never had as a guest before guests, and talks about puppetry, and all of our minds explode at once. It was delightful.

[Mary Robinette] It was, I have to say, pretty satisfying.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… Like, the reason that I brought up puppetry was… In that episode was that you all had asked me about… Something about the way I thought about writing. In my background in puppetry has affected everything about the way that I move through my writing career. So, the next thing were going to talk about is actually building a puppet. It affects the way that I think about writing. So, I see a lot of writers who get very hung up on, oh, I can't get my opening right. So, when I'm building a puppet, I sit down and I first have to think about what kind of puppet I'm going to build. I have to answer these questions about the style of puppet. I have to answer those questions first. And those questions are informed by a lot of different things. They're informed by what size is my theater. They're informed by who my audience is going to be. They're informed by my budget. And that affects… And this is before I actually get to the building part, which we will also talk about. But that affects my conception. For me, as a writer, when I sit down and think, oh, I'm going to write. Sometimes I do just free-form and right in the same way that sometimes you just doodle as an artist. Sometimes you just say here's some stuff, I'm going to slap it together and see what happens. But when I'm building something for a show, in the same way that I'm writing something for a themed anthology or for a contract, I think about what is the size of my theater? Am I writing a short story or am I writing a novel? Because that's going to affect all of my proportions. I think about the audience. Because that's going to affect the stylistic choices that I make. And, I think about my budget, because my budget for writing is my number of words. If I have a really small budget, which is, like, a 3000 word story, I cannot afford to have a lot of sets. Because every set costs words.

[DongWon] This is… So when I often talk about publishing advice and writing advice, one thing I say frequently is you have to hold to opposite ideas in your head at the same time and learn how to live in that contradiction. So, the reason I bring that up is in this case when it comes to writing your book, I firmly believe that you should not think about the market, you should not think about the world, you should just focus on the story you want to write, the book of your heart, all of that. Also, the contradictory advice of what you should do is think about the market, think about the industry, and think about what you want your book to look like in a certain way. Exactly, who's your audience, what's your target word count? If you're writing space opera and you write a 60,000 word novel, sorry, you didn't write a space opera, you wrote a short science fiction novel. Right? So to hit certain genre markers and to hit certain expectations of your audience, you do kind of have to frame things up in a certain way to set those expectations.

[Mary Robinette] So, what's interesting is that when I'm thinking about audience, I'm not thinking about markets. Because, specifically, because I come out of children's theater, my audience are not the people who are buying the tickets. So I'm thinking about will this be funny for a third grader? Will they get this reference? Will they be worried about this? Is this too scary for them? Then, later, I have to think about how do I get their parents to buy a ticket?

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But I don't think about how do I get their parents to buy a ticket when I am designing a book.

[DongWon] Right

[Mary Robinette] When I'm coming up with a show.

[DongWon] Maybe that's a useful distinction between thinking about audience when you're starting to craft versus thinking about audience when you're getting ready to pitch. Right? Because those are two very different stages of the project.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With two very different mindsets and approaches. When you start thinking too much about the marketing and the publishing framing, I think that can infect…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Your work in a way that can be limiting. But I do think it's important to think about who do you want to read this book. Who's this book for, on some level.

[Howard] I think one of the challenges that many writers… New writers, old writers, established, published, whatever… Many of us face is the discovery right about the time, and I'm going to lean into the puppetry metaphor in ways that may not work, right about the time that you're hot gluing the last bits of whatever to your hand puppet, and you realize, oh, wait, this hand puppet actually needs to be eight feet across and be driven by cables, and I need to now go rewrite my whole book, because I've discovered something about it that says this structure isn't right, and I didn't know how to build Audrey 2, but then I saw a book or read a thing or learned a thing, and now I know, oh, my goodness, there's this whole structure that I didn't know how to use that's the structure I really needed for my book, and I just finished hot gluing a thing…

 

[Mary Robinette] We are 100% going to talk about this. And I'm going to actually, unless someone else wants to talk about audience, I'm going to use that as my segue. So, I've been talking about the decisions I have to make before I start building. When I start building, the first thing that I do is I do a drawing of what I want it to look like. This drawing does not include what it looks like on the inside. But after I've got this kind of general, like, this is the vibe that I'm going for, then I have to sit down and I have to start thinking about the interior structure. And I work in layers. So I will draw the body parts that are going to be there. I will draw, like, where does this have to fit? I will draw those things, and then I will start putting layers on top of that to figure out what I need. Then, after I've got that sketch, that's not the puppet. I've got that sketch, and then I have to build. Most of the time, if I've got a puppet that's like a papier-mâché or something, often, I have to start with building an armature. Then I put clay on the armature, and I do additive and subtractive sculpture, where I'm putting clay on and then pulling it off, and I'm slowly refining it into the shape that I want. Then I do a mold. Then I papier-mâché into that. Then I have to send it. Then I get to do my painting. Then I get to glue all of the details on. If I just jumped straight to the sculpture, frequently it would collapse, frequently it wouldn't have a spot to put my hand. So, when I'm writing, what I often start with is that I start with… You'll hear me talk sometimes about a thumbnail sketch. Which is a term that comes out of my art background. Which is just a little drawing, just a little bit, like, this is the vibe. That, for me, with writing is sometimes it's a log line, Jane Austen with magic, this is the vibe. Sometimes it is a paragraph of asteroid slams into the earth in 1952. There's a lot of chaos. Then ladies go to space. It's just a very rough sketch. Then I will unpack that, then I start to move towards my armature, which is my outline or my synopsis. But the thing that… The thing, for me, is that at every stage of that, I am discovering something new, and I know that, I'm going to discover something new in every stage. So, having gone through that with puppetry, when I'm doing that with writing, it gives me this freedom, because I know that I don't have to be locked in. I know I'm still going to be making discoveries. And particularly as a writer with ADHD, it gives me a bunch of, oh, you did that, now you get to do this next thing. Knowing that there's still going to be discovery.

[Howard] I have never… Not even one time, while writing, given myself third-degree burns with a hot glue gun.

[Mary Robinette] I… Um…

[Dan] You're missing out.

[Mary Robinette] Missing out. Yeah. I have two different spots from puppets. Two different third degrees from puppets. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that I do like about writing is that it is significant… I am injured significantly less.

[DongWon] I mean, we could consider carpal tunnel to be a form…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of a hot glue burn. So…

[Dan] One of the… Sorry, go ahead.

[DongWon] Not at all. [Garbled] more joke.

 

[Dan] One of the great things about starting with that thumbnail sketch for me is that it helps me pitch the story later on. If I have a really succinct starting point, if I know what the core framework or skeleton of this story is, I know what the vibe is, then it's so much easier to tell it to people. And I know… I can pitch a John Cleaver book or I can pitch one of my cyberpunk books really easily, whereas my Partials series, I didn't start with that, I started from a completely different direction. And to this day, what, 15 years later, it's hard for me to summarize in one sentence or even one paragraph, what that book is.

[DongWon] Yeah, and when I work with a client, my… One of my favorite stages is this first stage, where were coming up with the pitch. Right? There pitching me on ideas, a couple sentences, a paragraph, whatever it is. And then we just start, like you were saying, like, accreting more and more layers on to that as it develops into something richer. But you gotta have that pitch out of the gate, for me, at least to feel really confident that this project is going to work at the end of the day.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I want to say that just because I tend to work that way, there are also times and joy in working the other direction. Where you're like, here's a bunch of ingredients that I have, is a bunch of materials, what can I make out of that? There's something in puppetry we call a found object puppet, where you make a puppet come to life with… Using the mechanical principles of how puppetry works. If anyone has ever seen me do the puppetry demonstration live in person, you've seen me do scarf dragon, where I take a… Just a scarf, and turn it in. But we do this with, like, newspaper, shoes, water bottles, whatever it is, we just like, well, put these objects together.

[DongWon] There's a photo on the Internet somewhere of Mary Robinette menacing me with a napkin puppet that is very delightful to me. But, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a… I also have fond memories of that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Any time he gets to be menacing. There's a wonderful puppeteer named Paul Zaloom and I think you'll be able to find some of his work on YouTube. But he does found object puppetry where he will glue different pieces together. So, sometimes that's fun. Sometimes you do the drawing and then you're like, okay, but what structure has to be under it to support that? So it's not that you have to always start from the inside, but it is the what is the vibe, what am I going for, and that I can work in layers.

[DongWon] Well, there's one last element of this and I know we're running long, but I kind of wanted to bring this up. As you're talking about building, there's a thing that, as I've been in the industry longer and longer, one of the things that has been most useful to me is to step back and remember that a book is a physical object.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes.

[DongWon] That we… A lot of the time. Not always. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But, like the core of what the publishing industry is is a physical goods business. We print books, we ship them to thousands of stores around the country, and then those are sold by hand to a customer.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Yes, there are e-books, there are audiobooks, there's a million other things that branch off from that. But the original business…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Is stuff. The commercial heart of the business is the physical business. Right? So, sometimes remembering that what you're making is a physical object in the way that you are thinking about building a puppet and what that means for the space that you're in, the shape that you're in, the materials you're using. I think there's a very, very useful metaphor to remember that a book is a thing that you want to hand to a person at the end of the day.

[Mary Robinette] When I did the translation for the Hildur Knutsdottir, the Night Guest, one of the things that she was very specific about is that there are some chapters that are only one sentence long, and she was very specific about which side of the page that sentence was on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] Um… When we're talking about physically building puppets, I'm remembering another thing from this Henson documentary about Rowlf the dog. He was, for a long time, the breakout Muppet. Before Kermit, before Sesame Street, he was the big one. That was pure experimentation. Their guy who was their main Muppet maker cut a basketball in half, more or less because he wanted to see what he could do with it. And he ended up… That's why Rowlf has this giant kind of spherical looking head with this enormous mouth, because he was built from a basketball cut in half. That kind of experimentation, where you don't have a plan in advance, you just have stuff, and you have ideas, and you want to see what you can put together… Some of my best writing I've ever done comes from that kind of let's see what happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm going to… Because I just need to hit the focus… Those things… Because in episode 3-14, I did not have a good way to talk about muscle and I do now.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, focus indicates thoughts. What your character is looking at is what your character is thinking about. It's whatever they notice. Sounds, scents, touch. That's what is important to the character, that's the thing that is in front of their brain. Breath indicates emotion. So, breath and rhythm are closely related. If you walk into a room and you are breathing rapidly, it reads differently than if you walk into a room and take a very big sigh. But those are both mechanically breaths. For on the page, that your sentence structure. How long your sentences are, along your paragraphs are. Those affect the way your reader… The pace in the way the reader feels about it. Muscle, which is the idea that the puppet moves itself… In writing, I've started calling this internal motivation. What is moving your character? What is making your character make choices? Because you want it to… You want all of those things to appear to originate from inside the character as opposed to having the puppeteer's hand reach on stage and move a prop. And then meaningful movement. When your character moves, when their doing body language, that body language is as important as the dialogue. So those are the things. Everything else you can… Most everything else we talk about in 3-14, if you want to go back and listen to that. Thank you all so much for joining me on my let me talk about puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I could actually keep talking about it. But those were… Those are the things that shape the way I approach writing. Because it was such a huge part of my life for so long. So we're going to be talking about this kind of thing all season. We've got other metaphors that other people are going to be bringing to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right now, I have a little bit of homework. And oddly, I just want you to watch a puppet show. If you can find a live puppet show, in person, that would be amazing. Go to puppeteers.org if you're in the United States. That's puppeteers of America. You can look for your regional guild. Most of the time, they will list shows that are happening. If you're not in the United States, you can look at unima.com. There's a… unima is the oldest continually operating arts organization in the world. It's Union de la internationale de la marionettes. I'm saying this very very badly. But you can again find a puppet show near you. And if you can't do that, check YouTube. There's so many fantastic amazing puppet shows. But look at… Watch a puppet show, and I specifically want you to watch something that's not the Muppets. Just so that you can see how many different amazing styles out there… Are out there.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go watch puppets.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-14-a-close-reading-on-voice-epistolary-storytelling-through-voice

 

Key points: Epistles, letters, and voice. What do letters do for voice? 2 things at the same time, what you plan to say, and knowing that it is written for a specific audience, how you present it. 2nd person! Can we be luxuriant and indulgent without epistles? Yes, using pacing, accent, attitude, experience, and focus. Try free indirect speech. Epistles let you concentrate it. Playfulness or humor in the midst of serious situations, like gallows humor. Epistles have a performative aspect, with the character conscious that their words will be judged. The signoff yours. Repetition and resonance! 

[Season 19, Episode 14]

 

[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 14]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling through Voice.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] At the very beginning of our journey in this book, I talked about how much I love the fact that it used epistolaries, that it uses letters. So we're going to really dive into how voice is working within the epistolaries in this particular episode. I actually want to start before we get into a specific reading that I'm going to ask DongWon to do, just to…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Just to hear him do it, is that I'm wondering sort of what is it… Why do we use epistolaries? What is it that letters actually do in voice? I'll say, for me, one of the things I like about using letters is that there are 2 sort of things going on at the same time. There's what you planned to say, and the fact that you know you're writing it to a specific audience, that your character is writing it to someone. So they expect it to be read. That changes the way that they actually present themselves in the things that they put on the page.

[Mary Robinette] I do agree because I think that one of the things that that illuminates is very clearly what the character thinks of the other character. Because of the way they frame things, the… All of the subtext that goes into that epistolary letter. It is also, I think, one of the things that is fun because there is the epistolary that is the letter, and then there's also things that are… Like news articles, and these are very different because they are written to a broad audience, whereas a letter is written, as you said, to one specific person. That is, I think, that's fun.

[DongWon] The letter epistolary, the thing I love really about it is I'm such a sucker for the 2nd person in a piece of fiction. I love the you address. It plays with your subjectivity as the reader in such an interesting way, because it forces you into the position of the person on the other end of this. Right? So, in this case, switching between Red and Blue, and using the 2nd person… I'm put in the position where I have to identify with the person receiving the letter in a way that I think is really fascinating to me, and I think really deepens the connection to character in this book. It's a really clever trick that I really love.

[Howard] How do I know what I think, until I see what I say? I have operated on that principle for decades.

[Screech]

[DongWon] I find these so delightful is the letters can be quite silly in a way that's really good. So. Anyways, Erin is torturing me by making me read this.

 

"My perfect Red. How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored? Perhaps you'll tell me once you finished with this strand?"

 

[DongWon] Just like these little references and jokes layered throughout… It is so delightful to me. Then, there's a later line in the same letter that… This taunting voice. Right?

 

"A suggestion of corruption in my command chain? A charming concern for my well-being? Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal? And then we'd be at each other's throats even more. Oh, Petal, you say that like it's a bad thing."

 

[DongWon] There's so much dialogue here, there's so much voice-iness here. The characters are coming through. It's such this crisp playful way as, like, Blue taunts Red through this whole letter. We're going to see such, like, different evolution in the tone of their letters to each other as we go. But these early ones are such a hook for the audience.

[Erin] Yeah. I think I've been thinking since we talked about it a few episodes ago, why I find these to be so dense in some ways. I think it's because I'm responding to the denseness of personal indulgence as opposed to the denseness of poetic prose.

[DongWon] Oh, I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? Because these are the moments in which I feel like I get the best sense of who they are, because of the way that they're trying to present themselves, as opposed to… Which is like the splash of color against this beautiful backdrop of poetry. Which I absolutely love.

[Howard] Indulgence is definitely the right word there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The luxuriating and indulgent… That I can feel… I can feel in reading these how much Max and Amal just love to write.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah. And love to write to each other. Right? These letters… They wrote these, this novella, sitting literally back-to-back, passing a laptop back and forth. So one would write the letter and hand it to the other. I think that's where that sense of playfulness comes from. You can feel the friendship in this, you can feel the taunting, back-and-forth, as they're both trying to show off for each other in a way that I think comes through.

[Howard] Oh, you're going to go Blue du ba de...

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, I got some draft punk on tap for you, baby.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] Hey, I've got some questions about how these epistolaries… Not just how they work, but how we can do the same sorts of things. Maybe even do the same sorts of things without being epistolary. But I think those questions have to wait until after the break.

 

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[Erin] I'm excited to tell you about a song this week. It's a song Story2 by the group clipping. What I love about songs, just in general, is that they have to get put so much story into, like, a really small space. In this case, it's through a character study of a guy named Mike Winfield. I won't tell you much more, because it literally takes 3 minutes to actually listen to the song. But one thing that I want you to listen for, maybe the 2nd time around, or as your sort of enjoying it, is how he gets so much about who Mike Winfield is, where he's been, and the tension of the current moment, all at once. The 2nd thing to look for is something that clipping does that's amazing is they change the time signature of the song as it goes and tension is tightened, which is something that you may be able to use in changing the tempo of your prose. So, look at how they decide when to change that tempo and what you can learn from it by listening to Story2 by clipping.

 

[Howard] Let me start with this question. The luxuriance, the indulgence, the loving to write. Can we do this without resorting to epistolary? Are these tools available to us in other ways?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. They're still using the same tools that we've been talking about for voice all along. They're still using pacing, accent, attitude, experience. Focus, even. But what they're doing is that, in the epistolary, it gives you a little bit more freedom… Just a little bit… To have some of those repetitions, some of the more colloquial language. You can do that absolutely when you're not in epistolary form. That's where we… That's where that free indirect speech that we've been talking about comes back in. That some of the things that are very specifically their phrasing, if you took that, and you shifted it to 3rd person and you put it into the middle of a paragraph of action, just a sentence out of that, you would get that same sense of the character, but you would get it spread out through the book instead of in this compressed place of the epistolary where it's isolated in form.

 

[Erin] I also think being playful in the middle of ser… In, like, a serious situation is something that we can all use. I mean, you are the humor expert, so you know this sort of better than anyone, but, I think, that that's something to think about here is that just because a topic is serious or a theme is serious doesn't mean that there isn't room for play. That room gives us a breath. It's like gallows humor. Even in the worst of times, people often use humor to respond to it. There's an episode of Deep Space 9 that I love where all the people are gonna die, and how they respond to it shows you so much about their character. One person gets quiet. One person jokes. One person plans. That shows a lot in the way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, you can do that in voice. Somebody who starts making a list at the… Imminent death is coming, is going to feel different than somebody who jokes about the different ways they could die.

[DongWon] The thing I love about the humor here, though, is… When I encounter humor in fiction sometimes, it's very frustrating, because it undermines the emotional beats of the overall story. Here, the humor never contradicts the story, it never contradicts the character beats. It is so clearly a character masking an emotion or taunting somebody else or being playful. But it takes the world seriously, and it takes the stakes seriously, and finds a way to be funny in the middle of that. Right? So I think the overall impression when people talk about Time War, when they think about this book, is of this lush romanticism, of this like deep character work and poeticness. But the experience of reading it… I often find myself laughing out loud at different beats of the book. It's much funnier than I think people remember after they come back to it.

[Howard] As a humorist, that is what I reach for when I'm writing anything that is not… Would not be categorized as humor. During a critique group for one of the shorts that I published in Space Eldritch, a friend said, "The jokes that you put in this scene kind of undermines a whole lot of tension and horror that's been happening." My response was, "I know. I got too tense and scared, and so I just did it." The rest of the group was like, "So did we. Thank you." I was like, "Oh. Okay." So this is a… It's not to everybody's taste, but I reflexively use the tool correctly. That's one of the things that so cool about these kinds of tools is that sometimes if you are getting too tense, you are getting too emotional, you realize, "Oh, I need to… I need to turn a phrase in a way that makes me giggle."

[Mary Robinette] This is also that… That sense is also something that your character will be experiencing while they are writing the letter. So there is a performative aspect to an epistolary section, where the character is conscious of the fact that their words are going to be judged, so they are trying to present themselves in a certain way. When we look back at that first letter from Red…

 

"My cunning methods for spiriting her from your clutches. Engine trouble, a good spring day, a suspiciously effective and cheap remote access software suite her hospital purchased 2 years ago, which allows the good doctor to work from home."

 

[Mary Robinette] It's like I'm just going to show off just a little bit. You think you've got me? No, no, no. Look at how clever I am. I set this up 2 years before you even got here. That kind of performative nature, I think, and how am I going to be judged, is, again, a thing that you can bring outside of the epistles into the way your character's moving through the world. How are people going to judge me, by the actions that I take and the words that I say in the text of a letter, it becomes very, very clear.

[Erin] Yeah. I think it really also is a great way to show character development, because the way you move through the world changes, and therefore the type of performance. You get better at performing, maybe other people get better at judging, they become more familiar with you. I know we wanted to look also at some of the letters from the very end, because how does the relationship change? I know, Howard, you had some thoughts about how the…

[Howard] Oh, Lord.

[Erin] Even the signoff changes from the very beginning to the end…

[Howard] Yeah. There's a…

[Erin] Of the letters.

[Howard] There's a technique, that I need to give a name to so that I can just call it a thing, in which you define the terms for your reader and one of the terms that gets defined, through these epistolaries, is the signoff yours. This is from an epistle that Red's writing to Blue.

 

"I am yours in other ways as well. Yours as I watch the world for your signs [epithenic as a horospeck?]. Yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery. Yours as I review your words, by their sequence, their sounds,, smell, taste. Taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still. I suspect you will appreciate the token."

 

[Howard] Then Red closes the letter.

 

"Yours, Red."

 

[Howard] Every letter afterward is closed, whether from Red or Blue, with the word yours. Now we know what that word means to them. Because Blue would not write yours absentmindedly. Blue would write yours saying, "Yes. All of these definitions you gave me and more." So, by defining the terms here, Max and Amal have lent weight to the word so that one word can do a huge lift all the way through the rest of the book.

[DongWon] I really love about this technique is it lets them be more directly emotional from the perspective of the character then you would get in narration sometimes. Right? In narration, you sort of have to have a little bit of a step back. Being able to fully embody for pages at a time the deeply lovesick romantic characters that we're seeing can lead to a more direct address. In particular, there's one line it that I've seen quoted many times, but I'd love to reference it here just to show how far we've come from the playful tone of the early letters to now in these, like, deep professions of love.

[Mary Robinette] As I read this to you, I want you to think about 2 tools that we're talking about, repetition, and then there's also resonance. That's where you recognize that there's a link between something you've said before and something we're saying now. So this section has some lovely repetition in it.

 

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves, in skies, in my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets. I'll kill them all, and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands, it will be to you. But never again like this."

 

[DongWon] The thing I love about this passage… I mean, other than it's like heartbreakingly romantic and so beautifully written. But it's so clearly identifiable with Red. That Red's most romantic gesture is I will kill all the poets through all of time…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And replace them. Like, that's her solution to making sure Blue understands how much she loves her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It again resonates with that first moment when we met Red on the battlefield. The thing about this resonance is that it's one of the ways that you can allow the reader… That you can make space for the reader. That's something that is really important in stories, I think, because the reader inhabits half of the story. Like, the writer has the thing, and then we invite the reader to it. But you bring so much of yourself to it, your own experience. When you are imagining a voice, you are using your own experience to imagine that voice. So, having these resonant moments where you can insert yourself and you can feel that, where you're drawing the connections yourself, makes it stronger than the stories where everything is explained out completely. Those stories tend to get very flat.

 

[Erin] One other thing I love about this, and the mention of repetition and all that, is that one of the first things we see is the repetition, which we talked about in a previous episode. "She has won. Yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasn't she?" That is… Repetition can be both sure and unsure. Like, repetition's very interesting. Because sometimes you repeat something because you know it, and sometimes you repeat something because you wish you knew it. You want to convince yourself of it. Seeing Red move from this sort of trying to repeat the things I have been told and taught are important…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To something I am claiming as important for myself is just a great way to look at how the same tool can be used 2 different ways, and is also a great way to show movement in the character as a whole.

[DongWon] This goes back to the previous episode, but in the way that Blue communicates confidence and vulnerability in her voice, we're seeing that come out of Red now. Red is much more confident in this scene than she's ever been in the early scenes. But that confidence is coming through an incredible vulnerability. An incredible moment of stress and distress in this letter as she's communicating how much she loves Blue, but also knows that Blue is dying at her hand in these moments. Right? So, the incredible complexity of what's happening here, but we're seeing a Red that is so much more certain and aware of herself and what she wants and who she is then we've seen up until this point in the book.

[Mary Robinette] She's also doing a thing in this where she is using some of the cadence of Blue with the listing. "I'll write it in waves, in skies, and my heart." But doing it with Red, short, punctuated sentences. So it's this thing where she is both reflecting the person that she loves and also truly expressing herself.

[DongWon] She's learning how to write this way. Right?

[Howard] The line, "Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something," is… Ah… I get chills.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The confidence. The acceptance. The decision. And the… I'm in the chapter where Red is at a dead run trying to fix an unfixable problem.

 

[Erin] I think on that chill we will move to the homework for you. Which is to write a short note from one of your characters to another about something that's important to them. Then you're going… Make it short because you're going to have to do it a couple of times. Rewrite it as a text message. So you're going to change the format a little bit. How does that change the way that this note is happening? Then, right it is something that's going to be screened. Think about the ways somebody in prison might have their letter read by someone else who doesn't care about it before it gets to their intended target. So that changes a little bit of the context. Then, finally, right it as the final message they will ever get to send in their life. Which changes the stakes.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

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[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get [lit] on the Inner Loop Radio.