Writing Excuses 21.15: Using Contrast for Maximum Effect

Apr. 18th, 2026 11:36 am
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Writing Excuses 21.15: Using Contrast for Maximum Effect 


From https://writingexcuses.com/21-15-using-contrast-for-maximum-effect


Key Points: Contrast! Light emotional beat, then dark. Or vice-versa. Dark night before the dawn? All is lost, then success. Or escape, then eldritch horrors. Foils! Bad, worse. Gradations! Clink-boom! Contrast makes the audience pay attention. Songs in a minor key. Juxtaposition. Ironic distance. Whiplash! Compress/expand. 


[Season 21, Episode 15]


[Howard] Locus magazine is one of the finest and most respected resources for readers, writers, editors, illustrators, and assorted aficionados of speculative fiction. Locus tells the stories of, and about, storytellers through author interviews, book reviews, curated reading lists, industry news, and more. The annual Locus Awards recognize and celebrate excellence across science fiction, fantasy, and horror, showcasing new and diverse voices in the speculative genres. Right now, Locus is holding their annual fundraising drive. I'm proud to support Locus, and I'd love for you to join me. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to explore the awards available to this year's supporters. If you're looking for a long enough lever to move the world of speculative fiction, look no further. Locus is that lever. It's the rising tide that lifts all ships. It's the shining city on the hill. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to help Locus keep the lights on and the future bright. locus mag.com/igg26.


[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 21, Episode 15]


[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Using contrast for maximum effect.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.


[DongWon] And this week, we're continuing our conversation about moving through the middle of your book. And, one of the things we wanted to focus on, having talked about soggy middles, try-fail cycles, is ways in which you can use contrast to heighten the impact of certain scenes in your book. Right? And when we say that, we sort of mean contrast in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes that is putting a big light emotional beat next to or in advance of a dark beat, just to sort of give you a sense of loss when you get to the darker moment. Or even the other way around. Right? Having the dark night of the soul before your triumph and success. Right? The night is darkest before the dawn kind of thing. Right? And I think some of the examples that we're going to use will have a feeling of being a little cliched, but I think we're reaching for the ones that are very obvious in that way. And, in the back half of this, we want to talk a little bit about ways in which you can sort of make it feel a little bit more subtle, and a little more integrated, and not just the, like, yeah, the dark cave before the hero's success. So, when you're thinking about moments of contrast, what are some examples that you'd reach for, either in your own fiction or stuff that you see out in the world?

[Mary Robinette] So, this... For me, this came about because I was on a panel and one of the people on the panel said that there... That you always had to have a all is lost moment. And I always bristle a little bit about the... Anytime it's like you always have to.

[DongWon] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] Tools, not rules. Exactly. And so what I started thinking about was, like, yeah, the thing you have is the moment where it does look like they have lost everything, and I think it provides this big cathartic beat when you come out of it. There's a bigger contrast between the moment where, oh, no, I've lost everything, and, look, we succeeded. But, when you look at horror, you also get this beat of contrast where it's... It looks like, oh, they're going to get out, and then they get sucked back in and devoured by eldritch horrors. So I think that the contrast does this thing for you, and that you see it in a bunch of different ways, in this really big macro scale, but also a lot of other places. So, I also think about contrast like with foils, like a contrast for the main character.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, those are things I think about with contrast.


[Erin] Oh, let's say you have, like, contrast is like a foil, like a thing to show what the character is like. I was trying to think about how contrast is handled in long running formats, like wrestling and soaps. Where, like, there is no dark night of the soul, because, like, the show is on 300 days a week...

[laughter]

[Erin] And so, like, there might be one person's dark night of the soul, but, like, it will...

[DongWon] That's a really long week, by the way.

[Erin] [garbled] Eldritch horror has consumed my sense of time. But I think, like, that is a... Something like, I was like, well, how does that work? I was trying to think about it. But what they really do use is, like, the idea of, like, this not that. So...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In wrestling, you have your heels, people who are just evil, and your faces, who are like the good people, and people do, like, a heel face turn or a face heel turn. But one of the ways that they do that, when they want to shift what a character is or how they're perceived is by, if you're a bad person, and then somebody worse shows up, then all of a sudden, ooh, you're not as bad as we thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And it makes it easier for you to turn face. And so, like, thinking about using contrast as a way to also reset audience expectations of what's happening on the canvas.

[DongWon] I love the idea of having... Contrast not just being opposites, but also, like, gradations. Right? You can have this guy that you thought was the worst villain, and then the real villain shows up, and you're like, oh, no, the bad guy was just a henchman. The bad guy is actually the nice one. What is truly evil is whatever is happening over there. Right?

[Mary Robinette] It's one of the things that makes us love people who are doing heists. They're criminals.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But they're not bad.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like the way the person is whoever that they're heisting against.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly. Like, Danny Ocean is not a good guy, but Andy Garcia's character, like, that dude's evil.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And so I think having that differentiation really matters.


[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about was... As a contrast moment was in Memory of... A Memory Called Empire...

[DongWon] A Memory Called Empire.

[Mary Robinette] Which we've talked about in a... At length a couple of seasons ago, but more recently, there's the scene at a restaurant. And it's... They're having a nice meal, and then there's an explosion. And this is a classic kind of setup where there's everything's really lovely, and then things go terribly wrong. And it's often so predictable. But one of the things I love about the way Arkady Martine handles that is that she makes it about something else. But, specifically, she makes it about something else that is also a contrast.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It is the difference between the way food is prepared in one place versus another place, and so you focus on that contrast in the scene, and you're enjoying the nice meal, and then there's this other... This other bigger contrast. So there's a lot of fun things you can play with.


[Erin] I also think contrast can be in a single moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Erin] All my examples are a little... Very me.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There's a famous... And I'm going to get it wrong now, so, gee, [garbled Tran don't at me?] but there's a famous General Hospital moment called clink BOOM in which one pair of characters clink glasses after getting married, while another one dies in a car bomb explosion. But what's interesting is that you see both of the things coming. Like, neither one is a surprise. The wedding is being prepared, someone's creeping around, they do that camera angle where you can show that somebody's being followed, but what you don't expect, despite the fact that both these things are coming, is for them to come at the exact same time. So it makes something that you would have thought was, like, super not surprising all of a sudden surprising, because you have to deal with it in a contrast that you weren't used to.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that that's a really good example of why it works, because both of those feel earned, like, even though you see it coming. In Downton Abbey, when they get rid of Matthew, the... It's this big contrast moment. Lady May is having a baby, and then he is driving, and then there's just this random car crash, and he dies. And it's unearned. It doesn't... It comes completely out of nowhere. Which, like, is a thing that happens. But it exists only because there is a contrast... Contract dispute. And it just... It felt cliched, it felt like this is a thing I've seen, this is... There's no surprise, there's no interest, and also they're telegraphing it so much leading up to it, that... Like, if he'd been racing home and desperate to get there, then actually I would have been a little bit shocked if he had died in a car crash, because I was expecting the happy ending to be him arriving at home. And instead, he's tooling along, and he just doesn't know that she's in labor, and it's... Like, birds are singing, and he's enjoying a nice car ride, and I'm like, oh, this dude's dead.


[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and sometimes you can just use contrast to heighten moments that wouldn't be heightened without them. So... Just by defying the audience expectation.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And this is a thing that's been used so much, it's becoming cliched. We can think of all the moments in action movies where everything, like, slows down, and they're getting, like, a moody pop song...

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] Over a scene of a bunch of people dying. Right? I think, like, this is a gamer reference, but, like the Gears of War commercial that used Mad World, like, played in this moody slowed down way while a guy is, like, chainsawing aliens in half. And you're like, all right, what are we doing? At the same time, it was like, this is cool as hell. I want to play this game. Because that felt novel and interesting at the time. But the contrast between the two actions gets your audience to pay attention in a way that they might not have otherwise. And can give the feeling of more weight and impact then it necessarily would have been if you just shown the thing in a more quote unquote normal way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was the way it was used in the much older film, Good Morning Vietnam.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the first times they see that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Contrast between the music and the horrors of war. And that one is very generated by the story. It's like, this is music he's playing at the radio station...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] While these things are also happening.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] The thing, and this will not help you right at all, sorry... But the thing that I love about those is that they're often the song in a minor key. And what's interesting about that is that is a contrast right there. Like, I will say, if you want to creep yourself out, listen to Don't Worry, Be Happy...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In a minor key. Because it's so... The lyrics are so bright and the music just sounds so creepy on some primal level. And you start creating story... What I think is really interesting about listening to it is I'm like, I don't trust you that you're telling me to be happy, because the music is not matching. And so I'm actually going to create, in some ways, like, what could be going on here? What's happening with this character? And I think that sometimes contrast can also leave space in us for the reader, in between the two poles, like, something is... There's some, like, gap that needs to be bridged, and the reader can kind of step in to bridge that gap.

[Mary Robinette] I think you've hit on something that there is a distinction in kind of the ways we're using contrast. But what you're talking about right there is creating something that is unsettling because of the juxtaposition of two contrasting elements.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Whereas the other type, where it's like these are very happy moments followed by a terrible moment...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a contrast there where you're trying to create more emotional distance for the character... For the reader to travel, so that you get a bigger cathartic snap. And they're both forms of contrast, but just for different effects.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think this hits on a really important point, and one I want to get into more after the break, but how is distance important for juxtaposition and contrast?


[Howard] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.


[Mary Robinette] Writers know something a lot of people don't. The darkest, strangest spots can be some of the most personal ones on the page. We make space for them in our work all the time. But what happens when a dark or disturbing thought shows up and won't leave? Not as a story idea, but as something that just takes over. Something that feels completely out of character for you, but your brain keeps circling back to, no matter what you do to try to feel better. That experience is actually one of the hallmarks of OCD, and it's more common in creative communities than most people realize. OCD involves persistent, unwanted intrusive thoughts about anything that matters to you. Your identity, your relationships, your fears about who you are. Along with mental or physical behaviors you feel driven to do to get relief. The harder you try to push them away, the stronger they get. These thoughts can feel very real. Which is what makes them so upsetting. And because OCD is so widely misunderstood, many people live with it for years without knowing what it is. But it doesn't have to be that way. Because OCD is highly treatable with the right kind of specialized therapy. OCD needs ERP, or Exposure and Response Prevention, which has proven to be the most effective treatment. And that's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's leading provider of OCD treatments, and it's covered by insurance for over 138 million Americans. All of their licensed therapists specialize in ERP therapy and will help you learn to take the power away from intrusive thoughts in live, face-to-face virtual sessions. They also provide support between sessions when you need it most. So you're never facing OCD alone. If this sounds familiar, visit nocd.com to book a free call with their team. That's nocd.com.


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[DongWon] Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed contemplating distance...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] In that little bit of a break that we had. And one thing that really strikes me, as we're talking about both these examples, as you were discussing right before the break, Mary Robinette, is in one way, we have ironic distance instead of, like, expectation setting. Right? when you have, like, the moody music over, or, like, a happy song in a minor key. That creates an ironic distance. That's something internal to the reader, and the reader's expectations, that's creating an emotional distance from the work in a lot of ways. To then have the emotional impact of them coming back into it. Versus the contrasting sort of things within the story of, like, a happy scene followed by a dark scene, or sometimes vice versa, that creates impact from shortening the distance between two different types of emotions. Right? So how do... How are you thinking about distance in these ways, and are they connected in terms of these two different modes?

[Mary Robinette] The way I think about it is using the... Using the... The first moment, say, to kind of set expectations, to place the reader in a specific spot, and then the second moment is kind of like a whiplash or a catapult situation. Where, in order to move from one state to another, you have to move through it fairly rapidly. And, like, the faster you go across a bigger distance, kind of the bigger impact snap it can have.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes that will backfire, because it didn't actually load it enough to get that snap. Like, everything that's surrounding it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But that's kind of the thing that I'm thinking about. I will say sometimes do this by not necessarily having a happy moment before having a big tragic moment, but sometimes making you think, oh, we're dealing with this story problem, and, oh, no, it's actually this one. But there's a contrast between the kinds of things that the character is trying to solve. And the... I don't know. I don't know another way to describe it, other than whiplash. Which can be a negative. But in this case, I think it's a little bit more like a slingshot effect around a planet...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] As if we've done that, all of us.

[laughter]


[Erin] I have. No. So, here's a question. Do you think it matters whether it happens... To the characters but not the reader? So what I'm thinking, we talked about a few episodes ago, the thing that happens where the, like, spaceship is exploding, and then the story rewinds and says, like, 12 hours earlier...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So at that point, you know that, like, every happy moment that's happening in the 12 hours leading up to this, is just the prelude to disaster. The characters don't. They're moving forward in real time. And I'm wondering, like, does that create... Is that the same effect, is that a different effect?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it is the same effect. Like, there's a story that Justin C. Key wrote, a short story, in which you know that you are reading about someone who is dead by the end of the story. And it is... It's an examination of their life together and it's a form of mourning. And so you're seeing these memories, and there's this bittersweetness because you are existing in both states. And so... And I do think it is... It... I know that it wouldn't work without that contrast, without that awareness. Otherwise, it's like, oh, look, they're at a soccer game. That's cute. And so having that... Preloading that knowledge for the reader does provide that contrast for them as they're experiencing things.

[DongWon] The deep dive project we did last year, Charlie Jane Anders All The Birds In The Sky is all about contrasts. Right? A lot of times, what she's doing is either doing the Greek tragedy thing, of, like, this is going to end in disaster and we know that that's creating contrast in the overall narrative tension way, or directly contrasting two extremely different people by showing us their relationships and the conflicts they have around that. And that lets us see all the unreliability in each of their narrations. Right? We can see the ways in which... I believe her name is Patricia is being unreliable in reporting about her own relationships be... Through the contrast of how other people see that, how other people experience those relationships.


[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As we were talking, I suddenly had a... Small revelation, which I always enjoy. It's why I like doing this podcast with you guys.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Um, there's a thing in puppetry we call compress/expand, in animation they call it towards and away. And the idea is that if I'm going to jump, I have to bend my knees first, so that's the compress, and then I expand. And so, one of the ways you can think about these contrasting moments is loading energy. And that is also, I think, why some of them don't work. Because it's so obviously not loading energy of any sort. This is the thing where you're at the beginning of the movie, and it's like, look at how happy this couple is... I'm so sad, she's going to die. Because there's nothing else happening in that scene. It's not doing anything. That scene itself is just existing. So it's not loading energy...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In any sort of way. In terms of your expectations, in terms of tensions that you can have. And then when it releases, it's like, but I didn't... I'm set for that.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, that loading comes from stakes. Right? And that emotional investment in how the character sees themselves, how the character feels about other characters. And if you're loading that up with the tension, then when you have that contrast, either through success or failure, that's where you get that big release of energy that makes for an exciting story moment.


[Erin] But how do you not make it feel like, oh, I'm about to have this moment of horrible thing, like, now I've just like lo... How do you earn that, like, the happy moment before the sad... Or the sad moment before the happy?

[DongWon] That is a bit like...

[Erin] In order to...

[DongWon] This is my last job...

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly.

[DongWon] And then I'm going to retire.

[Erin] But, like... I just got my place fixed out in the country. Yay.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I think by doing exactly what Arkady Martine did in A Memory Called Empire, which is that you make that scene about something else. So, you're faking the reader out. It's like the scene appears to be doing something. It is doing something, it is carrying energy for this story. It's doing all of this load-bearing thing, stuff about the differences in their world, about her feelings, about being in this space, about exploring this, her, like, horror that people just eat an entire piece of an animal, coming from a space station, that's just weird, and so it's doing all of these other things. And so, in a way, it's a form of misdirection. You make the reader think that's what this scene is about. And then they don't notice that you're setting them up for this other thing.

[DongWon] But it feels inevitable when that other thing happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? Because you've been lingering in this response and the tension is coming from all the micro contrasts of the scene that are leading into the bigger contrast.


[Mary Robinette] How do you do it?

[Erin] I don't.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You do.

[Erin] I don't... I don't know. To be honest, off the top of my head. I think... I don't think I use contrast as much, because I think I tend to... A lot of times, I like to center my stories in a mood. And so the mood will predominate, so even though there's differences in what is being experienced, it doesn't... The highs and lows are not quite as high or low.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean... I do... I shouldn't have sprung that on you like that, because I do think that you use contrast, but in short form, it shows up differently, I think.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In short form, what we're often looking at is a contrast between the beginning state and the ending state, or the contrast in the middle between the way a character handles things at one point and the way they handle it in a second point. I'm thinking about the contrast... Some of the contrasts that are in Sour Milk Girls. Like, there's the difference in the way we are talking and interfacing with memory at the beginning versus where we moved to at the end. And the reader's understanding of what we are talking about shifts. For listeners who are just coming into this episode, you can go listen to our deep dive on Sour Milk Girls a couple of seasons ago. It will be correct in the show notes, but I don't remember.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think that that in short fiction, because we aren't having to... We don't have as much room to work, that it is often a contrast between beginning and end. Sometimes we use contrast in terms of, like, what I sometimes call an avatar of success. Like, at the beginning, your socks are cold and wet, and at the end, look at how dry and warm they are.

[Erin] Thinking actually about the story that we actually just did recently, which is yours I believe...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which...

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we definitely...

[Erin] Possibly.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, time travel, yes, we have done that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The story, and, like, the contrast... Where I actually think... In thinking about the difference between the beginning state and the end state, and the difference in the way that, like, the character holds power at the beginning and at the end, what is interesting, because I think in some ways, I don't know that contrast is within the character so much as it is within our understanding of what the character's capable of.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to point out that and say at the end of the story, I am using contrast very consciously because I had forgotten that I did this. So, but it's an example of how you can do it in a very tight space. There's a... The very last scene, she is having... She's prepared welcome snacks for her asshole cousin, and it looks like the tension is just, oh, he's here, I have to be hospitable to him because he's my asshole cousin. But really, it's setting you up for, look at how I've been exercising my power this entire time.


[DongWon] Exactly. And I'm going to introduce a little contrast into this episode by transitioning from us talking about the concept to you doing some homework. So what I'd like you to do is to look at a pivotal moment in your book, and add a beat, either before or after, that inverts some element of the original beat. You can switch the tone, the mood, introduce a character or a character that's a foil to your protagonist, or switch up the location in a way that allows you to highlight some interesting aspect of your first scene.


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

 
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Writing Excuses 19.49: Getting to Know You

Dec. 10th, 2024 04:51 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.49: Getting to Know You
 
 
Key points: Romance elements you might use in your story. Buddy films! A bond of some kind. The meat cube... meet cute! Two characters meet because something goes wrong. A bit in common. Or the odd couple meeting. Conflict to friendship. Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. The half orange, the person who completes. Two aspects, the characters gaining knowledge about each other, and the reader gaining knowledge about the characters. DREAM: Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. Enemies/rivals to friends. Use other characters as foils. Catalyst actions. Flip the polarity, allies to enemies. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 49]
 
[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 49]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Getting to Know You.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] 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.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about using elements of romance in your story. This does not, I have to say, necessarily mean that you have to have a love story or even romantic attraction. You can use romance elements for... This is what buddy films are. It is the coming together as a team, as a couple, as hey, we have a bond. So we're going to be talking about some of the tools that you can use when you're doing that. One of them, we foreshadowed last week when we talked about the meat cube...
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] The meet cute. This is a romance trope in which your characters meet each other. Does anyone want to chime in and talk a little bit about how they...
[Howard] So they both walk into the flesh pot...
[Laughter]
[Dan] It's a cyberpunk story now.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] Or the new Netflix reality TV show.
[Erin] Right. [garbled] I think what I like about... I love a good romance. What I like about meet cutes is they're usually a situation in which there's a tiny amount of tension because something is kind of going wrong. But the cute part is, like, my dogs got away from me and they jumped on you or, like, I almost spilled my coffee on you. It's something very small and one character's able to put the other one at ease in the way that they approach it shows that there's something that's very simpatico in the way that they deal with the world, see the world, or deal with conflict. I think that helps to foreshadow the way that they will deal with each other going forward.
[Mary Robinette] That is a great way to describe it. The other thing that I think that happens about that is that there's always, in addition to the thing going wrong, and that moment of oh, yes, I care about you, there's the desire for that connection to linger. And there's usually some revelation about something that they have in common. Something that is an unexpected thing that they have in common. It's like, oh, we both go to the same gym, or, what? Your grandmother's name is Emelda as well? It's some common thing that starts to… Is kind of the first thing that's cementing the friendship.
[Howard] Yeah. You mentioned how romances and buddy cop films… Buddy films, are both at some level, fundamentally the same formula. I pose the question, what does the meet cute look like in a buddy cop film? It may end up being something like these two law enforcement officers or these two professionals at arms both come to the same scene from different agencies and there is gunplay and there is a little bit of mutual respect and then, oh, no, you two have to be partners. I work alone. And off we go.
[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about the meet cute is… It forces the characters to actually interact. Right? Interact about something. There's so many times when I'll read a book and I feel like the author's assuming that these two characters are in the same space. They're working in the same office. They're both in the same patrol car. Therefore, there's a relationship. Right? But we, as the audience, are not seeing that interaction. We're not getting a sense of that relationship. So, the meet cute, by having a thing that goes wrong in it, again, we're talking about sort of, like, those little micro tropes we talked about last episode. Where there's almost, like, that thriller component of, like, oh, no, something has happened. But the end result is one where we're leaning into interaction as opposed to a plot event and a plot hook in that way. Right? So those characters interacting, having a conversation, one person solving a problem for another person, and then leaving us on a note where it's like, oh, there's a possibility for future interaction here, because they share something in common, or they exchange numbers, or some aspect of it that lets us carry that thread into the future. Right? So you really want to make sure, as you're exiting that interaction, that there's something that carries us out of it with momentum.
 
[Dan] I don't want to get into a long definitional conversation about what is and isn't a meet cute. So I'm just going to say this is a different kind of meeting now to talk about, because there's one thing that you also see in a lot of relationship stories, is not the cute meeting where they kind of have some common ground that they can see, but the odd couple meeting. Where they are forced into conflict with each other. This is really common, I think, in a lot of buddy comedies, because they have that sense of butting heads. Until they become friends. But you see this in romance as well all the time. You asked about, Howard, what does the meeting look like in a buddy comedy. For my money, the best buddy comedy ever is The Nice Guys by Shane Black. And that… The time the two characters meet is when Russell Crowe breaks into Brian Gosling's house and breaks his arm. Like, that sets them up as antagonists, and then we get to watch them come together and become friends.
[Erin] I think, to build on what you're saying about the kind of buddy… Because I had the same thought. Like, it's like they're forced into the same patrol car, but I think it's like a moment of intrigue in the, like, most blasé versions of that, which is that, like, oh, we maybe have something in common. Again, it's finding the commonality. It's the, like, you do this by the book, and I like to just shoot things. But also, we both like kittens.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, a lot of times in buddy… Like, it's about finding the commonality in an unexpected place. So whereas a meet cute is I never thought I would meet you here today, in a buddy like film, I think it's more like I never thought I would find anything interesting about you, who I have already met.
[DongWon] Or any respect for you in some way.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So there is a… There's this theory that my mother-in-law has, which I call the Kowal relationship axes…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Based on her dating advice she gave to my husband, but it's great for characters, which is that if you think about these as sliders, the more things you have in common, the greater your compatibility is. So, it's mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. So, mind is that the closer they are in intelligence, the more compatible they are. Money, same opinions about money, what it's used for, not necessarily the same amount of money. Morals, the same ideas of what is right and wrong. Manners is the same idea of what is polite, correct behavior. So this is why you can have someone that you get along with, they're so charming in person, and terrible monsters on the Internet. Because their morals… Morals are completely opposed, but their manners are aligned. Monogamy is not actually you have to be monogamous, but you have the same idea of what the relationship is. You all have had the person that totally thinks that you're BFFs, and you're just like we kind of vaguely know each other. And then mirth, that you have the same sense of humor. So you only have to tip one of these off just a little bit, one or two of them off, to have like major conflicts and fractures. When you look at Lizzie and Darcy, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, they are actually really closely aligned in pretty much everything except manners because of her family and a little bit on mirth. Then, in the proposal scene happening, they're wildly misaligned on monogamy.
[DongWon] Excuse me while I spend the rest of this episode having a minor crisis about my last few relationships.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Sorry. Well, let me ease your mind a little bit. Okay?
[Erin] All you need is a meet cute.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Where does one find a meet cute these days? I've been going to the park and…
 
[Dan] It's all on the Internet. So, to ease your mind, a little bit, because while this is true, I also think that there is a lot to be said for the half orange. I talk about this a lot in relationships, that what a person, what a character really needs is the other half of themselves.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Someone who completes them, someone who has all the qualities they don't have so that together they are a single complete person. So, yes, you need to be aligned, you need to think about some of the things in the same way, but also, you very specifically, I think, need to have someone who can do things you can't do, who thinks of things in a way that you don't.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it doesn't talk about personality. So, introvert, extrovert? Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree with you that you need someone who balances you. That is one of the things that I love about these is that they're both correct, I think.
[Howard] The title of this episode, getting to know you, I'm ready to visit that in a little more detail after our break.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Erin] Today, I want to talk to you about the podcast Ancient History Fangirl. It's a history podcast and the hosts tell you history through story. Ancient historical figures like Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, [Rudicuff?] Or even the mythological [Coolcollon] have never felt more like real people to me as they did when Jen and Jenny told me their stories and brought them to life. They do in-depth research, and then weave it into a fantastic way to learn more about history. They have a lot of seasons and episodes, so I suggest finding a season or an arc that appeals to you. I started with their sci-fian episode, and I highly recommend it. You can find them on any major podcast platforms or at ancienthistoryfangirl.com.
 
[Howard] So, getting to know you. There are two aspects to this. One is the characters growing in character knowledge about each other, and the other is the reader gaining knowledge about these characters. You have to pull off both. You can't just say, A now knew all about B, you have to give the reader something to chew on. Something to enjoy.
[Mary Robinette] I have a tool for that. Which is, looking at the escalation, the arc, of the relationship. Much like the… One of the reasons that meet cute works is that it is the disruption of the normal, going back to our thriller episode. But there's this other thing called DREAM which I learned from Elizabeth Boyle. Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. So this is the arc that a person goes through… She got it from an anger management class, but…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] She is a romance writer, and she's like, oh, this is…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The building block of every romance ever. So, denial is that they deny that there is any kind of problem at all. What you do is you pick an externalization of that, you pick an action that the character takes in which they are clinging to that original identity. It's like, oh, who would go out with them? So, you make very… They're going to be at what? No, I'm definitely not going to that. So what action do they take? Then, resistance, that's when you acknowledge that, okay, I see why some people find him attractive, but I will never date him. Then exploration is where you start to think about it just a little bit. All right, well, maybe one date. Then, acceptance is, oh, no, I'm in love. Then matrimony is what you do with that. Or… Uh, excuse me. Manifestation is what you do with that. In a classic romance, it's matrimony. But if you think about the end of Casablanca, when Rick realizes that he is in love with Ilsa still, and that she's still in love with him, and his manifestation is not matrimony, it's to send her off and to take himself away because that is actually what's better for everybody that's involved. So what you do with that knowledge, the action that you take. And what's fun about this is that you can go through this cycle multiple times in a single book. What I see people do a lot is the characters will just hang out in denial, and then suddenly they get married.
[Howard] I've found that… 27 years of being married has probably taught me some of this. Demonstrations of one character's understanding of another usually take the shape of actions. Okay. Blow my own horn a little bit here. The whole cast went out falconing in the cold, except for me. I made a point of arriving at the house with hot drinks because I knew everyone would be cold.
[Mary Robinette] You were correct.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Was that thoughtful? Okay, yes. Sure. But the fact that I was thinking about these other people and had an idea of what they would need and the fact that they trusted me to bring something that they could drink, that gives us a picture of a relationship. Wow, these people are friends. They like each other. In a way that us saying, oh, thank you so much for the stuff. Oh, you're welcome. Just doesn't.
 
[DongWon] Having covered some of the tools, can we dive into another one of the classic tropes of the category?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Oh, yes.
[DongWon] So, one of my favorite setups is always the enemies or rivals who are caught in each other's orbit who have to build a relationship and grow to some kind of understanding or accord by the end, if not full on romance. To me, this is always such an interesting dynamic, because you… As we were talking about, you need to have the understanding between characters, but you also need the audience understanding of these individuals as well. So, often one is more in focus than the other, so we're getting the perspective of our protagonist and only bit by bit are we learning more information about the rival to begin to understand where they come from and why they are. So it's almost like building the romance for the reader in addition to building the romance for the character. Initially, we're like, wow, that person's a jerk. They're being so mean to the person I like. They might be hot, but, like, I hate them. So, learning bit by bit why we could respect them or be interested in them, I think is one of the delicious parts of this category.
 
[Erin] Yeah. You can also use other characters as a foil there. So, it's like you've got the rival who's a jerk, but then you've got, like, the truly evil, like, not even rival, like, person who makes the rival seem like, well, I disagree with their tactics, maybe, but at least I understand where they're coming from, unlike this new person. It's one of the things I loved growing up, watching soap operas, was that there's always characters in different stages of romance so that you're always… There's always one couple falling in love, one couple getting married, one couple settling down, and one couple breaking up. So there's always… So you know, like, when you see two people interacting, you're like, oh, this fits into this type of romance. I'm not going to mistake this couple falling in love for a married couple, because I have another example on the page, and it's also a way to give you something like, oh, this is something for this new couple to aim for. So I'm excited to see them make this journey down the line.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I think that goes with that with the couple that's making the journey, tying back into what you were talking about with the friends still lovers or variations of that, is there's always some, like, catalyst action that is happening. There's a point at which everything gets re-contextualized for the POV character, where they been watching this thing happening, and then there's suddenly, like, oh. This person that I thought was an asshole is actually leaving abruptly because he's taking care of his aging mother. Or when, again, Darcy and Elizabeth, when she suddenly realizes the reason he's been such a jerk to Wickham is because of the history with his sister. That's… It like recontextualizes every interaction that she's had with them up to that point. That's one of my favorite things, is that recontextualization.
[Dan] One of the things that I love about this type of relationship… At least for me, it's one of the things that separates it from odd couple. Odd couple is these two people, their personalities clash. One of them's messy and one of them's clean. Whatever it is. Whereas kind of enemies and rivals, or enemies to lovers, they are specifically opposed to each other, and they are trying to one up each other or they're trying to attack each other or whatever it is. What that allows you to do is crank the competence of both characters way, way up. Higher than you could do in a lot or most other relationships. That helps build that reader attachment. We don't like this person, but we also kind of really love this person, because they are so good at being terrible that when you get to whatever point midway or two thirds of the way through the story where suddenly they find themselves on the same side, we know that they're going to be an incredible team because we watch them be incredible on their own.
 
[Howard] Now, let's say for a moment that you're not writing a buddy show, you're not writing a romance, you are writing a thriller, you are writing a mystery. All of these tools apply, and you can go all Jordi Laforge and flip the polarity and have the trope be allies to enemies and it works exactly the same way. The more they learn about each other, there's a twist, there's a reveal, and now we have a broken relationship at the end.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah, it's funny, thinking about when you were mentioning the genres, I was thinking fantasy and science fiction, I think character relationships and dynamics are really at the heart of a lot of the classics. Like, your crew that's going out into space, like, has to… How do they get along with each other? This person doesn't quite like this person, but they accept it, they're a great engineer. Or when you have your fantasy party, like, going across the country, can the Bard stand the fighter? Like, a lot of these smaller dynamics, you can have as people's relationships change help to make things interesting, and I think why it's good for this week is, helps to make it interesting for you when you're like, I don't know what's going to happen next in the plot, they're not even halfway to the mountain of doom yet. That's a good time for, like, what's going on in their relationship? Is there a small thing that can happen that can make two people grow closer together or further apart? That makes your story, like, come alive to you a little bit as you explore how they, like each other or don't?
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that that brings us to our homework. So, your homework for this week is, in this scene, the one that you're working on right now, what is something that your character finds attractive about the other person in the scene? And no, this does not need to be a romantic attraction. And then the other thing is what does your character think is their own least attractive trait, and how can you make them more anxious about that right now?
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[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.
 
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Writing Excuses18.39: How To Write An Ending

Sep. 28th, 2023 02:19 pm
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Writing Excuses18.39: How To Write An Ending
 
 
Key Points: When I wrote that title, I knew that the structure of this book needed to involve splitting up the cast and sending Schlock off on his own, doing something stupid and chaotic and destructive and ultimately heroic. This formula is super simple. You split people up, and then you bring them back together, and that creates a natural structure for a story, and it can be very satisfying. A frag suit that talks back to him so Schlock has a foil. And treating a synthetic intelligence as if it is an artificial intelligence, and having that entity become a person, is beautiful. It's very hard to be funny by yourself. For a storyteller, many things are driven by this is horrible. Go back to the well and fill your head with physics. Callbacks, retroactive foreshadowing. Joy!
 
[Season 18, Episode 39]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, Sergeant in Motion.
[DongWon] 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.
 
[Howard] I have begun unironically using the term magnum opus to describe Schlock Mercenary. Because I… 20 years. 20 years of my life, 20 books went into this. Today, we are deep diving into book 20, Sergeant in Motion. The title of which comes from a maxim, "A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on." When I wrote that title, I knew that the structure of this book needed to involve splitting up the cast and sending Schlock off on his own, doing something stupid and chaotic and destructive and ultimately heroic. Until about the time that I'd… Until I'd actually started writing strips, I didn't know exactly what those things were going to be. I had just blocked out kind of the positions of the cast members. As I mentioned in the previous episode… As I mentioned in the episode we recorded previously, we… Those both mean the same thing. It's early, and I'm tired. This formula is super simple. You split people up, and then you bring them back together, and that creates a natural structure for a story, and it can be very satisfying. I feel like that formula worked.
[Mary Robinette] You're also doing interesting things, like, one of the problems with the modern era is… In the old days, you split people up and it was fine because they were off on their own, and now, it's like you split people up and they have cell phones. In your world, they have sentient communications and all sorts of things. So I think that you did some interesting things there, like, to cause different ways that the comms communication was a conflict, like, when Schlock is dealing with a frag suit that talks back to him.
[Howard] Yes. The frag suit that talks back to him was a last-minute addition because I realized that I did not want to resort to thought bubbles to find out what Schlock was thinking. I had to have a foil for him. Giving him a foil who was a… In the Schlock Mercenary universe, artificial intelligence is a person, and synthetic intelligence is a clever set of algorithms that almost arise to personhood. Having him treat a synthetic intelligence as if it was an artificial intelligence, and having that entity eventually reach artificial intelligence felt really beautiful to me. You treat someone like a person, whether or not they quote unquote deserve it, and ultimately, one day, they become a person and thank you for it. That just… I was not expecting to get to put that in, and there it was.
[DongWon] One of the really important things about you deciding to add that character in, which is, one, it's very hard to be funny by yourself.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Oh, yeah.
[DongWon] So, that gives Schlock such an opportunity to just bounce off of someone, and have punchlines and be goofy and also talk through what he's thinking in his process. The other is that [garbled] doing some pretty messed up stuff through a lot of this. He's eating sentient people pretty much constantly through the last book.
[Mary Robinette, Howard, chorus] Yeah.
[DongWon] So having an anchoring emotional thing that allows a level of sweetness and morality and all of those things, and gives him… He is treating this synthetic intelligence as if it's a person, and so we can see a side of Schlock that we wouldn't normally… Wouldn't be able to see if he was just chowing down on things for this length of that…
 
[Howard] In… I don't remember the book number. It's the book where Schlock ends up briefly jailed for a barroom brawl, and has this big emotional arc about immortality, and how immortality now makes him very worried because if someone dies, then some of the futures that could have been created by them are gone, even if you bring them back. One of the neighbor kids who reads Schlock Mercenary, friend of my kids, was over talking to my kids and came to me and said, "Why did you have to give Schlock a personality arc?" Because suddenly the amoral, not quite Everyman, but the id of the strip was now reflecting on who he was and was maybe less willing to devour things with wild abandon. The answer was because I know that by the end of the story, I have to have some measure of conflict there. He has to be asking himself a question before he devours everything in sight.
[Erin] But I do like that he devours… You know what I mean?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Everything in sight. Then, I was curious… I think you mentioned it in a previous episode, the idea that like somebody had said to you, like, Schlock eats it. That's sort of how the conflict is resolved. You managed to take something that is both like core to the story you're telling but also take it as such an epic scale. I'm curious, like, sort of how you got there? Because it's such a cool way of [garbled]
[Howard] Oh, there's a James P. Hogan series, the Giants novels. I can't remember the titles of the individual books. But in one of them, we do some archaeology and we discover that there was a race of creatures living on Mars, and as we do the archaeology and learn more about them, we realize that because of a quirk of biology, there were no carnivores. Because everything that was made of meat was toxic to eat to everything else that was made of meat. But plants were fine. That grew into their morality, to where they… Creatures never ate other creatures, they only ate plants. I remember thinking about that and thinking about Schlock and thinking about the dark matter entities and wondering what if the dark matter entities never learn to eat each other. Oh, no. Oh, no. Schlock has discovered how to obtain energy from his enemies in a way that's absolutely unthinkable to them. That made it more delightful and more horrific. As I've said before, in one sense, Schlock really is the… Really is a movie monster. He's a…
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Howard] He's a walking horror show.
[DongWon] You made one interesting decision around being able to eat the dark matter monsters, which is that they don't actually die, though. He doesn't digest them all the way. He takes energy from them, but they're still left at the end of it. What was behind that thought process, and sort of why you made that choice?
[Howard] Um, it felt to me like an outgrowth of the weird physics I'd arrived at. They had… In order to do battle with baryonic matter… baryonic matter, us, non-baryonic matter, things made of dark matter… In order to do battle with baryonic matter, they needed a way to recover from being destabilized. I've come up with this whole physics of metastable dark matter and stable dark matter and very proud of it. Not going to dive into the details of that right now. But they had a way where when they were destabilized, there was a copy of them made so that… They were stored as data. So that they could be regenerated, so the soldiers could go back to fight. I thought, you know, when Schlock is eating them, that will probably set off that mechanism and they will have a memory of being eaten and… Oh, that's even worse. Oh, I love that so much. Oh, not only are you dead, but you remember dying and what it felt like and… That was very delightful for me.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's funny how many things are… For a storyteller, are driven by, oh, this is horrible.
[DongWon] Yeah. Oh, this will make you feel bad. Yeah.
[Howard] I can't remember when I learned that lesson, but it was… It was fairly early on that I discovered that sometimes when you think of the worst thing that could possibly happen, and, as an author, that is your cue for… That is either the dark side of the soul or… But, that has to go in the book. Because your readers are going to think of that and they're not going to want it to happen. That's a tool in the toolbox. There are so many more tools in the toolbox that I want to talk about. But we're going to take a break first.
 
[DongWon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week, and it's a way I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave you with a lot of time to prepare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a wholesome meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next two months.
 
[Erin] Have you ever felt like you were living the same day over and over again? And everyone around you is getting murdered? If you want to feel like that, you should play The Sexy Brutale, which is a really lovely game that came out two years ago for PlayStation, Windows, Xbox one. In it, you are trapped in a manor house and everyone around you is dying, everyone is being murdered, and you get to go through and stop each person from being murdered one at a time. It's an amazing game of looping and learning. Each time you go through the game, you learn something new about the characters and eventually about who you are and why you are stuck in this place. It is one of my favorite short games to play. So definitely check out The Sexy Brutale.
 
[Howard] Welcome back. I promised more tools in the toolbox. A big one for me was PBS Space-Time podcasts…
[Laughter]
[Howard] I watched this… I listened to this podcast or watched… YouTube show. Watched this YouTube show. There was an episode on ways in which the universe could end. One of them talked about whether matter was stable or metastable. It was this idea that during the Big Bang, things stabilize, but maybe we were like trapped in a little valley, halfway down a cliff, and sufficient energy might push matter into a new stable state and that state would propagate at light speed across the universe, destroying everything, and that would be the end of it all. Which is very scary and very depressing. Then I started thinking about dark matter and realized, you know, dark matter can't… The way we understand it. Real physics. It doesn't interact with matter, and it doesn't really interact with itself. It falls… There's gravitational attraction. But when to dark matter particles fall towards each other, they don't collide and interact, they just fall through. Because if they fell and interacted, there'd be an energy release that we'd observe. So I thought, well, dark matter doesn't work the way I want it to work. What if metastable dark matter as all of these interesting particles, but something about the Teraport is what… That thought cascaded from stuff I'd been writing 10 years ago. Teraport and Teraport area denial damages dark matter. Oh! It pushes it out of the metastable state into the stable state. It turns dark matter that's interesting into dark matter that's just foggy. Yes, that came to me… I think halfway through book 17 or 18, I realized, "Oh! Finally I understand how my universe works. I can write this conclusion." So, toolbox? Going back to the well all the time and filling my head with physics.
[Erin] Thinking about some of the things that you're talking about that you know that are beyond what we end up seeing, I'm thinking about sometimes we talk about worldbuilding as, like, it's an iceberg, and there's like the part above the surface and the part below. I'm thinking as you end a project, it's like your last chance to, like, chip pieces off the iceberg and, like, get them to float to the surface so that your readers will see them. I'm curious how you decided sort of what to end up putting on the page, and what will just sort of remain a fun fact that you could tell us, but won't actually be in the actual comic?
[Howard] Um. Well, see, that bit, I knew I needed it, but I couldn't figure out how to make it funny. Then I tried naming the particles…
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Howard] That was so much fun, coming up with names for the particles. I realized, "Oh. Umbril. Umbral's a great word. And Umbreon. Wait, Umbreon's a Pokémon."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Oh, there's the joke.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] There's the joke. Then, making a character moment out of it where two characters are arguing about how stupid it is to call them darkions or whatever. Suddenly, it's a character driven discussion that ends with an intellectual property 4th wall breaking joke about we… They are umbrions, not umbreons, because there's a Pokémon. Interestingly, the idea of breaking the 4th wall, that is… As my humor matured, I did that less. Because that increasingly is… That felt like a cheat. But breaking the 4th wall is something that appears in early Schlock Mercenary and I knew I had to include it in the last book as a… As sort of a meta-call back. Yes, this is the same story you started reading. See, I still make jokes about companies that are bigger than me.
[DongWon] Did you have a list of callbacks that you wanted to hit, or was it just sort of like ad hoc? You're like, "Oh. Here's an opportunity for a Pokémon joke. That's something I used to do that's fun." Or was it like, "Oo. I want to make sure. This is the last volume, I want to hit certain things."
[Howard] At some point in the prep for book 18, I realized that I didn't have a list and I probably wasn't going to make a list. But I should do some reading. So I went back and I just… I read through a lot of old Schlock Mercenary. There were bits that stuck out to me, and there were bits that I thought, "Oh, that would be fun to use," and then I literally forgot about them. Which actually, that's kind of a good litmus test. If you forgotten about it between day one and day two, maybe the idea wasn't that good after all. But the 4th wall jokes stuck out.
[DongWon] I did notice Schlock ends up in a tub.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Ovalkwik. I had to bring Ovalkwik back. That… We talked about retroactive foreshadowing. I think retroactive foreshadowing… For me, that means, "Oh, this thing that I already did, now I can turn it into foreshadowing, despite the fact that that wasn't my original plan."
[DongWon] Right.
[Howard] There was a lot of that. There was a lot of that in the last book.
 
[Mary Robinette] I have a question that I feel like is probably a little personal for me, but did you include the Jane Austen quote for me?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Because I felt very spoken to in that moment.
[Howard] Um…
[Mary Robinette] Just say yes.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Oh, no, there's… There was…
[Erin] I'm so glad you noticed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I kind of had to because I realized that I had done a nod to Robert Jordan like at the beginning of book 4. I knew that I needed to make a literary… As a callback, I needed to make a literary reference and… Yes, the Jane… Because I am friends with Mary Robinette, Jane Austen was where I went first. Because that felt the silliest for Schlock Mercenary.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Also, when you're dealing with an intergalactic conflict, a truth universally acknowledged… It's like, well, actually that's not a hypothetical in this particular…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] We are making statements about the universe at this point.
[Howard] Yeah.
 
[DongWon] Going back to the toolkit, one thing I also wanted to emphasize here is, this is a visual medium. Right? This is not just writing, it's comics. So you're bringing in such big heavy worldbuilding in this volume, you're bringing in theoretical physics that I'd never heard of and I'm pretty up to date on a bunch of stuff. But, like, there was like really cool interesting aspects here. Then you decided… Then you had to figure out how do I render this visually. I can't remember if they're introduced in volume 19 or volume 20, but the first time we see the actual creatures inside the skeletons of these world ships, it was just such a cool visual design. Because we first see the ship, and it just looks like a… Looks like a dog toy, frankly.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] Almost… Like a ball…
[Howard] A wiffleball.
[DongWon] Then when we realize those holes are for their tentacles… I don't know. Just something about that visual reveal was so good and satisfying. How do you think about those kind of reveals alongside these big technical science reveals or character reveals? How…
[Howard] Sorry, I'm giggling because I remember that moment very clearly. There was a… I can't remember the scientific instrument that they used, but they were making gravitational maps of galaxies and looking at how the fog of dark matter was shaped actually differently than the whorl of stars. The whorl of stars, through a telescope, is very crisp. It's… I mean… It is such a golden age right now for…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Beautiful crisp glorious pictures of galaxies. I'm looking at that fuzz, and I wanted better pictures. I wanted more resolution. Drawing dark matter… I had done it in, I think, book 13, I had drawn a dark matter tentacles smashing through something, with the understanding that when concentrated stable dark matter smashes through something, it's only interacting with it via gravity. Several G's of gravity pulling on things in weird ways, which is very destructive, because it can reach through both sides of it. We don't build things for these kinds of stresses. Yeah, there was this image in my head of I'm going to draw something where we can't see the gravity, and then I'm going to draw something where we can, and the picture's going to be really crisp. I did have to talk to Travis about it and say, "The one thing that we can't ever do with the dark matter creatures is not knockback the line work. The line work can't be black. The line work always has to be colored. Which makes a whole lot more work for him. Because he couldn't just flood fill and then paint within the filled areas. He actually had to select the line work and put colors on that as well.
[DongWon] Travis is your colorist?
[Howard] Travis is the colorist since… Oh, gee. Since 2009, 2010. So…
 
[Mary Robinette] Um. I'm going to ask a variation of a question that I get asked a lot, which is about how many drafts and iterations. But, specifically, what I'm wondering about, since we're talking about wrapping everything up, how many drafts or iterations did you have to do for that very last strip?
[Howard] The very last strip. That's the one where Schlock is… Has stolen food from the dinosaur and is running away from it. That was all one go because it was an epilogue, and I wanted… How do I… Sorry, I'm articulating this badly. That picture was for me.
[Mmm]
[Howard] I knew that I just wanted to draw Schlock running away from a giant fluffy Tyrannosaurus Rex, and that the sergeant is in motion.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] He has stolen someone else's food. But the dinosaur needs to be smiling and Schlock needs to be smiling, and Tagon needs to have kids… Murtaugh is pregnant. All of those elements, they were just there to bring me joy. If other people like them, well, awesome.
[DongWon] It was such a Bill Watterson image. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It was such a Calvin and Hobbes, of sort of Schlock has always been this sort of Calvin and Hobbes at the same time…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] You know? But getting to have the T Rex in that sort of Hobbes role, it just gave it such dynamism activity. You love drawing dinosaurs so much…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.
[DongWon] Like, every time you put a dinosaur in a scene, I can just feel the sheer joy coming through…
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] That you…
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] There's a scene where what's-her-face is riding a dinosaur…
[Mary Robinette] Riding the dinosaur. I was just thinking of that.
[DongWon] It's the best thing. It's just so much fun.
[Howard] Sorlie is… Haley Sorlie…
[DongWon] What a big character.
[Howard] Yeah. Her story's a funny one. When I first introduced that character in book 15, Delegates and Delegation, the outline had her dying. I knew that this was a character that we were going to like, and she was going to do heroic things and then she was going to die heroically. About three quarters of the way through the book, I realized, "No. No." This is… There were some meta-reasons in there. Meta number one was I've introduced a female character who is probably one of the most compelling female characters I've created, and killing her off would be a bad move. Two, she's way too useful to the story. Way too useful to the story. Turning her, through the course of the story, into someone who has… This is subtext rather than… She has a familial non-sexual relationship with Landon and Tenzy. They cuddle, they are friends, but they're completely different species and completely different organic. There is this weird threesome there that I didn't overtly come out and say, "This is an asexual triple marriage." But in my head, I always drew them so they could be that way. I love her. She represents so many different things for me. Of course I had to let her ride a dinosaur.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Of course I had to let her ride a dinosaur. How could I not? I… Yeah…
[Mary Robinette] I love the moment when they're like, "You know, this is an actual meat space," and she's like, "That makes it even better."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I guess it does.
[Howard] Yeah. That was… The whole bit about them traveling all the way to some distant Matrioshka brain, I think is how it's pronounced. Coming up with that solution for Fermi's Paradox, that the great filter is mature species realize it is too dangerous to hang around where life might spawn, because it'll spawn and it'll be dangerous, so we're leaving. All of the grown-ups keep leaving. There's a point where Petey in the earlier book has aspired… Has apotheosis and in his moment of apotheosis, he looks around and he's like, "Where are all the grown-ups?" I loved coming up with that is a solution, and the fact that some of the grown-ups are Earth dinosaurs was just extra fun for me. So… I could talk about the end of Schlock Mercenary for hours and hours and hours. I love this thing so much. It was difficult to end it, for a lot of reasons. I think we'll talk about some of those in our next episode, Business Reasons. But, very unapologetically, I refer to it as a magnum opus because I spent so much time on it. It's been a huge part of me for 20 plus years now. Who's got homework for us?
 
[DongWon] I have our homework this week. I think, in theme with our topic today, what I want you to do is to go and write a one-page outline. Keep it relatively brief. Make some bullet points about how you want to end your current work in progress. Really, just think through what are the things that are going to provide the narrative resolution, what kind of callbacks you want to have in there, and what emotional beats you want to leave your readers on.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] To stay up-to-date with new releases, upcoming in person events like our annual writing retreats and Patreon live streams, follow Writing Excuses on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

Jul. 12th, 2018 01:28 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils
 
 
Key points: A foil is a character in a story who acts as a contrast to the main character, externalizing a point of conflict or contrast. May be a sidekick, two side characters, or even two protagonists. Sometimes the foil fills in weaknesses. Beware of flanderizing a foil, reducing them to a flat character. The best foils make both characters more rounded as they change in interesting ways. Foils can be good for exploring knotty topics, showing more than one opinion or view. Often, the foil can hang a lantern on the discussion. Heist novels can be an example of a group of foils! Specialists, weaknesses, and plenty of interaction playing on those weaknesses and the cracks in the process. Foils are a natural with teams who are just meeting, but they also can be good for introducing the long-term relationship of a couple. What keeps foils together? Family! Also, try using the Kowal relationship axes -- mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Keeping the morals aligned can help keep a couple together. Manners are a good place for friction.  
 
( Just between you and me... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Characters As Foils.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We've talked a lot about building really interesting characters, giving them arcs, having them changes they go along. Now let's talk about them messing with one another.
[Oo… Yes. Laughter]
[Brandon] What do I mean by a foil?
[Amal] I thought you were going to say what do you mean by messing with each other.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Okay. So, a foil is a character who serves within a story to act as a contrast to the main character. This is not a character who exists to stop their forward progress, which is what the word foil sounds like it is going to be, because of "Curses! Foiled again." But this is more like… Often a role that you'll see occupied by a sidekick character. They're someone who allows the character to express themselves, so that they are getting some of their internal thoughts outside, and also to provide usually a point of contrast or conflict surrounding an internal conflict that the character has within themselves.
[Brandon] It doesn't have to even be main character/side character. I've done it frequently with two side characters that in order to make them both more distinct in the reader's mind, I make them have some point of friction or contrast, which then as they discuss, they argue about, or… Just offer examples of one another in that way.
[Mary] Like one of the examples we were talking about earlier was Abbott and Costello. In which they are actually kind of foils of each other.
[Amal] Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite things to read or see, is when you have a rivalry, for instance, and you do have two protagonists. But you can… In order to establish what they each are like, you use the other character… You use that contrast as opposed to another element of the environment or other characters. Instead, it's almost like you're making the differences between them a character as well. That kind of grows from the fact that they are… They don't even necessarily have to be opposites. They can just be complementary, they can be contrasts.
[Maurice] I spoke a while back about one protagonist, whose sole object through the course of the story was to just be left alone and get high. That character's name was Sleepy. Now his foil is one of my favorite characters I've ever created. Just to put that out there. His name is 120 Degrees of Knowledge Allah.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That's amazing.
[Maurice] The reason why they work so well together, and why Knowledge Allah is his foil, is because in a lot of ways they were like polar opposites. Knowledge Allah was an activist, Knowledge Allah knows what he believed, why he believed, and in a lot of ways, Knowledge Allah also played straightman to some of Sleepy's antics. So, Knowledge Allah actually became the motivating force to help drive Sleepy's story and drive his arc in a lot of ways.
[Mary] I think that goes to the thing that people talk about a lot, which is opposites attract. That frequently what the foil is also doing is they're filling in the weaknesses of the main character. Which is why a lot of times you will see husband-and-wife couples in a foil relationship. In The Thin Man, which is one of my favorite series of films, Nick and Nora, they… Well, and actually Asta sometimes acts as a foil, too… But they act as a foil for each other. Although given the way the films are structured, Nora is much more in the foil role then Nick is, because he, as the detective, is often driving the action more than she is.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask you this. Do you design this specifically, or do you let this grow naturally or some combination of the two?
[Amal] The best example from my own work is this novella that I cowrote with Max Gladstone. The working title of which is This Is How You Lose the Time War. It was totally baked into our concept. It was that… We recognized that Max and I had super different writing styles and writing paces and methods. We wanted to make a virtue of that necessity and have these two characters that were going to be very opposite. One called Red and one called Blue, and have them be agents of opposite sides of the Time War. Everything about those… Like, everything about these differences became part of the plot, part of the texture of the book, and the development of it. But ultimately, the point of those contrasts was… Ended up being more about how they're each not great representatives of their respective sides. The more that they engaged with each other, which they do because it's an epistolary story. The more they engage with each other, the more they realized how alike they were in spite of coming from these places that are literally opposites.
[Brandon] It's really easy to, I feel like, flanderize one of your foils. Which is this concept that we use where a character, over time, becomes more and more focused on their quirks, rather than more and more rounded. More and more flat, hitting one note. But when a foil is done correctly, I feel like it, in the best films and books where I've seen it, both characters become more rounded over time because of the friction between them changing them both in interesting ways.
[Amal] Exactly.
[Mary] I think that I often, because of that, because of the way it allows you to flesh out a character… The times that I plan ahead to insert a foil… Most of the time, they develop naturally. But the times that I plan ahead are when I'm planning on tackling a topic that is particularly knotty or weighty, because it gives me a way to explore multiple aspects of that topic by having two characters whose contrasting opinions and views on it show that there's… It's not just a single side. So if I were telling a story about the merits of hamsters, I might have a character who is very, very pro-hamster and her best friend would be anti-hamster. Their conversations illuminate a lot… Not just about the topic, but also about how much of this is just the nature of the character versus the nature of hamsters.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] So, the reason I do a lot of foils is actually because a lot of my stories tend to deal with some of the weightier topics. So by having that foil who's like the opposite of whatever character I'm working with, helps me from sliding into a screed at any point. Because then… Now I have to look at the other side. I have to embody another school of thought, and let that play out more naturally.
[Brandon] You have to… You have a natural motivation as a writer to hang a lantern on what's going on, the… You're speaking… You start into kind of a lecture, that other character's going to be like, "Oh, you're lecturing us now?" It's very natural. It works really well.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and break for our book of the week, which is Breaking the Chains of Gravity.
[Mary] Yes. So, Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel is a phenomenal nonfiction book, and it's one that I came across when I was working on The Calculating Stars and Fated Sky. This is about the space program before NASA. So it starts from the very early days of people just like "Let me see if I can get this rocket off the ground…" And lots of people getting blown up.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It carries you through to the very early days of NASA. One of the things that I just had no idea about was the sheer number of women who were involved in it, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And also like… It also… I don't want to minimize the fact that many of the early… And the book does not. That many of the early rocketry pioneers were Nazi war criminals. But it does highlight the fact that they began as a teenage rocketry club in Germany that got absorbed by the German army, which I didn't know. That does… It certainly changes your view of rocketry when you begin to look at its past. But there were just so many people, and it's a fascinating, incredibly well-researched book. She's got a real grasp of narrative, so it's an engaging read at the same time that it's filled with really cool factoids.
[Amal] Has… This is… Can I piggyback on that recommendation? So, there's this amazing poem by Sofia Salatar called Girl Hours. It's dedicated to Henrietta Swan Leavitt. It's a brilliant poem. It's basically as if… Written as if it's preparing to be an essay on the subject, but then broken up, so like the top part is actually notes and says, "In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as human computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars. I didn't know about this until I read this poem, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
[Mary] So I'll put that in the liner notes as well. So you should check out this poem which is called…
[Amal] Girl Hours.
[Mary] As well as Breaking the Chains of Gravity.
 
[Brandon] So. Let's talk around foils. We often view them as the kind of A character-B character interaction. Have you ever designed a group where each character is meant to kind of be a foil for the same concept, or a foil for one another in a big group dynamics?
[Mary] This is what a heist novel is!
[Laughter]
[Amal] Yes! Yes. I want you to talk more about that, because I loved reading when you were writing about how you did research for a heist novel by watching heist movies.
[Mary] Yeah. I watched a lot of heist movies, but I also read as many variations on heist novel as I could. Scott Lynch's… I want to talk about something other than my own book. But Scott Lynch's Red Sea under Red Sky and lies of Locke Lamora… These characters all act as foils for each other. Each of them has a weakness, and there is another character in the group who needles them on that weakness. That weakness represents both what their skill set is as well as what their personal failing is. So having that conflict externalized allows for the book to be a lot more dynamic. One of the things about a heist, in particular, is that it's a group of characters each of whom has a specialty. The thing that a foil does in this case is remind you that they may have an area of specialty, but there's… That area of specialty means that they have a ton of other weaknesses. So it prevents the group from feeling just like a flat one-sided gro… Collection of experts. Which then is actually no fun to watch. Like, if you watch a group of experts go in and accomplish something, it's actually not very interesting. Just as an example of this, I was talking with Kjell Lindgren, who's an astronaut. He was talking about actually in space, he always felt very safe, because they had practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced everything that they were doing. They over prepare before they go up there. So, you go out, you do a thing, and it goes… And all of the acceptable variables, because of the amount of prep time that you've put in. So that, in a book, is not very interesting. But if you throw a foil in there, that suddenly offers you a lot of places to insert cracks into the process.
[Amal] That's true. I love that. At the same time, I was… While I completely agree, I find myself thinking of how I really actually really love watching people who are super good at stuff doing stuff. But…
[Mary] But then, the story is very short.
[Amal] That's true.
[Mary] It's like we go in, and we accomplish the thing, and then we leave.
[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. I mean, even the Food Network, with experts cooking delicious things, they have to generate some kind of drama somewhere. Oh, no, the pickles are sour. I don't know. Something like that.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] Pickles are usually sour.
[Mary] That's exactly why Gordon Ramsay is so prickly when he's dealing with adults, but if you've ever watched his kid shows, he's not. Because his role there is not to be a foil to the child.
[Amal] Exactly. It's to actually be a teacher, it's to actually embody that role.
[Brandon] Well, they do it for different cultures. If you watch the British version, he is way less of a foil than in the American version. Yeah. Anyway.
[Amal] [garbled]
 
[Brandon] [garbled] slightly different tactic on this. I've noticed there's kind of two general groups of foil. There is, when you're writing a book, there is the team who have… Are just meeting and you find that everybody kind of hates each other. Then there's the long-term couple who you use their foil nature at the start of a story to establish a long-term relationship. I happen to like both of these. I really like how the second group can really easily show that these two characters know each other so well, because they know how to push each other's buttons in just the right way, but they also know how not to go too far on pushing those buttons. It makes both characters usually more relatable, unless these two people just don't get along at all. Which happens sometimes. Which brings me kind of to a question. How do you make sure, when these characters are pushing each other's buttons, that the reader understands why they are together in this situation? What tactics do you use to make it so that they don't just say, "Well, we don't get along. We're not good for each other. We are not good teammates. We're going to break apart and go separate directions."
[Maurice] Well, the easy cheat for me has been, [garbled I kind of] go back to that combination of those two groups that you were talking about, and we call that family.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] I was just realizing that, in the scene I was just writing this morning, I was just like, "Why are these people to… Oh, they're brother and sister, and they're kind of stuck with each other, aren't they?" But they do. They know how to push each other's buttons, but they're still kind of stuck in this relationship, like we're not going anywhere, so how do we now accommodate one another?
 
[Mary] I use a tool that I talked about last week, the Kowal relationship axes, which I will recap for those of you who are listening to just this episode. Which is that basically, there are six kind of sliders, axes, upon which relationships are built. The more you have in common with a person on these, the less friction there's going to be. So, mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers, which represents sense of humor. This is a theory my mother-in-law came up with for describing dating.
[Amal] This is amazing.
[Mary] It's actually really, really phenomenal. So what I do is that I try to make sure that for the most part that my characters' morals slider is really well aligned. Unless there is a reason that I want to specifically explore that. But if they have to go on a process together, their… That is a place that they have to be in agreement, if there both committing. Their mind can be out of alignment, their sense of what money is for, their sense of manners… Their sense of manners is usually one of the ones that if I want them to… If I want there to be a lot of friction, that's one of the ones where I will slide them apart, and give them very different backgrounds, so that they have different ideas of what is polite.
[Amal] That is fascinating, actually. The idea that… This has less to do with writing and more from experience, but it's… I'm Canadian, and I went to live in the UK for six years. The culture shock that I experienced was almost entirely to do with how people treat you when they like you.
[Laughter]
[Amal] I was… I just… I have a very thin skin when it comes to sarcasm and being teased. Which made things very difficult when I suddenly found myself in a country where the more people like you, the meaner they were to you. I just couldn't… Like, I could not wrap my brain around this. I just… I like you, and you're my friend, why are you being horrible to me? They didn't see it as being horrible, they saw it as being familiar. Whereas if they were polite and distant to someone, then that would be someone who they weren't friends with.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap this up with some homework. The homework I'm going to give you is I want you to take a famous soliloquy, like from Shakespeare or something like that, a monologue, a single character saying something, and I want you to insert a foil. It doesn't have to be comedic. It probably will, from the nature of this assignment, but someone who is contrasting what they're doing, and interrupting this. Or go the other direction. Take a famous comedy bit, like Who's on First, and remove one side or the other. Take out Abbott, or take out Costello, and maybe replace them with someone who completely plays along, and see how far it goes, and see how it works when both characters are trying to one-up each other to the joke. Or just take one out and see if the… It works on its own. So, this has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 6.29: Writing Character Foils

Dec. 21st, 2011 01:25 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.29: Writing Character Foils

From: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/18/writing-excuses-6-29-character-foils/

Key Points: A foil is a character who highlights the features of another character's personality through contrast with their own character. E.g. Straight man and comedian. Buddies, like the straitlaced older guy and the crazy loose cannon guy. Holmes and Watson: eccentric versus common sense or Superman and Everyman. Plucky sidekick and hero, like Batman and Robin. Wise mentor and young apprentice. Siblings. Villain and protagonist! Why build a foil? When your main character is missing something. Or to externalize an internal conflict. Consider reciprocation -- what does the foil gain from the other character? Make sure your foil has a character arc, a reason to be there, something to contribute to the story besides being just the comic relief.
( Tin, aluminum, silver, gold... or pointy? )
[Brandon] Yup. All right. This has been a great podcast. I think since Mary's been bragging a little bit... You're going to have to give us...
[Mary] Doomed!
[Brandon] No, we love you Mary. You haven't been bragging. You were rightly proud of your short story. Will you give us a writing prompt?
[Mary] Yes. What I want you to do is, I want you to come up with a list of five character pairs. Then pick the one that is most interesting to you and write about them.
[Brandon] All right. Thank you all for listening. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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