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mbarkerWriting 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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