Writing Excuses 20.31: Framing the Lens

Aug. 8th, 2025 09:27 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.31: Framing the Lens 
 
 
Key points: Frame? How do you choose what's in your story and what's not? How do you select your focus? MICE Quotient. These are the questions I'm asking, and these are the answers I'm giving my readers. Set the frame in the beginning, a promise to tell you about this thing. What does the reader need to know? You may be writing your way into the story, and adjust the frame later. Think about how your readers will connect the dots. Verisimilitude... Captivate your reader, and keep them in frame as long as possible.
 
[Season 20, Episode 31]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 31]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] Framing the Lens.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Erin] And... Wow! We are almost to the end of our entire lens lineup. We have gone through many, many lenses. And before we get into this one, I just want to make sure that you're aware that in two weeks, we are starting our deep dive into All the Words in the Sky. So if you haven't read it, this is a great time to get in there and read it, because we will be dropping so many spoilers and we want you to have a chance to experience the book before we get into it. But first, we're going to talk about frame. And the reason that this one I thought would be a great one to kind of go last, is we've talked a lot... A little... A lot about what happens when you're using whatever lens you 're using. But not how you choose what the lens is actually focused on. How do you choose what's in your story and what's not? All the decisions that we've been talking about sort of presume that you already know what you're focused on. But how do you make that choice? And how does it inform all of the other choices that we've been making?
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's actually one of the hardest things, especially for a new writer, is deciding what to leave out... The... You've got a story in your head, but there's so much detail and you can't capture it all. It's not possible, and it's almost like not pleasant to read. So I wind up using a couple of different tools for my frame. One of which, will surprise no one, is the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Beause that gives me a way to articulate for myself these are the questions that I'm asking. Here are the conflicts that arise because of those questions, and here are the... Here's the answer that I'm giving the reader. Like, are they going to be able to get out of the place? Oh, no, more rocks fall. Ah, yay, they get out.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's a milieu story. And so, I then know that if part of the thing that I really want to talk about is did you know that the lichen that are growing in this cave are.. It's like, I wonder why they glow? Let me tell you about the glowing... It's like the glowing does not matter to them getting out of the cave and surviving the rocks falling. It's not actually important, even though I'm really interested in it. It allows me to say, no, I can set that aside. I don't have to explore that.
[Dan] Yeah. Whereas, if it were an idea story that is specifically about the glowing lichen or whatever is causing the glowing lichen, you could tell the same thing with the same characters and the same setting, but in a way that focuses more on the lichen and the escape from the caves is less of a story element.
[Erin] It's funny. I, I think, go a lot more by gut on this. And it's a lot of, like, how we tell stories. I think a lot about, like, if you were to sit around a campfire and tell a story, and this is also why I like short stories, because it's hard telling a novel around a campfire. It's a good way to lose friends, because…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Actually, the fire goes out and they're really cold and hungry. But, like, when you tell… When people sit down, like, oh, my gosh, I gotta tell you about the time, like, I set my teacher on fire. Don't do this at home. Actually…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Do you want to pick a different example?
[Erin] Yeah. Okay. As a teacher, I have failed myself. Let me tell you about the time I went into this cave with glowing lichen, and did not set my teacher on fire. Then, that is, like, you sort of… You set the frame at the beginning, and I think a lot of this makes me think about when you start a story, in some ways, you are saying, whether explicitly or implicitly, you're making a promise. You're saying I'm going to tell you about this thing. I'm going to tell you about the time I got trapped in the land of the lichen caves and had barely got out by the skin of my teeth. Or, I'm going to tell you about the time I figured out why lichen are glowing in this cave and used it to save the world. Same place, like you were saying, same characters, but you set the frame in the beginning. And so I think remembering that when I'm going… When I'm tempted to go off on a side note is too much like when someone's telling you a story and they're like, and that reminds me of my coworker… But you know what, actually, no, we were talking about the caves… Is to remind myself what is the promise that I made? What's the frame that I set when I started? And then let me continue going. And if it starts to feel like that is a stricture, like, I'm like so mad because every two seconds, I want to go off on this side story, then maybe I've set my frame incorrectly, and I need to rewind, reset, and tell the story I want to tell.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… I think of it… As you were talking, I was thinking another way to talk about it is what does the reader need to know? This is a thing that I think about all the time. What does the reader need to know to continue the story? And if you think about it as navigation, like, what does the reader need to know to navigate the story? If you have ever ask someone who learn to navigate before the Internet, you will get things like, okay, so you have to go down the street. Now, there used to be a school bus parked on the corner. The school bus… Do you remember Johnny? Johnny used to drive that school bus.
[Dan] This is how I give people directions…
[Laughter]
[Dan] And I feel a little called out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, again, you learned to navigate before there were paper maps… Before… Before there were paper maps…
[Dan] Before there were paper maps?
[Laughter]
[Dan] Navigating purely by the stars…
[Erin] You look great, I have to say.
[Dan] Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] when you said that thing about navigation, I was reminded that I'm like… This is unrelated to our topic. But there are two types of people in the world, people who navigate, like, by memory, by this thing, and people who do compass, like. There are people who will be like go three blocks, turn Northeast by Northwest. Then go six blocks in an easterly westerly direction. And, like, that's how they go. Versus, like, actually using things that kind of are more about, like, who lived there and what did things. And it makes me think that, like, frame is partly about what's in the story, but also in how your setting up the telling of the story. Like, directions given by a person who talks about Johnny in the bus is very different than directions by the person who has a much more compass-oriented way. And I think they work, as long as you don't switch from one to the other mid story and confuse the reader, because you've gone from a frame of one to a frame of the other without signaling that you're making that change.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And different readers need different things to navigate through a story. Like, if someone who is familiar with faster than light travel with science fiction stories, one of the things that they do not need you to do is to define FTL, faster than light travel, they've got it. But if you try to have that story go mainstream, you do have to define it because they have no idea what FTL is. If you're… So a lot of times, the frame is not just what is… What promises you're making about the kind of story you're telling, but also the conversation that you're having with the reader.
[Dan] Yeah. And I love thinking about this idea of what you include and what do you not include. Because it really does change the entire tone of the story. One of the things that I chose with the I Am Not a Serial Killer books is to include John's family. They are thrillers, they are about investigations to try to find monsters that are killing people. But we see his family constantly. The first book is basically a string of holidays, and we get to see how he and his mom celebrate them. And does his sister come to this one or not? And is his aunt there? And what do they talk about and what do they do, and how does it matter to them? And the reason that I did that is because I very much wanted the story to be about how John is and isn't a person. How he fits into the world and how he doesn't fit into the world. And using these really common resonant things like Halloween parties and Christmas vacations helps that come forward, because that's something most of us have experienced. And if that were not in there, you wouldn't get that same view of who he is.
[Mary Robinette] I made similar holiday decisions for somewhat different reasons, but also overlapping ones, when I was working on Martian Contingency, because I wanted to talk about what does it mean to create a culture. Like, when you're going someplace, what do you take from home that is part of making you who you are? Part of making you people from Earth, but now you are also Martians, and so there are new holidays and new ways of marking time and new blending. And so for me, if I didn't include the holidays, the parties, the giftgiving, the conversations about the time, it would have just been, oh, things have gone wrong in space. Oh no!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Which was… Which is fun, and like… It's really fun to torture people by dropping rocks on them and stuff like that. But it is… It's a mono dimensional thing. And so, thinking about the frame, thinking about what I want to include, I want to include more than one kind of thing inside that frame. I don't want to include, like, just holidays. Like a story that's just holidays, that's fine. That's also fine. But holidays, rocks fall… Those things are more interesting than a frame with a single object in it.
[Erin] I love that. And I am… We are going to give you, I should say, a brief holiday from us, and then we will return on the other side of this break.
 
[Erin] So, to pick up on something from before the break, I am really curious about sort of how do you decide what… If you're like, I want to include a holiday or I want to include the sense of being a person, how do you know when you're getting off track, like, when you're expanding your frame too far and when what you're doing is actually supporting the story that you're trying to tell?
[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, it's going back to an earlier lens that we used, which is thinking about the why. And that's the… Why do I… Am I telling this story? What are the questions that I'm exploring? And within the frame, when I'm thinking about what goes in it, I'm thinking about the why, but the why has then allowed me to set up, again, the tools that I particularly use, which is the MICE Quotient. So if the conflict, if the problem that is directly in front of the character, is not something that is related to the questions that I have already raised, then it's opening up a new tangent. That's when… It's like, oh. Oh, I'm going to need a bigger lens to fit everything in, a bigger frame to fit everything in. Or things are going to get really cramped and confusing, because it'll be so piled on top of each other that you can't actually tell what's important anymore.
[Dan] Yeah. In the first draft of I Am Not a Serial Killer, there was a whole chapter about civil disobedience in some social studies class, and that became a way for John Cleaver, the main character, to decide to take matters into his own hands and start fighting these monsters himself. And it was… First of all, I realized that very few people in my writing group understood what civil disobedience was, which was complicated… Anyway. But there was also the issue that it just felt wrong. It was a story where it became very didactic. It became the author saying, "Look. This is what's going to happen next." And it was getting far away from that thing I was trying to show about does he fit into the world or not? And so even though it was this chunk slice of life that was able to show some of his classmates and how he was different from them, but it was the wrong thing. It was… It didn't feel organic to the story. Which is what I eventually… What eventually made me decide to cut it out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Most of the cut scenes that I have from short stories or novels are things like that. Things that… If they don't… It's not necessarily that they're didactic, but they… They're taking the story in a direction that is not the direction that I'm interested in going. Again, I can… I will often use MICE Quotient as a diagnostic tool. But it can also… Sometimes it's not that, it's… It's like, yeah, MICE Quotient wise, this fits in, but the tone of the thing is wrong. Like, I'm trying to show people, in Martian Contingency in particular, what happens if you make a kinder choice. And this scene is a character being actively and deliberately cruel to someone. And sometimes it is because it is something that I have seen in media, and I've accidentally regurgitated it without interrogating my own text, my own intentions, without looking through my own lens.
 
[Erin] It's funny, what you're both describing makes me think of something that I think a lot… I do all the time, and I think a lot of people do, which is, sometimes you're not actually finding the frame of the story, you're just writing yourself into… You're writing your way into the story. It's why… There's that old trope of, like, don't ever start a story with the character waking up. You can start a story with a character waking up.
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Yeah.
[Erin] Go for it. But sometimes you're doing it because you know that later in the day, the character needs to do X, and you're still trying to feel your way through the story. So you start with, like, something that feels like a very obvious beginning. It is like… Opening your eyes is a very obvious frame to any day. Like, once you're awake, the day has begun. And so you start, and you write your way end, and so you're finding… You're choosing a broader frame than you actually need because you're kind of doing all the fluff in order to, like, get yourself in the mood and rev yourself up. And I would say, on that note, if you… You're working on a story, you're at the beginning, you're like, I don't know if this is the correct frame. Sometimes you can't know until you get to the end. It's like if you take a panoramic shot, you may not know where to crop it until you look at the whole picture and go, this is where the interesting thing is happening. This is where the action is. And so it's okay to, like, come in and figure out the frame after you've written more and sort of excise the parts that turned out to actually be kind of you figuring out where to go, and what's important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I find that I will start earlier because the story isn't in focus yet, much the same way that when I get up in the morning, as someone who is quite nearsighted, the world is not in focus…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Until I put on my literal lenses.
[Erin] 100 percent.
[Laughter]
 
[Erin] Time has been shooting away through this episode. There is one thing that you mentioned earlier, Mary Robinette, that I want to circle back to. Which sounds so corporate, but I said it anyway. But you mentioned the idea that if you talk about FTL in a sci-fi story for a sci-fi audience, they understand it. But if you take it to a mainstream audience, they're like, FT what? And so I am wondering about frame not just as like the frame that you're putting on the story, but frame as a conversation between the story and the reader. And, like, how do you frame a story depending on who your audience is, what they might be bringing to the story, how you think that it might be received without getting paralyzed by the idea of, like… Or just getting stopped in your tracks, by the idea of what the reader might take from your story?
[Mary Robinette] So, we've talked about some of this, like, when we were talking about the idea of theme and meaning. But I, in particular, when I'm doing my historical fiction, there's language that has always been a slur, but is historically accurate for one character to call another. But it will hit completely differently for a modern reader than it would for someone back in the day. I was talking with someone, is one of the least charged versions that I can demonstrate this with… Talking with someone who said that you can turn any sentence into a sleazy pickup line by adding the word "ladies?" to the end of it. Can I change your microphone, ladies?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Exactly. I feel gross.
[Mary Robinette] But you can also do something with the word "see" which will turn anything into a gangster film. Can I change your microphone, see? It's like I don't know but you just threatened me. You want me to change your microphone, see!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And so there's stereotypes. There are all of these different pieces that we come equipped with when we are reading a story that change with generations, that change with culture. And so when I'm writing, especially historical or going secondary world, I have to think about how that is going to translate. If I have… Using a puppetry metaphor, I remember we were working on a show and I looked at my design and we realized that accidentally, because we had… It was a whole bunch of rats. I was… Pied Piper. And we realize that accidentally we had made all of the rats street rat colors. So they were all dark browns and dark grays and blacks. And it was like that was encoding something that is not the message that we want to be encoding. That is an accident that can be read very, very easily by an audience as, like, mapping it onto black and brown people in the real world. And that's not the intention. And so I… We went back and added in some, like, blonde rats, because do you know rats actually come in blonde? They're really pretty. Piebald rats, to go with the Pied Piper. So going through and breaking that up so we worked sending an accidental message. So when I'm evaluating something, when I'm writing my fiction, I look at what are the things that I'm accidentally encoding that are mapped on the real world regardless of if it's a secondary world fantasy or not.
[Erin] I've sort of two thoughts on this. One is a really tortured metaphor that I'm going to share anyway. Which is if you… People sometimes are in relationships that are [garbled] they're situation-ships, and I had a guy friend who had… Who had a young woman that he was in a situation-ship with…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] He started to make all these things that were like… I called it, like, couples bingo. And I was like if you do too many of these things, like now you're… Like, you can't like take her to Christmas, three weddings, and then, like, be like, why do you think we're dating? It's like, well, I mean, there are certain things that, like, if you hit enough boxes, if you hit enough like… It's like if you're drawing a connect the dots. If you connect enough dots, like, people can figure out what the picture is here. So don't get mad when she breaks up with you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Because she realizes you're dating eight other people. Life lessons there. But the… Like, what I think about that is with stories as well, like, if you… Sometimes people will feel like I wasn't trying to map onto this real life thing, like, that was never my intention, and it can feel like, why do I have to change my story just because other people will read it that way? But, just like my friend's Christmas would have gone a lot better if he had been clearer or made different decisions early on, you don't want to end up having the entire story about your story be something completely different than your intention. You don't want to end up being defensive about your story or explaining what you really meant when you can make it clearer to the reader from the outset by not connecting as many of those dots or adding new dots to the picture or just doing things differently. And so, I know that sometimes it can feel like why should I have to change the story for the readers, or for the world, but the reality is that, like, the world is the world of people that will be buying, talking about, celebrating, marketing, and all of that stuff towards your work. And ultimately, if they don't feel comfortable doing that, the only person it really harms in the long run is you and your career because you are not able to escape the thing that you were not even trying to do in the first place, I think.
[Dan] Agreed.
[Erin] Thanks.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But it… It is absolutely true. And it's… This is a frame. The frame of the reader is one of the frames. The frame of the modern world is the frame through which your story is going to be perceived and enjoyed. When you're talking about, instead of the frame around the lens, when you're talking about the frame around a picture, the picture frame serves to give it context. And the modern world is part of the context that your readers will bring to a story. When you read… There's a reason, like, Huckleberry Finn has warnings on it now. It's still a fantastic story, there's still a lot of really great stuff in there, but there's pieces of it that do not read the same now as they did when Mark Twain wrote it, and then there are pieces that have always read that way, depending on who the reader is.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, like, again, using a less loaded example, Jane Austen use the word electricity in her novels. I 100 percent cannot. Because the frame of a modern reader is that electricity did not exist until they were children, and certainly not in Jane Austen's time. So if I write… Use it, in a story that is set in Jane Austen's time, it looks like an escape, it reads differently than it does when she was using it. Because our understanding of electricity has changed.
[Erin] Wow. Somehow, it's so funny, we've, like, come around to verisimilitude, my favorite ridiculously long word, for no reason, which is, like, the feeling of something feeling real. It's the old one people always talk about is the Tiffany problem, which is that Tiffany is a Middle Ages name, but it sounds like a Valley girl name. And so if you have, like, Sir Tiffany, people will not… Like, it will throw them out of the story. It will throw them out of the frame. Because they will automatically bring their modern frame to it, and they will no longer be able to focus on the picture you are trying to show them. Because they'll be thinking about everything else. What you want to do is captivate the reader and keep them in frame as long as possible. And with that, we have kept you in frame for a very long episode. And so I think this would be a great time to send us away to the homework.
 
[Erin] Which is, to get back to sort of our earlier thought about framing the lens, take a story that you're working on, and what I'd like you to do is think about what happens if you shift the frame just a little. The easiest way to do this is, is there a scene that you could take out that would, like, shift the way that the lens of the story sort of is focused? And what new scene would you add in in order to rebalance your story? Then go and write that scene. And have fun with it.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.27: Framing Stories

Jul. 8th, 2023 01:14 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.27: Framing Stories
 
 
Key Points: Frameworks in fiction. A podcast being recorded by a character. A story told by a character, like in Frankenstein. Beginning and ending frames. Value? A sense of verisimilitude. Tools for setting time and place. Adding tension, structure, or information. A perspective of larger movements. Signaling genre. What's the meta? Framing can constrain you, or be unnecessary! Frame stories, like prologues, must be good on their own.  Ending frames can twist our understanding. Frame stories aren't just beginning and ending bits, sometimes they are woven throughout the story. The frame can be resonant with the story. Ticking clocks, encyclopedia entries between chapters, epistolary. Frame stories are a 201 technique. Frame stories push the boundaries a little bit. They can add tragedy, horror, scale. Cartoon barbarians! 
 
[Season 18, Episode 27]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Framing Stories.
[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.
 
[Dan] Today we want to talk about frameworks in fiction. Dark One: Forgotten, the kind of central conceit, the inspiration behind that story, is that you are not reading a book or listening to an audiobook, you are listening to a podcast being recorded by one of the characters. So it's telling a story within this very specific framing. That changes the way that it's written, it changes the way that you would interact with it, and the way that we are able to tell that story. We thought that this was a really good opportunity to talk about frameworks in fiction, because this is something that's been around for a very, very long time. There's a lot of different frameworks that you can do. For example, if you've heard the term frame story, you have probably heard it in the context of something like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Wherein the entire story is being told to you by one of the characters. There's a little bit at the beginning where they say, "Now I'm going to tell you the tale of what happened to me." Then a little bit at the end that says, "That was the story. Thank you for listening." But there's a lot of other kinds of frameworks that we can do. Before we get into specifics, let me ask the group here, what value do we get by adding a frame like this, by casting our story in some kind of different frame or format?
[Mary Robinette] So, some of it… There's two different, I think, value areas. One is the reason that people started doing frame stories in the beginning was it gives a sense of verisimilitude. It's like, "This is a travelogue of a real place, you can actually go to," Gulliver's Travels. Spoilers, you cannot go to any of those places.
[Dang it. What?]
[Mary Robinette] I know.
[Dan] We want to go to that fourth one.
[Mary Robinette] This true crime podcast, this is the thing that actually happened to this person. So it gives this sense there. The other thing is that it often will give you some narrative tools for setting up time and place. Like epistolary novels can do a lot of heavy lift, because you've got a date stamp at the top of every section. So those are two kinds of areas that they can give you. But I think there's some others.
[DongWon] I have often suggested to clients, when we're doing especially early stage structural edits, if a book feels like it needs a little bit more tension or a little bit more structure or you need a way to give readers a certain piece of information that your protagonist may not have access to, the frame story can be an incredibly useful way to do that. Right? Whether it is a piece of… Neon Yang's The Genesis of Misery has this frame story, these two unknown narrators having a conversation. That comes up two or three times in the story that A) gives us the shape of what's about to happen, so once we meet the protagonist, we get a little bit of like the arc of what's coming and also a little bit of that perspective of greater pieces moving outside of the character perspectives. So big political things sometimes. The movement of history. Technology or magic systems that are operating in the background. A frame story can let you get that information in, which lets you punch up the tension in act one and lets you really signal heavily what genre you're in, what kind of story you're telling in a way that can be hard to do when your character is just… When you're showing what your character is doing. It's a way for you to like cheat and like tell your audience a bunch of stuff in a fun, cool way. I absolutely love a frame story. I think it can be so useful at the beginning, the middle, and the end, to just punch up certain moments where the story's getting a little confusing or a little flabby.
 
[Howard] I think it's… For terminal… Terminological semantic purposes, it's important to recognize that there's a lot of ways you can talk about this. Often, the way I talk about it is just by saying what's the meta? What's the meta for Dark One: Forgotten? Well, it's a podcast. It's a podcast. That creates a framework. What's the meta for Name of the Wind? Well, it's a framed story, someone is telling a story within the context of another thing that's happening.
[DongWon] Blair Witch Project's one of the best ones of all time.
[Howard] The Blair Witch…
[DongWon] Because they went very meta and convinced a certain set of the audience that this really was a documentary. Right?
[Howard] Yes.
[DongWon] I think it… There were people I know who watch that movie, there were 12 or 13, who were genuinely confused. That just amped up the absolute terror that they felt watching the movie because they were like, "This is a real thing. This happened."
 
[Howard] I just say this to clarify, because there is a story to be told in the meta itself, that this is a podcast. When we say framing story, sometimes we just mean, "Oh, it's like Scheherazade, the Arabian Nights," but sometimes we mean, "No. There is this framework we are working within that is in media res or whatever."
[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned Blair Witch, because that's one of the things I wanted to mention about horror, specifically, is that a frame like this can heighten that sense of danger, because if you are listening… Dark One: Forgotten's a good example. It is not exactly a found footage movie, but it's playing with that same idea. Right? If it had been done as an audiobook, there would always be that sense of this is a story being told to me that creates, even if it's only subconsciously, a little bit of safety. You know that if… When something bad happens, that it's only happening two characters in a story. But if even just for a second, I can trick you into forgetting this is an audiobook and make you think you're actually listening to Christine Walsh's podcast, that she's recording on her phone while being chased by a serial killer, then when something bad happens, it's happening to a real person. Because we've tricked you.
 
[Mary Robinette] There is a danger, though, that you can feel like, "Oh, I'm going to add this frame story." It can constrain you, or it's just completely unnecessary. I went back and did a reread of Where the Red Fern Grows, which for a certain population of… A certain… Like, your sixth grade teacher read it aloud to you or you had to read it. It's devastating. I went back and read it. There's a frame story on that sucker.
[DongWon] There is?
[Mary Robinette] That I have no memory of at all.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] No memory. It does nothing. There's no… It just makes the beginning and end flabby, because it's this old man talking about I saw this dog in the street and it reminds me of this dog I used to have. Then he tells where the red fern grows. Then he finishes the story and he's like, "I wonder what happened to the dog I saw in the street?" It's like, "Wha?"
[Howard] Thanks for the story, grandpa.
[Chuckles]
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, because frame stories are often used as prologues and epilogues, they get a lot of the same challenges that prologues do. Which is, they have to be good in and of themselves. It's your first interaction with this world, it your first interaction with the story. So if you're putting a frame around it, that is not just like a little thing that you dash off that's like, "Ooo, wasn't that fun?" It's like, no, that's got to do some heavy lifting. Right? So, pulling off a frame story, I think, requires real chops and real confidence in what you're doing. So, it's not… I often say that it's like added N edits, but it is… Which is often true. It's still, however, takes a lot of attention and focus to get that right. It's a thing that you should really dedicate as much time on as you're dedicating to any story opening, to any other major structural component of your story.
[Howard] One of my favorite frames… It's a half frame… Is in Larry Niven's… I think the novel is called Protector. The novel is about this guy who discovers that humans are descended from a race that had three lifetime cycles, and old age is actually immortality. There's a virus that can cause this to happen, and blah blah, and whatever. We get to the end of the story, and he says… It twists right at the end, it says, "So if you're reading this, I've infected you with the Protector virus, and you're going to become immortal. When you wake up, be fast. Because they are coming and they are angry and you need to be ready." Then it ends. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness. I want to be the sequel for that story." It was so much fun.
[Erin] I think ending frames, like where you find out, like, it was a frame all along…
[Yeah]
[Erin] Are such an interesting tool. Handmaid's Tale has like the sort of part I think everyone forgets, where it… There's like this was a research project sort of at the very end. One of my favorites is actually from Planet of the Apes, the book. Where at the very end of the novel, they're like, "This would never happen." And it's an ape family. They're like, "Humans? Talking?"
[Laughter]
[Erin] "No. Impossible." It's like so… It was kind of fun, because you're like, "Wow, it does kind of turn things on its head."
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Erin] I think that is always a [garbled]
[Howard] Well, I love how in the adapt… The movie or TV, I can't remember which one it was. Movie adaptation of that, they realized we need to do the twist… This needs to have a twist. That that twist… I don't think that twist will work. What will work? A Statue of Liberty sticking out of the beach? Sold! That's the one we all remember.
[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that those kind of closing frames can, by retextualizing part of the story, or recontextualizing, rather, they change your understanding of it. One of my favorite books of all time is The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is… It has two narrators. Some chapters are first person from the main character guy. Other chapters are third person. You find out at the very end, and I apologize for spoiling this like 40-year-old…
[What!]
[Dan] Book, that the third person chapters are all written by his granddaughter, as she is filling in the corners of his life story. It changes everything. It is so cool to have that experience that I've now ruined for you.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Yeah. One of my very favorite movies of the last few years is a film by Pedro Almodovar called Pain and Glory. There are these very artificial looking sort of… And you think it's just like memory that he's having, and again, I'm going to spoil this, I'm sorry. These very beautiful scenes of his childhood, that then turn out to be the movie that he struggling to make over the course of the film. So it's all the aging director and it's him reflecting on his childhood. Then, the final shot is really… You see the boom mic's coming in to the scene of the beautifully shot memory that he has. It just recontextualizes the whole movie. It snaps everything into focus in this way, and provides the catharsis for the character of like, yes, he managed to do the thing. We see him suffering for this whole movie, but he does make the thing that he's trying to make, and you don't realize you've been watching it all along until you get to the end. I cannot recommend that movie highly enough.
[Dan] All right. Let's pause for a moment, and when we come back, we're going to talk about different kinds of frames.
 
[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is a book that I just read that I am completely in love with. It's Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel. Katie Siegel does Tik-Tok's, and she did this Tik-Tok of a character who used to be a child detective, like an Encyclopedia Brown, a Nancy Drew, and is now a 28-year-old who doesn't do detecting anymore, but carries this baggage of everyone remembering her as a child detective. So she's adapted this into a really good murder mystery novel. It's her debut novel. It's a good murder mystery. But it's also this really compelling story about depression and friends and family and figuring out who you are. It's lovely. The character voicing is really good. I am just… I just really liked this a lot. I felt like I wanted all of these people to be my friends. It's very cozy. It's a very cozy story. So this is Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel.
 
[DongWon] We've talked about this a little bit before the break, but one of the things I want to get into sort of in this back half is the way in which you can use the frame story as a really integrated tool in the rest of your text. Right? It doesn't just have to be the thing at the beginning and the end, it can be a thing that is woven throughout your story that can change how you experience the narrative. We talked a little bit about how the final frame can sort of reflect backwards and change your understanding of what you've seen so far. But there are other cases where… The other thing about a frame story is often it lets you do direct address to your audience. It lets you do second person in a way that works really well, because it's either a letter written to somebody if it's epistolary, or sometimes it's a story being told to you. N. K. Jemison's The Best Season, this is a minor spoiler, but at some point in the book you start to realize someone is telling you this story. Then the question becomes who the hell is talking to you right now? Once you start to put the pieces together of what's actually happening, she's done this beautiful formalist thing over the course of the novel that you don't even realize is happening until you're about halfway through. So, sometimes the frame story… You don't have to be so rigid and think of it in that Frankenstein way or Lolita, where it's like here's a document that we found at the beginning, and then we'll return to it at the end. It can be a thing that's really woven throughout that changes your relationship to your reader and forces them to think about what's happening in the text in a way that like situates them as a subject in… That the story is happening to in a certain way.
[Howard] I think the first season of ABC's How to Get Away with Murder, the headliner there is Viola Davis, and she's brilliant in everything that she does. The in media res… I thought at first that, oh, this is just in media res. They begin by showing me the immediate aftermath of a murder. Looks like some college kids may have done something bad, and they're trying to cover something up. And now we go three months earlier, and they're in class. Okay. I think I know where this series is going to take me. Each episode bounces you into a different portion of the current, the just after the murder, it might be a little bit forward, it might be a little bit back. As we advance the clock of the story, three months earlier, two and a half months earlier, six weeks earlier. I watched this and every episode gave me chills, not just because it was well written and I love watching Viola Davis chew scenery, but because the form they were using was new to me. I had never seen in media res done this way. I can't yet figure out how I would do it in just prose or in comics. But I love it, and I love learning things.
[Erin] One of the things I love about that example is I think it also shows how the frame itself can be resonant with the type of story that you're trying to tell. So this is a story about getting away with something, it is about a ticking clock, it's about things compressing. Similarly, the frame itself plays with time, and plays with the clock ticking down. Another… Sometimes this works in a completely different way. I keep thinking about the sort of Encyclopedia Galactica…
[Yeah]
[Erin] Like the idea that you're like encyclopedia entries happen in between chapters, which is a form of like… A very…
[Howard] Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
[Erin] A very formal frame. But it also tells you a lot about the world. This is a world with a centralized understanding of things, where people are documenting what's going on. This story that we're telling is a thing that may be documented one day. It's either very important, or, sometimes, like in Hitchhiker's Guide, very silly. You're playing off the fact that it's not the kind of story that would end up in this big encyclopedia. But it's doing something that is resonating with the story.
[DongWon] It allows you to introduce contrast in that way.
[Erin] Exactly.
[Dan] Yeah. A great example of what you're talking about, Erin, is the book, the Prestige. Where the movie is basically a cool movie with a twist, the book is an epistolary, which DongWon mentioned earlier. That's a story that is told primarily in letters or correspondence. Two people are writing letters back and forth to each other. One of the really brilliant things The Prestige does is one of the people writing the letters… Those letters are weird. There's clearly something going on, because some of the letters act one way, some of the letters don't, or they seem to have forgotten things that happened. This leads toward the same twist which I am hesitant to reveal because it's a massive spoiler. But it… Just like Erin was saying, the specific frame they have chosen allows them to tell the story in a certain way, to create a very specific feeling, lead towards a very specific moment of revelation, that wouldn't work in any other format.
[Mary Robinette] There's a wonderful book Code Name Verity which I listened to in audio. In audio, it loses one of the things that happens in the print book. Which is that the entire print book is a code. She's sending a coded message. She's a spy. So it's wonderful. It's one of the best audiobooks that I've ever heard. But that's a piece that doesn't translate over. It's an inherent part of that frame story.
[Howard] [chuckles] Yeah. We had a similar problem with the audiobook for Xtreme Dungeon Mastery second edition. Because in the physical book, there is, if you flip the pages, there's a little cartoon barbarian running and smashing things. We just could not figure out… That's not in the audiobook at all.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm so sorry.
 
[DongWon] One thing I think that is coming across in how we're talking about this is this is not really a 101 technique. This is a 201 thing. Like, doing a frame story is truly pushing the boundaries a little bit, in terms of the formal constraints of what you're doing in your text. That's not me discouraging you from trying. You absolutely should try it. But I think when you're thinking about do I want to add a frame to it, there's a lot of questions you will be thinking about of like, how is this adding tension? What am I adding in this moment? How am I using juxtaposition to create more tension, as we discussed several episodes ago? These are really opportunities for you to be very playful with time, with POV, with a sense of inevitability and dread. It's a way to introduce tragedy, it's a way to introduce horror into your story. I think that can just make things feel bigger. Right? The reason so many epic fantasies have that frame scope frame to them is it gives the sense of grandiosity, of scale, in a way that's hard to do when you're just staying in the characters perspectives. So it really works with certain genres really, really well. Crime, murder, tragedy, horror… Any of those things that are like trying to get across very specific ways of playing with expectations and dread and tension. So, something to think about as you're approaching it. I just want to encourage everyone when you start figuring out do I want to add a framework to this, really think hard about how you're going to apply it, and what techniques you're bringing to bear to make it happen.
[Mary Robinette] Also, what constraints it's going to place on you.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Because once you put that frame on, you have limited the paths that you can take. Sometimes that is like super exciting and a really good learning experience. Like, oh, can I convey this information if I do this entirely as a series of emails back and forth?
[DongWon] That's one of the reasons I generally don't like epistolary, because it locks you into such a very specific framework of back and forth. It's ironic that one of my most successful titles is entirely an epistolary novel. But I think sometimes the constraints that the frame can introduce will really bother a certain subset of your readers who are trying to logically make it work. So there are ways in which you can be playful, but do be careful about what it does to your world building.
 
[Howard] Talking about Xtreme Dungeon Mastery again, and the light came on. In the first edition, Tracy tells this story towards the end of the book about how in the room with the pillars of runes that couldn't be read, and he decided to role-play his barbarian and just smash down the nearest door, and drag the adventurers through the dungeon at high speed. It was when he learned how collaborative role-playing works. Early in his career. In the second edition, as we were preparing it and laying out the materials, I had a conversation with Tracy and I said, "What if we put that story first? Because it's early in your career, and we use it as an introduction. Then we take that barbarian and we have them smash down doors at the beginning of each chapter, and use the barbarian as a thread for the content of the whole book." That's why we put the little cartoon barbarian in the corner. Tracy loved the idea. You triggered this, DongWon, by saying, this is an expert level technique. When the first edition came out in 2009, I wasn't even able to have the idea, much less execute on it. When we did the second bit edition in 2021, 2022, Sandra and I and Tracy were able to look at things and begin editing and re-ordering material and make what might otherwise be a very dry gaming supplement about how to do stuff into a story, where the careening path of this barbarian drags you through the drier material.
[Dan] I'm really glad, DongWon, that you brought up this idea of constraints, or maybe it was Mary Robinette. The idea that once you have chosen to tell your stories in a framework, that locks you in. That can be difficult, but it also… The constraints themselves become another tool you can use. What I'm thinking of is the kind of Alias-style 72 hours earlier. Which is a framework. Right? The… If the beginning of your story is horrible thing happening or bizarre situation, how did we get into this, what's going on, and then you get 72 hours earlier, that… First of all, it allows you to start off your story with a bang, but really what's going on narratively, when this is used well, is we know this horrible thing is going to happen. We know that the character is going to get caught, or that this awful thing will happen. Then, that creates a ticking clock, it creates a sense of foreboding that you can use as a tool to play with your audience.
[Erin] Similarly, I think epistolary, one of the challenges of epistolary is that when you're writing a letter, you are presenting yourself in a specific way to the person who's reading the letter. You're not going to be getting the thoughts underneath. You're going to be trying to… Like, when you're writing an email at work, you're not going to necessarily put everything you think about your boss in that email. So if that's the conceit of the story, how do you get your seething resentment at your job…
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? Per my last email…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So, but there are tools to do that. Then you can put things are… That things in your work that suggests that and suggest the tension in how do I want to present myself and what am I truly feeling. So then that becomes a tool that you can use in epistolary. So, similarly, it's both a constraint, but also something really cool that you can play with.
[DongWon] Yeah. One other thing I want to add to that is you don't have to let the framework overstay its welcome sometimes. Right? So I have a project coming up. It's still in development, but act two and three of the book are about a plague that hits the city and changes everything. Once you get to act two, everything really changes. So we had this problem in act one of how do we signal that this is coming. So what we ended up doing was introducing an epistolary component where every now and then, you would see a letter from this character who is one of the villains, a truly unpleasant person, talking about this things starting to happen and how no one was talking about it, whatever. Then, again, slight spoiler for a thing that no one has read yet, but, like, she just dies in a very comically horrible way towards the end as she gets infected with the plague after being like so scornful of everyone around her. In a way, that was like, yeah, she'd accomplished what we needed which was to signal this was coming. Her role was done. She's out. Then we can move on with the rest of the story. So you can really use a frame in very tactical ways. It doesn't have to be, again, at the beginning of the story, end of the story. It can be a thing that sort of gets you to a certain point, builds to a certain thing that you need to signal. It really solved a solution for us, or solved a problem for us, in a really just fun and elegant way.
[Dan] All right. This is been such a wonderful conversation. Let's get some homework.
 
[DongWon] So, what I would like you to do is take a thing that you have already written, either a short story, your work in progress, whatever it is. Try and add a frame story to it. Do this as a very traditional beginning and end. Add a frame, like a little prologue and a little epilogue. Then take a step back and think has adding that changed anything that happens in the middle of your story? Just experiment a little bit, play with it a little bit, and I think you will find that this is an interesting technique that you might be able to apply to this or future work.
 
[Mary Robinette] On the next episode of writing excuses That, we tackle how to make interruptions in your dialogue more believable, how to vocally furrow your eyebrows, and mumble core. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order

Apr. 6th, 2022 09:33 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order
 
 
Key Points: Stories or structures that can be read out of order? That ignore or bypass a specific order to events? Being able to read books in a series, or sections in a book, out of order, and it still works. Television episodes often do this. Although books usually still have to build. Fixup novels do this. Often there is a frame that explains why the story is told this way. Webcomics demand that each installment is understandable and rewarding enough that people want to find more. Series often require that readers be able to start with any of the books. Different characters and big time jumps can help readers with this. Make sure that at the beginning of the story or episode, the character has earned the reader's/viewer's trust, belief, admiration.
 
[Season 17, Episode 14]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes or so long.
[Peng] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.
[Howard] And I'm not allowed to write episode titles anymore.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I suppose I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Peng] I could be Peng.
[Howard] I'm Howard. I'm out of zoomer.
[Dan] I demand that you may or may not be Howard.
[Howard] Is that in order?
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] Disordered or orderless reading order.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] There are books that can be read out of order. There are stories, structures that demand a specific order to events, and structures that ignore that or just bypass it. Peng, what do we mean by this? What are we talking about with orderless reading order?
[Peng] Well, there are a couple of different ways that I think we can take this. I would say that it's one of the… It's a rarer structure for sure. Because we, as readers, especially Western readers, have been conditioned to expect that you start at the beginning of the book you finish at the end of the book, or the series. So, when we say flexible orders of reading, we could mean something like reading the books in a series out of order, or, if you got books that are… Have multiple sections, you might be able to read the sections out of order. But it's basically a story in which you can read all of the pieces either in the order that's suggested by the book or in whatever order you choose and it still has to work.
[Dan] Yeah. I think it is funny that we talk about this as a rare style of storytelling. Because within books it definitely is, but that's how television was for decades. Right? Modern detective stories, something like The Killing, you have to watch those in order because there's a very large serialized story being told. But go back to the 80s. You can watch any Magnum, PI, episode out of order with no context whatsoever, and still understand what's going on. So I… It's definitely a style of storytelling that we are culturally familiar with, just not really in our prose, in our books.
[Peng] Well, I think the main difference between TV shows like that, where every episode is its own thing and you can just watch any out of order, and books that are trying to do this is that with those TV shows, they're not necessarily building towards any kind of greater narrative. It's just every self-contained episode is a half-hour of entertainment, and that's that. Whereas books that can be read out of order, or they have some kind of a flexible order of reading to them, it doesn't matter what order you do choose to read it in, it still has to build in a way that these TV shows don't necessarily. So I think that is the greatest difficulty of this form, but also a really rewarding aspect of it. Because it is very hard to pull off.
[Mary Robinette] It's a… I think it's a structure that we did… We have seen perhaps a little bit more in a type called the fixup novel. Which is where an author takes… The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, is a prime example of this. It was a collection of short stories. He put them together, then added some interstitial material to kind of stitch it together. But you can really pick up The Martian Chronicles and read a chapter without reading the rest of the book, and it's fine. There are other examples of those. Most of the ones that I'm coming up with are in the fixup novel category, which is really a collection of short stories that are masquerading as a novel. But there's one that I… I haven't tried reading it non-sequentially, but The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Ward, I think you could read it non-sequentially and still get the overwhelming sense of loss that she builds towards.
[Peng] Does that book… Does it give you instructions to read it in any order you want, or is it just something…
[Mary Robinette] No, no. It's just something that I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it. It's not a fixup novel. It's just… It is… When I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is not a three act structure or any of the other structures." Yeah, but there's no instructions that you should read it out of sequence. There are books that tell you you can read it out of sequence?
[Peng] Yeah, so there's… Oh, go ahead.
[Dan] I was just going to say I'm familiar with one called Second Paradigm by Peter Wacks that's a time travel novel that every chapter can be read out of order and the story still makes sense.
[Wow]
[Dan] You could just open it up to a random chapter, read to the end, start at the beginning and wraparound. You could read the chapters in random order, and it all still works. It's really a brilliantly constructed story.
[Peng] That's really, I think, that's another really good point to call out about this structure is that because it is not so standard, a lot of times you… The story that you're working on, it might require some kind of a frame to give your story a reason for being told that way. So, out of order or in any way and order you want to read. It sounds like the book that you just named does that, because it is a book about time travel. So the jumping, like the book itself is conscious that it can be read in that way because it is about time travel. So it provides, like, a really good reason or frame for it to exist that way.
 
[Howard] When we think about this in terms of a physical novel where you're paging through in order to read, it's often difficult to imagine, well, why would I not just go to the next page? Why would I just open it up and start in the middle? My… And I'm going to use these words completely non-ironically… Magnum opus, Schlock Mercenary, the webcomic which ran for 20 years and you can still read at schlockmercenary.com. On any given day, if you went to schlockmercenary.com, the strip that is up in front of you is the very latest event in the story. I had to make sure as I was telling the story that every installment was comprehensible enough and rewarding enough that someone would click a button that says take me to the beginning of this chapter. Take me to the beginning of this book. Just throw me to a random location in the archives and let me see if I like it. We had all of those buttons. In fact, when we put the random archive button up, I got all kinds of feedback from people who said, "You're a monster. I click that button and then I look up and I've been reading for two hours. How did you do that?" Well, I guess I didn't build the story to be read in any order, I read the story… I built the story to make sure that the first element you see, no matter where you see it, is an invitation to go find more in whatever order you care to.
[Mary Robinette] So, I have a thought on that, but I'm going to wait until after we talk about the book of the week.
 
[Peng] Ah, okay. I've got the book of the week. It's Crossings by Alex Landragin. This is one of the… This is a pretty intense example, I think, of a book with a flexible order of reading. So I'm going to try to describe it. It's… The frame of the book is… It starts in Paris, during the Nazi occupation. It's introduced by a German Jewish bookbinder who stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings, which is the title of the book itself that you're about to read. Crossings is made up of three stories. One is a ghost story written by the poet, Charles Baudelaire, I think. The second one is a second noir romance about a man who falls in love with a woman who… She draws him into this dangerous hunt for a real manuscript that might have supernatural powers. Then the third is this memoir of a woman who claims that she has been alive for seven generations or something like that. But the really innovative thing about this book, Crossings, is that after you read that introduction by the German Jewish bookbinder who says, "I found this book, Crossings, and it contains three stories," is that he gives you the option to either read it straight through, so you just read one story after the other and then get to the end, or you can alternate back and forth between the stories according to directions he gives you in the book until you end up uncovering the reason that all of these stories are together. So if you choose to follow his direction, you end up bouncing back and forth like, I don't know, 12, 15 times between all these stories, working your way through all three at once until you get to the end. It's… I mean, it's just so innovative, so creative, so unique. It's really… It's worth reading because it is amazing how each story can build on its own if you read them one at a time or when you read all three of them together, they build up to something larger, even though you were going in a really different order.
[Dan] That's so cool.
[Mary Robinette] It's like…
[Dan] I love that.
[Mary Robinette] That is really cool. I'm like, that's like a grown-up literary choose your own adventure.
[Peng] Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's…
 
[Howard] When we put together the 70 Maxims collection, there's an annotated version of it that's an in-world artifact where the book has been in the possession of four different people. They've all made their own notes in the margins. I had a spreadsheet that tracked the chronological order in which the people had the book, and the chronological order of the events that they are making notes about. But none of my spreadsheet is actually in that book. So you are holding in artifact that has a very nonlinear, very read it in any order sorts of stories written in, no lie, the handwriting of my children and a neighbor kid and Sandra in order to capture that effect. It is structurally super weird. No, it's not how I would want to tell a mystery story, but I love what we ended up making.
 
[Dan] Cool. So that was Crossings by Alex Landragin.
[Howard] Oh, sorry, I interrupted the book of the week, didn't I?
[Dan] No, everyone interrupted the book of the week. But it was super innovative and fascinating. That's okay. But. Mary Robinette, you had something you wanted to say?
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So what Howard was talking about, about how he had to make sure that when a reader lands on a new strip, that it was comprehensible and also part of a build. That is something that… For those of you who are like, "Uh-oh, nonlinear. I can't even… Uh-uh." Which is, honestly, where my brain lands when I'm thinking about this. But it is something that I think about when I'm thinking about plotting novels in a series. Because I really genuinely want anyone to be able to pick up one of my novel as their starting point. But that means that I have to think about all of the previous books as prequels. Even though I didn't write them as a prequel, I have to think about having them function as a prequel in case someone comes into the series at a different point. So I think that even if you decide that you don't want to structure an individual story or novel in this kind of read it in any sequence way, learning some of the tools can help you with your… With the overall thing. Like, The Lady Astronauts universe started with a story… The way a lot of people come into it is The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is set years after The Calculating Stars, but it was the first thing I wrote. So people will ask me, "What order should I read this in?" I'm like, "It honestly doesn't matter." You can read… You can go Lady Astronaut of Mars, Calculating Stars, Relentless Moon, Fated Sky or you can go Calculating Stars, Fated Sky, Relentless Moon, Lady Astronaut of Mars. It doesn't matter. But it took a lot of… It's basically me making decisions about what things I want to hold as an emotional… A piece of emotional oomph. And what things I don't mind being backstory. As soon as I decide that they are backstory, that means that I no longer think of them as something that I want to avoid being spoiled.
[Peng] That's a really good point about that the most important thing if you're going to approach a book or a series with… By giving it a flexible reading order, would be to hold like the emotional resonances or the theme as the most important thing, whereas the plot might not be. So I was wondering, I was going to ask you, because you said one of your books takes place 60 years after the one that comes before it, even though you wrote it first. Would you say that if you're going to attempt something like this, that having a different character for every story or having bigger time jumps between them might be a way to allow for greater flexibility, because readers might be more forgiving if the character's going to change or if there is a big time jump versus feeling like they need to go in order if it's the same character the whole time or the time jump isn't very big in between?
[Mary Robinette] That sounds right to me.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like…
[Dan] It sounds…
[Mary Robinette] I mean…
[Dan] Yeah, it sounds good, although I… In my cyberpunk series, the Cherry Dog books, the Mirador books, I specifically intended them all to be episodes and you could read them in any order. But they all take place relatively at the same time. The… I was kind of specifically aping the TV model. Right? Where the characters are all the same age, they kind of exist in a timeless space. That seemed to work fairly well.
 
[Howard] One of the things that I keep in mind is the principle of whether or not a character has earned the reader's or the viewer's love and belief at a given point in the beginning of the story. As an example, the very first episode, for me, the very first episode of The Mandelorian, the Mandelorian earns the right to be awesome without a training montage or anything. He just… He earns the right to be awesome. The first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett, Bobba Fett does not earn the right to be awesome. All he has is the name Bobba Fett and the legacy of a bazillion Star Wars things. If the first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett is your introduction to Bobba Fett, I had to ask myself, "Why am I interested in who this character is?" So that dichotomy, for me, if there's the possibility that books are going to be picked up out of order and one of my characters needs to do something that requires the earned trust, the earned belief, the earned admiration of the reader, I have to put something in there for them to earn it. It can be another character saying, "Hey, Bobba, would you mind terribly being awesome for a moment? We need you..." And then Bobba does it, and now the reader's onboard because the other character was on board. So those kinds of tricks… Every time I started a new Schlock Mercenary book… Eh, from about book 10 to about book 20, I kept that in mind. Who are my characters going to be, how do I make them earn this early on?
[Dan] I think that's probably the reason that every James Bond movie starts with the last scene of a previous one we have never seen before. Because right off the bat, they're establishing, okay, this is who the character is. This is why you like him. He is awesome. Now we're going to tell a story.
 
[Dan] Mary Robinette, you have our homework this week.
[Mary Robinette] I do. I actually have two homeworks for you. Because I recognize that one of them may break your brain. So, depending on how your brain works. So I'm going to give you a choice. You can do both if you want. So. Look at your current work in progress. Are there pieces of backstory that you could unpack into a sequel? For instance, as I mentioned, Calculating Stars is a prequel to Lady Astronaut of Mars. It's basically me unpacking her backstory. So is there a story that's in there for you? The second one, and this is the one that may break some of you. Take your current work in progress. Make a copy of it.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So that you can do this safely. If you're using Scrivener, this is going to be easy. Otherwise, however you want to do it, shuffle it. Shuffle it, and then see what bridging pieces you need to put in, what elements you need to add in to make it still make sense in that new order.
[Peng] My brain broke because that was so exciting.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Peng] I'll go do that one now.
[Dan] Okay. I am excited to hear, dear listener, from those of you who attempt this shuffling thing. Because I think it could be really fascinating. So. This…
[Mary Robinette] I'm…
[Dan] Yes?
[Mary Robinette] I am going to say that this came as an exercise because of a real-life incident that I had in which my cats played across the notecards… Played a game of tag across the notecards that I was using to plot my book. When I picked them back up, I was like, "Huh. That's actually a more interesting order."
[Chuckles]
[Peng] Cats are geniuses.
[Dan] Let your cats plot your books, I guess, is…
[Howard] That's the next [garbled]
[Dan] A take away you should not have from this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story

Mar. 23rd, 2022 06:31 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story
 
 
Key points: The story within a story structure can give a mythical or mystical feeling. It also engages the reader in discovering the link between the two. Often it adds essential information or explanations. You can also use story within a story to illuminate the theme. Smaller narratives can make the story feel richer. It's especially useful for twists and reveals. Is it one frame around a single story in the middle, or is it a photo collage frame with lots of little stories inside? Frames can add verisimilitude. They can also help control pacing. Sometimes they can help the writer figure out what kind of story they want to tell. 
 
[Season 17, Episode 12]
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring a Story within a Story.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Peng] I'm Peng.
[Howard] And I'll be relating Howard's tale.
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] Very good. So, this is another structural element we… I don't think we've ever talked about on the show before. Story within a story. Peng, what do we want… Where do we want to start talking about this?
[Paying] Story within a story is such a beautiful and really delicate type of structure, I think. I think it works really well for stories that you want to have a kind of mythical or mystical feel to them. There's always this element of like discovery that you want to uncover the link between the two. So, I think, I mean we could start by just talking about some stories that do this really well, or ways that you can kind of back into this structure.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Give us an example so people know what we're talking about.
[Peng] Sure. So, I think a really great example, well, everybody knows Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, but a more recent example might be the 10,000 Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. In that book, it's about a girl who… She's got magical powers that  she doesn't fully understand where she can open portals to other worlds. Early on in the novel, she finds a journal hidden away in the attic of this house that she lives in. As she starts reading the journal, you realize that it has a much stronger connection to her story then you might at first realize. It turns out that she… Oh, should I spoil it? I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't. Um…
[Mary Robinette] You realize things.
[Peng] Yes. Which is… I'm sorry. It's just such a great book. I just realized that I was about to spoil it. But it's a great example of how you can have an artifact… Not an artifact, you can have a story within the greater story that you're telling, and it ends up adding like essential information that you might need to understand the present narrative or explains magic or something like that.
[Howard] A couple of examples that are not recent. There's the Canterbury Tales which I was alluding to, obviously. I will be relating Howard's tale.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] He's not the knight, he's not the baker, he's the cartoonist. Also, not going to Canterbury. And One Thousand and One Nights, which is a compilation of Middle Eastern folktales, compiled during the Islamic Golden age. The editors who put this together created multiple layers of framing stories connecting this material. It's one of the most outstanding examples of story within a story because of how many layers there are and the way it's structured.
[Dan] Yeah. The kind of modern… One of the modern takes on Canterbury Tales is The Hyperion Cantos, which updates it into this big kind of sweeping space opera story. The way they use story in a story, there is a much larger thing going on, this kind of sweeping across the whole galaxy, and by the end of the second book, you know they have fundamentally altered everything about this vast space faring civilization. So they use the story within a story element to kind of illuminate different aspects of that society that they're about to… That they're eventually going to change. So we get to see what the different… Some of the different cultures are like. We get to see some of the different religious beliefs. We get this very widespread vision of the world as we are doing this much larger story that will change it all.
 
[Peng] I think one of the other… One of the best ways that you can employ this technique, this structure, is, I think, often when you've got a story within a story, you're able to illuminate your theme a lot more directly in a way that isn't going to hit people over the head with it or come off as soapbox-y because you're doing it within the story that is within the story. So you have a little bit more room there to, like, explore something like the theme that you're trying to get at or the lesson, if you have a lesson.
[Mary Robinette] One of the… One of my favorite examples of this is The Neverending Story, which is…
[Peng] Oh, yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I don't… Most people know the film. The book, the physical artifact of the book, is just also a beautiful thing. One of the things that happens in it is that as the… As we go between the embedded story within the book, we are also… And then come back out to the hero's main… Real life and then back in, the lessons that he is learning in both places affect the way he moves through the world. It's really, really lovely. The other thing that I kind of want to say about this idea of story within a story is that while you can use it for big overarching structure, you can also illuminate a story or have the idea of story within a story affect something on a smaller scale or a microcosm. Honestly, the thing that comes to mind most is a Star Trek episode, the Darmok episode, in which there's the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It's this culture that entirely speaks in embedded metaphors. At a certain point, the only way to communicate is when Picard tells them another story. The thing for me about this is that these smaller stories, even if it doesn't become a huge structural element, embedding smaller narratives into your work can make it feel richer. Because it gives you these views into the culture and again contrasts, I think.
[Dan] Yeah. I agree. That's one of the strongest… That's actually my favorite Star Trek episode out of any of the series. Part of the reason is it provides this kind of mythic backdrop to it. I mean, Patrick Stewart reciting Gilgamesh would be powerful in almost any context. But once they have established the importance of story as a cultural element, then him sitting down and relating the story of Gilgamesh by a campfire just gives it this absolutely epic tone that is absent in a lot of other Star Trek.
 
[Dan] We are definitely far enough into this. We're well over half. Let's have our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's right. So I'm going to briefly pause to embed another story in the episode. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a fantastic novel. I listened to it in audiobook. The narrator was Chiwetei Ejiofor. He's just so good. But one of the things that… the whole novel is him writing journal entries. As the story unfolds, he comes across a trove of additional material. I'm going to say it that way to avoid some spoilers. That unlocks a bunch of things and makes you realize that what is happening in the story is not at all what you thought was happening. It's a really, really clever use of the story within a story.
[Dan] Cool. That is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
 
[Dan] Excellent. Now we've talked a lot about ways that story within a story can kind of recontextualize what's going on in the larger story, the frame that the other story's within. It seems like this is very useful for twists or reveals. Is that the best use? Is that the only use? Are there other things we can be doing with the story within a story?
[Peng] Well, that… Yes. I think so. But I would say that that's one of the… At least one of the best uses. Because often times when you have a story within a story, it'll start with the character who finds the story within the story in whatever form it is, a book or an almanac or something. They, when they find it, are usually not clear on exactly what it is or how it will relate to their life or their journey. So, I think it just creates this kind of an automatic desire in the reader to solve the question and figure out in what way does this story relate to the present narrative, or is it real or is it not. Because that's also usually one of the first questions that comes up when you encounter the story within a story, you're wondering if it's purely some kind of a fable or if it's a second reality that is also happening or has just happened.
[Howard] Yeah. I've found that the… Up until now, I typically just called this structure the framing story structure. Where there is a frame that is its own story, and there's a story on the inside. The realization that I've had recently is that with things like The Canterbury Tales and the One Thousand and One Nights, the frame is framing multiple stories. One of the first structural questions that I'd ask is are we going to build it like, for instance, I think it was Name of the Wind. There is an outer framing story, and then there's the meat of the story which is just one thing in the middle. Or are we building a single frame… A frame like those photo collage frames…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You'll get at the big box store, where you have lots of little stories stuck inside. The big framing story I think is… It's a fun way to make a thing feel epic, but the photo collage approach is a great way to build a very complicated puzzle which resolves itself as you make your way through the various stories.
 
[Dan] So let me ask a question of you all, because I'm curious. Now that we're talking about frames, Frankenstein, for example, is famously a frame story. There… It is the story of somebody telling the story to someone else. But, also rather famously, most adaptations of Frankenstein, the movies that have been based on it and things like that, do away with the frame. What do we get by adding… What is the value of adding a frame to a story, of doing a story within a story, instead of just telling us the tale of Frankenstein without the frame around it?
[Mary Robinette] So, historically, one of the reasons that you would have a frame story was to lend a sense of verisimilitude, that this is obviously a true thing that is being shared with you because there is a narrator here in the here and now that you can relate to and that will guide you through the story. So one thing that a frame story can do is to do that and give that sense of trust. But, the other thing that a frame story can do is that it can serve as, in much the same way that a frame would for a painting, that you may have a painting that needs a very narrow, thin band just to set it off from the things that are around it, but that helps you focus in on the important things. Or you may have like a miniature that needs quite a large frame around it in order to give you time to get into the meat of that tiny, tiny little thing in the center. So I think that those are things that that frame can do. I also think that frequently it is a tool that authors will reach for because they don't trust themselves to tell the center story.
[Mmmm]
[Mary Robinette] So as a modern writer, we're no longer having to deal with some of… Like, you used to have to do a frame story because that was the only way you could tell fiction.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So you have a lot more leeway now to do that. So you have to figure out whether or not it's serving the story, the emotional experience that you want the reader to have. The other piece of that, I would say, is whether or not your frame story is only around the outside or whether or not it has interjections and interludes within. Those can be a way to control pacing. Those are often useful in that way.
 
[Dan] Peng, let me get your opinion on this. If an author is looking at their work, the story they want to tell, what are some signs that they might want to wrap another story around the outside or insert another story into the middle?
[Peng] Well, it's a really interesting thing that you just said right before this, Mary Robinette, because what I was going to say was I often find that this technique can be really great to use if you're stuck. So it's interesting that you said sometimes you feel that writers might use it if they're lacking confidence in the thing that they're writing. But I would wonder if a lot of stories that end up having a story within a story ended up that way or rather started that way because the writer was stuck and they were having trouble figuring out exactly the kind of story they want to tell. So, if you're stuck, and this will kind of relate to our homework, but it can be really useful in some cases to try to go deeper and to write a story within the story you're trying to tell, because you're working with this really encapsulated smaller version of the thing where you just trying to explore the purpose and figure out exactly what you're trying to say. Then, once you have that thing as a guide, you can build the larger story around it, or it can help you move the larger story forward. So it's sort of like a guide in reverse, because it's a smaller thing, but it's a lot more straightforward in some ways.
[Dan] Your description actually calls to mind the Greenbone Saga by Fonda Lee. Which, each of those books includes little interludes that are basically small in world stories or legends or history pieces that are only a couple pages long, but that she definitely is using to kind of help explain what's going on in the present. To give you cultural context for something or just to let you know who this important historical figure is that someone's about to reference a few chapters from now. Yeah. Anyway.
[Mary Robinette] They also serve as pacing. Because, if I'm remembering correctly, there is usual… They often, as kind of an [entre act?], A thing where there's going to be a jump in time. So helping give that also emotional distance from the stuff that happened in the chapter prior.
[Dan] That's true.
[Mary Robinette] Which is a… I know that we are close to the end. We are over time. But I did just want to mention The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust. That has a story within a story which is… The basic set up is there is a painter, modern day. He's trying to… Well, it was modern day when I read it in the 80s. But he needs to do a painting. The book follows him from beginning to end. One of the things that he does, there's a Hungarian folk story that is cut up and interspersed through the novel. There's no explanation for why you're getting it. Until, at a certain point, you realize that it is a story that he is telling to his studio mates every evening. Because he doesn't tell you where it's coming from, as a reader, you try to draw parallels yourself. That is another thing that I think that this structure can do, is that it can engage the reader by giving them another vessel in which to put themselves and draw their own parallels, so that each reader can wind up having a… Their own intimate relationship to this work.
 
[Dan] All right. Peng, you have our homework this week.
[Peng] I do. Your homework is to take or create some kind of an artifact within your current project. Like, a letter or a diary entry or an in world almanac or a spell book you've got magicians. Flesh it out for a passage or a scene or a chapter. See what that adds to your story. If it enhances the world building or if it lends depth to a certain part of the plot or reveal something about your characters that you otherwise weren't getting at.
[Dan] Sounds like fun. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.4: Hybrid Viewpoints

Jan. 25th, 2017 12:17 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.4: Hybrid Viewpoints

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/01/22/12-4-hybrid-viewpoints/

Key points: Hybrid viewpoints mean we're mixing first and third person, or present and past tense, or otherwise tinkering with the structure. Frame stories. A journal entry, 1001 Arabian Nights, stories in a bar. Story within a story. The dynamic between the two stories can help establish untrustworthy narrators. Also, to provide backstory. Metaphors, puzzle pieces, and reveals. Flashbacks. They provide much more depth and impact. People really have flashbacks in visceral response, PTSD, trauma. Flashbacks are a tool for organizing the narrative arc to get the maximum emotional effect.

( I remember when... )

[Brandon] All right. Well, I'm going to call this one here. Though I think we could probably keep talking on flashbacks forever. We have talked about them before on Writing Excuses. So you can go through the archives and find those. I'm going to give us some homework. Because I want you to try a frame story. I want you to take a story you've already written, and I want you to set that with a next level of context. Somebody's telling that story. You're not going to change the story you've written at all. You're going to add a frame story. Something at the beginning and the end. Either in a first-person narrative or a third person narrative, where you give context to the story being told. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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