Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 04]

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 04]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Puppetry as a writing metaphor. 

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

[chuckles]

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

[Dan] Eventually.

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

[DongWon] Elmo Leonard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

 

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

[Dan] Nice.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] And you thought I was making…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Bad metaphors here.

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

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

[DongWon] [Parawalkers?] is one example.

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

[Howard] Jack not name, Jack job.

[Laughter]

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

[DongWon] Um… Who cares?

[Laughter]

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] And… Who cares?

[Chorus of yeah]

[Howard] I just want to watch him.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] And space can?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

 

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

[Yes!]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[DongWon] Right.

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

[DongWon] Right

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

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

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] I… Um…

[Dan] You're missing out.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of a hot glue burn. So…

[Dan] One of the… Sorry, go ahead.

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-44-a-close-reading-on-structure-tradition-and-innovation 

 

Key points: Where does it fit into the fantasy lineage? Using tradition, but also breaking from it. In conversation with... What the writer intends and what the audience thinks. The conversation that the author is having with the genre and the conversation that the reader is having. Anxiety of influence! Fifth Season is a break from the restoration line of epic fantasy.  "The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there's no changing it." Each POV is in a different genre. Story as unfolding and telling. When writing, do you think of being in conversation with other books, or with the canon? What has made you the storyteller you are? Who are you telling stories to? Be aware of the traditions you are following, and of the ones you are breaking. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 44]

 

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[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[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 44]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this week I wanted to talk about another aspect of Fifth Season. I think we're going to zoom out a little bit, a little further away from the text. This is coming from a little bit of my perspective, both as an English major and someone who almost went into academia, and also as a publisher. But one thing that I'm really interested in talking about this book is the way it fits into the lineage of fantasy novels. I think this is a really interesting thing to think about when thinking about how to structure a book, how to frame a book. This kind of touches on some stuff like Hero's Journey kind of things and the way that's used in fiction. But also, just the place that this book has in the canon of fantasy literature, to use a loaded term. So, in a lot of ways, modern epic fantasy is established by Lord of the Rings and a lot of it is descended from that. I think Fifth Season is a really interesting break from that tradition that nonetheless is in conversation with it. Right? One thing that struck me on my second reading of the book several years ago was how much of it uses the classic fantasy tropes. Right? To me, it felt so contemporary and so fresh and so different. But when I stepped back for a second, I said, "Wait a minute. This is a book about wizards who go to a magic school and use crystal magic." I was like, this is just the most classic fantasy I've read in a second. Like, harkening back to, like, Tolkien seventies, eighties fantasy. And the way she pulled from that and yet flipped it and reversed it to create such an exciting, fresh work.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things… I'm glad you brought this up. One of the things that I also love about that, in that is that much like when you look back at the Wizard Master… Excuse me, The Wizard of Earthsea, that magic does basically one thing, you use words and you can change things. Yes, there are nine different Masters, but it's basically, you use words and you can change things. The thing that's happening here is you've got one thing they can do, they can do some vibrational stuff.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] It's all of the different ways in which it can be twisted and pushed, and then is in conversation with this whole, larger body of work that is outside of fantasy that causes it to be doing some really interesting fresh things. Also, I just need to put out a little shout out to Dark Crystal, which is my favorite crystal magic.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yes.

 

[Erin] I [garbled really] like the phrase in conversation with… Such an interesting one, because some of it is like we don't actually know…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, we believe that a work is in conversation with another work. I remember earlier you were saying that this work is maybe a little bit in conversation with Octavia Butler. I agree with all these things, but it's interesting, like, how do we know sort of what tradition a book is drawing from? How much of that is the book doing it, and how much of it is us doing it? Because we bring our own context…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] With us. So we're like, oh, I see these things here, and I've seen them in other places.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's a really interesting thing. Unless you ask the author, which we will…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] It's hard to know.

[DongWon] Well, it's the difference between sort of intent and the reader. Right? My subjectivity… Sorry, we're getting a little academic here. But my subjectivity as the reader is projecting all of the stuff that I've read. Right? Like, I'm not super familiar with Dark Crystal, so I don't see that. I do… I am familiar with Earthsea and Lord of the Rings and parable of the sower. So, for me, I'm seeing this book as being deeply in conversation with those three things. We were off mic talking about Omelas as well, the ones who walk away from Omelas, another Le Guin story that this feels very in conversation with as well. Right? So…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think what traditions it's pulling from is fascinating.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, one of the definitions of genre is that it is literature that is in conversation with itself. That you are both be… Not just that it's the writer is thinking about it. It's that it is… The readers are having conversations about it. So, regardless of what Nora intended with this, because of the way it's being read, because of the way it's positioned, it is in conversation through the conversations of the readers. Actually, as we were talking about it, I think for me… I said Dark Crystal because it is puppets, but for me the thing that it actually brought to mind more was Crystal Singer. Which is a much older…

[Howard] McCaffrey. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Anne McCaffrey. Sorry, my brain just… Similar, one of the similar things there is that you have to have this particular skill, which is, in that case, perfect pitch. Then you go to this planet and you go through this transformation. Some people get turned into rock people by accident. But you are locked into this career now. Because you can no longer exist… There's a symbiont in this case, is the mechanism. But it's still that idea of this being locked in, being enslaved, for the benefit of this other civilization that then convinces you that the reason it's okay is because you are highly valued. So that then the characters become part of their own narrative.

[Howard] I just realized that's exactly like being a web cartoonist…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I could no longer exist without the Internet.

[DongWon] Also, you start to turn into rock…

[Howard] I was just going to die…

[Laughter] [garbled]

 

[Howard] I started to turn into a rock. No, the… Sorry, the important thing that I was going to say was that whether or not the author is consuming, is aware of, is having a conversation with the genre, the reader probably is. The best example I can think of for this is the TV show Heroes, which, when it came out, a bunch of us said we've already read this comic book. It's just the X-Men. Why are you trying to read tell it? We've already done this. Heroes was wonderful. It did neat things. But it was trying to do so without the audience having read comic books. Which can't happen. So, when you talk about tradition and innovation, it's entirely possible to convince yourself through anxiety of influence that you are innovating because you are not reading everything else. That's probably not the way it's going to be read.

[DongWon] Right. One thing that I think about Fifth Season is it is deeply in a lineage, in a tradition, and I do think that Nora knows that. Or N. K. Jemison knows that. But… How she thinks about it, I'm very curious to hear. I've not had a conversation with her about it. But, something that I do think is really important is that this book also represents a rupture. This is a very stark departure from one of the core… What I think is one of the defining impulses of epic fantasy, and what I also think is exciting is that because of this rupture, we've seen the start of a new lineage. I see fantasy works now in conversation with Fifth Season, rather than Lord of the Rings as they sort of… I mean, the Poppy war is the example that this brings to mind the most. And because… What I see the difference is, is most epic fantasy… I'm not saying that N. K. Jemison was the first person to do this, but she did it, I think, in a way that was very effective and sort of opened the genre up, is most epic fantasy is what I think of as restoration fantasy. Right? So, Lord of the Rings, the world was good, it has fallen through the rise of Sauron, and just the general, like, rise of the age of men, and the goal is to restore the former glory. The goal is to get Aragorn, the heirs of Numenon, back on… Not Numenon…

[Howard] Numenor.

[DongWon] Numenor, back on the throne. That is so much of what that book is about. The farmboy finds a magic sword can defeat the evil, restore the kingdom to the place of justice and glory and good. It is about restoring a former order. Right? This is part of what makes a lot of epic fantasy inherently conservative, because it's saying things that used to be good, we need to get back to those ways of being. Right? Fifth Season is saying the exact opposite, of examining structures over and over again and saying these things are broken beyond repair. Because we are exploiting people, damaging people, hurting people in a way that the only answer is to burn it down and start something new. Right? Or it's not even particularly interested in what the new thing to start is. It is interested in the examination of what has gone wrong entirely at this point, to the parts that we, as the readership… I don't know that every reader is feeling this way, but are coming around a little bit to maybe Alibaster was right. Maybe he had a point. This is the Magneto is right argument for X-Men fans, of which I've been a big component of. This is Kill Monger's right, this is siding with the villain a little bit because restoration can't be the answer for everybody.

[Mary Robinette] There's a line in the book that is the world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there's no changing it.

[DongWon] Exactly. Speaking of accepting things being the way they are, let's go to break for a moment, and will be right back.

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Family Reservations by Eliza Palmer. This is so good. It is not a science fiction or fantasy book. This is mainstream. You should read it. It weaves together some of the most complex family dynamics I've seen. Part way through it, I was thinking, "Oh. Oh, this is King Lear." Eliza describes it as succession meets fine dining. So it has some of the most delicious food descriptions ever. The story does a beautiful job of handling omniscient narrator. And I highly recommend it, not just because it's a fantastic read, but also because it is a masterful use of omniscient narration. If you been wanting to play with this tool, this book is a really good one to read to see how it's been handled in a modern context. Although you should expect to come away being very hungry.

 

[DongWon] Okay. Before the break, Mary Robinette, I think you had a point that you were trying to expand on with the quotation of that line.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's just that when we talk about things that are in conversation, and when you look at when this book was written in the conversations around Black Lives Matter and breaking the world, there are parallels that a modern reader will bring to that, whether or not it is intended. Then, I think, also one of the things about it for me that is interesting structurally is that if you think about the structure of the book also breaks structure. Like, it is not structured the way you've seen other books structured. That is part of what makes it feel so fresh, is that we aren't seeing regurgitation of the hero's journey. Although she is re-purchasing parts of it. Like, when you look at a hero's journey, there's a mentor, there's a character, like, Alibaster is literally called the mentor. The Guardians, one of the other things that happens when they go into the Threshold is that... In the Monomyth, you meet the Guardian, and they are literally called the Guardians. But they are the evil ones in this. It's... It is interesting to me that then the way that first book works, it interrupts the hero's journey at what some people call the dark night of the soul. Sometimes people call it the descent into the abyss, where we literally go into the earth. Like… So… But it is fundamentally not the hero's journey.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This book is fundamentally not that. It is taking those elements, it is breaking them, and it is re-purposing them to build this entirely new structure.

[Erin] I think it's like bringing new things in. I mean, the… It's so funny to think about the hero's journey. It's also maybe… It's there, but, like, it is only one small… There are a lot of ways to tell stories.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] There are a lot of traditions of storytelling. We have a small one that we've taken and sort of, like, that has been part of fantasy that I think does come from that Tolkien way of thinking. I feel like one of the things that I've been really loving in recent works in general is seeing different ways of telling stories coming into things. I think that probably there's also some of that that this… That this book is in… Is in conversation with. Even though not everyone may know that that's a voice that's being…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Added to the conversation.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think that's something really cool that books can do, which is that you don't have to understand every single thing that the book is working with in order to enjoy that story, in order for that story to be influential on other stories that are being told.

[DongWon] Exactly. It goes into the ambient conversation and space, and then people start responding to it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I particularly enjoyed is that each kind of track of the story has a different structure.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That works with each other's. So, Dam…

[DongWon] Damaya.

[Mary Robinette] Damaya. Damaya is very like, "Oh. Here is the orphan child who is becoming the chosen one," kind of thing. Syonite is getting very much the reluctant hero journey. For the beginning of it. But then when you start braiding them together, where these things are working in parallel, they fracture, they go in different directions. Then you got this other thing, the whole second person section, which doesn't play by any of those rules.

 

[DongWon] This is a trick I think of most clearly used in Game of Thrones, where each POV character is in a different genre of story. Some are in event, like… You have… What's the young girl's name, I'm blanking on her. But each of the characters, they're like, some are in an adventure story, some are in a political stunt story, some are in a straight up horror story. Right? Some are in a supernatural story, some are in a grounded political fantasy. N. K. Jemison has done that here, where again, we have the child coming into her own power, we have the wizard at the height of her power exploring the world, and then we have the very contemporary sort of like tragic hero story. Again, going back to the parallelism or the POV, realizing that all three are the same person…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is just… Makes it a stunning trick in terms of how it operates within the genre conversation.

[Howard] Um. I was just reading a bit from Leverage Redemption, the new seasons of leverage. One of the characters says, "Hey, look. We're going to mess this guy up pretty hard. Are we the bad guys here?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sophie says, "Oh, yes. Never forget that, Brianna. We're not heroes, we're just necessary." I love that moment, because in one context, yes, you're necessary and I'm siding with you. You are in… You're hurting this person, but you're doing a good that needs to happen. And on the other hand, I look at it and say, in the context of Fifth Season, well, this is probably how the Guardians feel about themselves. Oh, we're not the good guys, but we're necessary. And just that brushstroke across the Tolkien line of black-and-white, good versus evil… That's silvery gray brushstroke, it just shimmers and invites you to stare at it. I love it.

[Mary Robinette] There's an interlude at the one third mark in this book, which arguably is the end of Act One, sure. But it literally says, "A break in the pattern, a snarl in the weft. There are things you should be noticing here, things that are missing and conspicuous by their absence." I think that's one of the things that makes this so powerful, is that she is… There's a line from Hemingway that says that a story is the things that you leave out. And the things that she's choosing not to show, the structural elements that she is choosing not to use… We don't get the reconciliation. We don't get the restoration. All of those things that are being left out on purpose are what makes this so interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah. An earlier [garbled] reference how she calls out I'm not going to tell you the nice part of this story…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, no rude.

 

[Howard] When we talked earlier, previous episode, about… Erin and I had this conversation off-line about… Sometimes we'll just read spoilers because we want to know what happens, but we still want to enjoy the story. A story is an unfolding, and it is also a telling. I can appreciate the telling without the unfolding, and I can appreciate the unfolding while not paying attention to the telling. The consuming media with that in mind, feels to me like a break with tradition. It also, and I'm just going to put a pin in this, argues really well for this book, because it is so well told. The telling is so much more than the unfolding.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's why we would encourage you to read it more than once.

 

[DongWon] I have one question that's a little bit of a pivot. As a publisher, I've talked about this a lot on podcasts and elsewhere, I think in comp titles. Right? I'm inherently wired to think, this book is like these other books. This book is in conversation with these other books. I'm curious, as a writer, are you guys actively thinking about lineage in that way, or, like, canon in that way, and the idea that a canon can be a personal thing. Right? In terms of, like, what you've read and where that comes from.

[Mary Robinette] Um, I mean, definitely, I've never done anything like Jane Austen with magic or The Thin Man in space…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah, that is true. Yeah. So I think you're very unaware of your influences…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely never done Apollo era science fiction that was influenced by Ray Bradberry. Absolutely haven't done that. I don't know what you're talking about.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I don't know that I… I mean, I know what I've read and if I… I could reconstruct the things that have made me who I am as a storyteller. I think it's a lot of things though. I think some of it is canon science fiction, I think some of it is barbershop tales.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I think some of it is a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I do think that this is something that I a lot of times will challenge a student to do, which is to think about what has made you the storyteller that you are.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And who are you then telling stories to?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think those are two really key things, because otherwise, other people will tell you, like, when you put a book out in the world, anyone can tell you who you're in conversation with. But when you're writing it, you get to decide.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At that moment, take the power and say, this is who I am and here is how I want to tell this tale.

 

[Howard] The better you get at reading, at comprehending what you read, the more able you are to, when you write, to consciously say, I am writing like the things I have consumed and to be able to say I am going to attempt to write unlike the things I have consumed. I am aware enough of the traditions I've been consuming that I am going to break with them and I'm going to write differently than them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's a… I see that as a late career skill that takes a long time to develop and you develop it by reading.

[DongWon] That's what I love about Fifth Season is it is both deeply honoring and in conversation with the traditions that it comes from, but also is so deeply interested in being like, "Uh uh, I'm doing something different."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Erin, I really loved what you said in terms of the books that made you a writer or, like, the things that you're in con… The stories and not even just books. Right? We're pulling from all parts of our lives. For you, that being different from the conversation that you think the audience is, like, who is this for, what books are they reading, what books will they know and understand? Then, thirdly, the one that you can't control in any way, which is, what people will actually say your book is like. Right? What people will say once it's out in the world. I think your relationship to each of those three different interpretations is really, really important. As a publisher, I'm most interested in the second one, the one that I want writers to come in with is an understanding of here's my audience, here's what they're reading, this is like that. But you understanding for yourself why you're writing this and where you're coming from I think is so important and so powerful.

[Mary Robinette] I think it is the most important thing. To know why you're writing it and who your writing it for.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because you can lose yourself. I mean, I think it's important, you want to get published, you want your stuff out in the world. But I think if you lose hold of who you are as a storyteller, then you won't be happy with the story no matter how successful it is, no matter how many other people like the way that you told it.

[DongWon] 100 percent.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It is a common thing that I will see with… When I was going through the slush pile, I would see people attempting to mimic someone else.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And seeing people thinking about what does this editor want? What does that editor want? But it is that thing about what you want… I'm also going to say one other thing about the conversations that we're having. I would not be surprised if Nora had read Crystal Singer and forgotten that she had read it, and that that turned up in the book. Because I have, when I'm gone back and reread some things, I've been like, oh, I didn't actually think about the fact that when I was writing Glamorous Histories, I'm like I'm going to do this something fresh and new with my magic, it's all going to be based on folds and threatens. Then, I'm watching Game of Thrones… Not Game of Thrones. Wheel of Time. I'm like, oh, look at them using folds and threads. No consciousness of that. But this is what we're talking about, that you can be influenced by something, it can come into the book, but it's still your own.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's still your own, even if you have been in conversation with something and forgot the the conversation happened.

[DongWon] This is me talking about patterns once again. That's okay, that's how stories work. We are all absorbing stories that we've read, we are all absorbing fiction that we've engaged with, and recombining it and putting it back together in our own ways. Right? So just because a reader will come up to you and be like, "Hey. This is just like that thing from… That Anne McCaffrey did," doesn't invalidate your work at all. Your work is still your work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So don't let that throw you. It's okay to have influences, it's okay to come from a place and… In fact, I think it's one of the most important things, is to recognize you come from a place and try to understand that. If you don't have a perfect understanding of it, that's fine too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] With that, I have some homework for you. Very much along these lines. I want you to make a list of the books that you consider the antecedents to this book that you're working on now. What works is your book in conversation with? Are you following on and building on that foundation, or are you disrupting and pushing back on that legacy in one way or another?

 

[Mary Robinette] 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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-49-giving-your-story-a-voice 

 

Key points: Voice? Mechanical, aesthetic, and personal voice. Mechanical, 1st person, 3rd person, YA, genre? Aesthetic, what does it sound like, rhythms? Personal, idiosyncrasies. The telegraph operator's fist. Develop your personal voice, learn to trust your own taste. What makes one voice sound different? Pacing, sentence structure and punctuation. Accent, sentence structure and word choice. Attitude? Are you smiling, mad, or what? Character background. Accents? Go to original sources. Get an author/editor from that community to translate into dialect. Be wary of dialects. Remember that voice is not static. A hack - re-key a page of an author with a strong aesthetic voice before writing your own story to get their rhythm. Soundtracks may also help you get the right feel. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 49]

 

[DongWon] Hello writers. Whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, editing your newest project, or just desperately trying to keep up with your TBR pile, it's hard to find the time to plan and cook healthy and nutritious meals to keep you energized on these jam-packed days. So, I'm here to tell you about Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. They can help you fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with one less excuse to keep you from writing. This November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-packed deliveries right to your door. Ready in just two minutes, no prep and no mess. Head to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code WX50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.

 

[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 18, Episode 49] 

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Giving Your Story a Voice.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] And we're back to the deep dives. We hope you had an amazing NaNoWriMo, that you one, if you even wrote one word, you're a writer in my eyes. But…

[Mary Robinette] Same.

[Erin] I hope you had a great, great time. Now we're going to come back. I think this is actually a really great time to come back to the deep dives, because we're going to be talking a little more about sort of craft on the page level. Before we left, we were talking big worldbuilding things. Now we're going to be getting into the nitty-gritty, starting with voice. The reason I picked this topic is because I have been accused, in addition to being accused of writing horror…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I have also been accused of writing voice-y stories. Which I actually do agree with. And that the stories that I write have sort of strong character voices driving them. So I wanted to talk about what voice even means. I feel like it's one of these words that gets thrown around a lot, and, like, people say it and everyone nods, and then you go away and you're like, "Did I mean what they meant?" So I'm kind of curious, when we talk about a voice on the page, what does that mean to you all? Like, what is that… What is the absence of that?

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… I, likewise, have strong feelings about voice…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And the fact that we use it so indiscriminately. But I think that we use it to mean three different things. Surprising no one, I'm going to use puppetry as an example. So, I think that voice means… That there are three things that we're talking about, the mechanical voice, the aesthetic voice, and the personal voice. So when you think about puppetry, mechanical… You say, what is the style of puppet, mechanical style is, is it a marionette, is it a hand puppet, what is it? With voice on the page, is it first-person, is it third person, are you writing for YA, like, what are the mechanics of that voice? The aesthetic is what does it… What does the puppet look like? Does it look like a Muppet, like a handcarved puppet from Appalachia? Voice on the page is what does it sound like? What are the rhythms of the voice, what are the… Does it sound like Jane Austen, does it sound like someone from the Bayou, does it sound transparent? Which basically just is a… Means fashionable. Because Jane Austen was writing transparent prose in her day, and the people writing transparent prose these days are people who are…

[DongWon] Just means mainstream.

[Mary Robinette] Mainstream. Yeah. Then you have the personal voice, which is the thing that you… Idiosyncrasies that you yourself bring to it. So when you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. Like when with Kermit the frog, when Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over, people freaked out. Because Kermit just looked like a different character. So I think what happens with when we're talking to writers, is that that all of the personal experience that you've got, all of your taste, is going to affect the way you're writing. What I see happen to a lot of early writers is that they fall in love with another writer and they try to match their aesthetic, not understanding that the aesthetic for that writer arises from their personal voice. So they will actually overwrite their own personal voice in trying to chase an aesthetic. Which isn't to say that you can't like do a pastiche that isn't… That also reflects your personal voice. But I think that you're not approaching them consciously to some degree, or if you're not aware of the differences, that it can be very easy to suppress what is important, why you yourself is the person who should be telling a story.

 

[Howard] Those first two, the mechanical and the aesthetic, are things that you can lean on craft and you can adjust. The third one is extremely difficult to adjust because that's the one that is the most embedded in who we are. In the age of telegraph and all through… All the way up through World War II, telegraph operators had what was called a fist. A recognizable… You could tell who the telegraph operator was just by the way they did the dots and dashes. That was something that code operators knew happened, and they would try to change it so that they couldn't be identified. They very rarely succeeded. I bring this up just because if someone tells you, "Oh, I can hear your voice," and you're uncomfortable with this… Get comfortable with it, because your voice is important, and changing it is hard.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think Howard's kind of hitting on something really important there. Which is… People ask me all the time what am I looking for in a project, what do I look for… When do I get excited about a submission, a query, whatever it is? For me, the thing I always say is I need to be able to read the thing that you're working on and see you in this. I want to know who the writer is. I want to feel like you are the only person who could tell this story in this way in this moment in time. That's not true for everybody. That is a very personal thing that I get most excited about. But I think Howard is absolutely right, that the first two things that Mary Robinette was laying out are craft things that you can adjust. Right? You can adjust sort of the mechanical thing to fit your audience. Right? Are you writing YA? Are you writing a mystery? Are you writing a thriller? These will require different kinds of beats and pacing and sentence structures, and also, the aesthetic voice is very much a personal thing, but you can shift that too. You can shift to certain dialects from story to story to story. You're often going to want to move that a little bit to match the setting, the type of story, whatever it is. The last one is the most interesting to me, and is the most [garbled setting] to me, because I think Howard's right that you can't change it. So what you need to do is change everything around it to reveal it in ways that are exciting to the reader. You… Bringing out what is important to you, what your point of view is, what your perspective is, into the fiction is the thing that almost, like, you're choosing how to reveal it and how to make it felt in the fiction. You're not trying to change who you are, you're trying to let me know who you are in a way that makes it legible to me and exciting to me and engaging to me, the reader.

[Erin] The funny thing is that I agree, but I disagree.

[Laughter]

[Erin] The reason that I slightly disagree is, for me, those last two things, the aesthetic voice and the personal voice, are a bit of a slider.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, when I write, I actually try very hard to get deep into the character voice, and you have less of a personal voice in the story, if that makes any sense. There are things that are… I think of them as like tells in a certain way, which are, like, I tend to like compound… Longer compound sentences, I love the word just which I probably shouldn't love as much as I do. But, that part of recognizing a story that's by me is in the subsuming of voice, of my voice inside the voice of the character.

[DongWon] But I think that's aesthetic voice. Right? In terms of the personal voice, I read all three of those stories and I say, "These are Erin Robert's stories because they are interested in certain topics. They have a certain perspective. The world is rendered in certain ways." Right? The connection between Sour Milk Girls and Snake Season… Aesthetically, they could not be more different. Right? Like, they're coming from different settings, different voices, different styles, different moods. But I look at both of these and like, "Oh, these are stories about people trying to survive in a world that is set against them. These are stories about empathizing with people who would be monstrous in other ways." That feels like something that you yourself are interested in. I know that's not how we normally think about voice, but it's so subtle and so woven through the story, that to me, I don't know where else to put it. Right? It could be themes, in some ways, but it's not that cold. It is more… It really is just kind of this metaphor of the telegraphers like fist and tapping things out. It's almost… It's an uncontrolled, unconscious thing in some ways that kind of can't be erased. In a way that's exciting and you lean into it in ways that make me like, "This is dope. I love this."

 

[Howard] Circling back to the I have been accused of being a horror writer, or accused of writing things that have…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… If it's good art, and you're accusing me of something, I want to be found guilty.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I want to be demonstrably guilty of this. If my voice is something that is unique and has value, but people tell me they can hear it in multiple stories, I need to be okay with that.

[Mary Robinette] This is the thing for me about the personal voice. You'll hear people say, "You need to develop your voice," or, "Don't worry about your voice, it will develop on its own," or whatever. I think that you do need to develop your personal voice. But what that means is learning to trust your own taste. That, for me, is that slider that you're talking about, Erin, is that you have learned to trust your own personal taste. So your personal voice then affects the aesthetics of everything that you choose.

[DongWon] I will also say your personal voice does change over time.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[DongWon] It's not a fixed point. As you read things, as you write things, as you live in the world, you change as a person, and that can be felt in your fiction too, in ways that I think are exciting. That's why I love watching a career develop. I love reading through an author's career, like, what were they writing when they were starting out, what were they writing later. William Gibson's one of my favorite writers, but William Gibson writing Neuromancer versus William Gibson writing the Millennium trilogy versus writing the Jackpot series, just three wildly different people. I can see the thread of that person growing over time, but it has been so thrilling to watch his thought and perspectives develop over the decades. When you get to see that in a writer, I think that's tremendously exciting.

[Erin] Yeah. Agreed.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] We are about to take a break. When we come back, I want to dive a little bit into the aesthetic voice, and actually how do you make stories sound different and bring the character to life through voice. We'll be right back.

 

[Mary Robinette] I have another short story. This is Exhalation by Ted Chang. I was just completely captivated by this short story. It is one of those that is all aliens all the time. Where he really trusts the reader. He starts, and he does not explain what's going on. You have to put the pieces together as he goes, and it's deeply compelling. How it unfolds, the things that you learn about it, the many layers of worldbuilding that you get in this very, very tight space. Exhalation by Ted Chang.

 

[Erin] We are back, and we are still in our own voices.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But what makes our voices different from each other? I'm curious, like, what makes one voice… Not sort of the personal kind of… The fist voice, but, like, the voice of one character sound different from another. Mechanically.

[Mary Robinette] There's so many different things that can do that. It really depends on what you're looking at. But, there are 4 basic things. There's… This comes from me being an audiobook narrator. So, voice, for me, like, for you, comes really naturally, and I had to reverse engineer what I was doing. When I was being trained to do voice work, you've got pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch is how high or low, you cannot represent that on the page. Placement is where it resonates, again, can't really represent that on the page aside from reporting. But, accent, attitude, and pacing, you can. So, pacing is all about the sentence structure and punctuation. Punctuation exists on the page, as if for me as a narrator, to record the breaths and pauses. That's where… That includes paragraph breaks, that includes italics, all of that is to describe the non-pronunciation parts of language. Then you've got… So you've got pacing, you've got accent. Accent is about sentence structure and word choice. Like, coming from the south, when I'm talking to you all, I will say you all, when I'm talking to my parents, I'll say y'all. I'm often throwing an extra just like weird flourishes to the language that it doesn't need, like, instead of "I'm going to the grocery store," "I'm going to go on over to the grocery store." What the extra words are doing, I have no idea. So you don't… This is not to say that you need to like put phonetic representations on the page. But, you do think about the sentence structure and word choice. Then, attitude, when you're talking to someone on the phone, you can tell whether or not they're smiling. You get the email that you're like, "Oo, they are really mad." That changes the way we approach language. So you can think about these things and adjust them in a very mechanical way, or you can just think about trying to replicate something that you're hearing.

 

[Howard] On one level further up from that… Fair listener, you probably absent the total differences between my voice and Mary Robinette's voice, Mary Robinette will lean into puppetry metaphor. I will lean into audio engineering and music metaphor. Because we have different backgrounds. That is an aspect of character voice that you should delight in. Knowing a character's back story and knowing that the way they were raised, the career that they followed, the parents they had, the culture they had, will affect the way they narrate their point of view to the reader.

 

[Erin] One thing… Getting back to accent specifically, which is a really interesting one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How do you make it work, and especially, you may be thinking I'm writing a secondary world where accents are completely different than the way that we think about them. I did a lot of thinking about this for Wolfy Things, which has, I would say, a flavor of Appalachian English to it. But I actually went and did a bunch of reading, I listen to recordings of folktales being told by some folks in the mountains.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I tried to figure out, and I think this is something, Mary Robinette, you said before, the difference between sort of the essence of what they were doing and how they were expressing it. I was, like, I'm not going to attempt to write in a full accent and actually like do exactly the way that they would do it. But as I was listening, I started saying, what are some commonalities that I'm hearing in the way… What are words that people are using, like y'all and ain't. Our sentences shorter or longer? Where are people putting the emphasis? Then said, "Well, I can take that and put it in my story." That way, it's not like I'm trying to, like, it can feel like a mockery I think when you try to exactly copy someone's accent from a group that you don't belong to, because there are rules going on beneath the surface that are hard to understand.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Dialect is superhard and dangerous. Yes.

[Erin] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, with dialect, one of the things… Yes, I'm 100% with you on this. I did a thing with Of Noble Family, where it was set in Antigua and I wanted to represent the dialect and also knew that there was no possible way I could get it. Because it's… I'm not from there, there's so many layers of that. So I wrote it with the rhythms that were natural to me, and then I hired an Antiguan author and editor to translate it into the dialect. She would periodically be like, "What is this?" I'm like, "Well, uhm…" I would have to translate my dialect back into standard English so that… It was this whole fascinating process because their… Dialects are so widely varied. I think that one of the things that people will do is they often have a media representation of dialect in their brain. So I think what you're talking about is like going to listen to primary sources. So important.

[DongWon] Yup. I mean, southern accents on TV, you'll get for different regions in the same town that apparently… That supposedly, no one's left in their whole life. You're like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] "I don't know. This is a lot…"

[Mary Robinette] Uhm, no. That is actually… That is a thing that absolutely happens.

[DongWon] It can, but…

[Mary Robinette] No. Okay, I know what you're talking about.

[DongWon] You know what I mean, though?

[Mary Robinette] Sorry. My favorite thing that will happen to me as a narrator is that I will narrate a book, set… I just narrated House of Good Bones by Ursula Vernon, set in North Carolina, which is where I grew up. The number of reviews that say they should have gotten a real Southerner…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because they have a very specific idea of what a southern accent is.

[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, this might be opening a little bit of a can of worms, so I don't want to go too deep on this. But one of the reasons, just to make it very explicit, that you need to be careful of dialects is that when you come from a lot of populations, sometimes it's southern populations, but, for me, coming from a family of immigrants, accent, language choice, all of these things are tools that are used against us in very explicit ways. Right? The pronunciation of my name, the way my parents talk, certain things are… I was trained to speak in a very specific way, to not have an accent, and all of these things because my parents believed that it was very important for us to be able to fit into American society. I have complicated feelings about that at this point, but I understand where they were coming from, because they felt it was very difficult for them to have a place in the world, to get ahead in business, or things like that, talking the way they did. So, when you are thinking about wanting to represent a community, a particular people, on a page, I think there's a natural instinct to be like, "Oh, well, they sound like that, they should look like that on the page." But when you're not from that community, you… There are subtleties and nuances that you will stumble into by accident that will end up being very hurtful to people from that community. So that's just things you need to be aware of when you're looking at dialect. So, going back to the list of things that Mary Robinette had in terms of, like, those aspects of voice, there's a lot of things you can do with cadence and pacing and rhythm that will give a gesture towards it. It can be a very subtle thing that will make things feel very different on the page without flipping into caricature, without being in that Mickey Rooney breakfast at Tiffany's space that you don't want to end up in.

[Erin] We definitely don't want to end up there…

[Laughter]

[Erin] In that space.

[DongWon] I see it more often than you would think.

[Mary Robinette] Well. No.

 

[Erin] What you were saying about sort of how language changes and how accent changes made me think also that one of the things that I think is really fun to do with voice is that voice is not static.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? As you move through the world, my favorite, like, way to think about this example is, like, your boss says something really annoying or your coworker, and you're like, "Okay. My gosh, this is so… That so-and-so…" You're upset and you're talking about it with your coworker, then you clear your throat and go, "Per my last email…"

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? As you translate the way you're really thinking into the way that is appropriate…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Supposedly, or appropriate for that situation…

[Howard] Code switching.

[Erin] Code switching. That kind of code switching happens all the time. I think one thing that's interesting is when characters speak out loud versus what they are thinking…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, the thought voice, like, the voice of the perspective is usually consistent, but then you might have them speak one way in one conversation, and a different way in another. That shows, like, how familiar they are with that person, their comfort level… There's so much that you can do in that, that's a really fun thing in playing with voice.

 

[DongWon] You can do a lot with voice, especially if you're writing in close third. I think people think, it's like, oh, if you're in first person all the time, then you can do this. But if you're in close third, you can switch your narration to mirror the internal dialect or the voice of that character a little bit more closely. I mean, I wouldn't be extreme about it, but you maybe just nudge it a little bit in a direction to be like, oh, this person's hanging out with their friends. They're code switching a bit more to be like this. They're in a professional environment or they are at their job, they're going to code switch a little bit in this direction. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You can push voice in like… You have all these little meters and dials with voice that you can do so much with that can be really exciting and really enrich your text. That, to me, is when I start to see, "Oh, this is an author who's very confident, who's in control of the text." There walking me through their story in a very, like, deliberate way that I love to see.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of… I'm going to give you a hack that you can use that I've used for a couple of different stories to get a different aesthetic voice into your rhythm. Which is to take someone who has a very strong aesthetic, like, I've done this with Austen, I've done this with Richard Kipling. I re-key in a text of the page before I start… Sorry, a page of their text before I start writing my own thing to get that rhythm into my head and hands.

[Erin] I think there's also… This is why some people will have soundtracks that they write to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] If there's a specific feel that you're going for, a specific rhythm, and you put on that song that, like, get you into the beat and the feel of it. I think that can be a great way to, like, remind yourself what the aesthetic is and what you're going for. I'll also say, like, voice is tricky. I've said this before…

[DongWon] It's hard.

[Erin] For me, because I tend to really try to live very deeply in the voice. It takes a long time. For me, a lot of it's writing a paragraph, reading it out loud, and just thinking something about this does not sound right.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Let me try again, until it gets… Like, the mood or the feel that I think I'm going for. But once, for me, I've captured that in one paragraph, then I can go ahead and like replicate it in the next. I can do it again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I actually think that, as we're talking about these specific tools, is a perfect time to go to the homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that you're going to listen to someone's voice. This can be a person in a coffee shop, someone on a podcast, anywhere that you are captured by someone's voice. Then, write a scene from your current work in progress, rewrite it trying to approximate the essence of that voice.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/16/17-42-eight-embodied-episodes-about-disability/ 

 

Key Points: How do you work with disabled characters in multiple genres, across age ranges and media, and incorporate them smoothly into your fiction? Bodies, augmentation, body horror, second person narrative choices. Be aware of disability as a part of existence. Disability is not something to overcome. The medical model says anything can be fixed, and is embarrassed by chronic conditions. What kind of story do you want to tell, one about a disabled character in the everyday world, or in a world where disability is perceived differently? The social model locates disability in how society is constructed around it. Consider a two-armed person in Barsoomian society, with every door requiring four arms. Try to speak to disabled readers and readers who are not disabled, and let people understand what being seen really means. It's a knotty problem.

 

[Season 17, Episode 42]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Eight Embodied Episodes About Disability.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Will] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Will] And I'm Will.

 

[Mary Robinette] You might notice that we have three special guests with us this week. We are going to be exploring eight episodes with… Led by Fran Wilde about working in multiple genres, across age ranges and media, with disabled characters and how to incorporate that smoothly into your fiction. So, I'd like to start by having our guests introduce themselves. I'm going to start with Fran.

[Fran] Hi, everybody. Thanks to writing excuses for having me on. I'm Fran Wilde. My pronouns are she/her. I write fiction for adults, children, and teenagers. I write nonfiction for all of those same groups as well. My novels have won some Nebulas and been best of NPR, as well as short stories have been nominated for a bunch of things. I teach at Western Colorado University's MFA for Genre Fiction, and Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program for writing for children and young adults.

[Mary Robinette] Chelsea?

[Chelsea] Hi. I'm Chelsea. I publish books and self pub, generally a fantasy novelist. My first book won the World Fantasy Award for best novel, and my [Dav?] book starts a trilogy that is maybe but probably not Hugo finalist for best series. I have four books published. And I'm [part Indian?]

[Mary Robinette] Okay. And Will?

[Will] Hello. I am William Alexander. I write unrealisms for kids. Best known for Goblin Secrets, my first novel which won the National Book Award. Mostly when I write about disability, I use metaphors. But on two notable occasions, I didn't. That was the anthology… A story I have in the anthology Unbroken, which is YA, and Uncanny Magazine's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. My contribution to that was later read by LeVar Burton, which is clearly the pinnacle of my career.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, we will all just enjoy a moment of jealousy about that. Hah. Okay.

 

[Mary Robinette] Now that that's done, Fran, why don't you tell us a little bit about why you pitched this idea to us, and what you think is like… If people are only going to listen to this brief moment in time, like, what's the thing you want people to know? Then we're going to dive in and unpack all of it.

[Fran] Sure. Well, I was talking with Dan Wells about possible topics and this one hit… It's very close to home. I've been talking about and very publicly writing about disability for almost a decade now, and existing in the publishing world while disabled, as well as putting disabled characters on the page in ways that allow them to be protagonists and allow them agency. So this is something that's near and dear to me. Will mentioned disabled people destroy science fiction, but I really think that there's been a lot of work done in the industry and in publishing to bring the narrative of disability to the fore. Nicola Griffith has talked about how disability on the page is sort of behind the curve and bringing… Making things more visible. Making… Talking about bodies in all different kinds of ways and all different points of access is very, very important. So I'm really pleased that so many people could be on this call and on this conversation. I think that what we're going to do is talk about working in multiple genres and bringing disability on the page in all of those genres and age groups. We're going to talk about bodies. Why are they, how do you depict them, how you work with them in… As a creative. We're also going to talk about augmentation in various forms. How that can help depict characterization. How that can get in the way. We're going to talk a little bit about body horror and what that means in the disability community, and we're probably going to get into a conversation about second person narrative choices. I say probably because I'm definitely going to be steering it that direction.

[Chuckles]

[Fran] We're going to talk a little bit about linguistics and then get back to bodies, why, as far as what happens when your character isn't… Doesn't have the typical character set up, but is a different kind of character in the books. I think I talk about why dragons are sometimes preferable. Then the last episode is right now going to be a Q & A among all of us. But we've also got some homework for everyone and some different books to read every week. So I hope you stick around because I think this is going to be a very good conversation and a very important conversation. I'm so glad Writing Excuses is having it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That was a syllabus, not an introduction. But I love it.

[Fran] Thank you. I prepared it so specifically for that purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Fran does teach things.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I wanted to start to think about is… I want us to start with the kind of baseline that this is important. So we're not going to really dive in immediately to why it's important, we're just going to take it is assumed for the moment that it is important. So when we talk about disability representation in different age ranges, why… Like, what differences do you find when you try it? Are there differences in how you approach that in different age ranges?

[Fran] I think that's a really good question. There have been a couple of recent articles including in the School Library Journal about representation in picture books and how to center a disabled character in a picture book rather than using them for didactic or educational reasons. That is part of the discussion that has been happening in YA and children's literature for a very long time. But it's also a question for… That has been going on in adult speculative fiction, especially. So I was on a panel a couple of years ago that was called Unexpected Heroes, and the topic… Question came up, how do you make a character unexpectedly heroic? Someone, I have no idea who said this, but what they said was memorable. "Well, you just give them a disability." I pretty much flipped the table upside down and origamied it into a shape that was pointed right at the speaker and said, "No, that's not what we do here." But I think that's an interesting door, because that idea of disability as a tool rather than a part of existence is something that is important across the board to disrupt and to look at how we depict being human in a world where people are vastly different and have different experiences and how we open the door to more of those experiences and more of those discussions on what is good representation and what is damaging representation.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Will, it looked like you had a thought there?

[Will] I did have a thought. Mostly it's about how writing with different ages, especially very young ages, there are dangers of compounded infantilizations that you just see all the time. Here's a place where language breaks down for us, because… I mean, what does the word infantilization even mean with, in the case of picture books, as Fran brought out, we're talking about actual infants. So there's… The word juvenile, the word infantilize. They're pejorative. But we're also talking about actual juveniles who, in particularly juvenile readers are… Don't like being condescended to and will not stand for it. So there are… There are many, many layered ways to condescend all at once when talking about disability for young readers, and an ethic of respect that has to be the first step when writing anything whatsoever for a literally juvenile audience.

[Howard] I think, based on what Fran said a moment ago, the speaker who says, "Oh, give the main character disability." It's probably appropriate to say you can make the main character seem heroic by giving them something difficult to overcome, but that's not the same as give them a disability.

[Fran] Yeah. [Garbled – honestly?] I wish that is what they had said.

[Howard] Oh, yeah. I'm not suggesting that's what they meant. I'm not suggesting that's what they meant. What I'm saying here though is that in our heads, and I confess to a large measure of able-ism because that's the world I grew up in. In our heads, we often conflate disability with challenge. As writers, we need to recognize that words are tools that allow us to be really specific and avoid certain kinds of problems from the word go. As you were saying, Will, about compounded infantilization. We need to choose our words carefully early on so that we don't alienate the audience, so that we don't cause injury where none was intended.

[Will] There's much to unpack in the word overcome there, too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Will] Where the narrative arc of disability from an ablest point of view is to with pluck and grit transcend and walk again through sheer… And rather than living with a disability. Okay. Superfast. I think it's worthwhile defining the social and medical models of disability. Like, the quick 10 second version is that… The medical model is that anything can be fixed. Yeah, it is appropriate sometimes. I mean, you break your leg. The medical model of addressing this injury is to then repair your leg. But if you have some sort of chronic condition that medicine cannot fix with a quick pill or a quick surgery, that is in anyway ongoing or permanent, then from the medical model, you're an embarrassment, you're unfixable, you're permanently broken and that's a horrible place to be. Whereas… Fran, you want to take the social model?

[Fran] I do want to address the social model. I also want to see if Chelsea has a jump in thought because we're…

[Howard?] Ooo, yes.

[Fran] Running away with the floor.

[Chelsea] A little bit. I was just thinking about how… Maybe this is a little bit too much of a technicality, but when you're writing a story about a disabled character, one of the things that I'm always thinking about is the environment that the disabled character is in. Because it depends on what it is that you want to tell the story about, whether it's about them being a disabled character in the world that we all kind of contend with or if you want to visualize a world in which disability is [cheered?] or perceived very differently. I think that comes from interrogating the medical model of disability and social model of disability, which I think probably we need to explain right now.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let us actually explained that after we pause for the book of the week, because…

[Will] Suspense.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to let this episode run long because it's our first one for this. But I do want to make sure that we get our book of the week in and I know that is soon as we define these two things, we will have so much more to talk about. So… So… The book of the week is Invisible, which is a series of anthologies edited by Jim C. Hines and Mary Anne Mohanraj. There's actually a boxed set of it. This e-book explores various types of invisible states. A lot of it is disabilities, but it's not just disabilities. It has wonderful representation. It's lots and lots of own voices fiction. The proceeds from it also benefit the Carl Brandon Society. So book… As I said, it's a three book series. There is a boxed set. They're short stories. So it's a very low buy-in. It's got essays, it's got poetry. So we are highly recommending that you pick up a copy of at least one of the Invisible series about representations of all sorts and kind of read along as we go through the next several weeks.

 

[Mary Robinette] Now I'll let you do your definitions.

[Fran] Will, can you drop the social model on us and we'll go from there.

[Will] Sure. That is… The social model locates disability more in how society is constructed around it. The best metaphor I have for that for just very quickly explaining what that means and how it might be lived is a science fictional one that I read in a blog probably 20 years ago by someone who blogged under the name of Kamikaze Wheelchair. It was… I have no idea who they are out in the world, and the blog has disappeared. But if you're listening, it was a great blog. The metaphor is imagine that you're on Mars. Specifically a Barsoomian sort of Mars. So everybody there has four arms. Every door to every building in that place requires four arms to open and close. You, as you are, are fine. There's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing broken about you. But the world around you was not designed for you to move through it, and it will only reluctantly accommodate you. You get stuck in every doorway because you don't have four arms. So that tiny science-fiction example gives you a sense of the social model of disability. There's nothing wrong with you. But the world was not made for you, and would prefer not to notice you as you try to move through it.

[Fran] Thank you. That is a really, really good example. It also speaks to something that I think we're going to be addressing shortly, which is sort of what aspects of disability are considered acceptable right now to discuss and what are not. How you interact with the world and how that is impacted by your allergies, your mobility, your ability to hear or see, in all sorts of ways, are things to consider when you are talking about disability, when you are writing a disabled character. This is not necessarily to be confused with either plot or character motivation. I think that goes back to the sort of the medical model of disability. One of the things that seems to happen in a lot of disability stories is the magical cure, or this character overcomes something, instead of just existing and going about their protag-y ways with protagonist impulses in ways that carry them through the story and address their current motivations as who they are. Rather than applying a disabled character goes here label to them, I really want to advocate for that. One of the things that… When I wrote a very angry disability story a couple of years ago, and Nalo Hopkinson just let me know that she's teaching it once again in her fiction class this year…

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Fran] Which astounds me. But it is… It's called Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand. It was… I have written disabled characters into every story, every genre, but you don't necessarily notice that they're there. Because they're busy protagging, they're busy doing things for the story. But Clearly Lettered was narrated by a very angry CG mermaid in a cabinet of curiosities that is mostly drawn from a medical facility that I was in as a child when they were trying to figure out how to fix me. That was braces and all sorts of other things. They didn't ever look at the whole of me. They just looked at the pieces of me and fixed each broken piece. I think that that in some ways is how some of the representation that I see in fiction when someone tries to write a disabled character, they just write this piece of the person, and say, "Look, there is the character." I really wanted to talk about that experience of writing Clearly Lettered and the pushback. People who are like, "Wow, that was really angry. I didn't expect to hear that from you." Or "I'm so uncomfortable that you wrote that as a direct address with all of these second person commands to it." When I was writing a disabled… A disability narrative for disabled people. The people who read that and said, "That was my experience. I hear you. I'm so used to being told what to do and pushed around and told who I am. And you put that on the page in a way that let me feel seen." When I got that, I started thinking about how if we do this correctly, we can be speaking to readers who are disabled and we can also be speaking to readers who are not disabled and combine that experience in a way that lets people understand what being seen really means rather than being cured or being… I… Being seen in itself is an abilified term, but being heard, being seen, is how we talk about characters and experiences in fiction. So I'm just… I'm throwing that out there in a safe this is a very knotty problem. It's not something that is easily solved with a tweet. But it's something that is solved over time with lots of different experiences brought to it. So…

 

[Mary Robinette] That is something that we are hoping to do over the course of the next several episodes is give you the tools to unknot these knotty questions. So that brings us to our homework. For the homework this week, what I want you to think about is I want you to think about this Barsoomian model. I want you to think about something that is completely normal to you, but a situation in which your normal becomes a disability because of the way society is structured. For instance, everyone on this podcast is wearing glasses. That is not a disability in today's society. But if you drop us… Drop any of us nearsighted people a thousand years ago, our degree of vision becomes a problem. So, what is something about yourself that in one society is not a problem, and in another society becomes an absolute problem? Think about the social model of disability. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

from https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/02/17-1-genre-and-media-are-promises/

 

Key points: Romance novels need a happily ever after, or a happy at least for now. Genres, both bookshelf genres and elemental genres, make promises. Cozy mystery needs a murder! Superheroes need an epic fight. Animation is not just for kids. Novels do third person limited really well. Animation uses visual cues to tell part of the story. Lore miners like visual shows, where they can mine the background visuals for added depth. The Kuleshov effect! Remember, use all the tools in your arsenal to set the mood and story.

 

[Season 17, Episode 1]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Genre and Media are Promises.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] I'm here to tell you that if your romance novel doesn't have happily ever after or happy at least for now, it's not a romance novel. You're not actually writing to that genre. It's a bold stake in the ground, I know, but there are promises that the genres in which we write, the bookshelf genres in which our publishers place our books, the elemental genres in which we determine what's the thing that makes people turn pages, those make promises. Right from the outset. Let's talk about some examples. I've already spilled the easy one of romance. What are some other examples of genres and the promises those genres make?

[Kaela] Cozy mystery is extremely like… There are very, very strict beats to hit and moments to deliver that if you do not, you will have disappointed your audience. Because they…

[Howard] I don't know what those are. Can you enumerate a few?

[Sandra] Miss Marple or any… Murder, She Wrote is a cozy mystery. It is basically a very frie… There's going to be a murder. Somebody's going to die. But it's not somebody we…

[Oh, good]

[Sandra] Like… Yeah. So, like, it's… Murder, She Wrote. She's going about her cozy little life and then… Oh, no, there's a body. We now need to solve it without offending to many people's worlds. Then, at the end, it's all okay again. You can see this with a lot of BBC… They're like Father Brown…

[Father Brown]

[Sandra] Is one of them. Yeah, Father Brown is one of them. It is very contained and very safe, even though every single book or episode has a couple of murders in it. Yet the audience knows at the end of it, the bad guys are caught, they're put away, everybody's safe, it's all going to be fine. If there's a cat or a dog, the cat and dog are always going to be safe, and probably will help solve the mystery. So, like, seriously, this is the cozy mystery genre. The people who come to this genre, well, it's kind of like Meg was talking about in the last episode with Police Procedurals. You are expecting and wanting to get those beats exactly where you expect them. If you don't, you will actually make the audience anxious and upset with you.

[Megan] I have an example of when I was deeply betrayed by a cozy mystery series. I don't want to drop the title, because this is a huge spoiler. But there is a main detective character that the audience loves and cares about very much, and about three seasons in, decided he didn't want to do the show anymore. Instead of having him retire, they killed him. The next person to come in and solve his murder was the new main character. I was like [garbled] No!

[Howard] I'll go ahead and spoil it. Was that Death in Paradise?

[Megan] Yes.

[Howard] BBC? Yeah.

[Megan] I'm still not over it. Yet. [Garbled] But see, that's… There's an expectation that just shows up with the genre. I came to a cozy mystery because I wanted a mystery, and I wanted to be able to feel smart and solve the puzzle, but I never want to feel threatened and I never want my favorite characters to feel threatened. I just want to hang out with fun people while we solve puzzles.

 

[Howard] Yep. Okay. Let's pick another genre. Kaela, you got something for us?

[Kaela] Yes. Superheroes and how it means fights. Epic fights. Like, you can use all kinds of different structures in superhero movies and comics and things like that. As we have seen through Marvel's explorations. Everything from a heist through like more of a drama to the classic hero's journey. But we want epic fights that feel like they have weight. They're not just… I think that's one of the things that sets apart, that satisfies…

[Howard] It's not… We see this in the… Was it 2013 Avengers movie?

[I think it was 2012]

[Howard] It's not just fights. It's the fight bracket… The bracketing of we need to see what happens when it's Thor versus Hulk. We need to see Black Widow versus Hulk. We need to see… Through the series. We get Iron Man versus Hulk, eventually. We bracket so that everybody fights everybody else, even if they're on the same team. They have to have some sort of reason to fight. Black Widow fought Hawkeye. Hawkeye briefly fought Loki. So, yeah, you look at the superhero genre, and one of the expectations there is, "Man, I've got six superheroes here. Well, I want to know what happens if hero three and hero four fight, because that would be cool." If you solve this by giving villains mirrored powers, then it's just boring.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then it's just Iron Man One, which is Iron Man versus a chunkier Iron Man, or the Hulk movie from the same year, which was Hulk versus a spikier, chunkier Hulk.

[Megan] Kind of broke the promise. 

[Howard] So, yeah, superheroes and the fighting. What else?

[Megan] Then you even build a whole movie around it with Civil War. Where… I mean, there is an eternal bad guy, of course, but the big scene, the big Act III scene, was everybody in the airport parking lot and how do these powers go against these powers, or these accessories interact with these magical things?

[Kaela] Can I just say that that is the, like, one of the perfect se… Like, ways that audience has helped cultivate or helped shape the genre, as well, the way the audience interacts with it. Because, like, I remember having fights with people about who would beat who, with your favorite superhero. I'm like, "Uhuh. Spider-Man would beat any of them, because of his Spidey sense."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] You end up fighting about it. That's like you want to see how your favorite superhero is going to fare. Kind of like wrestling, right? Like professional wrestling. You want to see what the matchups look like as well. So it's a part of the genre, because it's also part of what the audience wants to know. They want to see how it goes. So you're like, "Okay. Well, let's make this interesting. Let's… I'll just keep doing this. Let's keep adding it in."

 

[Howard] Hey, let's do a book of the week. Who's got that for us?

[Sandra] I believe that I… Yes, I do. The book I was super excited about right now is Mine by Delilah Dawson. We haven't actually talked about horror as a genre yet, and the implications there. But this is a middle grade horror novel. It does a beautiful job of using horror tropes, pitching them appropriately to a 12 to 13-year-old audience or even just a little bit younger than that, letting it be just scary enough for that age range, and delivering the beats and points. It's just… It's a delightful story. I highly recommend it. So, Mine by Delilah Dawson.

[Howard] Very cool.

[Sandra] Yes.

 

[Howard] Very cool. So we've talked about genre. Let's talk about mediums, media, a little bit. Because the kinds of stories you tell change dramatically based on what the tools are you're using to tell them, whether it's a novel or a comic or a film and TV…

[Sandra] What you got for us, Meg?

[Megan] Hi. My name is Meg, and I want to talk about animation. There is this deep set conviction, especially in American audiences, that if something is animated, it's just for children. Which can be a problem, because there are many animated projects that are not made for children that some unsuspecting parents may see in the video rental store and say, "Watership Down? Rabbits? Animated? That's for my four-year-old."

[Chuckles]

[Megan] It's not. What's been so exciting is in the last few years…

[Howard] Is that why you became an animator? Was to save all the rabbits?

[Megan] No. No. It was to kill all the rabbits and then show the grown-ups [garbled]. No, I became an animator because I think it is every single artform combined into one in the absolute coolest way. But until very recently, most animated productions in the US were either made for kids, kids serialized action adventure, or very raunchy comedy for grown-ups. Because to make sure we know it's for grown-ups, we have to turn all the grown up content to the extreme. But there's a lot of international work, particularly anime from Japan, which targets many different audiences. So we're seeing a lot of creators who grew up watching those kind of stories wanting to branch out and basically get as many different types of stories in animation as you get stories and books in traditional publishing. It's very fun to be part of that shift.

[Howard] So… Now, part of what you've said here is that there is an incorrect expectation in the United States that the animation… Animation as a medium means the story is for kids. Specifically, though, are there promises that animation makes about the way it's going to tell a story? For instance, like with a novel, there's a thing that novels can do that almost nobody else can do well. That's the third person limited point of view, which is that I am narrating the story from the point of view of the character who we are following around right now, and we're getting their thoughts, we're getting this internal stuff. You can't do that in film. Well, Dune, the David Lynch version, tried to do it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] With people who kept whispering these voiceovers. That almost worked. That's all I'm going to say about that.

[Almost]

[Howard] Almost worked. What is it that animation does that other things can't do that becomes an expectation of animation?

[Megan] How it looks. The actual design of the characters often indicates the type of story you're going to get. Usually, stuff for kids? Bigger heads, bigger eyes. Stuff for grown-ups. Smaller heads, smaller eyes. That's a very gross oversimplification. But you'll see a lot of adult comedies take a lot of design cues from shows like The Simpsons. With large eyes but tiny pupils. Which is, I think… Sandra?

[Sandra] I was going to say, I think it's on Netflix, Centaurworld.

[Gasp]

[Sandra] It actually does some very beautiful things visually to indicate character growth. The visual design of the main character actually changes as the story progresses. So you can actually see how far along their character arc they are by how they look on the screen. That is a beautiful thing that animation can do, and it's an expectation that I would love to see more animation shows taking advantage of. Obviously, they can't quite do it in the same way that Centaurworld is set up to do, but this is the kind of expectation, is that with a visual medium, some of the story has to be delivered visually. You see this with picture books as well. I'm doing a lot of learning and writing picture books, and over and over and over again, as a writer of short stories and prose, I'm told, "You're describing too much, you're describing too much. You have to let your…"

[Howard] Let the illustrator do their job now.

[Sandra] "Illustrator tell the story in the pictures. You have to trust them." So that's an expectation for picture books that the art and the words will interact to create a third thing which is the story.

 

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. So, I was just thinking about how one of my favorite things in TV shows… What I… Mostly animation, I'll be honest, because that's what I do, I like watching it. But that… In all shows, even, one of my favorite things to do… How to interact with that type of media, is lore mining. I love to mine the backgrounds, the little things, the visual cues in the background that aren't addressed by the story. I'm like, "Ooh. Wait. What does that mean? That nearly matches that one. In [garbled] that's missing half of this thing. I guess that does mean that they're long-lost connected. They have to be, right?" I will just like literally talk out loud by myself, putting all of that together, lore mining the background. That's my favorite thing. But you can't do that in books. Yes, Megan?

[Megan] I was going to say, are you a Gravity Falls fan?

[Kaela] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Zero Gravity Falls.

[Howard] Gravity Falls. Here's the way I described… And I came to Gravity Falls late. Gravity Falls is X-Files for kids and for grown-ups who were righteously disappointed in X-Files.

[Laughter]

[I love it. Yeah.]

[Howard] So, well done in that way. One of the things that I want to point out about the differences between some of these genres is… There are things that are pointed up by the recent and now canceled live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, is that in the animation, the Cowboy Bebop anime, the characters are having feelings, but there's really only so much you can do with an animated face to show us a complex series of emotions without tipping into the uncanny valley or doing something weird. So, often what they do is they'll cut away from the face in the anime and show us pouring a glass of whiskey. Show us the hand doing something. Show us something else in order to tell the story behind what's happening on the face. But in live-action, dang it. Cho is a fantastic actor. Just give him his back story, aim the camera at his face, let him say two lines of dialogue and then act, and we'll have it. That's not what they did. Meg, you were flailing about. What?

[Megan] Sandra's had her hand up for such a long time.

[Sandra] That's fine. That's fine.

[Megan] So, there is something in film making called the Kuleshov effect. Which is the shot…

[Howard] Kuleshov? Say that again.

[Megan] Sorry. The Kuleshov effect.

[Howard] Okay. Kuleshov.

[Megan] It's the idea that even if you are presented with a neutral face, the shot that comes after… What the camera looks at exactly after will inform the audience of how the person is feeling.

[Cool]

[Megan] Something that the animated series did, that I felt the live-action did not, was use all of the tools in their arsenal to set their mood and story. Because actor's face is an incredible tool, actor's body language, but that's only one very small part of what you have to consider in any sort of film sequence. You have where the camera's set, how quickly you cut, what the background noise is, but the background music is, what your lighting cues are. There's so many different pieces that the original Cowboy Bebop absolutely mastered. That's one of the best and most solidly animated series that have ever existed. You can't just take certain pieces of that, certain hallmarks of that, and get the same effect. Because a visual only tribute isn't a real reproduction.

[Right. Yup. Yeah.]

[Howard] We could clearly keep talking about this and talking about this and talking about this, because genre and media, as things that make promises to the audience… I mean, there's a million of these.

 

[Howard] So, I think we need to cut from here straight to the homework. Meg, I think that might be you?

[Megan] All right. That is me. All right. For the homework this week, what do you plan on having your work in progress deliver? Does the genre or medium you're working in support the promise of that deliverable? If not, write out a one-page outline in which you change the genre or medium to support the promise you're making.

[Howard] Ooo, I like it. I like it. Hey, this has been Writing Excuses. You have your homework. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/07/18/16-29-building-trust/

 

Key Points: Think about hospitality. You are inviting the reader into a space you have created, and you need to make sure they feel comfortable and know what to expect. They need to know what kind of ride they are taking. What are the stakes? Help people decide whether they want to keep reading or put the book down. Set the expectations. Raise questions and answer them. Your starting stakes are not necessarily the stakes of the whole novel, but they should be a microcosm, a small bubble that shows us the kind of story this is.  

 

[Season 16, Episode 29]

 

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Building Trust.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard. And you should trust me.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wow. We're going to have to work really hard to convince the audience of that.

[Howard] It's going to take more than the first line, I got to tell you.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, how can we build trust with the audience?

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] So, one way I think about this is… One of my friends and clients, Amal El-Mohtar, has this really beautiful metaphor that… whenever she talks about writing a book, she uses this metaphor of hospitality. Right? You are inviting the reader into a space that you've made for them. Your part of your job as the writer, is the creator of this space, is to make sure they feel secure, they feel well cared for, and they feel comfortable. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to invite them into a cozy, friendly space. You might be writing a horror novel, and the thing that you're inviting them into is a goddam haunted house right? So if you are doing that, then you are taking them and you are holding their hand and saying, "Trust me. I built you a scary experience." But one of the things about a haunted house is you know what you're signing up for. You know, at the end of the day, a murderer is not actually going to stab you. If you violate that boundary, then you've made a very bad experience for your reader. So one of the things you're trying to do…

[Mary Robinette] They've been stabbed.

[Dongwon] Exactly.

[Dan] Now all I can think is how can I get that to work.

[Laughter]

 

[Dongwon] But one of the things you want to communicate in the opening page is this is the kind of ride that you are on. This is the kind of story that you're on. But also, I know what I'm doing and you should trust me. I'm going to take care of you. Right? I think those are important things you really want to communicate to get that sense of trust and also authority. Also, I am in charge here. This is my house. Welcome. This is my space. You're going to be okay.

[Dan] Yeah. I really like the this is the ride you're on metaphor, because that makes so much sense to me. I hate roller coasters. If I get on a ride at a park with my kids thinking that it'll be some fun little like Peter Pan thing, and it turns out to be a roller coaster… I'm never going to that park again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. A lot of this is just about things that we started talking about last week and the week before about establishing the breadcrumbs. There's a number of different ways that you can build trust with the audience. One of those… One of my favorite tools to use is the voice of the character. I… Like, I enjoy… Whether I'm doing third person or first person, when I pick up a book, the voice… The tone tells me so much about what kind of character… The character of the book and it gets into the character of… The character. I'm a writer, I'll go back and edit that later.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the point is that it… This, it your word choice, your sentence structure, what the character is thinking about, what you've kind of focused on, all sends a signal to the reader. This is… You're going to get more of this. Come with me, and I'll give you more of this.

[Dongwon] In addition to the voice, I think one of the things that really establishes what kind of ride we're on… I think voice is sort of setting the stage, but then communicating the stakes of your story, I think, are one of the best ways to really communicate what are the dangers here, what are the threats here, what kind of genre are we in, what kind of story is this. By genre, I really mean sort of the concept of the elemental genre. Is this a thriller? Is this horror? Is this twisty? Is this a romance? The thing to think about stakes in this kind of goes back to what we were talking about last week in terms of don't start with an action scene because violence and death are actually not great stakes in the beginning of a story because you don't care about the character yet. Stakes are about relationships. We are people. So we are wired to connect to other people. I think that's one of the main ways that stories work is we connect to a character's experience. What makes that relatable is their relationships to other people. Right? Stakes are about a character's connections, their feelings, their conflict between themselves and another person in the world, or sometimes a mind divided against itself. Sometimes an internal conflict within a character establishes the stakes of the story. I think as you can communicate that upfront, that can be the most effective way to sort of establish what kind of story and what's on the table and where we're going.

 

[Howard] I… In the first episode we did, Dongwon, you talked about nobody wants to read a book. Your first line is there to prevent people from throwing your book in the trash. I think that on the topic of building trust, at some point, you have to be willing, in that first page, to tell people if you don't want to be on this ride, it's okay to put this book down. Because there are people for whom this is not a book they want to read, and I would rather they know that soon then be angry at me for having found it out 60 pages later. The example that I use is the opening scene of the 2011 Three Musketeers movie in which a guy wearing steam punk-ish scuba gear emerges from the waters of Venice and fires repeating crossbows at his enemy. I looked at that scene and thought, "Oh. Oh, that's the ride we're on. Okay. I'm here." But, you know what? If your suspenders of disbelief have already snapped, just pull your trousers up and leave the theater and be done. Because this isn't a movie for you. So when I think about building trust, I want to make sure, yes, that I've planted the hooks so that everybody is going to read to the end of the first page. But then on the first page, I'm going to include things that tell people this is what you're here for. If this isn't you, it's okay to leave.

[Mary Robinette] This is why when you… You will often hear me talk about like within your first 13 lines, try to get some hint of your genre element, preferably like within that first three. So that readers know what they're in for. Using the example of the Three Musketeers, if we had started with a historically accurate beautiful court scene and then moved to the repeating crossbow, when you get to that, you will flip the table and storm out. Whereas the other way, you're setting expectations. It's like, "No. You're going to get the pretty clothes, but that's not what this book… This film is about."

[Yep]

[Mary Robinette] So, a lot of it with this is making sure that the reader understands kind of the scope, in addition to all of those other things.

 

[Mary Robinette] Why don't we take a moment here and pause for our book of the week?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, our book of the week is actually going to connect to next week's episode. So, we are talking about Shirley Jackson's masterpiece, The Haunting of Hill House. This is one of the greatest horror novels of pretty much all time for me. I think it's one of my favorite books ever. It's very different though from what we expect if you're thinking of horror as Steven King novels. It's very moody. It's very atmospheric. The thing that were going to be talking about is that first page. Really, almost just the first paragraph of that book. So, if you're not really up for reading a whole horror novel, just feel free to read that first page. But for those of you who are open to it, I think it's one of the most incredible pieces of literature out there. It is also an excellent TV show that's been made out of it that has very little to do with the book, but it's also very enjoyable.

[Mary Robinette] You… Thank you. So that's The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

 

[Mary Robinette] You looked like you were about to say something right before we paused for the book of the week. What was that, Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Oh. Really, talking about this idea of setting those expectations in that first paragraph, when… One of the most important questions in publishing, I think, for me… Sometimes I talk about it as maybe the only question in publishing and everything else is some version of it, is deciding who this book is for. But when you decide this book is for this person, inherently in that statement you are saying this book is not for this other person. Right? That's okay. It's okay to have your book not be for a certain segment of the audience. Dan doesn't like roller coasters. You shouldn't try to make Dan get on your roller coaster. So, I think communicating that in the first part…

[Dan] Don't say it that way, because now everyone is.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] I think really being clear about that is really important to let people opt out as much as you're letting them opt in.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. The other thing, for me, when we're talking about building trust, goes to something that Howard said last episode, which was raising a question and answering it. This is one of the things that I find… One of the most effective tools that you can do to build trust with the reader is… Because writing a novel, writing a short story, is about withholding information until the point at which you want to deliver it. So what you want to do is you want the reader to know that you will deliver the information when they need it. One of the ways you can do that is to raise a question and immediately answer it, raise a question and immediately answer it, raise a question… Don't answer it. They know, "Okay. I'm not getting the answer right now because it's not important at this moment. I will get it later." But you want to make sure that those… That the ones that are kind of obvious questions, the ones that the reader is going, "well, hang on," are thematically linked to the thrust of your story. Just a question for the sake of why is that happening is going to… Again, with the breadcrumbs, draw them down the wrong path. So, like when I'm talking about a thematically linked question, if you've got a murder mystery, why is that dead body on the floor, that's a thematically linked question. You don't want to immediately tell them why the dead body is on the floor, because they have to figure it out. Whereas if it's a battle, why is that dead body on the floor isn't the question. Right? That's… It's like, "Ah. There's a dead body on the floor from a bullet wound. It looks like… It's… One of the enemy soldiers is on the floor." You want to answer the question almost before they get to it. So that they aren't…

[Howard] To extend…

[Mary Robinette] It popping up.

[Howard] To extend the dead body metaphor…

[Mary Robinette] Which we love.

[Howard] The vast majority of us have never been in a room with a dead body. So, often the question is why am I reading a story about a person… Why is this person in the room with a dead body? Is this a police procedural? Is it a war documentary? What is it? So that's… I like that question.

[Dan] Well, I think it's important to… This is such a wonderful example, because you can illustrate a lot of different ideas with it. There are a lot of authors, and Dongwon mentioned this, I think last episode, that you have already spent hundreds of thousands of hours thinking about your book and your characters. So to you, this might not be a question. You might not realize by putting that dead body on the floor that you are posing a question to the reader. Perhaps what you're trying to do by not explaining the body is to illustrate that the people in this war scene are inured to death and they are desensitized to violence. You're just trying to show how grim and dismal their life is. But it actually is a question, and the readers are going to wonder about it and that's going to lead them off track.

 

[Dongwon] Often times those questions, we also talk about them as story promises, right? You asked the question, you are promising to the reader I will address this in some way. Maybe in an offhand way, maybe in a small way, maybe a big way. I think when Mary Robinette was talking about that series of questions that are asked and answered, I think of those in terms of… As we talk about the story stakes, the way in which the stakes in your opening scene don't have to be the stakes of your whole novel, right? Because if you're giving… If you're writing 150,000 word epic fantasy, the stakes of the whole novel are not going to exist in that first scene, and it would be madness to try and get them in there. But you need to give us some stakes, and those need to be thematically connected to the big stakes. But you're doing a little microcosm, you're giving us a small bubble in which we can understand the kind of story that we're in and where we're going to be going with that. So think about ways that you can have a nearer, smaller version of the stakes of the story as what's in that first scene, what we're engaging with there. So that then we have an idea of where it's all going over the course of the 800 pages that come after this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that we talk about so often when talking about stakes, when talking about how to make a novel more immediate, is the character. The character of the no… The character that you're along the ride on. Something that I have recently had an epiphany about… When Dongwon was talking about a mind divided against itself, that when you're on a character story, that the essential question that the character is asking is who am I. That they've hit something that has caused them to have some doubts or some conflict about who they are. So you can begin to show those cracks in who… Who their understanding of themselves is even in that opening scene when they have to make a small version of a larger choice that they're going to have to make later. That who am I… Am I the person who takes the call from my mom or am I the person who finishes ordering my coffee? That call later is about something much, much bigger. It's… That's a very small stake-y thing, but it is… It's that who am I question can often lead to more specific and personal stakes later.

 

[Mary Robinette] Actually, Dongwon, do you have, speaking of characters, do you have homework for us?

[Dongwon] I do have some homework. The thing that I want you to do is to break down every character that appears in your first chapter. Ideally on an index card. Then, on those cards, write out what each character's wants and needs are. What does the character think they want? What does the character need to get to resolve their arc? Then, ask yourself, what stakes are on the page there that you can work into this scene in an explicit way? If you have a strong idea of where each character is going, then you can start injecting those stakes and making sure there represented on the page in those opening scenes. I have a second piece of homework, which I mentioned briefly earlier. Which is, we're going to be talking about specific examples for the next few episodes. Next week is going to be The Haunting of Hill House. So do yourself a favor and read that first page. Then when we get into the in depth conversation, you'll have a little bit more context of where we're going.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/10/16-02-publishers-are-not-your-friends/

 

Key Points: Publishers, the companies, are not your friends, even if editors and individuals may be your friends. The businesses have different incentives, which may not match your incentives as an author. Example: the corporation will try to take worldwide rights in all languages, but they probably won't exploit them well. Another example, when you want to change series or genres, the corporation wants to keep you in that well-worn slot, but you may want to change. Also, be aware that your agent and you may have different incentives. Remember, you are the person who cares about your career, so take care of it. Your relationship with the publisher and the agent is a business relationship.

 

[Season 16, Episode 2]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Publishers Are Not Your Friends.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

 

[Dan] We are back for another episode of Brandon's intensive course on career planning and kind of the inside of publishing. This time we want to talk about publishers. Now, Brandon, you named this episode Publishers Are Not Your Friends.

[Brandon] Yep.

[Dan] That's not what I want to hear.

[Brandon] Well, yeah. It's not what I wanted to hear, either. Actually, I got told this by my agent early in my career. Working on, I think, my first contract. I'm like, "But, no. I want to have a really good relationship with my publisher." The thing is, when I say publishers in this, I'm not usually meaning the individual, the publisher, I am meaning the company, the publisher. My editor is, indeed, my friend. Right? Indeed, many people at the publisher are my friends. But the corporation that is publishing you, traditionally published, is not your friend. This can be expanded to, unfortunately, Amazon is not your friend. Indeed, to an extent, your agent is an individual might be your friend, but your agency might not always be your friend. What do I mean by this? I mean that everyone is, when you're looking at yourselves as businesspeople, everyone has different incentives working on books. Your incentives as an author do not always align with your publisher or your agent. Almost always, it's going to align with your agent's incentives. But there are a lot of times where the publisher's incentives and yours are very different. I've got a bunch of examples of this. We'll go through them. But the idea is that I want you to start thinking about this. Because the publisher as a corporation will pretend to be your friend. Indeed, you will have good relationships hopefully with the people at the corporation. But they will make the corporate decisions rather than the friend decisions when money is on the line.

[Howard] Several years ago, my friend, Dave Brady, wrote a piece on loyalty to a corporation and the madness that it is. I want to read a little bit of this text from my friend Dave because it's so amazing. "A corporation is not a living creature. It has no soul, it has no heart, it has no feelings. It can neither experience towards you nor enjoy from you even the concept of loyalty. It's a legal fiction and it exists for one purpose, to make profit. If you assist in this goal, your ongoing association with the organization is facilitated. If you distract from it, will be cut. Family is where they have to take you in, no matter what you've done. A corporation is the exact opposite of that."

 

[Brandon] Exactly. Again, none of us want to hear this. I didn't want to hear this. In fact, it took me years to understand what my agent was saying. I'm hoping that with some of my examples here, you will be able to understand. Like, let me talk about one of them that happened in my career. So, when you sell the rights to your book to a publisher, there are lots of different rights that you can sell. You can sell… What is normally sold to a US publisher is US or North American English rights. They will want to take worldwide rights in all languages. They will not be able to exploit those very well. But they'll want to take them. Well, why do they want them? Well, think about it this way. If they take all of those rights from you, and they make an extra $2000, then, they have come out ahead in that contract. Those rights are only worth maybe $2000 to them. To you, those rights may be worth $50,000. The corporation is not going to look and say, "Wow. If we let him have these, it's $50,000 to him. If we keep them, is $2000 to us and $2000 to him." They're not going to think that way. They're going to think, "$2000 of profit is $2000 of profit. We should not let go of these." But to you, those mean a ton. How did this work in my career? Tor fought to try to get world English rights out of me. They let go of all the other English rights… Or all the other language rights very easily, but they wanted to sell my books to their imprint in the UK, which was going to give them a couple thousand dollars for them. My world English rights, which is usually considered the UK, Ireland, Australia, and other places they export, like India. That was worth, when we finally sold it, somewhere around $50,000 on that same book. Tor would have been perfectly happy taking that $2000 and never launching me in these other countries. And really kind of ruining my career worldwide. They would have done that in a heartbeat. We took it to a publisher in the area who had unaligned incentive with me, that wanted to sell me really big in these countries. Tor would not have lost any sleep or even shed a tear if they had made an extra couple thousand dollars off of me by ruining my career worldwide.

[Dan] Let me give an alternative perspective on this. Because, first of all, that's absolutely true. I make a vast majority of my money outside of the US. So I am all aboard for international rights. On the other hand, some of my early deals with HarperCollins, they wanted to maintain international rights and we didn't let them. We kept them because I wanted to be able to sell to Germany and South America, which are my big markets. The result is that me as a person, my contract to them was actually worth less, because I was only making them money through one channel, instead of through multiple channels. We were able to work around that, and Partials was still a very big success. But it's definitely something to think about. I had to find other ways to make myself more valuable to the publisher.

[Brandon] Yeah. Part of this equation for us, and this goes back to last week, learning your business, was understanding that Tor had a poor business in the UK, and indeed, would not have been able to do for me, in the UK and world English markets, as well as going to a local publisher. It was worth such a small amount of money to them that we didn't think it would really add anything. But it is a consideration. There are times when you want to give up some or all of these rights for one reason or another.

[Mary Robinette] Just to add on to that. The… When I had the Glamorous History series, Tor also held the English language rights. They never sold the rights to Of Noble Family in the UK, which is book 5. There's a reason, in the UK, you can only get books one through four, book five wasn't sold. That is the one that took the longest to earn out. Because we only had one stream for that, which was the US.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Now, I want to pause here for our book of the week, which is actually a little bit about my story with HarperCollins. On my second series with them, the Mirador series, which is my cyberpunk YA, that series didn't fit well with them. In hindsight, it was not a good fit. My age… My publisher, my editor, I should say, my editor loved it. He was 100% behind the book. But, as Brandon was saying earlier, the publisher at large was not. We kind of had to convince them to take a risk on it. What that meant is that they didn't really understand the book, they didn't really understand how to sell it. So the series, every book in that series sold worse than the last one. By the time we got to the third book, they essentially just opened their window and threw a bunch of copies out and hoped people caught them. It got zero marketing, zero publishing. That one is called Active Memory. It's the best book in the trilogy, and I would love for you to all go read it. Because it's great. Even though the publisher did not know what to do with it, and therefore didn't support it.

 

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, another place that this happens is when you are trying to change up your career. Starting a new series. Starting a new genre. Another thought experiment you can have, and of course, this… There are lots of different things that play into each of my examples here that could change around the numbers for you. But let's imagine that you are pretty good at writing fantasy novels. You make, say, $50,000 at fantasy with each of your new fantasy novels. But you, as a writer…

[Mary Robinette] I would love to imagine that.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But you as a writer love the idea of writing different thing, because your artistic pursuits take you different directions. Indeed, let's say you could write science fiction books, and they make $40,000. Which to you is a good trade-off, because it lets you do something else. It lets you avoid burnout. It lets you just explore new areas and potentially get new fans and things like this. Publisher's not going to want you to do that. They would rather have you not be writing that $40,000 book, in fact, they would rather you just not release it. Because they would rather slot into that slot a science fiction writer earns 50,000 a year, rather than have you do $50,000 with a fantasy and the other side… And then your science fiction next year do $40,000. They would just rather have two $50,000 books and have you not publish a book that year. Now that obviously is a very different alignment in interests. I've known lots of writers who are like, "You know, I want to try a fantasy now." Publishers are like, "Oh, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea for this reason and this reason and this reason. You shouldn't do this." Well, a big part of this is that, but even if they were making the same money, it is very… Much easier for a publisher to brand an author as "This is our fantasy person." The marketing people want to know this is our person who writes this style of book. They want to be able to have the sales force go into the bookstores and say, "You buy this sort of book from this author." That's just way easier for them, and it's actually way… They have strong incentives to have that kind of list. They don't want to have this person who does all these eclectic things that they have to explain to people. Where that may be where you want to take your career.

[Howard] I wanted to point out that in this situation, in this circumstance, it's really difficult for the individual author to wrap their head around the full list of things that the publisher is looking at when they're making those kinds of decisions. But the agent you may have partnered with may have a really good grasp of that. This is one of those cases where having a friend was also a business, who is an agent, can really help you deal with the publisher. Because you can talk to your agent and you can say, "Look. I want to write science fiction. That's what's going to keep me happy. What do you and I need to do, writer and agent, what do you and I need to do in order to find a way to make money with publishers for that?" The discussion after that point is going to take all kinds of shapes depending on you're publishing with.

[Mary Robinette] To that point, harkening back to the first thing in this, when we were talking about thinking of yourself as a business as well, be careful about branding yourself by whatever it is that the publisher initially slots you into. So, I was initially slotted into historical fantasy. Right now, I am writing science fiction, historical science fiction. But whatever. But the point is, I am doing much better… My sales numbers are much, much better with the science fiction. If I had branded myself solely as a historical fantasy author, if I had done that with my twitter handle, my website name, and all of those things, that would have locked me into something that did not represent everything that I could do. George RR Martin, his first books were about vampires on steamships. Like, you don't want to lock yourself into whatever that first book is, because something else may happen. The publisher, if they are paying attention to your numbers, which is what happened… The reason we moved over to Science Fiction was because they noticed… With me, they noticed that I kept winning awards with science fiction short stories. I was not winning awards with fantasy short stories. So, they're like, "Why don't you try a science fiction novel?"

 

[Brandon] It is much easier, and we'll have a whole episode on branding later on, but it is much easier for the publisher to brand you as a series. This is really common in YA. They lips us it's easier for their sales force to sell a series than an author. It's easier for the publisher to be like, "We have this series." You want to brand your name. They're going to want to brand the series. This is just very… Historically, what I've seen in almost every instance. The other thing I want to mention before we leave, even though I know were running a little low on time, is, there are a couple of places where you and your agent will have different incentives. Not nearly as many, but I do want to bring them up. It's happened in two cases, most often I've seen in the industry. One is that, particularly early in your career, a small amount of money to you might be life changing. Right? You may be able to pay your rent with an extra $500 from your book getting sold into a foreign market that does not pay a whole lot of money. Your agent will make 75 bucks off of that $500 sale. Their incentive, if you look at an hour to earnings ratio for them, it might take them three or four hours of work to get that sale to happen in that small country. They may look at it and be like, "This just isn't worth the money. I'm not going to spend the time there." Where that $500 coming to you could mean the difference between making rent and being able to be full-time and not. So you need to be in charge of your career and saying to the agent, "I really want you to go and spend this time." They... A good agent will recognize that selling you worldwide is going to help build the brand of the author in ways that are beyond that extra 500 bucks. But I've known a lot of agents who just don't do the extra work to sell those small markets.

[Howard] I was almost published by Steve Jackson games. The publisher is not your friend. Steve Jackson is my friend. The original contract that came out, I looked at it and realized if you're planning on selling a couple of thousand books and paying me 5%, I will run out of money before these hit print. Steve came to me, my friend Steve, not the publishing company friend, my friend Steve said, "The only way for you to eat is for you to self publish." Then he put me in touch with his spouse Monica who walked me through building self-publishing. Monica has since passed away and I love her and can point at that friend is one of a handful of people… A handful of people who made my career possible. But that handful of people does not include a company. It was somebody who was acting against the interests of their company in order to help me. I was very fortunate.

[Brandon] Yeah. Kind of pulling us to a close here. We'll talk about this later. But we'll keep coming back to this concept. Just get it in your head. You are the person who needs to care about your career the most. You are the person who needs to watch out for yourself and make sure you're not being taken advantage of. You can't expect an agent and a publisher to do this for you. Maybe at times they will. Maybe at times they'll help you out. But at the end of the day, you have to understand, you have business relationships with people in addition or alongside your friendships.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Now we do have one closing bit of homework, which is also from Brandon.

[Brandon] Yes. So, one thing that was related to this is that Dan and I when we were breaking in, one of the things we found very useful to do, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I want to give you the homework for it. Which is, make a little black book, so to speak, of publishers. This is write down all the publishers in traditional publishing who are releasing new books by new authors consistently into the bookstores where you shop and you can find them there. Write those names down, write those publisher names down, and start watching for the books that they release and the editors who work there. So that you start having a grasp on the industry and who are the players that are in the industry. Read all of the acknowledgments pages for those books. Find the names of the agents. Start actually treating yourself like a businessperson who is looking how to network and how to understand your business.

[Dan] Fantastic. So. Thank you for listening to Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/16/15-07-creating-chapters/

 

Key Points: How do you make chapters? Feeling! Some people create them, others chop things into chapters. Chapters have a beginning, middle, and an end, like a short story. Chapters have a miniature arc of action. Chapters are like episodes, climbing towards a finale. Chapters interlock, forming a part of a book. Take your outline, which describes scenes, and think about what scenes can be combined into a single chapter, thematically or emotionally. Pay attention to the page turn! The chapter break forces a new beginning. How do you begin and end chapters? Do you do cliffhangers or not? Chapter titles, first lines, first paragraphs may signal what a chapter is going to be about. The beginning of a chapter is like the first line of a book, a place to grab the reader and pull them into reading more. Use cliffhangers sparingly. Try to use cliffhangers with a promise of what you are going to get, rather than just question marks. Pay attention to genre, thrillers need tension. Make your chapters rewarding, but keep your readers wanting more, too.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Chapters.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We are, again, taking questions that we have been given and creating episodes around them. This one is a common question we get asked, which is, how do you make chapters? How do you decide where to break your stories up, and how to divide them up? I get this a lot, like in Q&A sessions that I'll do and things like that. It's always kind of hard to answer, because it's not a thing I studied. It's not a thing I ever looked at in anyone else's books. It's just a thing that I just started doing, and it just felt natural. I talk to a lot of writers, and that's how it goes. Right?

[Victoria] Yeah, it's hard to sit here and think about what are the mechanics or what are the rules. I feel like we're going to be able to talk about a lot of our personal guiding principles, but not necessarily any codified guidelines for something like this.

[Dan] Yeah. Although the good news is, based on what we're saying, listeners, you can take away that, at the very least, this isn't something that matters is much as you think it does. Right? You can kind of fake your way through it until you get a feel for it, and it will turn out better than you expect it to.

[Howard] We had a difficult time naming this episode. I think… I just realized the disconnect for me is that I don't create chapters, I chop things into chapters. I had a thing that is… I have a thing that exists, and I am deciding where the breakpoints are. Rather than saying, "Wow, I need a chapter here." As we prepared for the recording sessions today, we have a craft services table with food for us. I got to unwrap a block of cheese. That block of cheese is probably way less interesting than the novel, but it needed to be cut into chapters, it needed to be cut into pieces so that Howard didn't just walk away with a fistful of cheese. That's the way I think about it. These are…

[Dan] I mean, he still did, but…

[Howard] Well, that's because cranberry wensleydale is crack.

[Brandon] See, it's interesting because I do create chapters. I'm not taking the whole and just chopping it up. When I'm creating an outline, one of the things I'm doing is I'm… I'm just getting it all on there. But when I sit down for the day's work, I say, "All right, what do I need to achieve today? How can I form a chapter out of that? How can I have a rising action, how can I have questions be answered, how can I actually create something that feels like it has a beginning, middle, and an end?" Basically, I'm going to create a short story set in the world that is a continuation of other short stories.

[Howard] So, your chapters take shape after the initial outlines. I don't want to suggest that I do chapters when the final prose is done. Yeah, I'm the same way. In that I outline, but I don't outline to the chapters. They take shape later.

[Victoria] I think I'm in Brandon's camp here in that I don't like thinking about how hard it is to write a book.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] A book is a very long, very daunting thing. What my plots do is essentially function like a series of escalating episodes. I treat each chapter as a short story, as a short story of kind of interlocking stories. Almost like a season of television than a movie. So when I'm approaching a chapter, whether it's a short chapter for middle grade or a longer chapter for a fantasy, I make sure that I have a miniature arc of action happening within that chapter. I want to fulfill certain promises. I want to not only move my characters from A to B physically and emotionally, but I almost wanted to feel like an exciting little episode that does something in the interest of climbing the steps toward my finale.

 

[Brandon] Yeah, the great thing about this also is once you learn this with chapters, like… I don't want to imply this isn't important to learn. That's not what I was meaning at the beginning, because I think it is. But it's something you can pick up on your own. The great thing is, once you start to learn it… People ask, "How do you create a thousand page fantasy novel? How do you create…" I've got Stormlight Archive which is two arcs of five in a 10 book series, and each… It gets, like, that is way easier than learning to create chapters, which you do over time, practicing, at least I did. Once I got able to interlock these scenes, basically episodes, I could be like, all right, these 10 episodes make a part of the book. Three of those make an entire novel. Three of those make a super arc through a series. Then you start to do this, and the chapter is where that all begins for me.

[Victoria] I do the same thing, I think. Shades of Magic is broken into something like 10 parts, each part has maybe 5 to 6 chapters in it. Each part is functioning as almost a season arc. The entire book is like a TV show. Each chapter within the arc is like an episode of the season. I know that I want to create a certain pace. But also, I do this from a complete self-preservation standpoint of I would get completely overwhelmed if I couldn't break it down into a substantial… Like substantially a smaller piece. On top of that, I like the satisfaction of a chapter that feels like we go through all of the emotional beats that I want you to. I wanted to feel… I have books where I have had a one-page chapter. I'm not saying you can't do that, to a different effect. But in something like… The longer the format, the more daunting it is, the more I recommend that writers begin to think of them as many, many bricks in a wall.

[Dan] When I started, my chapters were basically just how much can I write in one day. Which is why in Serial Killer, every chapter is about 2500 words. Because that's what I was doing back then. That's still my most successful book, so maybe that's a good way to do it. But, like, by the time I got to Makeover, which was like my 16th published book, I had… I'd become much more of an outliner. So when I create an outline, it's this big massive thing that tells me scene by scene everything that's going to happen. Then I will look at that and go, okay, which of these scenes need to be combined into a single chapter? Which is a little different than what you're talking about, at least narratively. Because there's not a single thread of storyline that goes from the beginning of this chapter to the end, because it will have two or three different scenes and possibly different viewpoints in it. But I try to do that in a way where they're all thematically linked together, or where there is an emotional through-line through it. So we're going to talk about this aspect of the story or the world or the technology or the magic. We're going to see one character deal with it, and then a different character deal with it in a different way. They will inform each other. That will form a chapter.

 

[Howard] Chapters and prose really are the one place where prose and comics share a structure, and that is the guarantee to page turn. With comics, you're always writing to the page turn. Because there is a visual reveal that is huge when you turn the page. With prose, you never think about that because you don't know where the pagination is going to be yet. With electronic publishing, you know even less. Except for the chapter break. You are… I have yet to read an e-book where I was forced to see the beginning of the next chapter while I could still see the end of the previous chapter. For me, that's huge. Because it means there is this psychological shift tween that thing I just read and not being able to read anything… I'm making the gesture, turning the page with my hands… And now there is all new information all at once. That is… I think that's important to think about, because even if they're just pushing a button to do it, you, the writer, now have a moment of physical puppetry control over the reader. You know they're doing anything. What can you do with words in order to make that more effective? I probably just made it a lot more difficult for everybody, didn't I?

[Dan] No. That's actually brilliant. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I can look back… Even that first one, at Serial Killer, and see places where I did that. Where, hey, you need to be… "I'll see you in the morning." Then the chapter break is, "By the time I got there, they were already dead." You can do tricks like that. That's… Now I'm going to have to think about that and try and do it on purpose.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, the book of the week is Docile by K. M. Sparza. It's a debut novel, coming out in April. It's a really, really fascinating examination of consent under capitalism. It is a slight near future alternate history in which our debt crisis has reached a point in which people are selling themselves into kind of an indentured servitude for a variety of functions. In order to forget this part of their lives when they do choose to sell it… In order to erase their family's debt, they take a drug called Dociline. It's about two young men in the story. One who has decided to sell his family's debt off, and with it, himself, and has decided to refuse Dociline because of what it did to his mother. The other one is the one who buys his contract and is the heir to the Dociline Empire. It is about an examination of consent, of really, really interesting gender and sexuality, a lot of fascinating themes, and also, just a delightful read.

[Brandon] Excellent. Docile by K. M. Sparza.

]Transcriptionist note; Google Books says Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.]

 

[Brandon] Coming back to this, let's talk about… One of the other questions asks about how we begin chapters. I want to talk both about beginnings and endings. Because, thinking about it, where I break a chapter is often based on where I began a chapter. Because chapters work very well for me if I have some sort of note I can hit again near the end to signal, hey, we've completed this arc, or a character's looking for something, the character finds something. It's this MICE quotient thing Mary Robinette likes to talk about, I'm using very instinctively in creating chapters. So, how do you begin and end chapters, and then, kind of a question of this, if you want to talk about… Sometimes you want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, sometimes you don't. What's the difference there?

[Victoria] Um… Go ahead.

[Dan] So, when I wrote Zero G and started my middle grade series, I wanted to give chapter titles. Because that's kind of a very good middle grade thing, I always loved chapter titles when I was a kid. That enabled me to set things up… This chapter is about X. Like, you know that right off the bat because there's a title that tells you. I realized, in the process of doing that, that that's kind of what I had previously been using first lines or first paragraphs to do. As a way of signaling a little more subtly this chapter is going to be about this character trying to do X. Some way of setting up, here's what you're in for, this is my promise, this is my establishing shot.

[Howard] Chapters, for me, are… The first line of a chapter is an opportunity for me to revisit the experience of the first line of the book, because often the first line of the book gets so much attention that, for me, anyway, the pros ins up far more refined. Not purple necessarily, but every word is exactly in place. I try to give that consideration to the beginnings of chapters because I see those as decision points for the reader. The… A lot of times, when I'm reading a book, I will turn the page to a chapter and realize, "Oh. Oh, this character. I'm not all this interested in this point of view." But, if there is some turn of phrase or some something right there at the beginning, to reward me for having turned the page… I'll muscle through it. But I'm a bad reader.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Don't write for me.

[Victoria] Yeah, because I write my chapters like short stories, I do put the same amount of emphasis into the beginning and end of each chapter as I would the beginning and end of the novel. I also really… I love it, like I come out of a poetry background, I love the challenge of trying to distill, not necessarily a premonition of what that chapter's going to be, but I write multiple perspectives. For me, that opening line of each chapter is a way to instantly ground you in the voice. Because I don't mark it. I don't start the chapter by telling you whose perspective it's in. So I'm relying on the moment of perception. I write it from third person, so it's just a close third. But the moment of perception at the beginning of the chapter can tell you so much about the person that you're following, about the things that they notice, not only what they're going to be going through in kind of a hinting way, but just where their emotions are at, where their mind is that, all those things. Then, yes, like Brandon, I am somebody who because I write them like short stories, and one of my favorite things in short stories is the full circle moment, I love finding a way to echo by the end of the chapter where we are at. Then, every now and then, I try really hard not to overuse the cliffhanger ending because I think it gets tired. I think you have to use it sparingly. I think there's a difference between having enough tension to make you turn the page and having a dum dum dum moment.

[Brandon] Right. I've… We've talked about this before on the podcast. I've… The further I've come in my career, the more I've disliked the cliffhanger that says, "And he went to open the door and…" dum dum dum. I've liked the cliffhanger that says, "And he opened the door and his ex-wife was there." Right? Like, the cliffhanger that promises you something rather what you're going to get rather than promising you a question mark. When you can make those work, I like them. I do like to use chapters occasionally to force the page turn. I think you do have to use those, particularly in epic fantasy, you have to use it wisely. The longer your book, the fewer of these, I think, you can actually use. Which is counterintuitive. But if it's a short book, it's… You feel less guilty making them read it all in one or two sittings. If it's a long book, that will get exhausting.

[Dan] Well, that's what I was going to say, too, is, in addition to book length, consider the book genre. Writing in thrillers, you want every chapter to end on something tense. Maybe a cliffhanger, maybe not, but if you ever get to a point of rest where your reader can say, "Oh, okay, everything's cool. No one's in danger right now, I can go to sleep." You're writing your thriller weirdly.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, I have a big fantasy series that I feel like behaves more in these epic ways, where you have to use them sparingly, where every chapter really functions like an episode. Then, I have a series wherein I wanted to feel like a comic book without pictures. In that case, it is the chop, chop, chop of the turn. It is treating every chapter like a moment. In that case, there is more grouping of chapters into a smaller arc. But it's about… You can use brevity to the same effect that you can use length. You can use any element, like we're obviously talking a lot about the opening line and the ending line, but every aspect of a chapter is the utility that you have, from the voice to the length to the paragraph formatting, everything that you choose to do. To how many scenes you want, whether you want to have scene breaks within the chapter or not. I think it's about setting rules and expectations for your reader. It's really weird if every chapter of your book is like 30 pages long, except for two, unless those two moments are affecting something that is extremely dramatic.

 

[Howard] Episode five of season two of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, one of my favorite episodes, and it structures for me, it outlines what I kind of feel like a perfect chapter is, because, all of the threads come together in this moment of triumph, and then we get a POV and realize, oh, wait, that wasn't all the threads. Oh, a bad thing happened. End of episode. Page turn. So it's enormously rewarding, and then there's this piece at the end. It's not that it's super short, there's this piece at the end which absolutely draws me further in. Yeah, my philosophy on chapters is that I want every one of them to be rewarding. I want people to be excited that they read that, but I want to leave them wanting more, so that the next chapter is something they'll turn to.

[Victoria] Well, I just want to say, I think rewarding is a key word here, because rewarding is different from dramatic. Right? Like, I think there's a cheat code sense that if you want the chapter to be the most exciting version of itself, for the most rewarding version of itself, you have to end in this like dum dum dum, whether implied dum dum dum or actual dum dum dum. Sometimes, the most rewarding thing that a chapter can do is give you the equivalent of a full meal, and then the promise of something new. I think it's about also… It's about balance. It's about varying it between those things.

[Dan] So, just last week, I read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is part of the Tiffany Aching series, one of my favorite ones. There was a chapter in there with a funeral. It ends with the funeral. There's no cliffhanger whatsoever. There's absolutely nothing to drive you forward. It is completely final. But. The way that the ending was written was so beautiful. It was this perfect capstone to the dead person's life, to the survivors moving on and still going forward, that I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. Because I'm like, "This is so beautiful. How can I not be reading this?"

[Brandon] Curiously, the Terry Pratchett young adult novels use chapters and his adult novels don't. There's no chapters, they just are scene, scene, scene, no numbers. I've always found that very interesting. Why he chose to do one way or another, I'm sure he answered at some point.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time for this episode. Although I have some homework for you. I would like you to take something you've written, and try moving the chapter breaks around. See how it feels to you to force yourself to end in the middle of what you thought was a scene. How to add more onto your chapter and end there. I bet you will find that you're doing this pretty naturally, that you're already creating these arcs. But maybe you'll learn something interesting about your writing and be a little more intentional about it. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/15/14-50-write-what-you-no/

 

Key points: An old writing adage, Write What You Know. But what does it mean? Tap into what you know from your own experience! Extrapolate from what you know. Write what you know is true. Know your genre... or not? Write what you love. Mix the familiar and the strange. Write what you know, but add what you don't know, too. Write what you know may be boring to you, but your experience is individual. As a writer, you filter everything through your own experience. What you are passionate about may be a better story. Use your own emotional touchstones to make a richer story. Expand your knowledge, know more. When you tackle something difficult, put the other parts on an easy setting.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You… No.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] This is an age-old adage in writing circles. Write what you know. You may have been taught…

[Howard] Can I just say write what you nope?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yes. You may have been taught it before. It's kind of confusing. The first time I heard it, I'm like, "Wait. So I can't write fantasy or…" What do you guys think of this adage?

[Mary Robinette] So, I agree that this is one of the things that is often wildly misunderstood. The idea behind the original is that there are things that you know, that you can tap into. You know what it's like to be afraid. You've had these different experiences in your life. If you tap into those and write from your own personal experience, you're going to have a story that's rich in texture. The thing that I often say for fantasy people is extrapolate from what you know.

[Brandon] Yeah, that's a good suggestion.

[Margaret] A phrasing I heard of it once from Alice Chadwick at a conference on narrative and nonfiction. He said, "Write what you know is true." There's some unpacking around that, but I think that really it speaks that same grain of truth, of you don't have to write your own literal experience… I'm not necessarily giving advice to journalists with this, but as a fiction writer, you can write from your own experience. If that is grounded, then that will ground your story, no matter how fantastical you get from there.

[Howard] For journalists, it's write what you've verified with an additional source.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The… Early in Schlock Mercenary, I hadn't done a whole lot of research with military folk yet. But I was fresh out of a very unhealthy corporate environment where… I've talked about this principle before… Position power was being substituted for personal power. I am your boss, therefore you must like me. All the time, all over. It was very top-down. I was familiar with how that worked and how it was broken. I just sort of built the personalities of my mercenaries in that manner. I got email from people saying, "Were you and I in the same unit? Because I swear you've described my lieutenant or my captain." I found that very flattering, because what it said to me is I know enough about broken people to have correctly described one that I've never met.

[Brandon] One of the things that… When I think about write what you know, I get actually really conflicted. Because I like some of the sentiment that this phrase is telling you. But then I go the rounds. If I kind of look at fantasy novels, there is a big part of me that thinks, if you're going to write in a genre, you should familiarize yourself with this genre. You should know the conventions of the genre and you should become part of the discussion. There's another smaller part of me that says, "Yeah, but people who have none of that baggage sometimes create things that are just wildly new and completely off the beaten path and doing something very interesting with the genre." So you can see, I kind of… The two different sides of me fight about this pretty often.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the questions there is, like, where is the line between what you know and what you love? So I think that when people are writing something that… And they're coming to science fiction and fantasy from outside the genre, there still chasing the thing that they love and they're still writing the thing that they know. They're just adding this unfamiliar to it. Which is the same thing that we do in genre. We're writing something that we love. We're always trying… We talk about this all the time on the podcast, the familiar and the strange. It's just that for us, the genre is the familiar. That is us writing what we know. Then we add other things that we don't know onto it. So I feel like it's two sides of the same coin.

[Margaret] Yeah.

 

[Brandon] How do you guys incorporate who you are into the settings that you're building?

[Uh…]

[Howard] You know what, that's a question that…

[Margaret] I try not to, honestly.

[Howard] That is a question that will be very specifically answered in great detail when I'm no longer around to defend myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I remain unaware of an unknown number of my biases that creep into my work in ways that I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, whatever. I like to think that I'm aware of how I'm influencing these things, but there is a voice up in the nosebleed seats that says, "Expect to be wrong. But don't worry, because you'll be dead before anybody really points it out in detail."

[Margaret] When… At a slightly more literal level, I know my first published short story, Jane, was in Shimmer magazine. This is a story about a paramedic who winds up at the center of a zombie apocalypse. Really, it's about her relationship with her foster mother. I have her walking in the streets of Los Angeles. She absolutely lived in the first apartment that I lived in in LA. Even… It's like… It was boring to me, but I'm like, "Only one other person has ever lived in that apartment with me." So, it's like… Walking up the street, if you were familiar with the street when I lived there, the empty lot that's there was absolutely there. She is fictional, the dog is fictional. Like, I don't know much about zombies, but I can root it in a Los Angeles that I've walked the streets of, and I've heard the traffic, and I understand it.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said in there that I really want to underline for the readers about why write what you know actually works. It's boring to me. But the experience that you have as a person is individual. It's not an experience that other people have. It's why you all get so excited every time I break out the puppetry stuff. When I'm in puppetry communities, it's like… They're like, "Oh, that thing went wrong? Let me one up you with this." It's like this is… It's all old hat to us. But when I come over to writing, to prose, it's a novel and fresh way to look at things. So, one of the things that… To get back to your question about how to put yourself in there, is that you act as a filter for everything that you're writing. We get asked all the time where do the ideas come from. We also always say they're all around you. But what you're doing as a writer is that you're filtering it through your own experience. So I think, for me, one of the things with the… Parts of the way write what you know that is true is to trust your taste, and to trust your own experience, and to trust that it is interesting to other people.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So this is Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. I was the audiobook narrator for this. It's the sequel to Amberlough, which I raved about previously. This is such a strong book. It follows on the heels of Amberlough, which it basically feels like it's the Weimer Republic. Here we have three of the… Or two of the viewpoint characters that we had in the previous book plus a new one. So we've got to people that we are familiar with and they've moved… They are refugees now in another country. So what you're getting there is a lot of the outsider "OMG, what's going on?" But you can still see Lara's voice coming through, even though this is in a totally new place. Also, the characters and their interactions are all informed by where they have been… By their past. I think that honestly you could read this book without having read the first one, but the emotional resonance between the two books is so powerful if you read them sequentially that I… I'm recommending Armistice, but if you have not read Amberlough, pick up Amberlough, then read Armistice.

 

[Brandon] All right. So, kind of, I want to push on this theme a little bit further, because I think this is really interesting. A lot of times, when I'm talking to my students and working with them at the university course, this is something that they completely miss. This idea that something that they are really passionate about can make a much better story than trying to in some ways write something patterned after what you've seen before.

[Howard] Certainly, write something bigger than they could ever be is…

[Brandon] Or just more bland. Really.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's the thing. People don't trust themselves that what they're passionate about is going to translate into stories. I really do think if you are really excited and passionate about something, that's going to help you make a better story.

[Absolutely]

 

[Brandon] Now there is a danger there in the kind of waxing too long about a topic or going too deep into jargon or things like this. Kind of losing track of a story because you're too busy writing about the ins and outs of breeding rabbits which is really interesting to you. How can you balance this?

[Howard] For me, it's emotional touchstones.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to share a very personal example. In 2006, I separated my shoulder and was prescribed Lortab and ended up addicted to it. The addiction was not one where I was stealing in order to illegally obtain pills. It was one in which I now had a dependency that was controlling me, instead of me controlling it. We went off of Lortab, and when I say we, it was Sandra removing it from the house and shepherding me through the process of living without this stuff. For two years after that, if you said the word Lortab, I wanted to cry. Because I knew that this was a thing that would relax me, that would make me kind of happy, and I absolutely could not have it. That experience was incredibly alien to everything else about me. You could say a word and it would hurt me. That knowledge… I can use that as a writer. In 2018, I injured my arm in a different way. The doctor said, "Well, we don't know what's wrong yet, but maybe ibuprofen, or we can get you some hydrocodone." I know what hydrocodone means. That 12-year-old addiction came back all at once. I almost broke down in the doctor's office. Now I have this understanding of how when an addict says, "I'm not no longer an addict, I'm just not using. No, I'm always an addict." I have an understanding of that. I don't need to write a story about someone who separates his shoulder and then has a blood pressure problem. I can write a story about somebody who has lost a loved one and thinks they're over it, and 15 years later stumbles across a photograph and discovers that they're not. When I think write what you know, that's a thing that I know.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Yeah. The… Less personal example, but all puppets, all the time, which is what I do, is… We talk about voice and things like this. I've talked about this when we were talking about the voice podcast, that there's three things when we're talking about puppetry, style of puppet. It's mechanical style, the aesthetic style, or the personal style. The mechanical style is what kind of puppet is it? The aesthetic style is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like it's handcarved? The personal style is you can hand the same puppet to two puppeteers and it will look like a different character. It's because of the individual taste of the performer. Jim Henson, if you look at anything else that he did that is not Muppets, like, was much more in a Dada, surreal, experimental land of filmmaking. Steve Whitmire, who initially took over Kermit, was much more of a linear storyteller. So they're going to just make different choices. This is the kind of thing that were talking about with write what you know. It's like when we're saying trust yourself, trust your own instincts, it's… These things will allow you to create something that is special and unique. When you're taking something that's deeply personal, like what Howard experienced, you're going to explore that in ways that are different from someone else who has that. It's going to allow you to bring an honesty to your work when you're reaching for things that you know. This is why also when we, in the larger picture, when we're talking about the hashtag #ownvoices, which is the importance of reading fiction and supporting fiction written by people from a lived experience writing about their lived experience, the reason is because that lived experience is going to inform that fiction. When you sit there and say, "Oh, but my world is boring. My world is normal." What you're also doing is you're setting yourself… First of all, you're devaluing yourself.

[Margaret] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But you're also kind of setting yourself up as the default, as the dominant, and exoticizing everybody else. That's… That is also a problem. This is not to say that you're not allowed to write other people. That's not… It's not that you're never… It's like I am totally allowed to write people who are not a… Let's see when this podcast airs… Not a 50-year-old white woman. But… Oh…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry.

[Howard] I'm already a 50-year-old white man as of this recording, so… Have fun with it.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. To be honest. But the point being that I am allowed to write other characters. I'm allowed to do these other things. But when we talk about write what you know, there's two aspects of that. One is that my work should be influenced by what I know. The other thing is that my work will be influenced by what I know, whether I want it to or not, and I have to be aware of that when I go into stuff.

[Margaret] I think the other thing that strikes me about… I think probably the first time I heard write what you know, I was maybe a second grader, it was like one of those came across in elementary school…

[Howard] I have bad news for you, kid.

[Margaret] Well, that's the thing, because it sort of… You get told that as a child, and it's like, "What do I know?" What you know is not set in stone. One of, I think the charge inherent in write what you know is expand your knowledge. Know more.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I'm going to say is, especially if you are tackling something that is very difficult, it is totally okay to put everything else to the easy setting. If you are… Especially if you are an early career writer, and you're like, "I am trying to get a handle on plot." Don't try to get a handle on writing the other at the same time that you're trying to get a handle on writing plot. With Calculating Stars, I knew that I was going to have to be handling mathematics and orbital mechanics and all of these other things. Judaism! Which, I don't know if you noticed, been raised Southern Baptist and Methodist. Really, this is not… I was handling all of these things. So I set Elma to a Southern woman, I gave her a mother that's very much like my mother, that relationship, I gave her a marriage that's very much like my marriage. I sent everything I could to what I really know, to give myself room to work on and concentrate on the things that I don't know. Even there, I was extrapolating from what I know.

[Howard] And you decided to tackle this project when you are already pretty comfortable with what goes into writing a novel.

[Mary Robinette] That's true. That's the other aspect.

 

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to wrap us up here. It's kind of a sad moment, because this is us saying goodbye to Margaret. Not forever. But this is our last podcast with Margaret, so we're going to let her give the homework this week.

[Margaret] All right. So, the homework assignment this week. We want you to take an area that you are super familiar with and turn that into a superpower. The same way Mary talked about how we all think her puppet stuff is completely cool, the way that my background as a screenwriter has made me a structural god among novelists…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] This is…

[Mary Robinette] Quite true. Accurate. Accurate.

[Margaret] Find something in your life that you maybe don't think is all that interesting and make it the coolest thing on the planet.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you, Margaret.

[Margaret] Thank you.

[Brandon] For hosting with us this year. You all are out of excuses. Now go write.