Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 20.07: Lens 3 - Identity 2 - Motivation & Goals

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-07-lens-3-identity-2-motivation-and-goals

 

Key points: Motivation and goals. Motivation beyond the story. Motivation and goals may shift. What happens when they achieve their goal? Eight jewels of Rovisla. Some goals and motivations conflict with each other. Ability, role, relationship, and status. A headlight writer. At the edge of the cliff, what does their motivation make them do? 

 

[Season 20, Episode 07]

 

[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 20, Episode 07]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Motivation and goals. 

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We have been talking about different lenses that you can be using to view things. So what we're going to be talking about now, coming off of our history and community, is we are going to be talking about this idea of identity and that the motivation and goals and that as a lens that you can apply. So a character's motivations can help them... Make them like relatable to the reader. It can drive the story's momentum, it can create obstacles. But what is good character motivation and how do you share that with the reader? How do you make that visible on the page? So we're going to be talking about, like, what do they want? What part of themselves is the goal serving? What are some of the things that you think about when you are thinking about motivation?

[Dan] For me, it's important that the characters have motivation beyond just the story that they're in. I mean, the first Star Wars movie is such a blunt instrument example of this. He wants to be a fighter pilot. That's his motivation. It's dumb and it's small and it doesn't matter very often, but it is distinctly not I need to go and rescue this princess and destroy the Death Star.

[Howard] But he also wants to go get power converters from Tosche Station.

[Laughter]

[Dan Wells] That is true. That's the thing that he wants.

[Howard] Which is, he wants to get off the farm.

[Dan] To get those in order to get off the farm.

[DongWon] Well, he wants friends, specifically, which becomes his most important character trait throughout the entire arc of Star Wars, is that Luke is someone who cares about his friends. Right? So what we just cleverly done there is unpacked how many different motivations a character can have its, even when what they want seems very simple, which is to be a fighter pilot.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Erin] That, I think, there's a lot of times the motivation they have on the surface is not, like, the true thing motivating them underneath.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Being a fighter pilot is about being away from here. It's about literally flying off, it's about wanting glory, it's about wanting recognition, it's about a lot of those things. Those can get then applied to a different goal. So a lot of times, like, the character's motivation and goals seem like one thing. The motivation underlying stays the same, but the goal shifts.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that I think is so important because sometimes you'll see people and they will have the goal shift, but they won't realize that the new goal does not match the motivation. For me, the thing… You've probably heard me talk about this before, that I talk about objective and super objective. That the super objective is kind of the deep-seated hole that is always there that they're trying to fill. When I'm playing with the idea of goals, I try to think about when they achieve their goal, because often there's the short-term goals. What is the new goal that immediately replaces that? An example that will hit too close to home for our listeners is the idea of, well, I want to be a writer. Okay. So I'm going to submit something. But I'm not a writer, because I haven't had anything accepted yet. Even though I've submitted something. Then, oh, I've had something accepted, but I've only sold one story. So there's this constant… I think for… I think the really interesting goals, the ones that are very sustaining, are the ones where the character is constantly redefining themselves to tell themselves that they haven't met their goal… Their… Yeah.

[DongWon] Well, this… Again, we can go back to Star Wars for this, because what Luke wants is to become a hero like his father was. He becomes a hero like his father was at the end of Star Wars, and then discovers what an awful fate that is in the second movie, when he finds out what happened to his father and who his father is. Right? So we see this evolution of Luke's goal as he's searching for an identity, as he's searching, quite frankly, for love of a parent, of community, of people around him, and how much that goes against him as he struggles in the third movie with am I like my father or am I not? Right? So you can see how the goal shifts as the objective and the super objective kind of move around him. What I love about that also is that wasn't a plan when they made the first movie. That evolved over the writing of the second and third movies. So you can see the way in which writers find ways to disrupt a character's motivation and goals to keep tension moving, to keep the story interesting and developing, and they end up with one of the most enduring stories of our generations.

[Howard] The understanding and application of… Mary Robinette, to use your terms, the objective and super objective hinges pretty heavily on whether or not you understand that in yourself. I've had career conversations with artists, with writers, with cartoonists, and I often come back to, hey, do this job because you would be drawing comics anyway, not because you want to get rich. I remember as a kid, is a really little kid, kindergarten age, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor because I felt like that was a neat job. Then in high school, I wanted to be a rock star because I wanted to be a rock STAR and I wanted to be rich. Neither of those were things that involved the actual passions that I had for doing things. It wasn't until later in life that I realized, wait, I like making stuff. Performing in front of people less so. Carving people up into little pieces with knives, quite a bit less so. I like drawing and telling stories. So the motivation for my character was really driven by the thing I'm passionate about, and the super objective was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could do this full time. What steps do I need to take to do it full time? So, what is it that your character is deep down have discovered about themselves that they really want? Or, what is it deep down that they haven't discovered that they really want? That they haven't explored yet? Maybe the character arc is about learning that.

[Erin] First of all, just a note to self that in a crisis, I will never let Howard perform any sort of surgery on me.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Cutting somebody up into little pieces may not be what people think of when they think of medicine…

[Dan] Very [garbled] characterization.

[Howard] I planned to put them back together. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] I was convinced that I was going to be a veterinarian until I was a senior in high school, looked at my grades, and realized it was a bad option and went into puppetry. But I also changed from… I wanted to make sick animals well, and in puppetry, I just made animals.

[There you go. Garbled]

[Erin] [garbled] worse. I love that. What I was going to say also in addition to life lessons, is that what I like about that is that it talks about how the super objective is something that sort of beyond individual, kind of, like, titles, or you may not understand what it really means to be a doctor. There's just something about it that you identify with. The reason I bring this up is because a lot of times in science fiction and fantasy, I'll hear people talk about their character's motivation as really tied into, like, the world itself. They're like, the character's motivation is to get, like, the eight jewels of Rovisla.

[Mary Robinette] Sure. Yeah.

[Dan] My favorite books, Rovisla. Okay. Continue.

[Erin] Sorry. So, yes. So, like, that's the thing that you're, like, well, why? Like, I don't know one jewel of Rovisla from another. So, like, what is happening…

[DongWon] How many apostrophes are there in Rovisla?

[Laughter]

[Howard] There are three, and they are all jewel shaped.

[DongWon] Okay. Got it. Please continue. I'm… This is very interesting.

[Erin] Sorry. So, since I don't know anything about the world, that motivation means nothing to me. Often, in early chapters of a story, if you focus too much on the Rovisla and not enough on the internal super objective…

[Howard] The apostrophes…

[Laughter]

[Erin] The apostrophes, so to speak, then you don't actually get what makes that character interesting, and people glaze off of it, because we relate to super objectives that we can understand.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well… Sometimes the best thing you can do, sometimes, is give your character exactly what they want. Right? If you are searching for the eight gems of Rovisla, and you're 50 pages in the book, and you get the eight gems of Rovisla, that can be such an interesting moment of, like, oh. Oh, no. Now what? Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What is the story here? Right? Like, them realizing there are still problems that aren't solved in fulfilling their quest. Right? Like, one of my favorite novels of all time was one when I read it when I was very young which is Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown. Right? The goal that she sets out to do, she accomplishes way earlier than one would expect given the length of that book. Everything that follows after is what takes that work from being a delight to being an absolute masterpiece.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that we actually saw in N. K. Jemison's book last season, is that on one of the timelines of the character, that it's like I want to be a really amazing Oragene.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And, yeah. Got that. Ooo, not what you actually wanted. And there is all kinds of complications that come from that. One of the… The next episode, we're going to be talking about stakes and fears, but I just want to say that one of the things that I love about a really good, juicy goal is that achieving it creates the next problem.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that I love, I'm going to tell you about after our break.

 

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[Mary Robinette] I love giving a character goals and motivations that are in conflict with each other. So I break it down in my own brain when I'm trying to come up with them, with… By talking about ability, role, relationship, and status. This is basically what the character is good at, or not good at, the responsibilities that they have, the relationships, the loyalties, and then where they are kind of in a power dynamic. So, if I have a character who's like I love my mom and I want to be there for my mom, but also, if I am there for my mom, that I have to miss this big stakeholder meeting where, I don't know, stake-y things happen.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm imagining this to happen at a steakhouse.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I was thinking actually different kinds of stake, like the stabby vampire thing.

[Vampire? Oh, boy.]

[Howard] There is this aphorism that I've… This saying that I've held close and tried to live by for much of my life. It's don't put off what you want most for what you want at the moment. That is itself the current between the two poles of conflicting goals and objectives. Your… In that sense, in the way I took it originally, is the battle between your immediate appetites and your long-term desires. I mean, that's every substance addicted person ever where they are fighting this battle against a now metabolic desire for a thing that is hurting them, and is preventing them from achieving their long-term goals. That doesn't mean that for goals and objectives and motivations to be in conflict, one has to be wrong. But that's a very common real-world occurrence.

[DongWon] I think time is a great way to create conflicting goals and objectives. Right? What happens on this timeline, what happens on that timeline. Another way is through relationships. Right? Were going to talk about this more when we get to talking about stakes, but the way in which our different goals represent different aspects of who we are in life. Right? What my goals are as a student, as a professional, as a family member, are all really different things, and those are often in conflict with each other. Like, our professional goals and our relationship goals are famously often in tension with each other. Right? In terms of, like, balancing work and life.

[Dan] Yeah. The first Toy Story movie does this really well. Where what Woody really wants ultimately is he wants to be the beloved leader of the toys. Like Mary Robinette was saying, that sometimes the goals can be in conflict with each other, he misinterprets this to mean I have to be the favorite toy. To the point of becoming this incredibly venal selfish guy who's trying to get rid of one of the other toys. Buzz Lightyear shows up, he's the new favorite toy, and Woody is ready to sacrifice him completely. Because he has misinterpreted his own motivation. Then, when he finally gets what he wants and gets rid of Buzz, he immediately realizes, oh, no, I can't be the beloved leader of the toys if I have thrown one of them out a window and cursed them to be lost forever. So he spends the second half of the movie trying to be the beloved leader inclusive of Buzz rather than excluding him from them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] I also think something really fun about, like, really understanding the motivation of your character is that it can help you, or at least it helps me, somebody who kind of writes forward, I'm a headlight writer, so I'll write what I understand until I get to the part where, like, the light I can no longer see what I was originally aiming for, and then I figure out the next part of the story, and then figure out the next part. A lot of times when I'm at those transition points, I go back to the character's motivation and think, okay, I got them to the edge of this cliff. What motivates them? A character who's motivated by being seen as amazing is going to, like, dive off the cliff in a really, like, spectacular way. Whereas someone whose motivation is more about care might say, okay, how can I make sure this is a safer cliff for everyone, and create a path down it? So, figuring out what that motivation is means that this… The story, even as goals change and plot points change, the story still feels like it has a nice emotional through line. Because it's still responding to what the character's motivation is and what that makes them want to do.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that the character's motivation and their goals affect the actions that they plan, that they take, in the story. That changes the shape of the story. So when you're looking at the story… This is one of the reasons we wanted to include this in our idea… In the who and the lenses that… You can… It's not just, ah, this is a very juicy character. It's… It will affect the shape of the whole story.

[Howard] I think it's… Just in terms of story structure, if you've got an outline that on the surface just looks like it holds together beautifully, with twists and turns and pinch points and a great ending and whatever else, but your character motivations don't match, it's going to be a struggle to read. It's going to be a struggle to edit. If you've got a story where your outline is weak, but the character motivation is really strong, and at every turn of the page, at every hard return as you are writing, you are following what that character's voice in your head is telling you, you might end up with something where, yeah, you have to go back and edit and wrap a plot around that in some way, but you're going to end up with something that's a compelling read, and more of us are going to enjoy it.

[DongWon] I mean, this is specific to my approach to storytelling and what I enjoy to read, but I'm very much a plot derives from character person. Right? Like, I think when I see story problems arise, so often it's because somebody came in with an idea of here's what happens in the story and then tried to backfill what the motivations were that got them there. Sometimes when you do that, it's really hard to get motivations to line up with the actual events that you want to have happen. Versus if you flip it, and this is admittedly a little bit easier if you're a headlight writer like Erin versus a plotter, but having a strong sense of what your character's motivations are, are the things that can lead you to interesting complex plots. Right? As you have characters who want different things, and, for themselves, have their own tiered wants that are in conflict with each other, that's where complexity comes from. Right? When you have a character who wants three things, two of them are in conflict with each other, and they're trying to pick between those, and another character also wants three things that intersect with the first character's things, you have so many places you can go to, so many choices you can pick from. That's when the interactions, the intersections between these plot arcs are going to feel really nuanced and exciting because you have the richness of this whole tapestry that you start weaving together.

[Mary Robinette] It's interesting, as you say that, because I'm… I tend to be a plotter, but I do not plot my character arcs. I think that's because I come out of theater, so character is the thing that I've internalized the most. So I'm like, here are the events that are going to happen, and part of what I enjoy is this is how my character reacts to them as these events stampede across their goals. One of the things that I will do sometimes is that I will give my character a small goal at the beginning that's just like a cup of coffee, warm pair of socks, just want to take a nap. Whatever it is. I think of that as kind of my avatar of success, for now we are in a safe secure place because we can have the thing that we have not been able to have. As a… Related to that with the Glamorous Histories, once Jane and Vincent are married, I didn't want to do the will they, won't they kind of thing where it's constantly breaking a couple up. So I gave them the motivation for the all four of the second books, that all they want to do is get off the page and go have sexy fun times.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Things keep getting in the way of that. So I do think that if you can give them something that is not related to the plot in any way…

[DongWon] Yeah

[Mary Robinette] Shape or form, that it can help make things a lot more interesting.

 

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of things that can make stuff more interesting, we have a little bit of homework for you. So, we've been talking about motivation and goals. I want you to write a scene from a secondary point of view character. This is not something you need to include in the novel, this is… Or short story, this is an exercise. Write a scene from a secondary point of view character. Pick a concrete goal for them that is not the protagonist's goal. How does that change the way they react in the scene? Can you take those reactions and bring them back into the main scene and make it more interesting?

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-48-nanowrimo-week-5-writing-endings 

 

Key points: How do you wrap up your novel? What makes a satisfying ending? Make sure the parentheses are closed. But how do you decide what to resolve, and what to leave open? Endings let the characters and your reads feel everything that has happened. Give the readers the same grounding that you did at the beginning. Where, who, why, how. Restate the core thematic elements of the story. Give us the aftermath. How do you leave the door cracked for a follow-on, and still give a satisfying ending? Remember, life is messy, and your character may not achieve all their goals. Leave some things unanswered. Think about how you want your reader to feel, and make sure that is the last beat, but leave other questions hanging. End with a success that leaves something else to try. Revision! Not for NaNoWriMo, but when you reach the end, you know what questions you should have been asking, and you may need to go back and set it up right. Go ahead and try different endings! Nowhere near the end? Write yourself some notes about what you want the ending to be.

 

[Season 18, Episode 48]

 

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[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 48]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 5, Welcome to the End.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Mary Robinette] Congratulations. You have made it to week 5. For those of you who are still writing, and all of you should be, because we believe in you, you are now trying to wrap this thing up. Listen, if you lost steam, you don't have to have 50,000 words. This is about just moving forward. You can save this episode and listen to it when you're ready. But we're going to be talking about how to wrap up your novel. So, what are some things, like when you are thinking about moving towards a satisfying ending? What are some of the elements that you think about as, hmmm, this feels good?

[DongWon] It's funny. I have an issue, editorially, in thinking about endings. I have such a bias towards openings and the beginnings of books, and all like getting into the story and asking all these big questions, but I sometimes forget to think about how important the ending is. So I've made it a real focus for myself in the past few years to really pay attention and really care about how a book ends and how we're moving on from the story, emotionally. Right? There are so many very famous authors, very successful authors, who are notoriously bad at endings. Where the book just kind of stops. Right? So I think we criticize those endings, but there's a way in which maybe we can think about endings as a broader category than just making sure there's a long denouement, where everything is fully wrapped up. But, overall, I think making sure those parentheses are closed, that we were kind of talking about last week, as we were talking about starting to get to the climactic beats and making sure certain things are tied up. But how do you prioritize what are the things that you want to close off, what are the things that you want to leave your reader with a real sense of resolution on, and what are questions you want to leave open?

[Erin] I think endings are difficult because they're quiet. In some ways. Not all. But there's a moment where everything you've been doing sort of resonates in the room. It's like the moment after a concert ends, when you can still hear the mild echo of the music in the air. There's something like really beautiful about that. But also frightening in the stillness. Because it's sort of you don't have the candy bar scenes that we were talking about last week to like distract you, you're really sort of left with you and the word. I think that's why a lot of times I'll say, for me, I had a real tendency to like just try to murder everyone…

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] At the end, because then there's no one left to be in the quiet and in the stillness. I could just be like, "The end. They're dead." But I actually have found out that… Somebody told me once that it's like landing a punch. When you punch someone, you want to actually let that impact happen. If you punch someone, and then go to black, you never really see them feel it. And that endings are the moment where actually your characters get to feel everything that has happened. As frightening as it is, it's really important to also give your reader an ability to feel what has happened at the end or throughout the course of the book.

[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that The Wire ends. As much as I think season 5 went wildly off the rails, that final moment, you've got McNulty driving down the highway with a person. He stops, and he gets out of his car, and he just stares at the city for a while. Then we get a chance to see, like, what is each one of these people doing, and we get to see McNulty thinking about it and digesting it and processing it. Then he gets back in his car and he drives away. Giving your characters the chance to process what has happened and what they've gone through gives your readers that same chance. Rather than just yanking out the rug and saying, "Thanks for reading my book. Imagine for yourself what happens next."

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I had a lot of problems with when I started the switch from short fiction to novels is that I would in my novels the short story pacing. That I would stick the landing and I would be out. Because novels are about immersion. I wasn't giving my readers time to absorb this. The dénouement that we talk about sometimes. So what I've started realizing is that I need to give them the same things that I gave them at the beginning of the book. I need to ground them, because my character is in a different emotional place. They're often in a different physical place. So I find that if I start thinking about it with the why, where, who, and how that we talked about at the beginning, that I can… I know more of the elements that I need to include. It's like it helps me ground my readers. Like, who is my character now? Who have they become over the course of this journey? What physical actions are they doing in this scene that conveys that to the reader? Where are we? Like, how is the status quo changed? Like, what does the environment tell me about this new landscape, and, like, why is it important? So these are the things that I will be thinking about. Like, we're talking about the very, very last piece of it. But it's that looking back at the beginning for my answers to what we're talking about at the end. Some of it is what Dan was talking about in the previous episode of the inverse thing, or, you've heard me talk about it with nesting code. But that's what I start thinking about, is easing them out and kind of very similar pacing to how I brought them in. If it was a fast opening, that I'm going to give them a faster paced close. If it was a thoughtful opening, that's going to tell me something about the pacing at the end. So, sometimes I'm looking at mirroring that kind of pacing that I had at the beginning, sometimes I'm looking at doing an inversion, because it's saying something about the changes that have happened across the course of the novel.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Sort of building off of that idea, I think there's sometimes… One of my favorite types of endings that I've run into that I think kind of plays into this is when the last scenes are just a restatement of the core thematic elements of the story that you've just experienced. Right? So I think going to your Wire example, McNulty, looking at the city of Baltimore at the end is just a statement about what this whole show was about, what this 5 season project was, was we did a portrait of Baltimore, and now we're looking at it and reflecting on the journey that we went on. One of my very, very favorite endings to a TV show, finished last year, was Better Call Saul. Which, I don't want to quite spoil it, but the way that it ends is such a statement of what is important in the show. Right? Why did we spend all of this time with Saul as he went on this whole journey? It's making really clear, crystal-clear in some ways, the importance that love has in that story and what he stands for and what is important to him and who he wants to be. That is all restated in the final episode in this really beautiful, elegaic way. So I think when you're looking at your ending, it's almost a little bit like writing an essay in college, where you start with you state your theme. You explain how you're going to say your theme. That's kind of the opening to your story. Then you get to the business of explaining all the things. At the end, you're like, "Here's my conclusion. In this story, we discover that love is real." You know what I mean? There's a very simple, boiled down version of how you end the story that can look like that, that I think can be simple and impactful. I'm thinking about your punch example. There's a thing in Hong Kong cinema where you will actually see the punch 3 times. Right? You'll see the blow land, and then it'll cut to the slow mold impact of like you can see how it's affecting the person who got it, then it'll cut back to the wide angle and you'll see them jump backwards or fall down or whatever it is. So you see these 3 different beats and 3 angles on the same strike. That's the thing that makes it feel so impactful to the audience of, like… It can also seem corny when it's done certain ways, but, so often, it happens very quickly, you don't even really see what's happening, you just see boop, boop, boop. And you realize that that guy just got crushed in that moment, he got hit so hard. You can feel his ribs breaking, in that moment. Right? I think letting it sink in in that way and being a little obvious in your ending is not a bad way to go.

[Dan] If you've ever watched a GIF of like a disaster, someone falling down, something collapsing, and it ends right as soon is the disaster happens, and you're like, "But wait, I wanted to watch it land. I wanted to watch it fall. I wanted to look at the rubble for a minute." That's what we're talking about, that sense of, yes, you've seen the big thing, but you didn't really get a look at the aftermath, that's what really is satisfying about it.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the other tools you can use to make that disaster really satisfying.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writers. Welcome to week 5. How are you doing? I wanted to share something with you. I wrote my first published novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, during NaNoWriMo. I also wrote multiple unpublished novels during NaNoWriMo. I've won Nano and I've had years where I could not hit that 50,000 words. So as you enter this last week, I want you to remember that every word you've written this month has been a victory. Because the journey is the thing. By writing, you are learning to write. You're learning to set goals. You are learning about your writing process and what works for you. Whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5000 words this month, you are a writer.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we're going to talk about kind of the messiness of it all. I think you had something you wanted to say?

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a thought as we were talking about all this, where we've talked about closing things out and leaving things on this very resonent ending. I think that can be really important. In the categories that most of us work in, there's a lot of series writing, a lot of people writing trilogies, a lot of people writing ongoing series, and a lot of people are doing quote unquote standalones with series potential. So, one of the things I would love to hear your thoughts on a little bit is, how do you leave that door cracked open? How do you give the satisfying ending, make a book feel like a book, even if it's middle of a trilogy? Right? Make the audience feel like I went on a journey, this had a conclusion. I feel good about where we're ending. And still have more questions to be asked. Have… They want more story, they want to spend more time with these characters. What do you do to leave that door cracked open?

[Mary Robinette] The trick that I've found is that life is messy, and that I don't have to give my character all of their goals. When you read a book and the character achieves all of their goals, those are the ones that feel too tight. So sometimes I don't… It's not so much that it's a cliffhanger, it's that I have deliberately left something unanswered, knowing that that can be a problem for later. But I think about… To give that sense of satisfaction, I think about how I want my reader to feel. When I'm looking at nesting things at the end, I try to make sure that whatever solution, whatever goal thing lines up with the emotional feeling I want my reader to have, that that's kind of the last beat I land on. That's the thing that gives it the sense of closure as a standalone, while the other questions that are still hanging there are available if I want to use them for future books. So, like in Calculating Stars, Elma achieves her goal of going to the moon. Right? But I don't answer your questions about what it's like when she gets there. I don't answer your questions about what the next steps are. I leave all of that open. Her conflict with Parker is still a conflict with Parker. Like, that's not a solved problem. So I have all of that to play with when I come back to the subsequent books. Then… This is outside of the scope of NaNoWriMo, but when I am looking at my next book, I look at my solution to the first one, and that becomes my problem for the 2nd book.

[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that we've talked a lot about try-fail cycles. Generally, a novel ends on a success. I mean, it can end on a failure, but I think it has some sort of emotional closure. But, it feels to me like it's a success that leaves something else to try. That thing that you're trying becomes the thing that happens in the next book. So that's sort of like… So there's a finishing, but there's something more.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Dan] This is such a horrible thing to bring up the last week of NaNoWriMo, but a lot of what makes a lot of this work is the revision process. Knowing that, okay, we've reached this point. Now we need to go back and set it up right. Getting to the end, having satisfying answers, really means you need to make sure what questions you're asking. In the Fellowship of the Ring, for example, that first book ends with the Fellowship breaking and everyone splintering off into different places, and yet it does feel conclusive, because Tolkien made sure that the question asked at the beginning, is Frodo constantly wondering am I leading people into danger? Can I really live with the fact that I am corrupting everyone around me? So, leaving the group behind and setting off on his own with Sam, that is a victory for that specific question. So it feels, okay, this feels very natural. We've asked this question, we've answered it, obviously there's other problems, but we've concluded this part of the story.

[Mary Robinette] But this is why we… When we talk about you have to keep writing and finish, this is why. Because you don't know always what questions you want to set up at the beginning until you're getting to the end. It's… Like, when I was an art major, I would see people… I mean, I did it myself. Where you would draw the perfect hand and the perfect arm and the perfect shoulder, and then you would step back and the entire figure was entirely out of proportion. Because you work thinking about the entire picture. So with novels, like, one of the things that you can be doing for yourself during this last week is coming to an agreement with yourself about, oh, this is what I want the book to be. Like, these are the… And if it doesn't match what you started, that's okay. You have a new understanding of it. You can go back and fix everything that you did earlier later.

[Erin] I would say one other way to do that is if you want… If you liked what you had at the beginning, and you feel like you've gotten away from it because that also happens is something that I like to do right before, when I've done Nano, like, right before I get into the last bits is to actually tell myself out loud, or actually to be honest, tell my cats out loud…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] The story so far. Like, not every single thing, but, like, what I can remember of the story. I find that what I go to, like, the things that I choose to explain are the things that have continued to stick with me about the story that I'm telling. So I may have forgotten one subplot or one character, but, like, when I go to say, like, the Fellowship of the Ring, which I wrote during Nano… No…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. It is about X, like, that's what gets to the core of it for me. Then I can say, if that's the core, then what's the ending that works for that core? Then, like Mary Robinette was saying, go back and fix the rest in post-, as they say in the movie business.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, truly, when working with clients on projects, the things that usually change the most our beginnings and endings. Right? Often in tandem. If the last act isn't quite working, then you'll find the roots of those problems in the first act. Middles always… I mean, every part needs revision, but the middle tends to be a little bit more defined from the jump, and then really… It really is about asking questions and answering them. So if the answers are wrong, then maybe the questions are wrong, and vice versa. So, this is again, this is NaNoWriMo. If you're not feeling super great about your ending, that's totally fine. Right? We're not… No one's expecting you to have the perfect answer to the question you didn't even know you were asking on day one, because it's been a crazy month. You've made it this far. Right?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will also catch you here is that you're like, "I don't know how to solve this. My character has to solve this thing and I don't know how to solve it." You feel like you're locked in because of everything that you've written up to this point. But your… When the book is out in the world and you're letting other people read it, they never have to see this draft of it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So you can always go back and just say, "You know what? They could have solve this the entire time, if they had only been able to tesseract spiders into the building with bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] I knew it!

[Mary Robinette] "But I didn't introduce the ability to tesseract earlier. So, I'm just going to say that they can do it, and I'm going to make a note to myself that I have to establish that when I go back and do my revisions." So just go ahead and give yourself the tools that you need and fix it in post-.

 

[Dan] Well, one of the great things about writing and NaNoWriMo does this perfectly is you can try different endings. This is what I said about free writing in the beginning. If you get to the end and you think, "Well, maybe this would work as an ending. Maybe this is a good solution to the problem." Write it. If it doesn't work, don't delete it. Try something else. Right that. I know that for a lot of you, that is so painful, me telling you to write a bunch of extra words that are not going to be in the final manuscript. Well, guess what. That's most of this job.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a project recently where 500,000 words were written that went into the trash that will never see the light of day, for the 150,000 that got published. Right? Sometimes that's what happens. Right? I think one of the best lessons about NaNoWriMo is there's no such thing as a wasted word. Everything that you put down to paper got you to this point. It helps you realize that these extra scenes need to be written, even if the older scenes also had to be put in a drawer somewhere. All that was useful work. All that was the work that got you to understand what your book really is and make your book the best version of it it could be. So I hope you're hearing us talk about revision and not feeling discouraged. Instead, be excited that you now have clarity about what it is you're trying to accomplish with your book, even if it's just a little bit. Even if you have one degree more…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I hope you don't have to write 500,000 words…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] To the 150 that got published. That's not great. We all felt not great about that. But also, we all felt great about the book that was there at the end, and so proud and so happy about the work we did on it.

[Dan] Well, the same thing that I said earlier about endings, making sure that you're asking the right questions to provide a satisfying answer, apply that to your life! Apply that to the process. Apply that to NaNoWriMo. Don't necessarily think of this as I'm going to end November with one awesome book. Think of it as I'm going to end November having learned how to write a book. Then, even if the ending is weird or there's bits in the middle that are clunky and awkward, that's okay. You learned how to write a book.

[Mary Robinette] Just briefly, I want to speak to the people who are like, "Hey, you know what, I'm coming up on 50,000 words, but I'm nowhere near the end of my book."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's fine. You can… We're talking about things in proportion right now.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] You're totally fine. Don't worry about it. You don't need to have, like, the ending. You just need to hold on to what you're aiming for.

[Erin] Yeah. You can… You may want to take a break. You may say, like, writing 50,000 words in a month was a lot, so even though I don't have the ending like I want to get there. This is when you could leave yourself lots of fun notes in brackets, like, "And here's the part where they figured out the meaning of love," and, like, "Here's where he defuses that bomb filled with spider bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Right? Then you can come back and your future self will have the problem of figuring that out. But I hope the main thing that your future self takes away from it is you wrote stuff that did not exist at the beginning of this month and it exists and only you could have written it.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So we're going to give you some homework. This is, again, a way to help you just keep moving forward. Especially those of you who are like nowhere near the ending and you're just like, "I gotta keep going. I've just gotta keep going."

 

[Mary Robinette] Here's your homework. Gift your character with your insecurity. Brainstorm about what should happen next in the voice of the character as they're facing the challenges in the scene. Because your character doesn't know what's going on either. So all of that and just be part of your character development, and the brainstorming process may get you closer. It also will just get you words on the page, which is very useful. You may wind up cutting it later, but after you hit 50,000 words.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Good luck. You're out of excuses.

 

[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any question that is on your mind.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-44-nanowrimo-week-1-getting-started 

 

Key Points: NaNoWriMo, writing 50,000 words. How do you get started? Writing your opening? Meet the characters and set promises for the readers. Confidence and authority, voice! And information! Promises to me, to motivate me! Voice, character, or setting. Voice driven or action driven? Hook the reader! Write a little, then ask what excites me about that. Do some freewriting, meet the character or setting or voice, before starting. [If you don't start, you can't finish.] Give readers reasons to care, to connect. Think about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Breadcrumbs, not infodumps! Character stakes, what is at risk. Where are we, who are we with, and what genre is this? Within 13 lines, what is the character's goal? Remember, Nano is a time to play, to try out things. Dive in!

 

[Season 18, Episode 44]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 1 - Getting Started.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about National Novel Writing Month. All month, in fact. For those of you who haven't participated in this, National Novel Writing Month is a month-long challenge in the month of November, where you attempt to write a novel or 50,000 words, depending on how you want to define that. So what we're going to be talking about is what you need to do in order to try to have something that's vaguely coherent at the end of the month. These are tools that you can use the rest of the time when you're working on novels or short stories, but we're going to talk this week about getting started.

[Pause]

[Erin] So, how do we do that?

[Laughter]

[Erin] I mean, it's like…

[Mary Robinette] Surely, someone else will start talking now?

[Erin] That's often the problem…

 

[Dan] Getting started is hard.

[Mary Robinette] Getting started is hard. So, in getting started, what we're talking about on day one is that you're going to be writing your opening. This is where you meet your characters and you set promises for your readers. So we're going to be talking about both stuff that you need to establish, but the order in which you establish things is very much up to you. So, what do you all find are some, like, consistent things that make an opening, like, that first page?

[DongWon] I personally really love openings. They are my favorite part of the book. As a literary agent, I'm mostly looking at openings as I'm going through queries and new projects and things like that. So, for me, the thing I'm looking for in that first page, in those opening sections, is a sense that the author knows what they're doing, and they're going to take me on a journey that I'm excited to go on with them. Right? So, projecting a certain amount of confidence and a certain amount of authority in those opening pages are really important. Some of the best tools to do this is with your actual voice. The words that you're using and the sentence structure that you have is a great way to bring readers in and project that kind of confidence that you are going to be telling us a story that we're going to be excited to read. That can be everything from word choice to sentence structure to a kind of musicality and rhythm that you have in those opening sentences. But that really needs to be balanced with all of the information that you need to give to your readers. Right? It can't all just be voice-y beautiful prose, you also need to be communicating a ton of information in those opening pages.

[Howard] I'm a sucker for a good first line. It can take a long time to write a first line that you're happy with. Often, the first week of NaNoWriMo is not a great time to grind on that.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Howard] Caveat. If the first line is good enough to excite me, the first line might be good enough to continue to excite you. So, I always try and fill my first page with things that are not just promises to the readers, but are promises to me, to get me motivated, to remind me how much fun this story's going to be.

[DongWon] Right. This is Nano. You're not here to make perfect prose, you're not here to make sure everything's super refined and edited to perfection, you're here to get words on the page. Right? So, I'm telling you this as ways to think about what your goals are for the opening, but don't stress about anything that I'm saying right now.

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned voice. Voice is one of the 3 things that I try to do in an opening. You don't need to do all of these 3. Really, your goal is to hook the reader and get them interested. The way I think about it, you can do that with a really great interesting voice, or with a compelling character, or with a fascinating world or setting. One of those 3 is going to grab that reader in the want to learn more about it and come on in. If you can do all 3, that's even better, but…

[DongWon] Yeah, you can only do…

[Dan] Do one of the 3.

[DongWon] Some combo of those. Right? It's not going to be pure voice. If it was pure voice, then they're like, "What is this story about? I'm out." If it… But you want to have character in their. It's sort of like you're readjusting the levels to sort of fit the story you're trying to tell.

[Mary Robinette] So, I find that what you're talking about, I see as kind of 2 different paths into a story. That you can have something that's kind of voice driven, where the voices doing all of the lifting and carrying, or you can have something that's action driven, where the character is in the middle of doing something. That… There's overlap between those 2 things. Like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, nobody is doing anything. It's all voice driven. Whereas, if you look at the beginning of Ghost Talkers, using my own novel, that begins with a character saying, "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died." Ginger Stuyvesant was sitting with the spirit circle… I don't remember the rest of my actual lines…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But she's in the middle of doing something. But it is that hook, that both of these have different ways of hooking the reader and pulling them in.

 

[Erin] I would say that you may not know which of these you're doing because it is Nano and you're just trying to figure it out. So one thing that I find really fun during Nano is to write a little bit of a beginning and then go like, "What could this be? What excites me about it? Like, what about the voice that I've just written is really interesting? What about the action that's happening is really intriguing?" It's a great way later in the month if you get stuck to go back and look at what are 2 or 3 things that I was really excited about, like Howard said, right at the start, that can continue to motivate me when I'm not sure, like, where I went or how the story has taken a twist or a turn.

[Dan] Well. One thing that I do, and I've talked about this on the show before, but I still do it, and I still think it's valuable, is I will do free writing before I start a book. I will write some dialogue, let a character talk for a couple of pages. Or I will describe the world. I will describe my favorite aspects of the world, the part of the setting that gets me excited. I will try to write something and nail down a tone of voice, or find a weird turn of phrase. Never intending to actually use any of this in the novel, but just to kind of get me into the right headspace so I can hit the ground running when the actual writing starts.

[Mary Robinette] I do something similar, that I will often do a couple of exploratory attempts. Sometimes I am planning for it to be the first chapter, but it's just me saying, "What is this? What is going on here?" Much like Erin does, also. It's just like is there something here that excites me? For those of you who are doing NaNoWriMo seriously, all of these exploratory attempts count towards your total word count.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Save them. No writing is wasted.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about Nano is that it really teaches you that no writing is wasted. When we come back from our break, what were going to be talking about are some of the pieces of information that you're going to need to pass to your reader. But, right now, let's take a brief break.

 

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all of my decision-making for the story. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak freshness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping! Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

 

[Howard] It's the first week of NaNoWriMo. It is time to get started. I'm going to throw a couple of aphorisms at you. You must be present to win. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. [Sigh] If you don't start, you'll never get to finish. I speak as someone who has never actually won at NaNoWriMo. I've started it several times. I think one time, I actually got 30,000 words in on a project. But I've never actually completed something that I would consider to be a first draft of a novel during NaNoWriMo. Do I feel bad about it? No. Do I feel in the least bit conflicted about encouraging you to start NaNoWriMo? Absolutely not. I am giving you permission to start and maybe fail. Because that happens to the best of us. I don't want to suggest that I'm the best of us. There are way better than me who have failed at NaNoWriMo. But you miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. Sit down at the keyboard and write something. Let the words flow, or let the words don't flow. Because until you try it, you won't know whether or not you can do it. [Sigh] I've heard it said that the limitations that affect most people are what they believe their limitations to be, rather than what their limitations actually are. So, whether or not you think you can finish NaNoWriMo, I think you should start.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right. So. Now that we're back, what I'd like us to talk about is some of the information that you want to try to get to the reader early, early in your novel or short story. One of the reasons you want to do that is that part of the promises in all of those things is that you're giving the reader reasons to care and to connect. Readers are desperately trying to ground themselves at the beginning, and they will grab hold of any piece of information that you give them and begin to build a world. So you want to make sure that you are giving them information in order to build that world in their head.

[DongWon] One of the biggest mistakes I see in openings is not giving enough information. Right? A lack of information density can make for an opening that feels incredibly slow. It's just not pulling me into the world. It's not giving me information about the character and not giving me a sense of what the shape of the story is going to be. So, the way I always talk about opening pages is I want them to be like a layer cake. Right? Where there's so much stuff put into those opening pages that are giving me a sense of world and character and all these things. So one way to do that is to kind of play with your voice a little bit and play with time and interiority and perspective to be able to give us lots of different pieces of information from lots of different angles as quickly as possible.

[Erin] Sometimes I actually like to think about this is literally the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Like, these are the things that your reader's going to want to know in the beginning. You don't have to give them all in one sentence. Though, if you can, that's exciting. But, really, I like to think about when am I answering like, who. Who is this happening to? What. Like, what is actually going on at this moment? When and where is our setting. Like, when and where are we? Then, for why and how, how is a lot of tone. Like, how is this story going to be told? Is this humor, is this a light touch, is this like dark and foreboding? Like, how is the story being told? Why is a little bit of sort of the if there's any theme that I want to put in there, that I want to seed early on. Sometimes, I'll actually go through the pages of a story and be like when our each of these elements clear? If one is clear very, very far down, then, am I doing that for a reason? If I'm not, can I bring it up, and at least suggest what's going on so that it doesn't feel missing?

[Howard] On that point, or to that point, I love the idea of descriptions as being either additive or corrective. I see corrective as inherently problematic. If I've given you some description, you're going to start building independently of me continuing to write things. If I lead you in one direction and you keep running in that direction, but that's not what is actually happening, the next piece of description I give you is corrective instead of additive. Every time you do that, you are breaking a trust with the reader. Now, in a humor novel, you can absolutely get away with it. In fact, it's a fantastic technique. But, I started thinking about it in this way, where, yes, I want to order things, the who, what, when, where, why, but I also want to make sure that if I start people down a path, I don't let them run far enough that I have to correct my description later.

[Dan] I think it's important to point out… We don't want to freak you out with this thought that you have to explain everything in your first couple of pages. That's not what we're talking about. Think of it as providing evidence of what's going on, rather than providing us answers for what's going on. You don't need to explain your entire magic system, for example. But you do need to give us the information that pertains to the scene itself. If your first scene is a fight between wizards, then, yeah, we need to understand some of the magic system. If it's not, you can just drop hints here and there, give us some breadcrumbs, and explain the rest of it later.

[DongWon] One thing I always say is that I need character stakes in the opening scene, I need some sense of, like, what's at risk here. The other thing I always say is these can be lies.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] This goes a little counter to what Howard was saying, but this doesn't have to be your main character's biggest problem. This can be a minor set of stakes that they need to get through for this scene, that will then lead them into bigger inciting incidents. Right? So, I need a sense of the shape of the story. Don't feel pressured to communicate your whole novel to me in this moment. I just need a story, a subplot, a little something for me to chew on that's going to pull me into the rest of the book.

[Howard] Coming back to additive versus corrective real quick. If you tell me someone is desperately trying to get a hold of someone else, but can't, and you don't tell me why, I… Well, if you tell me because my cell phone has no charge, then you grounded me in the 21st-century. If you tell me that I can't get to a pay phone, whatever, then you grounded me maybe a couple decades earlier. Or smoke signals or whatever. I need to know if we're in Civil War era or 21st century fairly early on with the descriptions end up being very, very corrective when you deliver them.

[DongWon] This brings me to one another point is to be a little careful of metaphor in these opening pages. Because everything… I don't know anything about your world, so sometimes somebody… I'll run [inaudible into fantasy?] where somebody puts a metaphor in and I'll think, "Oh, literally, people are fish in this world." Not they were like a fish in this moment.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? You can take stuff that is completely wild because I am… It's all open skies for me. I don't know what it is I'm engaging with yet. So, those metaphors can be taken incredibly literally in those opening pages. So, something to be a little careful about.

[Mary Robinette] I… I… I'm going to give like some metrics for a really mechanical way to do this. For people who like rules and are feeling freaked out. I want to be really clear that this is exercise stuff, this is not books must be written this way. But if you're like, "I don't know, this is too much." Using Erin's idea of who, what, where, why, I do something very similar. That is, I try to make sure that my character's… My readers know where we are, who we're with, and something about the genre or mood. I count when as part of the where. I try to do that within the first 3 sentences. So that I'm just like giving… And it's not that… When I say who, it's not that you have to know my character's entire back story. It's just giving a little bit of an idea of whose eyes we're going to be looking through, who we're going to be connecting to. Then, within the first 13 lines, I try to make sure that we know something about my character's goal. The reason I say the first 13 lines is an entirely mechanical and mercenary thing, which is that it's about the first half page of a manuscript, and that's about how long you have to hook an agent or an editor when they are in the slush pile. So if you can give them something that your reader… Your character wants. To DongWon's point, it doesn't have to be the big thing, but something that's, like, somehow thematically linked. Like, if we're going to be on a big quest later, they're just looking for the remote control right now. But something that they want.

[Erin] Let's say 2 things about that. One is that I think those small things, like looking for the remote control, build the trust that Howard was talking about earlier. You show that, like, I'm going to show you something and I'm going to deliver on it. Then you don't have to deliver on it as quickly the next time, because you've built that trust. But also, to be like a chaos gremlin…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, in opposition of what you're saying, I also feel like one of the things that's nice about Nano, it's, like, a time to play around and find out what…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Surely.

[Erin] And find out what happens if you break all these rules. Do you want to write 50,000 words where no one knows where they are the entire time, including the reader? Hey, go for it. You may find out that you've discovered a new way of writing fiction, or you may find out that it's confusing and you need to go back and add that in. But this is a great time too, like, play around with what you're doing and how you're doing it.

[Mary Robinette] I actually completely agree with that. So we're in great shape. And, I think, that we've set you up to begin your first nano day. Hopefully. So, dive in. All of the words you count write.… All of the words you write count! Now, we're going to give you a little bit of homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that I want you to write 2 different openings. The first one is going to be more action driven, where your character is doing a thing. The 2nd one is going to be voice driven, where you are ruminating on something and kind of just exploring voice. You may wind up using neither of these, both of them count. You can do them in any order you want. But explore 2 different ways of opening that novel.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're now offering an introductory tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/02/17-40-questions-answers-about-structure-with-special-guest-peng-shepherd/

 

Q&A Summary:

Q: How can I avoid putting too few or too many plot threads into my story? How do I know when I have the right number of them?

A: Put them in priority order. Big overarching storyline, big B story, then... Every MICE Quotient major thread makes a story roughly half again as long. Practice. If you lose track of the plot threads while writing, there are too many threads.

Q: How do you spread the structure of a plot line over several books? How do you know when to split it structurally in order to get the right payoffs?

A: Beware publishers splitting books. Each book, and each section, needs a satisfying ending. 

Q: How do you ensure that smaller plots or smaller POVs don't make the reader lose sight of the main plot or feel like the subplot is an unwanted diversion?

A: Character attention can direct reader attention. Watch out for repetition. Make your A plot your shopping trip, and any subplots are impulse purchases that need to be attached to the shopping.

Q: What are some strategies or lines of questioning we can use to better align the character goals, the villain goals, and the overall problem of the story?

A: The character and villain goals should come into conflict. Think about why the character and villain want these things, and how those come into conflict. Often the character needs to give up the want for the need, and you need to tie that to the greater need. 

Q: Besides studying successful story structures for guidance, are there clear do's and don'ts when it comes to story structure? What are they?

A: No. Whatever works for you and keeps you writing. Watch out for characters that do what's in the outline, but it hasn't been motivated or signposted for the reader. 

Q: What methods of assembling structure do you use? 

A: 3x5 cards laid out based on plot thread elements. Cat plotting. Scrivener notecards. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 40]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Questions & Answers About Structure, with Special Guest Peng Shepherd.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We have our special guest with us, Peng Shepherd.

[Peng] Hi, everybody. I'm Peng. I'm very glad to be here.

[Mary Robinette] Remind our listeners a little bit about who you are. You did a wonderful master class with us about structure, and we wanted to bring you back to do a questions and answers. So can you just remind folks a little bit about who you are?

[Peng] Sure. I am a novelist. I am the author of The Book of M, and most recently, The Cartographers. I'm very excited to be back, because I just love… So we did the whole master class about structure, and I had said many times in many of the episodes, "I am such a structure nerd." I went away and I thought about it and I wondered, why am I such a structure nerd? I think that because I'm also a discovery writer, structure is kind of my outline in a way that an outline is an outline for an outliner. So I think I might… I depend on it the way that a plotter might depend on an outline.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] I loved the structure master class. My only regret is that I came away from it a day later with all kinds of epiphanies about microstructures, and ended up deploying brand-new techniques that I didn't even have names for through the current project, my current work in progress, as a result of having a podcast conversation where we're all supposedly knowledgeable and stuff. I just learned things and didn't say any of them into the microphone.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that listeners who listen to that podcast might remember is me having a moment where I said, "Oo, I think you just solved the next novel that I'm working on." I am pleased to report that the… That is true.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And that I did use the calendar structure. I am using the calendar structure that we talked about for The Martian Contingency. Now you might be wondering where these questions are coming from and how you can ask questions on a podcast. The answer is that we are doing this podcast live in front of the attendees of the Writing Excuses workshop and cruise.

[Cheers]

[Mary Robinette] So, these are their questions. Dan, what's our first question?

 

[Dan] Our first question is very basic, but it's something that a lot of people have. This is a common one. This comes from Corinne Flynn. How can I avoid putting too few or too many plot threads into my story? How do I know when I have the right number of them?

[Peng] That's a good question. I would advise putting them, I think, in priority order first. Because you've got to have one overarching storyline that's going to carry you through. Then there is usually a pretty big B story. Then, after that, there's not necessarily a lot of room. I mean, how many plot lines have you had in a…

[Mary Robinette] Well, it depends on the story. The thing that I… Because you all know that I talk about the MICE Quotient incessantly. But the thing that I say is that every MICE Quotient ele… Like, major thread can make a story roughly half again as long. But not every plot thread is a major plot thread. So. How do you handle it, Brandon?

[Brandon] My last Stormlight book first draft was 400… 520,000 words long. I have a lot of plot threads going on…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In one of these books. But I would say, early on, practice is just what got me there. Unfortunately, that's the answer to so many things. My first book that I tried writing when I was a brand-new baby writer, I got like 200,000 words in, and I'm like, "That feels like an ending," and then just had a fight.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Didn't resolve very much at all. I'm like, "And it's book one!" I didn't know I was writing book one, but there it is. Over time, the more I wrote, the more I came to understand what a plot thread requires from me to do it in a way that I find a satisfying narrative. That's why I can now, decades later, right 400+ thousand word books with a lot of different plot threads, because I know how much they each take.

[Mary Robinette] I just want to double check. Was that 400,000 words in addition to the five secret novels?

[Brandon] So this is the Stormlight book I released before I launched into those.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Great.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] So…

[Mary Robinette] I just wanted to know where to…

[Brandon] Sounds cooler. Each of the secret novels were between 90 and 110,000. I'm sure it's kind of the same with you folks, that as you write, you get a feel for how long a story takes you. So you're like, "I know that this one's going to be around 100,000 words," and you just launch towards that, whether you have an outline or not, and you are consistently in that same range. This is an experience thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] If I'm losing track of the plot threads while I'm writing it, then structure notwithstanding, that's too many plot threads. Maybe I'll get better at it and be able to do more, but for my own part, it's what fits in my head and works for me.

 

[Dan] All right. I want to have a follow-up question, because something Brandon just said is right in line with another one of our audience questions here. This one comes from Roy Radien. How do you spread the structure of a plot line over several books? How do you know when to split it structurally in order to get the right payoffs? Now, Brandon, you said when you first started, you just kind of stopped when you were done. But how do you know when is the best place? How do you do that now?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, I can tell when an author has done this. These days, I don't know if you've had this experience, but it happens more often when the publisher's like, "Yeah. Split this book." Then it's just… It's always unsatisfying. Okay. I say always…

[Mary Robinette] No, Brandon…

[Brandon] Mary Robinette's like, "Wait. I may have done it once."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But for me, I'm always looking at each book needs a satisfying ending, and each section of a book needs something satisfying. So when I'm building a novel, I'm asking… When I'm building a series, I'm asking what is the satisfying part of every installment. We've seen a lot of people try to launch, in movies recently, big long series where the first one wasn't satisfying. This is, I think, a huge misstep, a huge mistake, and a huge mistake I made in that first book that I tried writing, where I just kind of ended it. So, if we're talking structure, knowing what your book is trying to do, knowing what's going to make a satisfying ending, and knowing that's your primary job. Then you can start saying, "All right, these sub threads I can raise, hang a lantern on the fact that I'm not going to answer them yet, the characters are too inexperienced." Then that will be sort of the passes, the balls I'm throwing to myself to catch in a future novel.

[Mary Robinette] So the… The reason I raised my hand, like wait, was that I… Calculating Stars was originally supposed to be one book that we split into two. The reason that I knew I needed to split it into two was because I was having to jump important emotional beats…

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In order to save them for the second book, or the second part of the story, in ways that were going to be unsatisfying and frustrating.

[Brandon] Yeah. I should define that better. When it's poorly is when you turn in the book and the publisher splits it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Brandon] I've split books before, as I've been working on them. I've been like, "No, no. This is a trilogy," and expanded them. That works just fine. It's when you turn them in and the publisher's like, "No. Too long. Here's the halfway point. Now you've got two books."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because when I split mine, as you say, I had to unpack and expand.

[Dan] The most egregious example I can think of of the publisher quote unquote splitting a story partway through is the end of the second hobbit movie, which is named after Smaug, the entire thing is about Smaug, and the movie ends five minutes before they kill him, which happens in the third movie. It's shockingly incompetent.

 

[Dan] Here is another question. Once again talking about subplots and how many plots you have. This is from Sarah Hippel. How do you ensure that smaller plots or smaller POVs don't make the reader lose sight of the main plot or feel like the subplot is an unwanted diversion?

[Brandon] That is an excellent question. I would say one quick tip is character attention is something that often directs reader attention. When the characters care about it, particularly in books we can show from their viewpoint how invested they are, if you can take that character and have them spin it into the larger story in some way, this helps a ton.

[Peng] Yeah. They also have to be… I love writing multiple perspectives and I often end up with far too many. So I do have this problem where I've got like 15 people and I need about four, and I think it really is as you go back, you can see when you've got too many people, some of them are repeating each other in some way. Like they're both looking at the same thing with the same mindset. So you want… You only want that one mindset or from that one perspective or only that one person has that knowledge. So that has helped me clean it out, to make sure there's no repetition and that everyone has a reason for being there.

[Howard] I layer it and I think about it in terms of the impulse purchase on a shopping trip. The shopping trip is the A plot. The impulse purchase is the C, D, E, whatever plot. But because it is attached to the shopping trip, we haven't lost sight of things.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's take another question.

[Dan] All right. So this one comes from Daydream. What are some strategies or lines of questioning we can use to better align the character goals, the villain goals, and the overall problem of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Well, you know my favorite thing about the MICE Quotient…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Is that it helps you define kind of the process, the types of conflict that they're doing. So one of the things about a character goal and a villain goal, is that they… That these goals come into conflict. The character has the simplest possible goal, the villain has the simplest possible goal, and then their actions mess each other up.

[Peng] One of the ways I really like to think about character goals is what makes it unique, and it's usually the why. So, a character and a villain, they both want something, and they both get a cost to not achieving what they want. But it's always the reasoning behind it. Like, the mis-belief they've got about the world or about themselves that is preventing them from easily getting the want, and coming into conflict with their opposing party.

[Brandon] Yeah. On those lines, a lot of times, what the character is doing is revising their own goals as they go through the plot, mature, see what's going on. In this case, showing the character giving up the want for the need, which is kind of a classic story archetype, you are very easily able to spiral that into the need is the greater need, the narrative's need, the world's need. The character then giving up the want becomes a great tie-in to that when you do it right. That one isn't that hard, if you're looking at the scope and expanding the scope of your story through the middle.

 

[Dan] So, I want to talk a little bit more about what Howard said, of making sure that the different plots A, B, C… The impulse buys are connected to that central thread. Because of the pop cultural medium we exist in right now, superhero movies are the examples that are leaping to mind. So, for example, Amazing Spider-Man 2 brought in so many villains. None of them had anything to do with each other. They were people who were causing problems. They each had their own plans. But they were not related to each other in any meaningful way. The story of Electro did not really connect to the story of Green Goblin, etc., etc. Compare that to the Dark Knight. The Christopher Nolan one. Where we have multiple villains, the two main ones being Two Face and Joker. In that case, the writers used Two Face specifically as a linking element between the other stories. So the goal of Batman was to get Harvey Dent on his side. The goal of Joker was to ruin Harvey Dent and turn him into a monster. So they did the same thing, they had multiple villains in the story, but they were very deeply connected because the goals were so close.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are going to pause for the book of the week. We are running long for this episode because we've got so many great questions. The book of the week this week is actually my book. Whee hee! It's called The Spare Man. It's basically The Thin Man in space. So if you have not seen The Thin Man movies, they're amazing. But this is a happily married couple, their small dog, solving murder mystery on an interplanetary cruise ship, which is definitely not at all inspired by the boat that I am on right now. There's a small dog which lives because I know the rules. Banter, cocktail recipes, including [Vera approved] cocktail recipes, and did I mention murder?

[Brandon] Not of a dog.

[Mary Robinette] But not of a dog.

[Dan] Not of the dog.

[Mary Robinette] Not of a dog.

[Howard] And a conference room with really uncomfortable chairs.

[Mary Robinette] Really uncomfortable chairs.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that's The Spare Man, available from fine bookstores everywhere.

 

[Dan] All right. This question is from Dorinda. This is much more of kind of a wide-angle question. Besides studying successful story structures for guidance, are there clear do's and don'ts when it comes to story structure? I guess the follow-up, what are they?

[Howard] Two answers. Answer number one, no. Answer number two, what works for you and keeps you writing is the right answer.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, that's the very… It's the truth, right? Every… You can find an exception to every rule, except that rule.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I… Now, I can give some pitfalls for me, personally, right? Like, I can say, "Hey, here's things I've run into that my writing style… When I find that I've done something wrong." With me, that is usually comes down to me knowing what needs to happen in the outline, so the characters know what needs to happen in the outline, so the characters do what's in the outline, and that's not properly motivated and/or signposted for the reader, and a lot of times what I'm fixing after beta reads is things like this. I've kind of noticed that that's a thing that sometimes I do. It's very common for outline writers. Right? You've got… There's the joke a lot of… You see this in criticism of movies, where characters do things and the joke is, "Oh, they have the scripts, so they know what they're supposed to do." The characters know what they're supposed to do, they have the outline. That I want to avoid, and I watch out for it.

[Peng] Can I ask you a question, Brandon?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Peng] These days, how often do you ever get surprised and then deviate from the outline that you've written? Does that ever happen anymore?

[Brandon] So, surprised never happened to me. The way that my just psychology works, I'm always searching for the better answer. The outline is a guide to try to get there, that's what past Brandon, the best that past Brandon could do. Without the experience of having written the book. As I'm writing the book, I'm always saying, "What can be better?" I'm working on the next Stormlight book right now. I hit a thing where I'm like, "This just isn't good enough." Right? It just isn't good enough. So I dig back into it, and I dig deeper, and I'm like, "Let's try something else." That happens a ton. It's not that I get surprised, it's more that I get disappointed. I'm like, "No. This is… I need more." Then I dig. Once in a while, I'm like, "Oh. This is a better connection." But I don't even see it as a surprise. I see it as current Brandon can take what past Brandon did, but has more experience now, is older and wiser.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] By a few weeks. I can now change that up and go forward with something new that is going to work better.

[Dan] I do have an example. This was a question for Brandon. I'm going to answer it. I do have an example of something that surprised me. This was a book, a horror novel that I wrote a couple of years ago, which none of you have read because of this thing I'm about to tell you. I realized at some point in chapter 4, five, six, whatever it was, that it would be a much stronger story if abruptly the monster ate the love interest.

[Hah-hah-hah-hah]

[Dan] On the one hand, I was right. It was way better, it was much more interesting to turn that obvious love interest into a red herring, then he gets eaten, and then we move on. The problem that I had not properly dealt with at the time was, well, what do I do about my ending now? Because the love interest was part of the thread that was going to lead their. I didn't take the time to properly recalibrate the trajectory of the story to account for his absence which left a very unsatisfying ending. Even though he wasn't in 80% of the book.

[Brandon] I've got an answer for you after the podcast. It might be too spoilery.

[Dan] Oh, I'm excited.

[Brandon] I've seen this happen really well. [Garbled] to say, "Oo, have you thought about this?"

 

[Dan] All right. I have one more question. Okay? This one was written to me about a role-playing game that I ran earlier on the cruise. But I think we can apply it more widely. It says, "Dan Wells, after playing in one of your homebrew games, I was intrigued on how you prep or colorcode the different pieces of the game." This is something that I do when I run games in person, is, in order to streamline certain things, I take a lot of the rules of the game and a lot of the elements of character and I put them onto cards so I can just pass them out. Then that makes decision-making much easier and we get into the story much more quickly. But if we can put that into a broader question, what methods of assembling structure do you use? I've seen people on this cruise arranging Post-it notes in different orders. Mary Robinette, I know you do 3 x 5 cards that you can shuffle physically.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Different people use different methods of organizing the tools that they have so that they can see the story.

[Mary Robinette] So I am going to mention, because I can't remember if I have mentioned this on the podcast before. With the 3 x 5 cards and The Spare Man, I laid them out based on plot thread elements that I needed to include. I was re-jiggering because I had made a change about who the villain was going to be. Then my cats ran across the notecards. I looked at it and was like, "That's actually a better sequence."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, technically, part of this book is plotted by cat. Which I highly recommend is a plotting method.

[Peng] See, I would even say the opposite, because I start… I'm very visual and I like to be able to see the plot visually. I started with notecards and I also have a cat, but it didn't go that way.

[Laughter]

[Peng] It did not. So now I use Scrivener. I think, it feels to me like the same thing, because you can drag notecards around on the screen, and my cat can't type.

[Chuckles]

[Peng] So it really works for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Can't type well.

[Brandon] I want to… Yeah. My cat walked across my laptop when I was working on the Wheel of Time, and I kept the letter E. So my cat typed one letter in The Wheel of Time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When you're reading those books, you can know that it was partially cat-produced.

[Mary Robinette] So what you're learning here, dear listeners, is that if you want to be successful, you need a cat.

[Brandon] Yeah. Preferably multiples, who are trained as well as your cats, Mary Robinette. I use a Word document.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Even still. Just a single document that is my outline that I have built using my tools for outlining. No notecards, no fancy Scriveners, even though I've had a lot of people tell me that I should move to Scrivener. I believe them. I'm just old and stubborn.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Everybody's looking at me like I have a solution here. I love the cat thing because that's how natural selection and evolution works is the random introduction of mutations. If it's a mutation that is successful, then we keep it. So go team random cat.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, as Elsie would say, we are all done. So, if I can get a homework assignment?

[Peng] Yes. Your homework for today is to try writing a piece of fiction outside your usual length. So if you're a novelist, try to write a micro fiction story. If you are a short story writer, try to write a chapter or two of a novel. Something that doesn't end is long. See how the size of the idea and the length of the story influences how you end up structuring that exercise.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much for joining us.

[Peng] Thank you for having me.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Thank you to our lovely live audience for your questions.

[Cheers]

[Mary Robinette] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/07/16-45-world-and-character-part-2-moral-frame/

 

Key points: Morally gray? Are the characters rebelling against what society says they should be doing, or are they doing what society says they should? Is it the society, or the characters, who are gray? Society gives us a moral framework. For your fictional world, it depends on your worldbuilding decisions. History, environment, government, magic system, technology, it all affects customs, social norms, accepted behavior, which then influences your character's goals, desires, attitudes, and behavior. Pay attention to the history of your character. If your character is an anomaly, why? Just because there is a moral frame doesn't mean everyone will interact with it the same way. Look for the things that your character believes about the opposite end of the spectrum, but is wrong about. Look at subgroups, both from within and from outside. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 45]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, World and Character Part 2: Moral Frame.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm morally ambiguous.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] We are talking about… Following on the conversation last time about character bias. This time we're talking about moral frame. Fonda, what do you mean by that?

[Fonda] So, moral frame is an element of worldbuilding that I don't think gets talked about a lot. I want to talk about it because I have noticed that many people refer to the characters in my books as morally gray or morally ambiguous. It got to the point where I started to kind of think about it and dissect that a little bit. What I realized is that there is a difference between characters who are morally gray because they are acting against what society tells them they should be doing and there are characters who are morally gray because they are acting in accordance with what society tells them they should be doing. So I have responded often times two people saying that I have morally gray characters by saying, "No, I don't actually have morally gray characters. I have characters who live in a morally gray society." What I actually write is morally gray societies. This is something that I realized over my six books is that that is something I tend to gravitate towards. I mean, honestly, what society is not morally gray? We all live in a society that is full of moral ambiguity. So we have a moral framework that is given to us by our society. Whether or not each individual person adheres to that and to what extent they adhere to that is another issue, but that moral frame depends on our time and our culture and what society, what type of society we live in, and differs widely. I mean, we are seeing, right now we are seeing a global response to the pandemic in which that is… That is highlighting differences in moral frame when it comes to how much we value individual freedom versus duty to community, for example. There are times in human civilization when that moral frame has been very different. There… At one point, there have been cultures where human sacrifice was not just acceptable but was actually the morally right thing to do. So, your moral frame of your fictional world is going to be determined by the worldbuilding decisions that you make. They include things like history, the environment, like Mary Robinette mentioned a few episodes ago, the governance of that society, and also its magic system and its technology if you have those speculative elements in there. All of that has a really powerful effect on the customs, the social norms, the behaviors of people, what they accept or don't accept. Then, that has a cascading effect on your character's goals and desires and attitudes and behavior.

[Dan] Yeah. I ran into this when I was writing my Partials series, my YA post-apocalyptic trilogy. They… There's a plague that destroys the world, very timely story right now that I don't promote much in these pandemic times, but I realized quickly as I was doing this worldbuilding that I had created a situation in which the characters were faced literally with the extinction of the human race. Like, that was what they were up against. When that is the failure mode of your society, a lot of things that would be completely immoral in any other situation become, as you said, not only the right thing, but the responsible thing to do. Some of the aspects of their culture, in particular regarding reproductive rights, seem completely beyond the pale to us today, but in the society of the book, that was the right thing to do for a lot of the characters. That was the way to save the human race. So this is, I think, a really important part of worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… I think one of the other things for me when you're talking about these morally gray worlds is to understand that none of them exists… We keep talking about this. None of them exists in a vacuum. But this also includes a time continuum. So one of the things that your characters are going to be doing is pushing every… Historically speaking, every society thinks that they are more enlightened than the society before them. There are very few exceptions where this doesn't happen. When it does happen, it's the "Oh, in the golden times." What you're remembering is generally your childhood. When you didn't have power and when things went well for you because people were doing things for you. So this is part of why we get these 20 year cycles in society. That there is this push and pull between resistance to authority figures and wanting to have authority for yourself. So when you've got these characters in your trying to figure out kind of where those moral gray areas are, you also want to think about what society… What their parents society looked like. Like, what are they rebelling against, and what did society look like when they were children? Like, what are they… What is their ideal of things were comfortable then? If… Assuming they came from a comfortable childhood.

 

[Fonda] Yeah. I think one thing to think about is if your character is an anomaly in some way. Why is that the case? If they're acting against the norms or the expected behavior, then why them? Why now? What are the logical consequences of them doing that? To create, like, a very simple example, let's say you have a fantasy story in which only the boys are trained to be dragonriders. You have a character who is going to be the first female dragonrider. You can't just have a story in which true grit and perseverance and pluck, she becomes the first female dragonrider, everyone claps and cheers, curtains come down, exit. Because if just through hard work and grit and pluck, a woman could become a dragonrider, then someone else before her would have already done it. So what is it about this time or her circumstances or changing society or something going on in the world… Is there something that is happening that is making her become the first female dragonrider, and what are the consequences of that on her and her community? So, I think, if when you ignore culture and environment and moral frame, that's where you potentially get stories that feel like modern era 21st-century people dressed up and dropped into the trappings of a fantasy world.

 

[Dan] Let's pause here for our book of the week, which, Fonda, I believe comes from you this time.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, my book of the week is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. The reason why I want to make this my pick is that it is… It is not an easy read, it's a pretty harrowing read actually, so be prepared. Have some tissues with you. It is a great example, though, of a book in which the character is existing under fighting and trying to change a world that is governed by a very strict, very homophobic moral frame. So it is… The world itself is uncomfortable to live in, but is a great example of how the author uses this moral frame to advance the journey of the character.

[Dan] Cool. That is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson.

 

[Dan] All right. So, talking about characters who are anomalies within their culture, I think brings us to a question about characters who all think alike or characters who don't think alike. If we need to be careful of anomalies, does that mean that everyone's going to end up with the same kind of perspective and the same moral frame?

[Fonda] Yeah. No, that's a trap that I think people fall into sometimes and use to excuse things. Like, so if they… You end up with situations where, well, every… That's just how it was back then. Everyone was sexist. That's used to justify a world that is portrayed as being unremittingly sexist. But that's… That is not an excuse, because in any given society at any given time, people are interacting with the moral frame in different ways. They are either embracing it, they're reinforcing it or upholding it, they're opposing it, they're questioning it, they're trying to change it. We see that very clearly in our own world. That we… We have many different types of people, factions of people who are trying to push and pull at this moral frame in different ways. We are in constant conversation within society's moral frame. That would be the same in your fictional society as well. So, you are choosing to tell that story and to show the relationship that your characters are having in a moral frame. It is actually lazy and boring to have all your characters interacting with the moral frame in the same way.

[Mary Robinette] I got to take a class by Donald [Moss?] in which he was talking about the dichotomies of society and that there's… That we tend to, when we go into fiction, think of these polar extremes, that either someone is the super sports fan or someone hates all sports. And that most people actually exist somewhere along a spectrum. So there might be someone, like, who enjoys a particular sport, but not all sports. Or, there's someone who's a fan of this team, but is okay with not seeing anything else. Or there might be someone who's like has all of the televisions in their house tuned to different sports game happenings simultaneously. And that it's… If you start thinking about these, then you can use the polar extremes as a kind of mechanism to find where those gray areas are. It doesn't have to be about sports, obviously. But it's an interesting thing. One of the things that he says that is a good thinking tool for this is like what is the thing that they are absolutely wrong about the other end of that spectrum? So, like, the person who doesn't watch sports at all saying, "Well, sports don't have any drama or narrative at all." Without understanding that there is a narrative that is brought to it. They're wrong about that. So, like, looking for the thing that your character fundamentally believes. I think Dan calls this the lie that your character believes. But about a big societal position can give you some interesting ground to play in.

[Howard] A very useful real-world principle here, and it's one that most folks aren't familiar with because the establishment doesn't want us familiar with it, it's called jury nullification. It is the idea that when you are a juror, even if the case is super clear, yep, the defendant is absolutely guilty of… I'm going to make something up… Using potions after 9 PM. Okay? They're absolutely guilty of that. And the punishment is something horrible. But, if the jury feels like, wow, that's a terrible law. Who picked 9 PM? Who picked potions? I sometimes drink potions after 9 PM. The jury can say, "Not guilty." The jury, in legal terms, is allowed to be wrong, but their decision is final. This idea of jury nullification is built into our system and it is a method whereby a group of 12 people can decide that they don't like the law or they don't think the defendant should be acquitted or they've all taken bribes and now we really are in a terribly morally ambiguous… That's actually not ambiguous, that's just really dark brown. But the principle of jury nullification will never be explained to a jury in a courtroom because none of the attorneys nor the judge nor the defendant even… Nobody wants the jurors to know that the truth is we don't actually have to listen to you, we can just sit here and twiddle our thumbs, and at the end, we can decide something.

 

[Dan] It occurs to me, as we're talking about this moral framework, that it is a really good way of talking about subgroups within a society as well. My own religion is the one that leaps to mind. I'm Mormon. Most people, I suspect, have a fairly solid stereotype in their minds of what a Mormon is like. Whereas for me, living inside that subgroup, there are countless… There are thousands of different ways to be Mormon. I am very, very different in a lot of ways from my neighbors, while also being very similar in maybe more visible ways which is what the outside rest of society when they look at us.

[Fonda] Yeah. This is a… That's something you can really do in your fiction is to break down the idea of there being a homogenous group. Right? You see this in something like Star Trek, for example, right? The original series has all Klingons are warlike. There's just no nuance to the Klingons. They're all a type. They're all warlike, they're all just about dying in battle. Then, in future seasons of Star Trek, you start to break that down, you actually see Klingons as individuals, and they are not all… They have a moral frame that is around more and being warlike and honor, but within that soc… That moral… That Klingons society which does have an overarching moral frame, there is many different personalities and they are different on their spectrum of how much they adhere to that moral frame or not, and they're in conversation with it. So keep that in mind as well, when you're thinking about moral frame and how your characters interact with it. I think that a useful thing to do when you're thinking about morally gray characters is I like the contrast someone like Walter White in Breaking Bad. Right? Who is… He is morally gray because he is… He's breaking the law of our society. Like, clearly running a meth lab is illegal, and we can all agree on that, because we're all sharing a certain moral frame with that, Walter White is acting in opposition to. Another one of my favorite shows is the miniseries, Rome. In that show, the main characters kill and crucify I do all sorts of horrible things, but they are doing it in accordance to their moral frame. Because they're soldiers and generals and leaders in ancient Rome. So they are, from our perspective, 21st-century viewers, acting immorally, but they are actually acting morally within their own society.

 

[Fonda] So that actually leads me to the homework, which is what I want listeners to do this week. Take maybe about a handful, 4 to 6 characters, in stories that you enjoy, that you would consider morally gray. See if you can identify if they are acting in opposition to or in accordance to what their society or group would be saying is allowed or not allowed.

[Dan] Fantastic. There's your homework. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/04/05/15-14-agent-query-trenches/

 

Key Points: In the trenches, dealing with querying? How do you survive, emotionally? Don't go into a holding pattern, keep writing, keep making things, keep submitting. Don't give up the day job! Be honest with agents or publishers about your ability to work, when the deadlines are. Set your own success thresholds, your own goals, and be upfront with the publishers. Don't like queries? Try first chapters! Be aware, it's a lot more work, going to conventions, talking to editors, and asking to send them sample chapters. Learn to write a synopsis, which may be your query, before you write the book! Use Howard's checklist: a character, a conflict, a setting, and a hook. When should you give up? If it's making you ill. You may want to just write for fun! You may get someone to act as your shield. Think about what you love, you may be able to get it another way. Before you start, decide what the failure modes are. Be aware that even published authors have to deal with editors criticizing their stories, bad reviews, criticism! Learn to cope with it early on.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 14.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Agent Query Trenches.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] This title comes from a specific question that people asked us about what to do when you're in the trenches dealing with querying. We've actually gotten… We have seven questions…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] All along the same idea. Which meant we needed to do a podcast on this.

[Dan] We asked you what you wanted to hear about, and so many of you were like, "Please help me. This sucks." It does.

[Brandon] Yeah. Queries are miserable. Let's just do the first one. What are your best tips on how to survive the query trenches? I think they're asking kind of emotionally, right? How do you deal with the fact that you're getting lots of rejections or just never hearing back from agents on queries?

[Howard] Years ago, at… I think it was at LTUE, I was talking to a woman who'd handed a manuscript to Tracy Hickman, who was going to pass it along to an agent. She said, "What am I supposed to do now? I'm in this holding pattern." I said, "Well, if it gets handed back to you and you're told that it's awful, are you going to stop writing?" She said, "No." Okay, cool. So if it gets… If it comes back and they say it's awesome, but it's not what we want. Do you have anything else? Have you written anything else? She said, "Well, not yet." Okay, if it comes back and they said it's perfect but it needs revision, are you ready to keep writing on it? She said, "Yes. Okay." All of these sound like you can spend your time waiting still writing. Because this validation that… Because it sounds a lot like your question is about I'm in a holding pattern because I'm expecting validation and I'm nervous about it. Whether I am told I can write or I can't. For me, the best answer personally has always been regardless of what they think, I'm going to keep making things. So I keep making things.

[Brandon] That's great advice.

[Dan] There's a lot of self-care things you can do, but this is, for me and for Brandon, this was our baseline. Back when we were trying to break in, our rule was always be writing and always be submitting. Because once you send that thing off, if you sit on your hands and wait, it is going to eat you alive. But if you spend that time creating something new and doing what you love and following your passions, it makes it a lot easier.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to ditto that. So, not to repeat it, what I will say also is that the thing about your emotional state while this is going on is to understand that the fact that the query has gone out, and you're waiting, that you're in a Schrodinger state. That it can either… You either have a published manuscript or you don't. The beautiful thing about it is that you currently don't have a published manuscript. So, the only state change is going to be a positive state change. Once you know that, I think that a lot of the pressure goes away. Because if that thing comes back, you can just send it out again. There's no… There's like actually no risk.

[Brandon] The thing is, the more stories you have on submission, that you can be submitting, at least, for me, the less any one rejection hurt, for me. This is just, I think, kind of natural, if you've got all these different options. You're not so invested in a single one that a punch to the face right there hurts way more than if you've got lots of different options. I'm not sure how to make that metaphor work.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But it really did for me. Beyond that, do remember that a rejection of a manuscript is not a rejection of you. I know we've talked about this before, and it's hard to think that way, but this is how you have to be. You have to be like these are pieces of writing, these are pieces of art I've created. It might be, when they get rejected, that there's something wrong with them. It might be that it's just the wrong match. They may be fantastic pieces of art. Either way, there the pieces of art you created, and that imbues them with a certain level of validity, no matter what happens. Right? They may not be ready for a professional publication, because they might not hit the market. They might not have the skill level. There are all sorts of reasons. That doesn't mean they aren't your wonderful pieces of art that are valuable because you made them. I really think that is the case. So, do lots of art and be submitting lots of places. Try not to let the rejections hit you too hard.

 

[Brandon] Someone else asks, "Is it reasonable to be able to go through the process of getting an agent/working to publish with a traditional publisher, while working a busy job or being a student?"

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Not only reasonable, but arguably, requisite. Definitely don't quit that job until you've got a bunch in the bank.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's the more standard model.

[Brandon] Having something else to distract you is also really handy when you're waiting for all of these responses to come to you. Yes, in fact.

 

[Brandon] Although the next question is along the same lines, "If I'm slow making edits or accomplishing tasks because I'm busy with school or work, does that run the risk of an agent dropping me or a publisher canceling my contract?"

[Mary Robinette] I think as long as you're honest when you go in… This is a thing that I do see happen to writers, that you take 10 years to hone a book, and you turn it in, and you have never had to write something in a year, which is what most publishing contracts are. When they come to you and say, "We would like the book on X date," it is okay to tell them, "I think I might need more time than that." They'll negotiate with you some. If you want to make a living as a writer, it is easier to have more books coming out. But there are also plenty of people who have a career where they bring out books very slowly. It's just a different shape of career.

[Brandon] Yeah. There are lots of people whose goal is to publish this wonderful novel that they've written. That's… They're the Harper Lee's of the world. They want… They have this one thing, and they work hard and get it published. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be writing a book every year. You have to decide what your success thresholds are, and what that shape is, and what it looks like. It's okay to kind of set your own goals there. I would reinforce what Mary Robinette has said, that if you are… The publisher would rather have the person who is upfront and says, "This is going to take me two years," then the person who is always a year late on their contract. The person who is upfront and says, "This is going to take me two years," they can plan, they can schedule, and you'll be just fine.

[Dan] Yeah. Don't think of it… The problem is not that you take your time, the problem is missing deadlines. So if you just establish the correct deadlines upfront, you should be okay.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Seven Deadly Shadows.

[Dan] Yes. So, a good friend of the podcast, one of our guest hosts a couple of years ago, Valynne Maetani. She is Japanese by heritage, and she cowrote a wonderful Japanese urban fantasy with another great local author, Courtney Alameda. This just came out at the time of recording from Harper. It is wonderful. It is about a girl in Japan who works with her father in… er, grandfather, in a shrine, a Shinto shrine. While she is going to school in dealing with all these standard high school things, the shrine is attacked by Japanese ghosts, by yokai. It spins off into this really dark… Courtney is a horror author, Valynne is a great thriller writer. The two of them together have put together a really cool urban fantasy with this really strong Japanese flavor. I absolutely love it.

[Brandon] Seven Deadly Shadows.

[Dan] Correct.

 

[Brandon] Awesome. So a lot of these questions are digging out an idea that I actually don't think that we've covered yet this podcast, I think we need to highlight, which is, they're saying, "How do you deal with all of this? How do you deal with this emotionally?" I had a strategy for dealing with the query problem. Because the query problem is, and everyone I know admits this, yet there's not really a better method. It is that a query is a bad pitch for a book.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Usually. Right? The first chapters are a good pitch for a book. You read the first chapters of a book, for most novels, that's going to give you a really good indication of the writer's skill level, how good they are at making promises, how engaging their characters are, and things like that. None of that comes across in a query. All that comes across in a query is maybe the basic idea behind it, and some of the skills that you can bring to it individually and things like that. My goal was always to skip the query stage.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] After the first year of querying, I realized I was bad at writing queries and good at writing chapters. This is hard to do. But it is what got me published. I never got anything other than blanket form rejections on queries. So, I went and I listened to editors at conventions, I talked to editors at conventions, I watched what people were saying, and I asked if I could send them sample chapters. A lot of times, if you ask someone in person, they will say, "Yes. Send me sample chapters and an outline instead of a query." That doesn't really help if you're like, "I'm sending queries and getting all these rejections." Brandon's saying, "Well don't do that." But I will say that is what worked for me. I got, in all of my years of sending queries, one single non-form rejection letter. That was from Joshua, who eventually became my agent. But he had forgotten who I was by the time I met him in person and asked… I sent him sample chapters for something that was a bad match for him, and he had rejected them. It was a comedy piece. So, what do you guys think on that? Like, is this helpful? Is this not helpful? Is it…

[Mary Robinette] I do think that there is some merit to that. With the caveat that you should ask the editors and agents that at the appropriate time. You should not, like, just come up to them randomly. Like, don't target them. But I think there is something to that, that if it's not your strength. The other thing that you can do, honestly, if writing a query is not your strength, is that you can get help. There are people who will write query letters for you.

[Brandon] Yeah. This isn't disingenuous. Again, the query is a, generally a bad pitch for your writing. It can be a good pitch for your story. Someone else can write that.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, one of the things that a query letter, and this is a solid reason to get good at it, is that often, not always, but often, the publisher will wind up pulling the language from your query letter for the catalog copy. So it is an opportunity for you to control which of the things you are comfortable with people knowing and controlling spoilers.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's not perfect. But it is an opportunity. Also, the other thing about learning to write a really good query is that it is a way to focus your story. So, I now write my query bef… The synopsis query, the little pitch thingy, I write that before I write the book most of the time. I found that that really helps me hone it. So it is… There are arguments both ways.

[Brandon] I must have query PTSD, because I never query on anything.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I don't even want to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, Brandon, we're just…

[Dan] You're also a household name. So…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, there's…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There's a little bit of a difference there.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, Brandon says, "I have this cocktail napkin." "We'll publish it!"

[Dan] Although, I do think it's worth pointing out, just to emphasize this, you hinted at this, when you decided your strategy was to avoid queries, that ramped up your level of work significantly. You have to do a lot of extra things in order to make that work. So if somebody wants to follow that same path, they need to be prepared to do a lot more legwork, a lot more personal contact.

[Mary Robinette] It's more expensive to go to conventions.

[Brandon] Way more expensive.

 

[Howard] I have a back cover copy checklist that actually works really well for creating a synopsis, which is character, conflict, setting, hook. It's just those four things. Gimme a character. I don't care if your book has 20 characters in it. Just give me one. Just focus on one, because that'll be more interesting. What's the conflict? Gimme a sentence that shows what the conflict is. What's the setting? Put them in a room, put them in something. Now plant the hook. One of my favorites is from the back of… I think it's Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George. Meet the Castle that changes itself every night and the women… Or the children who will do anything to protect it. I'm in. So having that formula for me… It's not a perfect formula, but having that as a starting point, makes writing a query, which is essentially marketing copy, much, much easier. Much, much easier.

 

[Brandon] So, we have the question here, when is it time to give up?

[Mary Robinette] This is a…

[Dan] On your dreams as an author?

[Brandon] It just asks, "When is it time to give up?"

[Mary Robinette] So, it's time to give up when it is making you ill. This is… Like, this is a thing that I think we do not talk enough about. That it's… First of all, it's okay to write just for fun. It's… You don't have to be on a publishing track. No one goes up to someone who plays the guitar and says, "Well, where's your recording contract? You play the guitar, you've got to have a recording contract." It's like, no, everyone accepts that you can just play the guitar for fun. You can just write for fun. If the process of jumping through these hoops is making you ill, it's okay to stop. It's okay to put it down. It's also okay to say, "I'm going to put it down for a while and then come back to it later."

[Brandon] You know what else I've heard is also okay? If you have a significant other or loved one who is willing to be a shield for you, and you are going to give them the works, and you're going to say, "When one of these gets picked up, tell me. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume they're all out there in the aether." I know people that, for their mental health, that is how they have to work. It works really well. The creator focuses on creating, and the partner focuses on making sure that these queries are going out and even sample chapters and things are happening.

[Dan] I've got two friends who, over the last year or so, have both given up. Which is… Which makes it sound like a failure, and neither of them see it that way.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Dan] They're both authors. They're both creators. For one of them, it was the realization that what she really loved about art, she could also get through visual art. So she said, "I haven't had success with this, I'm going to pursue a different direction." So she still has something very fulfilling in her life, that she loves to do, and is finding that she's excelling in it, which is great. For the other one, and this is stuff that she shares publicly, Natalie Whipple, who wrote what is still today my favorite eSport science fiction novel, just kind of said, "You know what, what I really love is storytelling. I think I'm just going to play D&D. She now GM's two different Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Some with her kids, some with friends. She is getting all of what she was happy writing would give her through a different outlet that is leaving her very fulfilled and happy.

[Howard] There's an entrepreneurial principle here that runs parallel to the… You've set a trigger event, Mary, a trigger pull event, which is when your health begins suffering, it's time to change. It's time to change something. The entrepreneurial aspect is before you go into this business endeavor, you need to have decided what the failure modes look like. It may be that the failure mode is when I have paid the bills for all of the things in my life using my credit cards for three months in a row, it's time to give up this business and go get a real job. Okay? Because putting that pin in the ground ahead of time means that when you look at this financial disaster you've created, you can say, "Oh. I actually predicted this as a failure mode. It is now fine for me to quit and to move on." I do not know what this looks like for writers. I know that as a cartoonist, in 2006, Sandra and I were literally on our last seven or $8000 of savings, and that was what we sent the first Schlock Mercenary book to the printer with. If that had not paid for itself and paid all the bills, then it would have been time to go get a job. We knew that that was the signal for time to give up. I got lucky, didn't need to give up.

 

[Brandon] We're out of time on this, although our homework this week, we wanted to find some way to kind of help you with some self-care. If you'll forgive a little bit of a diversion here, this doesn't necessarily get better once you get published.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the thing you have to realize. Right?

[Mary Robinette] So true.

[Brandon] Now, those of us in this room, me in particular, sit in a very privileged position where we're able to earn a living off of our writing, which certainly does take away some stressors, right? I understand that. But, once you get published, you are still going to be dealing with editors sending you long sheets of notes about how bad your story is, right?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Once the book comes out, you are going to hope for reviews, because reviews are very important to you, like Amazon reviews and things. Some of those are going to be bad. They're going to be scathing. If you are fortunate enough to get very popular, every place you go on the Internet, you risk having people… Running across people having a discussion about you. This is where I am right now. I can't go anywhere that I used to hang out without just running across threads. Though often times the first comment is laudatory, the second comment is the opposition, right? Why do people like this guy? He's terrible. Point, point, point, point, point. That is just… You're going to have to, as a creator putting your work out there, get used to the idea that you are going to face criticism in some form or another every day of your life. So. Learning to cope with this early on can be really handy.

 

[Brandon] The homework we suggest is something that some of us here at this table do, which was, we go read one star reviews on Goodreads of books we know are brilliant. Right? I do it for Terry Pratchett books, right? I go in and say, "Okay. Who could possibly, possibly hate Good Omens?" I go read about the one star reviews…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm like, "Oh. Art is subjective. People are allowed to like different kinds of art. It's okay for them to not like my art. A one star review does not… Is not a personal attack, it is just this art isn't working for me."

[Dan] You practice a much more kindhearted version of this. I will read the one star reviews and go, "Man, the world is full of idiots."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, go do that. Go familiarize yourself with the idea that art is subjective and then keep making your art and meeting your own goals. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/02/15-05-setting-goals-for-your-career/

 

Key Points: Set short-term and long-term goals. Think about who are you writing for. Do what you want to do. Write what you want to read. Watch out for the mortality rate in publishing, it can be demoralizing. Everyone's career is different. Set goals for yourself. Think about what you want to do this year, what you want to do with a series, what kind of space you want to be in, what genres you want to write in. Be aware of the wavelength in your genre, how big are the peaks, how long is the tail. Look for goals that you can control, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. Word count versus time spent? Another career goal might be to have a plan for when this career ends and you move to the next. Careers take many shapes. Focus on the goals when you are writing a book, what is the next step in front of you. One word at a time. Sometimes your career plan is to write something wildly different. Write what you love vs. mass appeal? Think about author brand, think about writing that is always you. What is your through line, to keep readers following? The voyage, what kind of story do I want to tell, is being true to yourself. How am I going to tell it is marketing. Look for the common thread in your writing, the similarity that you want to hold onto. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting Goals for Your Career.

[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] I'm realizing that I should have set more goals.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] So, this is a really interesting question we've gotten here that I don't think we've ever covered on the podcast before. Which makes me excited whenever we get a question that spirals us in some new direction. What kind of goals…

[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What kind of goalsetting do you do in your career?

[Dan] This is something we have talked about a little bit with Dongwon. But I am very interested to hear what Victoria has to say about it, because I feel like she is one of my models that I try to follow, because you do so much career planning for yourself.

[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] So I'm both very ambitious and very prone to…

[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.

[Victoria] I love it. I love it. This side of the table, we like to plan our futures…

[Dan] Hufflepuff.

[Victoria] In very specific ways. Well, I also think I'll probably have some differing or interesting answers, only because I started when I was 21, I'm now 32. I have had many hills and valleys, and it has taught me to be very intentional about the way that I set goals, and that I try and create and shape this weird thing called a career.

[Dan] So, give us some examples.

[Victoria] Well, I think it's really important to set both short-term and long con. I'm a firm believer in both. But I had an upset early on in my career, three books in, where everything went terribly, terribly wrong. I was 25 years old and about to quit. I decided, before I quit, I was going to try and write one more book. I was going to throw out any notions that I had about audience. I was going to write specifically for a version of myself. I was writing a 25-year-old me book. So, because of that, I put in it exactly what I wanted to read. I began to cultivate this idea that when we are writing for an audience, specificity will always be better than breadth. I wrote it as weird, as dark, as strange as I wanted, and I had a lot of fun. The book that came out of that was Vicious. It would go on to restart my career. It would go on to open a lot of doors. But really, what it did was it taught me, from there on, every book that I wrote, I would write for an age of myself, whether I'm writing for 10-year-old me with my middle grades, 17-year-old me with my YA, current me with my adults, and made sure that that audience was so hyper specific. The more specific I got in my planning of my audience, the larger my actual audience grew.

[Howard] My career really didn't begin as a cartoonist until I was maybe 33, 34. I started Schlock Mercenary when I was 31. I'm fascinated that… Fascinated, and I'm saying this for the benefit of our listeners, that someone at age 25 can feel like their career is over. Because when I was… Wait, wait, let me finish. When I was 25, I had no career in anything yet. It's not about getting started early, it's about doing the thing that you discover you want to do. With Schlock Mercenary, I think I was about 32, 33 years old when I realized this comic is working for people because I'm writing the thing that I want to read. At the time, the idea that a science fiction comic strip could be funny without making fun of science fiction was a little weird. That was… Everything else in the space I was working in was making fun of science fiction. What I was writing, and it took eight years to figure it out, with the help of Brandon and Dan, what I was writing was social satire. I didn't know that that is what I loved. But it turned out that it was, and I'm happy I did it.

 

[Victoria] I do want to preface this with a… I'm going to throw out some what seem like very young ages. I did start in my teens. So I did put in years from before. I knew I wanted to be an author from age 16. I got my first literary agent at age 19. I was 22 when my first book sold. One of the reasons I say you can get to 25 and feel like you're ready to quit is because the mortality rate in publishing is very high, and five years in publishing… It's like dog years, where I felt like I had been in this for a very long time. Publishing can be kind of demoralizing in that way. I'm sure that you guys have covered it and I'm sure that we're going to cover it more.

[Dan] So, for me, I mean one of the mistakes that I made, looking back, is assuming that I was Brandon Sanderson.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Don't we all?

[Dan] We've been friends for decades.

[Brandon] Man, I have trouble with that as well.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, we shared an editor at the same time. All these kind of similarities. So, watching your career gave me… Not an unrealistic sense of my career, but just an assumption of oh, this is how a career works. Which is not true. Everyone's career is very different. So I was not setting goals for myself, I was just kind of like, "Oh, I got published a year behind Brandon. Everything's going to also be about a year behind Brandon." I was not setting goals for myself at all. This has nothing to do with relative levels of success, just that I was not proactively planning what my career was going to look like. I was kind of coasting on assumptions. Then I hit a point where I realized, "Oh, wait, I have to try so much harder than I'm trying right now." So I did set down and do some goal planning. This is what I'm going to do this year. This is my goal for this series. This is the kind of space that I want to be in next. In a few years from now, I want to expand into this other genre, or do these other things.

 

[Victoria] Well, I do want to also say I came at it through a bit of trial by fire, in that I started in YA. YA is potentially, of all the subgenres and all of the classifications, the most cutthroat in that they decide before your book is out…

[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.

[Victoria] Whether you have succeeded or failed. It is not a mentally very healthy and sustainable way to do things. So I think YA has the highest mortality rate, as I call it, among authors. They are very, very flash-in-the-pan focused, very what is hot right now and it is not hot tomorrow. Whereas one of the best things that I did for myself mentally was to expand out into adult genre, into science fiction and fantasy. I remember going to my publisher about two weeks after Vicious came out and being like, "Am I a success or am I a failure?" He said, "Your book just came out two weeks ago." I said, "Yes. You've had plenty of time to know."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Tor was like, "Check back in in a year or two. This isn't how we work." So I do think that there's a lot of these things which cause us to feel even lonelier in the process, even lacking in not only role models and ideals, but also simply in peer qualities, peer information. We don't share information very willingly. We're taught that everyone is an island unto themselves. It's a very isolation driven process.

[Brandon] Yeah. You talk about mortality rate. I've always discussed it as what I call wavelength. Certain genres have bigger peaks and bigger valleys. Just because of how many books are being released and the potential audiences and things like that. YA, I've noticed, man, if you get kind of a staple in adult science fiction and fantasy, it sells much longer, has a much longer tail, but that peak sometimes can be a lot lower than in YA. I like that you're all talking about this. I think people, when they hear or read the title for this episode, they're going to think, "Oh, goals are things like I want to hit the New York Times list, or I want to sell this many copies." None of us are talking about goals like that. We're talking about, if I… What are my goals? When I set goals, my goals are usually daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. I actually have a spreadsheet, and every day, I have the spreadsheet showing me how much I've done, how much is left. The average I would have to write each working day if I want to finish by this date. That's a really useful word count for me, because I know if it gets too high, then I have to change my date. Because it becomes beyond what I can do in a given day sustainably.

[Howard] Isn't that more of a Ravenclaw thing?

[Laughter]

[garbled… You just… Howard… The other day…]

 

[Victoria] I think it's really interesting, and I do want to bring it up, because I think you and I, Brandon, have very opposite tactics, but we both measure. Which is that I used to measure word count, but some days, as everyone who listens to this and I'm sure all of you know, you can work for eight hours that day, you can do a huge amount of legwork on your story, and you can achieve very few words. So, earlier, about a year and a half ago, I switched from word count to time spent. It's not quite as reliable for hitting a very specific deadline, but I found that from a mental health perspective and from a productivity perspective, creating a lower threshold of what I need to accomplish in order to feel like I'm succeeding creates a much more diminished self loathing and then allows me to conversely be far more productive in any given day.

[Brandon] This is definitely something you have to do individual, because… Individually, because I don't have that worry. I don't have that… What is… If I'm recording every day and I hit a period where there's low word counts, that's important for me to know, because it means that I need to look at the story and something's wrong. Right? If I'm doing low word counts… If I'm doing low word counts once in a while, the average word count I need to hit in order to hit this goal doesn't change very much because it's over time. But I don't have this… Like, if I'm not productive, like the…

[Victoria] You don't have my self loathing existential crisis. [Garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] I don't end up having that. But a lot of people do, that's very, very common.

[Victoria] It is. It's very common. But I think this gets back to the point you were making before, which is when we are talking about goals, we are being very careful to confine it to goals that are in our control as creators, because we all know that there are so many facets of this industry and so many factors that will never be in your control. It is really fun to dwell on those instead of doing your work.

 

[Howard] I want to offer a goal here which may sound a little bit negative at first. When I was talking, years ago, with Jay Lake, who has since passed away. He is one of my favorite people, because he introduced me at WorldCon to other people by saying, "He's writing the best science fiction comic that exists." I was like, "Who is this guy? How did I end up on his friend's list?" But he told me that the average career length for people in this field… Not career length for the people whose names maybe you know from seeing them on bookshelves forever, but for people who get published, and then go on to do other things, was like 5 to 7 years.

[Victoria] Mortality.

[Howard] Yeah, the mortality rate. Then he told me, "Howard, you've been doing this for 12 years, you're a fixture." Except he began… He inserted an adjective before fixture.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It made me feel wonderful, but it was also a little terrifying. Because the career goal that I didn't have, and the one that I'm offering to all of you is, I want… When this career ends, I'm going to accept that it may end at some point, I want to know what I want to do next. I want to live my life in such a way, I want to do this career in such a way that when it draws to a close, it doesn't draw to a close in a panic, it draws to a close because I still have a plan.

[Victoria] This is fascinating to me. I just celebrated a decade in publishing, like I celebrated it, like I had hit… Like, my 100th birthday.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I was so excited on it. Because… I think I did that because around six or seven years in, people started calling me an overnight success. I was amazed and insulted, because I think we have this idea, we love to fetishize the metrics of success, which are not in an author's control, and in so doing, erase a huge amount of the work that is going to create where you are at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons we'll always be focusing, or we try to re-center this on the minutia of the daily word count goals, or of the annual creativity goals, or of the hopes for the longevity or shape of our career, or the caveat plans that we make. Because, like you… The same way that you write a book, one word at a time, you get through and you make a career one word at a time, one year at a time. You finally get to say… And look, like five years in, right around the time that I sold Vicious, I also did a work-for-hire project for Scholastic. I found other ways to stay in the career, because a day job in writing was still going to give me an opportunity to be writing. I think sometimes we get to purity focused on like you're either a full-time writer, or you're not a real writer at all. The fact is like there are so many shapes that these careers take. There are so many hills and valleys, even on an escalation towards whatever we call success. You're still going to have years where you feel like you didn't do as much, where you feel like your position wasn't as high, regardless of where you are. I think that can be very un-grounding. So I think focusing on what are our individual… What are our goals when we're writing a book, what are our goals for the next step in front of us? Because really that's all we can really contain.

[Brandon] One of the best writers I know, flat out best writers I know, has never sold a book. This is partially because lots of health issues, some mental health issues, mean that for her, simply writing every week is a fight and a struggle, and writing something good… She keeps going and has kept going for 20 years, and writes amazing fantastic stuff, where the question for her is not, "Will I hit the bestseller list?" It is, "Do I get my writing done this week, through all the other things in my life that are so difficult?" She's really inspiring because of that.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Ghost Station.

[Dan] Ghost Station. So, this is mine. About four years ago, as I started to realize, oh, I have hit the end of a phase of my career, and I did not plan for a second phase, what am I going to do now? That's when I sat down and, like I said earlier, I started to look at genre. This is a weird thing for me to say, because I'm already in like four different ones, but I decided part of my career goal, my career plan, was I wanted to move into something wildly different. Reach an entirely separate audience that I had not yet been reaching. I love historical fictions, so I started writing historical fiction. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. But, last November, it came out as an Audible original called Ghost Station, which is my historical thriller. Cryptographers in Berlin in 1961 about two months after the Wall goes up. They're trying to figure out what's going on, and they're trying to reach their double agent on the other side. It's all just Cold War thriller. It's totally different from everything I've written before, but I loved it. I love everything about it. I'm hoping that this can build a new phase of career.

[Brandon] That's an Audible Original, so if you have an Audible subscription, it's one of the freebies that you can get every month, is that what that is, or is it…

[Dan] It's not… It's not necessarily going to be free. But you can get it dirt cheap, yeah.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah, because I think with your subscription, they have some weird thing. So go look it up. It is Audio Original.

[Dan] Yeah. So, a year after it releases, so next November, we'll be able to bring out a print edition of it. But…

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] For now, it is Audible exclusive, and they've done a fantastic job with it.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of coming out this topic from a different direction, we have two questions here asking basically the same thing. How do you balance writing what you love versus aiming for mass appeal? I like this question, because a lot of our listeners might be thinking, "Man, I wish I had Dan Wells's problem."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] "Of, man, I have to have four different careers going." They're like, "I'd like to have one." So, backing it up to aspiring writers…

[Victoria] Yeah. I have very complicated feelings on this, and I'll try and articulate them all. But I was actually thinking about what you were saying, Dan. I was thinking about the nature of your career, Brandon. I was thinking about the ways I fall somewhere very specifically in between them. Which is, I was thinking about author brand. Right? The thing is, like all of your books, Brandon, happen inside a universe that you have designed. So they all have a connective thread. Very few of my books have a connective thread, but I feel like we have… we both have an author brand. The idea that my readers can go from my middle grade, my YA, my adult, they can pick up any of the books, they're still going to feel like me. Damn, you were talking about the fact that you're entering into a genre that you haven't written in before, but I've now read your work in several genres, and I would say that your books always feel like you. So, like I know… I would be completely inauthentic to say, "Just write what you love. Never think about audience. Never think about brand." Because even when I'm thinking about audience, it's me. But I'm thinking about very specific versions of me, targeted to very specific audiences. I think one of the greatest things you can do as a creator is begin to think about what your through line is between your books. Is there something that kind of Pied Piper leads readers from one to the next? Is there a reason that readers should not, se… A series fandom should not stick with you for only one series, but should follow you from book to book. Because I think that's one of the great challenges that authors have, perhaps when they start with a series or a trilogy, and they finish that trilogy, and they go to write a new thing and they haven't cultivated an author brand. So they have a series brand, and people don't follow.

[Howard] Next week, we're going to be talking with Pat Rothfuss about prose. It just occurred to me that… This is harkening back to stuff that we said last month about the voyage, point A to point B. The story that you want to tell may well be that voyage, that point A to point B. What kind of person takes that trip in a sports car? What kind of reader takes it in a minivan? What kind of reader takes it in a four-wheel-drive truck? The prose that you use, the words that you use, the pacing that you used to tell your story, I think that is going to have more bearing on the market than the point A to point B. So being true to yourself may be what kind of story do I want to tell. Then, market chasing is how am I going to tell it?

[Dan] Let me give an example of this from my own work. This is not something that I had realized was my through line until a reader pointed it out. That in all of my books, there is a character who is obsessed with something and you get very deeply into it. Whether that is serial killer lore or virology in the Partials series or computer programming in the Mirador series. Even my middle grade is essentially a hard science fiction as a kid learns about space travel and microgravity. So what I have realized since then is, "Oh. My characters tend to get really excited about something. They delve super deep into it." That is what excites me as author. So I can write in anything. That's why I wrote a book about cryptographers, because they get super excited, enthused, and we learn all this stuff about cryptography. But then there's a totally different story around it.

[Victoria] I definitely think if I'm looking at similarity, I have 16 books. The thing is that they're all about all kinds of different things. The two things they all have in common is that they're weird. Like, they're not realism. They have some kind of thing that's left of center. But also, I try to balance the accessibility of the prose with the poetry of the prose that I like. I am really interested in writing books that convince people that they don't like a genre that they do like the genre. So I'm very much about finding that central space that doesn't alienate, but opens the door and says, "Come in." Like, I know that you don't know if you like the space. I know you find this space daunting. But I love being an entry point into a deeper space of the genre. For me, a lot of that comes down to, as Howard was saying, to the way I tell my stories. I specifically gear them toward a central audience that is perhaps a little bit wider, a little less niche. I do that because I know once I can get them in the room, I can tell whatever story I want. But I want to get them in the room first.

 

[Brandon] We are a little overtime…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So we're going to wrap it here. We could probably keep talking about this forever. But, Victoria, you have some homework for us.

[Victoria] I do have some homework. We've been talking in this episode about making sure you not only have goals, but those goals are delineated between things in your control and things out of your control. An exercise that I actually go through with my agent every year, and that I did before I was agent did as well, is called the 1-5-10. I sit down, because I love lists. I feel like most of us really like making lists, because it gives us a false sense of control over the universe. I make goals of what do I want to achieve in one year, in five years, and in 10 years. Where do I want to be? Thinking of it that way allows me to look at my most immediate goals, finishing a project that I'm working on, maybe the five year allows me to shift my place in what kind of stories I'm writing or take on something that's a bit of a daring challenge, and the 10 year starts being about career, starts being about the shape of the imprint that you're making and the goals that you hope to do. I think it's really important. I want you to try and make three lists, a one, a five, and a ten. I want you to be ambitious, but I really want you to try and keep those goals to things that you can actively influence and control. If you need to make a second list of 1-5-10 for hopes and dreams, that is absolutely fine, but I think it's really important that we don't conflate the metrics of success, like hitting a bestseller list or selling X number of copies that the industry controls so much of with the things that we can actually control as creators.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/07/14-27-natural-setting-as-conflict/

 

Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.

[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.

[Brandon] Yeah, we are.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?

[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.

[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."

[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.

[Brandon] That's a very good point.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.

[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."

[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?

[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.

[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?

[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…

[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.

[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.

 

[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.

[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In a science fiction setting…

[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!

[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?

[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]

[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.

[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Coconut glass.

[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?

 

[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…

[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.

[Howard] Boy versus nature.

[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.

[Mary Robinette] Whoo!

[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.

[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.

[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.

[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.

 

[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?

[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…

[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.

[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.

[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.

[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?

[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…

[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.

 

[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.

[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.