wetranscripts | Entries tagged with hang a lantern

Writing Excuses 18.50: The Unreliable Narrator

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-50-the-unreliable-narrator

Key Points: Unreliable Narrators! Some know they are unreliable, others are fooling themselves. Reveal or revelation? If the character doesn't know they are unreliable, signpost it to the reader. Hang a lantern on it. Let another character question it. What is the scope of the unreliability, just one specific secret, or a broader range? Building trust with the reader for a character with a secret. Have the character reveal one secret, while holding others. Or save the cat. Don't overdo twist reveals! Consider intentional versus unintentional, and broad versus specific unreliability.

[Season 18, Episode 50]

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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 50]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Unreliable Narrator.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And you can't trust us.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm someone.

[DongWon] I'm someone else.

[Erin] I'm a third person.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But are you?

[DongWon] The most unreliable answer.

[Laughter]

[Erin] We are going to be talking today about the unreliable narrator. This is one of my favorite techniques. I… Well, I actually believe that all narrators are unreliable in their own way, because it's always, whenever you're telling a story, even in life, you're telling it from your perspective. But when we talk about unreliable narrators, these are when you're actually trying on purpose to have your narrator either believe or represent something different than the actual facts of what's happening on the page. I have this whole construct/theory of unreliable narrators that I'm going to pitch you all…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In sections. So, the first part I'm wondering about is do you think it matters? If the narrator knows that they are unreliable versus if they are fooling themselves and therefore fooling the reader?

[DongWon] I think it's incredibly important because it changes the relationship to the audience. So if your audience is reading a book that has an unreliable narrator who does not realize that that's what they're doing, then they… We are going through that journey with them. They're experiencing their slow realization that they are being unreliable or we are watching them descend further and further into a break from reality. Right? So there's us walking with somebody. If the narrator is being deliberately unreliable and lying to us, then… There's a different kind of experience where we are sort of… The audience is almost antagonistic to the narrator in a certain way. This doesn't mean that the narrator can't be sympathetic and fun and all of those things, and almost has to be to balance that out. But it requires a different care that you're taking of the audience to make sure that when the reveal comes, that they have been lied to, but they don't feel betrayed and angry at you, the author.

[Howard] I played How to Host a Murder once, and I was the killer. But the first 2 pages of my booklet were stuck together. I did not know I was the killer. I didn't know. So I was the most convincing liar of anybody, because I was utterly innocent in my own mind…

[Choked giggling]

[Howard] Of this killing. We went to the end, yeah, I totally got away with it. It was like, "Okay, who was the murderer? Who has the…" "I don't know." Everybody looked at the… We passed around our books. Somebody said, "Howard!" They peeled it apart and were like, "You did it!"

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was like, "Oh. I did?" Yeah. To me, that's the big distinction. The unreliable narrator who knows they're lying can be tripped up in their lie. Can be dishonest… They're dishonest with an agenda. Whereas the unreliable narrator who just doesn't know the truth is going to be utterly honest about what they know, and is, to my mind, more convincing.

[Mary Robinette] As we're talking about this, I'm thinking about something that I did in Relentless Moon, which is that my main character has 2 secrets. One of them she is keeping secret for societal reasons. She has anorexia. The other she's keeping secret for spoiler reasons. Which is… She's keeping those both secret from the reader. But then she also has a secret that she is keeping from the other characters. So one of the things that I was… But that she's sharing with the readers. So one of the things that I was playing with in that was having her lies be in the same patterns. So that when the reveal happened, that you recognized that you had been lied to in the same way that the other characters had been lied to about this different packet of information.

[Erin] Oo, that's cool.

[DongWon] That is really cool.

[Erin] I was thinking about the word reveal. So what I think is really interesting is that secrets are meant to be revealed. So part of the difference between these 2 unreliable narrators is what the story is building towards.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, in… If you're hiding a piece of information, your narrator is on purpose, at some point, there is a general sense that that will be revealed in a specific moment, or, like, it will come to light. Whereas if the person is fooling themselves… I think of it more of a revelation. A slow revelation, but the reader that something is happening that they shouldn't trust. But it doesn't have to happen… There's not necessarily a moment. There can be. But it doesn't have to go, like, one, like, "And then…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] "You'll never guess what really happened!" But more, as you're getting more and more details about the world, you're like, "There seems to be something that's askew." That kind of brings me to one craft technique that I learned about in creating unreliable narrators, which is that if they don't know that they're being unreliable, you have to give some sort of signpost to the reader that they are. Usually by bringing in something that the audience can make a very clear judgment about, and be like, "Well, that isn't the way I would interpret it, and they're interpreting it very differently, so something is off." In Wolfy Things, there's a moment where he sees his mother crying and he's like, "She still trying to, like, salt the food."

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] You know, with her tears. Just because like… Like, that's so off, she's obviously upset about, like, the appearance of this wolf and what's going on there, but he misinterprets it so wrong, like so badly…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That you're thinking, "Okay. There's like something… He's not seeing the world the way that other people see the world."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How do you make sure in that moment that the reader isn't just like, "Oh, you, the author, missed something," or like, "That doesn't make sense to me, this book is bad." Right, like? Because I think when I see that done poorly, that is the result. The result can be like… Oh, I'm just not connecting with this. I don't understand this character. They're acting ideologically in some way. But when it's done really well, for me, that's like the most exciting thing. Right? Like, I loved that moment of realizing, like, "Oh, man, this mom at a way different experience than what this kid can see." It makes sense, because he's a kid. Right? Like… So…

[Howard] I hang a lantern on it. It creates conflict. Another character in the scene… I use it a lot with worldbuilding. I especially use it with worldbuilding when I realize, "Man. I built this earlier, and I have characters talk about it, and I don't like it. I don't think it works that way. I need them to have been wrong." So another character comes in and says, "Hey, guys. I think you're talking about this all wrong. Let's have an argument." There's comedy and there's argument and the reader now sees, "Oh. Oh. Yeah, I had some questions about that too. But now that a character is asking questions about it, I'm fine." They don't actually need to resolve it. They just need to question what was happening. Now the reader no longer blames you, the writer, because there like, "Oh, yes. My concern has now been raised in the text. I'm fine, I'm on board with whatever continues."

[DongWon] Yeah. Parallax can be really useful if you're in a longer text. Right? So if you're in a novel, your multi POV, you can have sort of 2 characters looking at the same thing from slightly different angles and you can sort of see the difference between them. In a really tight constrained text…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With a single voice, like, how do you make that clear?

[Erin] I think one way is by bringing in…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] An outside influence. One of the reasons… One of the roles that the Conjureman plays in Snake Season is to present a point of view in the narrative that is not the point of view of the character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To see her interact with something that I could give you, like, here are the actual facts of what's happening in this interaction and here's the way she's seeing this interaction. Sort of show how those 2 things are diverging from each other as a way for you to be like, "okay. Something is a little different here." Then, at the very end, there's the husband's point of view and what he says in dialogue is another way of saying, like, this is where he's just describing exactly what he's seeing and what he understands. That's also a way to show an even greater contrast. As the contrast between the character's perspective and these other characters that the interact with becomes greater and greater, it gives a sense that there's more and more unreliability. I think the other thing that's really important is to give your character an absolutely genuine belief and reason for believing what they do. I think if you're like, "Oh, I'm just going to have them misunderstand this as a technique," it doesn't feel true to the character. Like, Nikki really believes that that's what's going on with his mom. He's really wrong. But what his belief is seems like it's really genuine, it's coming from a place of heart. I think if when people are sympathetic to your characters, then they care about them, and they want to understand why there seeing the world way that they are. That really brings them into the "Oh, this is what the character is about" mode versus "this is what the author is doing" mode. You basically keep them tightly in the head of the narrator, so they don't have time to think about what else is going on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But I think the… Just to draw a line under the thing that you said, which is, in that sign posting that Howard was talking about, that you present the reader with something that is clearly recognizable to the reader as a… Like, his mother is looking out the window and giggling. It's like, okay, she's not afraid of this wolf. Then, having that obvious misinterpretation then sets them up before you get to all of the other misinterpretations, sets the reader up to know… To look for that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other pieces along those lines which is, I think, something that you're also doing with Nikki is what I call the doth protest too much. That they spend a lot of energy trying to justify their belief. That they think about it and talk about it…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Way more than it would… Otherwise, it would be like, oh, mom's upset again, and you move on. But it's like, moms upset because of this, or, actually, it's because of this. Like, that they doth protest too much.

[Erin] Exactly. All right. I love this. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, I have another question to pose for you in my grand unified unreliable narrator theory.

[DongWon] Or will we?

[Gasp]

[Erin] This week, I have a short story collection for you. It is Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker. Sarah Pinsker is an amazing short story writer. You gotta love that there are 2 Hugo and nebula winning short stories in this collection. 2 Truths and a Lie and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather. But there's just… It's story after story after story. One of the things I find really interesting is that she does… She thinks about the world in such a fascinating way. I feel like there are the stories that she's really well known for, but some of the quieter pieces that are in here… Like I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise are just really beautiful love letters I think to the form and just expertly crafted short story experiences. So, that's Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker.

[Erin] We're back. We weren't lying about it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, for the 2nd question that I have for you all about the unreliable narrator is the scope of the unreliability. So, the way I think about this is that you can have someone, like you were talking about your character having a secret. So that's like a very specific thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The way that say, the rest of the world, everything is accurate, but this one thing is something that they're hiding. Then, I think about somebody like Marie in Snake Season whose entire worldview is a little off. Like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's not like she's hiding something specific, she's just misinterpreting everything around her.

[DongWon] The slow build to realizing how wide the scope is of her unreliability…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is so much the deliciousness of that story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There… I've used this. I've used this? I've referenced this before. The lore master for the Elder Scrolls online… One of his first challenges was the fact that the Elder Scrolls games were terribly inconsistent in the way the history of that universe played out. Their solution was unreliable narrators. Anytime we describe something, we want to describe it in the narrative from the point of view of a character. Because a character can be wrong. But if we describe it without quotes around it, then people are going to take it as gospel truth. What was funny to me, and what I just now realized with regard to scope, is that in that article, the lore master never use the term unreliable narrator. It was exactly what he was talking about, but he never used that term. On the one hand, I thought, "You can't possibly not know the literary technique you're using," and just today I realized, "Oh, wait. You're writing game software. You don't want to put the word unreliable in the text…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "In front of the gamers…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because you will communicate a whole new level of unreliability to them.

[DongWon] Well, this kind of goes to one of the earlier points that Erin was making, which is any time you have a character proclaiming their worldview, there's something always unreliable about that. Because we… Our subjectivity inherently influences how we see the world. This is going to be a minor spoiler for N. K. Jemison's The 5th Season…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But there's a moment in the book where you realize that the narration is 2nd person, that you are being told the story by somebody. That, for me, was such a moment of like, "Oh, no. Everything is now unreliable." Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That subjectivity has been influencing the story this whole time… For me, that was just like a thrilling moment because it just inherent… By shifting me into a character's perspective, suddenly the scope of the unreliability was infinite.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It was this entire story, this entire world…

[Mary Robinette] That was such a gut punch. I was actually thinking about the broadness that you're talking about with Ghosts, because Ghosts has 2 things going on. One is that she has been made unreliable narrator by someone removing her memories. But she also… Like, when she… When she takes… When they take Princess to the…

[DongWon] Memories

[Mary Robinette] To the memory…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] The 2nd time, none of her plan is in that narration. Even though it's kind of clear to the audience, but your… It's… She's justifying why she's making these choices. It's such a broad, like, there's so much broadness there, I think.

[DongWon] Yeah. She shifts from accidental to deliberate…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Unreliable narrator in a way that is very fun, and it is such a heel turn in the best ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So…

[Erin] It's funny, too, that I think of… Thinking about her looking at Princess's memories, I think it was interesting, there's a little bit of a… Her questioning of Princess as to whether or not Princess is actually a reliable narrator of her own relationship with her father and what was happening before. So that, I think, is also one of the reasons I love playing with memory is that like memory is one of the least reliable narrators.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That we have, and yet it is the way that we experience the world and kind of go through things.

[DongWon] Yeah. The fact that Princess was a reliable narrator was the unforgivable crime. Right? The realization that someone was… Dared to tell the truth was unbearable.

[Mary Robinette] Dared to tell the truth and also all of the things that princess may not have understood about her…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Own situation.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… There are so many layers of unreliability in that story. And revelation.

[Erin] I have a question, speaking of sort of reveals, about characters with secrets. Which is something I do less of. I tend to do like unreliable on a broad scale. How do you make sure that a character holding a secret doesn't feel like they can no longer be trusted in any way versus just in this one way?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things for me… One of my pet peeves is holding the secret to long from the reader. So, with the… One of the ways that I build trust with my readers is that I will raise a question then answer a question, raise a question, answer a question, then raise a question and not answer the question. So, with this one, because I knew that she had two secrets, I went ahead and gave the answer to the first one within… The anorexia, within the first couple of chapters. I feed it to you a little bit slowly, and then I give the answer so that the… So at that point, you're like, "Oh, now I can trust the character because they have let me in on this one secret." But then all of the other secrets that she's holding, the other secrets, you're like, "Well, she must be being forthcoming with me now, because she was honest about this other thing."

[Erin] That's awesome.

[Howard] I would do the… You're familiar with the term save the cat. Early in a story, you have a character save the, and now we know, "Oh, this is a good person." All right. That trick works after you have revealed that someone was keeping a secret. You have them do the save the cat, and we're like, "Oh. This person is actually okay. They've done a good thing." Now, you may be mistrusting whether that cat was actually worth saving. Maybe it was a feral, rabid cat, and they're saving it in order to kill us all. I don't know. But you get the point here. You're trying to… You adjust that likability slider strongly. Crank that all the way up so that we're willing to trust them again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. I may be jumping a little bit too far ahead, and also maybe too much of this is a personal taste thing, but I always want to caution writers about over-relying on the twist type reveal.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? So, two movies that are incredibly popular, so this may undermine my point, but The Sixth Sense and Old Boy, the Park Chan-wook movie, both rely on last-minute reveals. They completely recontextualize all the action that has happened up until that point. I, as an audience member, in both of those cases, even though there's other aspects of those movies that I could really admire and really like, felt almost betrayed by the narrator. Right? The narrator in this case wasn't a character, but it was the authorial voice of those movies. So I got mad at M. Night Shyamalan, the person, which was unfair. I don't hold a grudge against the man. He's fine. He makes good movies. But, like, there was an aspect of that that…

[Mary Robinette] Thou doth protest too much.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I'm trying to be nice.

[Howard] It's okay to be mad at him for the Avatar movies.

[DongWon] Sure. But… I mean… There's a way in which that twist can really undermine your audience's relationship to the text. Now, that can be done very, very well. Sometimes that twist will have that backward ripple effect. One example I think of is Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I re-watched recently. There's a late reveal of Asuka's character that makes you recontextualize why she is the way she is in a way that I think is beautifully done and makes a character that I find very annoying suddenly, for me, one of the most sympathetic characters in the show. So, anyways, I'm not getting into the spoilers of that. But there are ways to do it really, really well, and there are ways that… I think sometimes if you don't have enough time after to really settle back into the story, it can just leave you with the feeling of being uncomfortable and unsettled in a way that is unpleasant to me narratively.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have this personal theory that one of the reasons that that particular thing happens to early career writers is that they are themselves unreliable, in that they didn't know the answer to something. So they were just like, well, now it's a big secret that I'll reveal later. Then they keep going until he hit a point where they have to reveal it, and they are justifying themselves… To it, justifying that choice to themselves all along as, well, I'm doing it this way because I'm going to build tension and will have this big twist. Really, it's that they just don't know the answer and don't want to write those scenes.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I don't think…

[Howard] You've read the first 3 years of Schlock Mercenary.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not pointing fingers.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Doth protest too much.

[Erin] I will say that I think a lot of it's also trusting yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As a writer. That without a gimmick, people will still want to read your stories.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] One of the things that I struggled with a lot in trying to write Wolfy Things is that… I tried to make some a of the, like, the relationship between him and the wolf, like, a lot more like a lot less clear. In the original version. Like, where it was a big twist at the end. I would give it to people and they're like, "That's fine. But, like, I really didn't need to be surprised by that." In some ways, not being s… Like, being able to have your own revelation as a reader earlier and then see that you understood the truth of things and it's still going to go horribly wrong was actually more fun then the feeling of like, "You got me," that happened that the end of the story.

[DongWon] This is a thing I've learned as a GM is that it has been way more fun just to tell my players stuff, just to be like, "Here's what's going on." Then they're like, "Oh, no. That's bad." Then they have to figure out what to do with that information. Then you can have more twists and reveals, but it's grounded in them knowing what's going on versus me trying to, like, surprise them with a big gotcha moment. I think that can be disorienting and unsatisfying for me as a storyteller and for them as the audience.

[Howard] We're recording in Utah. One of my favorite hikes here in Utah is to a place that we call First Falls up above Sundance. From the starting point of the hike, you can look up the hill into the cirque, up the mountain into the cirque you know that that's the ending, you know that that's your destination. As you walk, the scenery is beautiful. The plants, the bees, the bugs, the whatever else. There is this experience on the hike that is just wonderful. But the whole time you're hiking, the waterfall is now no longer visible. Then you come around the corner to it, and it's bigger and it's loud and it's wonderful. The whole voyage has been rewarding. It was not that last turn that made it worthwhile.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] That last turn…

[DongWon] It's a payoff, but [garbled]

[Howard] It is a payoff, but it was not the whole reason…

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] You took the trip.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, the key is what emotion do you want the reader to have. Is it… Is that emotion, "Oh, that author is clever," or is the emotion, "Oh, the crippling dread…"?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, what emotion are you trying to have the reader…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] All right. Now, we have already been slightly unreliable about our 15 minutes long…

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, I am going to bring this together into my grand unified theory for 2 seconds, and then we will go to the homework. Which is to kind of think about how these 2 things intersect. I'll… We'll put a lovely graphic in the show notes so you can check it out. But thinking about what you want to do, I often think about how these 2 things come together. How intentional the narrator is in their unreliability or the author is in their unreliability, and how broad it is. So you've got your M. Night Shyamalan twist. That's when you're being broad. The entire nature of what you thought about this thing is wrong, and I'm going to tell you at the end intentionally. You've got something that's a secret. That's intentional and specific. I'm not going to tell you about this one aspect of me, but everything else is the way you think it is. There's what I call the memory hole, which is unintentional and specific. That's the I've repressed the memory of this time I killed that guy. You know?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The pages of my How to Host a Murder book are stuck together.

[Erin] Exactly. But everything else you did was actually accurate to the character, it was just those stuck pages. Then, lastly, the false belief, which is my favorite…

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Which is when you're basically wrong about everything around you.

[DongWon] I have to say when Erin first showed me this chart, I then spent the next 10 minutes in a fugue state just categorizing everything I've ever read…

[Pain]

[DongWon] Into these categories. It is one of the most useful infographics I've seen about this topic.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] Erin, you're very good at this.

[Erin] Thank you. With that, we will go to the homework.

[Howard] All right. Take an event that you are familiar with. Which probably means it has to be something that personally happened to you, and write about it as truthfully as possible. Then, write about it from the point of view of someone who knows the basics, but not the whole truth. Sort of the memory hole. For bonus points, tell the story a third time from the point of view of a lying liar with an agenda.

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

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff that we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-34-seventeen-years-of-foreshadowing

Key points: How can you take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing in it, how can you look back and edit to put good foreshadowing in, or how can you make what you've already written work? What are the foreshadowing tools? Use stuff that's already on the table. Take what you're already doing and make it intentional. Use both plot foreshadowing and emotional foreshadowing. Foreshadowing can be for red herrings, too! Use alpha readers to find out what needs more emphasis, where to hang a lantern. Foreshadowing leads to a reveal, so make sure the pieces are in place to justify the reveal. Do you have to put foreshadowing in your work? What does foreshadowing do for us? No, not necessarily deliberately. But character drives plot, which is a form of foreshadowing. Plot, worldbuilding, character, theme, it all can contain foreshadowing, so the story makes sense. When you explain a story you are writing to someone, you stop and say, I need to explain X. That's something to foreshadow in your writing! Genre, telling a story, plot beats, they all are kinds of foreshadowing. Plant Chekhov's gun on plenty of mantles, and fire them as needed.

[Season 18, Episode 34]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing. In the previous episode, we talked about me ramping up to the finale of Schlock Mercenary, and the… I think it was Mary Robinette asked the question, "When did you know what the ending was going to be? When did you know you were going to have a big ending?" There's 17 years of foreshadowing going into the final three years of Schlock Mercenary. Because, even though I didn't know where I was going at the very beginning, I managed to make the early stuff work. That's part of what we want to talk about today is how to take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing at the very beginning, how to look back at what you've done and edit so that there's good foreshadowing in it, and, when, like perhaps a web cartoonist, you don't have the luxury to go back and edit and put in the foreshadowing, you can make what you've already written work. So, I'm going to pose this to our august body of…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Of hosts. What are your favorite foreshadowing tools? How do you like to do it?

[Mary Robinette] My favorite stuff is actually using things that are already on the table. I very rarely will be writing and think, "Um. I need to put this in because I'm going to use it later. Let me foreshadow this plan that I'm going to do." I'm much more likely to hit a point where I need to use something and then look back at stuff that I've already laid down, grab one of those things, and then go back and tighten it or tweak it and maybe put it in one additional place. The closest I've come to really… It's probably not true, but the closest that I can think of that I've come to doing additional… I mean, intentional foreshadowing in the Glamorous Histories, I was like, "And then Jane uses…" And I said bracket. I was like, "And then Jane," and I said bracket, "uses a technique of glamour that is going to become very important and plot specific later…"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then when I got to that point where I knew what that thing was, I came back and dropped it.

[Erin] I'd say I'm a pretty, like, instinctive whatever you call that type of writer these days, pantser or gardener or what have you. So, for me, a lot of times it's figuring out what have I… What's my subconscious already done, similarly, and then make it conscious. Take the things that I'm doing unintentionally and make them intentional. There's a story that I'm working on now that involves rhyming in it, which I promise is better than it sounds, and I realized that the rhymes were happening at random times in the story. I thought, "Well, what if they happened at moments… At specific types of emotional moments?" So I wanted to have these rhymes in the story, but could they be doing more? Then, that way, when you see the rhyme, the fifth or sixth time, even if you don't notice it on some level, you're going to see like that means that there's been a ramp up of emotion. So it's less the plot foreshadowing than an emotional one, but it's because I'm like, okay, if I'm going to do this thing, I might as well do it on purpose.

[Howard] I love that kind of micro-structuring. Absolutely love it. In the mixed mediums, cartooning is words plus pictures, there's even more of it available. The fact that you can cant the camera a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, and, if when a particular speaker is on, you always skew the camera just a little bit in one direction… It doesn't have to be much, five or 6 degrees is enough. The reader probably won't notice, but the reader's subconscious is going to be on board with there is something about this character that weird, that's tilted. The rhyming, a purely prose version, that's neat.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I will sometimes do… I said that I rarely do foreshadowing intentionally, is that sometimes I will, when I'm writing my story stuff, I will foreshadow as a way of laying down a red herring. Because I want the reader to spot it and go, "Oh, oop. She's foreshadowing something that's coming up." Then I don't use it. Like, it's deliberately putting the gun on the mantle with no intention of using it. So I will do that sometimes. Because I… When I am reading and I spot something where the author has put something in, and it's very clearly foreshadowing, it can often make me frustrated, because I can… It reminds me that I'm reading in some ways.

[Howard] It can knock you out of the story because you see… You start seeing the narrative scaffolding and… You're not supposed to see the scaffolding, you're supposed to live in the house.

[Erin] One thing I find really interesting about foreshadowing is to me it's a received action. So, someone has to take up what you are putting down. So, like, sometimes you think you have put so much scaffolding, you're like, "How could anyone not notice it?" People read it and be like, "I did not notice that that one, there was doing all the work that you thought it was doing, because you understand the entire story." So one thing that I find really fun to do about foreshadowing is to do it, and then give the story to someone and say, like, "What did you actually get?" Then adjust from there. I find personally that I read more into things like as a reader, I tend to take the tiniest things and think that they're foreshadowing. So I write that way. It turns out that sometimes I actually need to hit a point harder than I think I needed to. So sometimes what I do is just go back and take a moment that I'm like this was the teeniest bit of foreshadowing and then like shine more of a light on it. Because, to me, it was big, but to the other people it was small. It sort of feels like when you have a crush on someone and everything they do, you think is really momentous, but they're not noticing because it's all in your head. It's the writing version of that.

[DongWon] I've been having this problem a lot, not necessarily the crush part, but I've been having this problem a lot in general, which is, I've been doing a lot of [TDRBG?] GMing. So I've been running [garbled] campaigns and things like that, and I keep doing this thing where when you're starting a campaign, all you're doing is foreshadowing, you're laying out a huge buffet of plot hooks really, which will be foreshadowing things later. Then my players keep looking at me and being like, "We don't know what we're supposed to do now." So I think I'm having that thing of sometimes you really need to hang a lantern in a way that feels very obvious to you, the writer, that won't necessarily feel as obvious to the reader, because he'll be presented with so much information. Right? So putting your finger on the scale to make sure that this thing is highlighted in a certain way is such a challenge to sort of put yourself in the audiences shoes so they're set up to receive that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it's… It is that making sure that they notice it, but walking the line between not noticing it and being predictable.

[DongWon] Yup. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that happens to the creator is… The reason it's… Like, but it's so obvious, is because you know the end. You know all of the intentionality behind it. The reader does not.

[DongWon] Well, this is where you can hook into pattern recognition in your readers in a really useful way. This is kind of what Erin was talking about a little bit in just… You can set up these rhyming structures, because we've seen heist movies before. So we know when you're going to show the vault in a certain way, we have certain expectations of where that story's going to go. You can leverage these story beats, these tropes, whatever you want to call them, in a way that helps you emphasize the foreshadowing that you want, and then you can either subvert our expectations in terms of the red herring that Mary Robinette was talking about or you can fulfill them in satisfying ways, and then that'll feel, when the reader gets there, they'll be like, "Oh. They were telling me about this 50 pages ago. That's so satisfying." Right? So I think a lot of when you're starting a story, when you're in those early stages, and maybe you do or don't know where you want to go, but a lot of what you want to start doing is start laying out these early parts of different story patterns, and then figure out which ones you want to conclude, and pick up on, and which ones you want to like close the doors on as you go. Right? So, for me, sometimes thinking about those like little micro arcs, of like a character arc or a plot arc, can be really helpful in setting reader expectations and sort of priming the pump for them to get interested in what the eventual foreshadowing is going to result in.

[Howard] Well, the foreshadowing has to lead to a reveal. We will get to that reveal after our thing of the week.

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Babel by R. F. Kuang. This book just blew me away. One of the… I listened to it in audio. I highly recommend the audio edition, which is narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown. It is a story of a group of young students in Victorian Oxford who are translation students. It's a story about colonialism. It's a story about patriarchy. It's a story about friendship and found family. The magic system is so exciting, because the power of magic comes in the tension between words that cannot be translated into another language… Or, they can be translated, but that the process of translating, you lose some essential meaning of that. It's just really, really delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to highlight it for you is that she does this beautiful thing where it's this group of friends in the way they interact and behave with each other in the beginning when everything is going well foreshadows the way they are going to interact and behave with each other when things go poorly at the end. It's just… It's lovely because it sets up an inevitability and also is not predictable. Because you are hoping that things will go a different way. It's a beautiful book. One of the reasons I recommend the narration, the audiobook, in particular, is because you get… There are footnotes which are part of the structure of the book. But the footnotes are read by native speakers of the languages, so you can hear how the words are actually intended to be said. So that's Babel by R. F. Kuang.

[Howard] When I was 10 years old, I found a mystery novel and I started reading it, and immediately realized there was highlighting and handwriting all over these pages. I asked my dad what was going on. He said, "Oh, that's one of the books that grandpa read." Like, why did he write in the book? "Well, your grandfather loved reading these mystery novels, and every time he saw something that was a clue, he would write notes about it. He would highlight it. Because he wanted to be able to solve the mystery before the detective did." So he was putting in this conscious effort. I want to go on the record right now and say that is not how my foreshadowing works.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I write to the reveal. I don't write to you figuring out the reveal. I write to the reveal. So that when a thing happens, you look at it and you say, "Oh, of course that's what happens because there was this bit of foreshadowing." But, to use a silly example, if the camera has panned across gasoline dripping from the bottom of an automobile, then, well, there's going to be an explosion, and when you get the explosion, you're like, "Oh. Because there was gasoline and whatever." But there could also be no explosion because someone grabbed the fire extinguisher. It's… Whatever the reveal is, I want to have the pieces in place so that it feels justified. One of the only places I can remember consciously planning ahead for a big foreshadow was, and I think it was in book 15 or book 16, I had one of the characters talking about Fermi's Paradox. In a galactic society, where there's… The aliens have been around us for a thousand years, what does Fermi's Paradox even mean? Why is it even important? The answer is, well, um, galactic society should be a lot older. This galactic society is only about 40 or 50,000 years old. We are there other ones? What is happening? What is going on here? Having one character puzzling over that, and other people brushing it off, made for good comedy, but it also let me come around to, towards the end of Schlock Mercenary, coming up with my answer to Fermi's Paradox as a way to help drive the end of the story.

[DongWon] So you could have a plot load bearing academic concepts?

[Howard] Exactly. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, as we've all been talking, it's actually occurred to me that we may be having some listeners out there going, "Oh, I'm not doing any of this." So, let me ask the question, do you have to put foreshadowing in? In your work? Then that leads to the follow-up question of what does foreshadowing actually do for us?

[DongWon] I want to say that, no, you don't have to do it in a conscious and deliberate way. But there is one aspect of this I want to touch on, and we haven't talked about much up until this point, which is one of my favorite modes of storytelling is what I think of as character as destiny. Where, I mean, this is… Game of Thrones is very famous for this, Fonda Lee's books do this incredibly well. There's a mode of storytelling that's very much about the plot is going to derive from these foibles or characteristics or essential aspects of who your characters are, and then how they're going to interact with each other. Right? Circe wants… Loves her children, loves her family, and therefore will do anything to defend them past the point of reason. Right? We know this fact about her. So that is a form of foreshadowing in certain ways for later events when she becomes completely unhinged. Right? Over the… Spoilers, I guess… Deaths of her children. Right? Those little things that character is destiny can operate as a form of foreshadowing. So I guess my answer to your question is, no, you don't have to have it explicitly in there in the way that we've been talking about in terms of like certain plot hooks, setting up certain plot beats later, but it will always kind of be there if you've written your characters well. Because your people… Your characters will make decisions that should make sense to the reader. Therefore, we will always have a certain satisfaction when they make choices that are true to the characters that we've met so far. That is, in itself, its own form of foreshadowing.

[Erin] Yeah, I think a lot of times we think of foreshadowing as such a plot…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Specific thing. Like… It's like a plot thing you need to do. But I actually think that all… I agree, like… Foreshadowing is kind of sense making. You help people make sense of the story. Sometimes you do that in a plot way and sometimes you do that in a worldbuilding way. Like, there is worldbuilding foreshadowing where in order for a thing to exist in your world at the end, it's probably good for people to understand that it is like… That there is something of that in the world earlier on. Otherwise, it feels like a deus ex machina, where it's like, "And then there were spaceships." You're like, "I thought we were in Lord of the Rings, so that was surprising to me." You need to somehow… Maybe there's wreckage of mechanics that people find along the way, and that's a foreshadowing of its own. But I really think that foreshadowing can be… Can, I think, lead people sometimes to put too much of it into the plot, and not enough in other places. Because one of the things I sometimes I find myself doing in stories is like I figured out how to make the plot make sense, but now the characters don't feel like they're in that plot.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The characters are just being dragged along by it. They're doing things to foreshadow the action, but their behavior hasn't been foreshadowed, so it doesn't seem true to the character. So I would sort of challenge folks to look for ways in which your story makes sense on every level, character, theme, world, as you move along, and not just think of foreshadowing as something that needs to move the action.

[Howard] For the discovery writer, it's useful to point out that at some level, foreshadowing is the inevitable outcome of the syntax of a narrative. If you have a narrative in which things happen one after the other, you can look at the things that happened earlier and they are foreshadowing for the things that happened later. At some level, that's all foreshadowing is. The larger foreshadowing, the example I gave of Fermi's Paradox, that's the case where I'm now working to an outline and I want to have something big happened. I wanted to be big and satisfying, so I have to do some advance planning. But if you're discovery writing, you can probably read back through your manuscript and find foreshadowing everywhere. Because it's a natural growth of the syntax of the narrative.

[Erin] I actually think humans are natural foreshadowers. But we do it in asides. When you're telling a friend a story about something that's happened to you, you will often pause midway through the story and go, "Okay, but to understand why I hate my boss, you've really got to think about like that time she broke the copier on purpose and I've never forgiven her." Do you know what I mean? We naturally foreshadow, we just don't do it in a very like artful way…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because we just stop and go like, "Now you need to know this thing." So, sometimes I find that if you actually talk about your storytelling to other people, you will find yourself explaining the story that you've been writing, and then you'll stop, and you'll be like, "Oh, wait, the thing I didn't explain is X." That's the thing that is really important to foreshadow. So, by doing it like artless Lee like to a friend over a drink, over coffee, you can actually figure out what you need to do more artfully on the page.

[DongWon] I would argue that one of the best storytelling podcast that's out there right now, it's a podcast that's very popular called Normal Gossip, which is people telling gossip stories to each other about normal people. It's not gossip about celebrities, it's gossip about somebody you know. It's the single most funny thing I've ever listened to in my life. But also, it's so useful because it's exactly the stuff that you're talking about. Where each story has to be so beautifully structured and crafted to get the right feeling and rhythm of storytelling out. I love this idea of that's… If we are always naturally foreshadowing because you want to communicate to the person that you're talking to what kind of story are we in? Is this funny? Is this sad? How is this character relevant? What kind… So often, it's like, well, I know that person's going to make some chaotic choices, because you're telling me a story about them. Right? Otherwise, this isn't going to resolve in an ordinary, normal way. We all know it's going to get crazy from here. So I think that's part of the joy of a certain kind of storytelling. So, just by the fact that you are telling a story, you are foreshadowing a certain kind of elements, a certain kind of plot beats. So, in some ways when we talk about foreshadowing as an official technique, it really is just turning the dial up a little bit on some of those features. It's intentionally ratcheting up what are already natural storytelling patterns that we all have, and that you're already doing if you're writing anything.

[Howard] When the next door neighbor's gas grill explodes, and somebody says, "Y'a know, this reminds me of a story," we are all paying attention. Because contextually, you've just foreshadowed something that I'm on board for. I want to start this last little bit by saying we're probably familiar with Chekhov's gun. I had people accuse me of using Chekhov's gun. "Howard, in Schlock Mercenary, there are so many mantles, and so many guns, and so many… We just expect there to be gunfire all over throughout the ending." Yeah, for my own part, I had lots and lots and lots of throwaway gags that I knew I could return to if I needed them in order to make something feel like it was inevitable.

[Howard] I have homework for you. Last week's homework, take one of your favorite things and write a new ending. Homework this week, take a throwaway gag from one of your favorite things. Something that was only a plot point in one episode or in one book or in one scene. Right… Outline a scene in which that turns out to have been foreshadowing for something of huge dramatic import.

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

[DongWon] This episode is made possible by our incredible Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&As, live streams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.37: Outlandish Impossibilities

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/15/14-37-outlandish-impossibilities/

Key points: Outlandish premises, impossibilities. Extrapolate beyond the reasonable to make us laugh and make us think. To explore an issue, to have a conversation. Outlandish impossibilities may be the fastest way to set up the discussion we want to have. How do you clue the audience in? Telegraph it up front. You get one buy in. Hit them early with the premise they need to accept. Treat it as a budget for buy ins. What is the story purpose? To enable other things, spends budget. Build reality and credibility, build the budget. How much can the reader absorb? Prioritize, paint the big picture first, then add smaller details. Hang a lantern on strangeness, let the character ask a question (and promise an answer!). Or put a lampshade on it, treat it as part of the furniture, let the characters take it in stride as normal, while making other things important. Play it straight or play it silly? Scene-sequel and emotional beats. What kind of emotional response do you want the reader to have. Use the character's reactions, the prose leading up to it, linebreaks, and pacing to signpost this.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 37.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Outlandish Impossibilities.

[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] Some fantasy and science fiction books have very outlandish premises. I'm not just talking about magic, right. That you have to accept magic. Dan and I were talking about these before the podcast. He started groaning immediately when I brought up some dystopian stories, for instance, ask you to swallow a really, really hard-to-swallow premise.

[Dan] So, like, Divergent, as much as I enjoy it as a book, the premise is a future that there's no conceivable way human civilization will ever arrive there. It is an absolute impossibility. But the story it tells is cool and worth telling. So…

[Brandon] I remember when my wife was reading the book Unwind. She came in and I said, "Well, what's the premise?" She's like, "Oh. Um. People argue over abortion so much that they decide that abortions are illegal, but when a kid turns 16, you can turn them in to the state to have them harvested for organs to give to other people. As a compromise…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] On the abortion debate.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I said, "What?"

[Dan] Okay…

[Laughter]

[Dan] As the father of two teenagers, I'm okay with this plan.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] My reaction, afterwards, like, I bet every teenager thinks that their parents would do that. It's obviously just…

[Dan] Mine will now.

[Brandon] Ridiculous, right. But some of the best stories come from a place of a ridiculous premise. This is what science fiction and fantasy is about, right?

[Howard] It's not just science fiction and fantasy. This is where I live. I am writing social satire…

[Mary Robinette] You are writing science fiction.

[Howard] Yeah. Well, no, but I'm writing humor. I'm writing social satire. It is my job to extrapolate something beyond the point which is reasonable in order to make us laugh and make us think. That is, in many of these cases, especially the YA dystopias that we talk about, in many of these cases, what we're trying to do is explore an issue that is not even tangential to the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is just there so that we can have a conversation about what do you do if you are friends with a group of people and only one of them is going to live and you want to be that one. What is… Well, okay, we have to set this up in some way, and we don't care how, because the story is about this situation. So, for story purposes, outlandish impossibilities are there not because, at least to me, not because they are the story, but because I want to have a discussion about a thing, and that's the fastest way I get to have that discussion.

[Brandon] Absolutely. A lot of the original Star Trek episodes were like that. Where they're like, what happens to a culture where they're stranded on a planet for so long that the story of Chicago mobsters becomes their Bible? How does that change their society? That's ridiculous, but it's interesting to talk about. That's the fastest way to have that conversation.

[Howard] Though the Star Trek episode, the Next Generation episode where all of their conversations are memes. Which we now look at and recognize as oh, that is actually a portion of where our language is drifting. We recognize that we can't drift completely there, because…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, we had already drifted there. Like, that's why Shakespeare is written in nothing but clichés.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] He really should have been [inaudible] better than that.

[Mary Robinette] I know.

[Brandon] So, let's say you want to write a story like this. Is there any special setup that you would use to clue the audience in, to make them swallow this really, really difficult to swallow pill?

[Mary Robinette] So, there's a thing, I think Margaret was the one who talked about it, about the buy in, that you get one buy in. For me, what I try to do is telegraph that kind of upfront. It's like, this is the world that were going to be inhabiting. A really simple thing is Little Mermaid under the Sea. The buy-in is there are mermaids. There are mermaids. That's the… It's like, after that, you roll forward from there. But, you demonstrate to it. The other thing that's happening in Little Mermaid though is this is a musical at a time when people had stopped doing musicals. So that entire opening number is getting people used to the idea of mermaids and undersea culture and musical with only very, very tiny plot progression. Like, there's really very… Not much is going on there besides this is the culture. This is the buy-in we're asking you to do.

[Brandon] This is a really excellent example, because, as I was thinking about this topic, there are some times where for learning curve purposes, you play a little coy with some of your worldbuilding elements. In some of my books, I wait to introduce the magic till later in the story because I know people are picking up a fantasy book, and I'm going to step them through characters and things first. But in a lot of other stories, you need to hit people right up front. Little Mermaid's a good example. Harry Potter. Often times, the prologue is there to say I am hitting you up front the premise you need to go… You're going to need to accept. There are wizards in this world, and there's a dark wizard who almost took over the fantasy world. Buy into that, and then we'll talk about the character.

[Dan] I see this a lot with the chapter critiques that I do, where they are trying to slow roll the revelation of their world and some of those worldbuilding elements. You can do that with some things, but there are some things you have to get out right upfront because otherwise we're going to be constantly redefining your story every couple of pages and going, "Oh, oh, wait, they're actually riding on mammoths instead of horses. Oh, oh, wait, they also have holograms." Like, some of that stuff you need to…

[Mary Robinette] That sounds like a very specific…

[Howard] Holographic mammoth mounts?

[Brandon] No, Dan's absolutely right. I get this with my students a lot. They don't know which things to get you to buy into first. A lot of this is we need to know a tech level for a fantasy book very quickly. We need to know kind of your big premise of the world very quickly. If it has got this really big premise.

[Howard] Our episode with Margaret, How Weird Is Too Weird. It was back in February. One of the… That's when Margaret said, you get one buy [or tennis bye?]. The concept that I use is you've got a budget for buy ins. What is your budget? With your new students, just the concept of you have a budget… They may still overspend. But you can point at it and say, "The problem here is not that you have too many ideas. It's that you exceeded your budget." How do we… Can I quantify budget on a spreadsheet? In a sense, I can. Because when I am outlining things in the spreadsheet, I have a column that says, "What's the story purpose for this?" If the story purpose for anything is make the other things possible, then that is a budget negative. That is something that is… That is a spend that I need in order to make the rest of the story work. So I have to look at the other cells and I have to… Those things have to… They have to be really important to the story. They have to be putting money in the bank. They have to be building credibility. Hunger Games works because the interactions between the kids feel real. If the interactions between the kids felt fake, then we don't have anything that we're going to read.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that someone told me early on… I can't remember who this was… Was that you can drop a worldbuilding detail about every once a page. What they meant was not you get one worldbuilding detail per page, it was that you get one thing that matters per page, roughly. That that's about how much the reader can absorb before they drop something else and forget. So you have to give them time to absorb something before you give them the new thing. Which is what can often lead to that slow roll. That you will have… Like, well, I'm going to give you these worldbuilding details, but you don't prioritize the ones that you need to do. So it's like you hit them with kind of a worldbuilding detail that paints sort of a big picture thing, and then you can start feeding them the smaller details after that. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah, that really does.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and pause here, though. You're going to tell us about our book of the week, which is You Owe Me a Murder?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. You Owe Me a Murder, which is not by Dan Wells. It is by Eileen Cook.

[Dan] I don't owe anybody, I always pay up.

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You are not a serial killer, either.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook. It is a young adult novel. It is basically Strangers on a Plane. So if you've seen the Hitchcock film Strangers On a Train, it is that premise, but it's teenagers on a field trip, like, study abroad thing to London. That scenario happens on the airplane. It's an outlandish premise, that someone would sit down next to… A teenager would sit on a plane next to someone else and say, "Why don't you kill my person? I'll kill yours." Yet, that is exactly what the book is. I tell you, this book is one of those things where I'm reading it and pretty much every page, I'm like, "Oh, no no no no no no no. No no no no noooo." It is such good characterization, because when she has made that single outlandish premise, every character interaction after that is completely plausible, follows this logical causal chain. It's so tightly crafted. It's such a good book.

[Brandon] So that is You Owe Me a Murder…

[Mary Robinette] You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook.

[Brandon] So, kind of along that topic, how do we write characters who take something very strange is normal, and how do you not alienate the reader from that character, but instead, pull them into that character's way of thinking? I'm thinking of a lot of these fantasy and science fiction books where you… Dystopian, but also just epic fantasy, where people just take it for granted that X, Y, or Z. In the Wheel of Time, we take it for granted that there are dark friends who live among us who, it could be any of our friends, who might just murder us in the middle of the night. They just accept that. That's part of their world.

[Dan] That one's easy, because it's true.

[Brandon] How do you write characters that take something really outlandish, that's part of their life, and integrate into them and not make them alien?

[Howard] If I have… As a reader, if I have a question, if I think something's outlandish, and a character beats me to the punch by asking the question, and shrugging and moving on because there's no way for them to find an answer, I will shrug and move on. Especially if that character is already sympathetic. Because the author has acknowledged that, "Hey, some of this…" Maybe it's a question that I'm given the answer to later. That is… They've bought another 20 pages from me, because they promised me I'm going to get an answer. They can break that promise and give me something that I like more. They just have to have that character in that moment ask the question that I'm going to ask.

[Brandon] So, this is one classic method, which is hang a lantern on it. When the character asks the question, it allows us to say, "Oh, the author's thinking about this. I'll get an answer eventually." But what about these worlds like, say, the Golden Compass, where everyone's soul manifests, or a chunk of it, as an animal that skitters around the world and interacts with them? No one questions it because the whole world has it. How do you make that work?

[Dan] Well, one of the ways to do that is, first of all, to just let the characters take that completely seriously and take it in stride, the way that that world is, by giving them something bigger to worry about. When someone from our world reads the Golden Compass, that's the first thing that stands out. It's like, "Wait, what's a demon? Why is there this cat following her around?" Like, we have these questions. She doesn't, because she's very concerned about whatever other thing it was, and… it's been years. She's traveling around inside a university or something. She has her own wants, she has her own desires, she has her own goals. That is what is important to her. So we get caught up in that story, is she going to be able to find her friend, is she going to be able to get that thing she wants, then, a chapter later, we realize that we've just kind of taken the rest of it in stride, the way the characters have.

[Brandon] So, this is kind of the opposite to hanging a lantern on it…

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] Is to downplay it so much, and make other things important, that we start accepting it.

[Howard] It's lantern versus…

[Mary Robinette] Well, I don't…

[Howard] Sorry. Lantern versus lampshade, for me. Lantern is when you're calling attention to it by asking a question. Lampshade is when you're turning it into furniture.

[Mary Robinette] So, I feel like it's less about downplaying it and more about assigning it a place on an emotional scale. That, for me, is that if you have a thing that is outlandish, it occupies an emotional reality for the character. Carol Burnett talked about this when she was doing comedy, specifically, she was talking about the… For those of you who do not know Carol Burnett…

[Dan] You're wrong and terrible people.

[Mary Robinette] It's okay, I just turned 50. That's why I watched her as a… When I was a small child. But just do yourself a favor and pull up YouTube… We'll put this actually in the liner notes. The Carol Burnett scene where it's a Gone with the Wind takeoff, and she… There's this wonderful scene in Gone with the Wind, where in the original, where Scarlett doesn't have anything to wear, and so she takes down the curtain and makes a gown out of that. They do that same scene, and she makes a gown out of it, but she does not remove the curtain rod.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And is knocking things over…

[Mary Robinette] Comes down and just… Someone asked her how she played something like that. She's like, "My character believes that she has made the right choice." My character… She occupies the emotional truth of her character. I think that when we're dealing with an outlandish thing, it occupies a place on an emotional scale for our character. If we assign it there and give them appropriate responses, that then also tells the reader how to react to it. So if they are reacting to it as if this is completely normal, then our reader knows, "Oh. Okay." If they are reacting to it as if it's outlandish, then that tells our reader a different thing.

[Dan] To go back to what I was saying before, that scene's a great example, because that scene is not about there's a curtain rod in my dress. No, that scene is about I have to impress the suitor. So she has a goal. She has a thing. We have hung, to abuse the metaphor, we have hung a much bigger lantern on something else. So that's where all our focus is pointed.

[Brandon] This segues us really well into my kind of last topic for this podcast, which is, when do you play it straight and when do you be silly? Howard has made an entire career of this dichotomy.

[Dan] Dancing across that line.

[Howard] You're not wrong.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, how do you do it?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] How do you decide when…

[Howard] Fundamentally, it's about scene-sequel and emotional beats. The punchline… If you read Schlock Mercenary strips back-to-back, all in one sitting, it does not read very much like a book. Because the beats are just weird. If I were to tell the whole Schlock Mercenary story as prose, there would be fewer punchlines and they would be spaced differently. So, the comic strip itself is a bad example in some ways. And yet, there are emotional beats in a story which need to be played seriously. Which need to… I want the reader to cry. I want them to be unhappy. If there is going to be a joke, in Schlock Mercenary, I will usually try and pull the joke afterwards, not to undercut the emotional response, but to give us an escape valve for the emotional response. The math, the timing of these things, is a lot different when I'm working with prose. But looking at scene-sequel format, looking at your beat chart for your story, will tell you where you're going to be silly, where you gotta play it straight, and…

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said that I just want to draw a line under is thinking about the emotional impact on the reader. When you're trying to make that decision, that is ultimately the decision you're making, is what effect do you want this to have on my reader? I'm going to play it silly if I want my reader to have a laugh here. If I want them even that as a cathartic thing in a much more serious piece. So what I will do then is that I will attempt to sign post it, again, by the character's reaction, but also by the prose that I'm using to lead up to that. Where I put my linebreaks in order to get those beats that Howard is talking about in a prose format. If I want to hit something as a punchline, then I'm going to put it in a different place in the paragraph then I would necessarily if I wanted it to just blend into the world.

[Brandon] Right. I think also some of the things we were talking about earlier will affect this. For instance, we talked about a lot of these dystopian books, what they do is this really outlandish premise, but then the characters' emotional responses are played straight and their interactions are played straight. So even if there are laughs, the story is serious, and you have to accept this premise. A lot of the comedic ways of doing it escalate, right? The premise is weird, and then the next thing that happens spins off of that is even weirder. That's a very Terry Pratchett way of doing things.

[Howard] There's a simple tool for prose writers. It's the line feed. If you have something that you want to stick, that's where the line feed goes. If you have a punchline, and you want people to take time to process the punchline, that should have been the last thing in the paragraph. If it's in the middle of the paragraph, then the rest of the paragraph may be working against the joke. Now, it's entirely possible that that's the effect you wanted to have. That you wanted them to giggle, and then suddenly realize in horror that that wasn't where this was going at all. But I use white space a lot. Because for writing humor, the wall of text doesn't tell people… It doesn't sign post it. It doesn't tell you where you're supposed to laugh. Where you're supposed to… What's setting up the joke versus where the joke is.

[Mary Robinette] Technically, that's because those linebreaks create a… Represent where we pause naturally in speech. The same way the end of a sentence does. But with the sign posting, it's not just those linebreaks, it's also, as I said, the prose that we use leading up to it if… Douglas Adams, the opening line of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is a great example of this kind of sign posting, because the style of prose that he's using gives you permission to laugh. That is… That's the thing that you need to convey to the reader if you want them to know that it silly, you have to give them permission to laugh. Otherwise, they'll go into it and you haven't given them permission, they will not take it seriously in ways that are damaging to the story.

[Dan] I think it is important to point out, whether you're going for serious story or comedic story, that a lot of what makes these outlandish premises and outlandish ideas work is the emotional resonance that the reader has with them. Divergent, like I said, is not a world that could exist, but Veronica Roth wrote that when she was a college freshman. When she was in a period of her life where she did feel like I am being locked into one path, and the society is trying to choose who I am going to be for the rest of my life. People in high school and early college feel like that. That's a very familiar emotion. So for the audience she was writing for, it wasn't a real-life detail, but it felt very familiar, and we have that resonance with it.

[Brandon] We're out of time. But, Dan, you actually have my favorite homework that we've come up with this year.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Give us this homework.

[Dan] Okay. We want you to write an outlandish impossibility. The best way that I know of to do that is find a three-year-old. Ask them to tell you a story. Then take that story seriously. Write it out as if it were a real thing. Whatever bizarre relationships or things or monsters or whatever that that person, that three-year-old, tells you, that's your reality. Write that story and make it work.

[Brandon] If you want an example of this, go read the webcomic Axe Cop.

[Dan] Yes.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front or On the Fly!

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/01/06/14-01-worldbuilding-begins-up-front-or-on-the-fly/

Key points: Season 14 is about setting, a.k.a. worldbuilding. Broad pictures, and refine as needed while writing? Worldbuild until you reach an interesting question, something that will sustain interest for a book, then outline and research. Upfront to find points of conflict and friction. Ramifications and ripples often cause revisions. Sometimes you hang a flag on it, and justify why it has never been noticed before. Sometimes you just put a note in brackets and keep going, sometimes you go back and revise. Sometimes you make it up as you go, until you just have to stop and define it. Frequently, when you are in the middle, you just make a note to revise later, then keep going. Two categories, questions that can be bracketed and keep going, and those that must be checked before further writing. Sometimes you start with worldbuilding in hand, then realize partway in the implications, and have to patch those holes. Restrictions breed creativity. Learn to roll with the holes!

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode One.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Up Front or On the Fly!

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're starting Season 14.

[Brandon] We are. I am Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I am Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Welcome to Season 14. This is the last in our kind of five-year arc, which we started with Season 10. We have done How to Write a Novel. We have done Elemental Genres. Then we did Plots and Character and now we're doing Setting. It occurs to me, maybe we should have done that in reverse order.

[Mary Robinette] I think, you know, I feel like everything is happening for a reason. It's like we planned it…

[Dan] We're discovery writing our podcasts.

[Howard] It's not really all that uncommon to get to the end of the novel and start your worldbuilding.

[Brandon] That is true.

[Mary Robinette] That is true.

[Brandon] And this year…

[Dan] What we're talking about today…

[Brandon] We will be studying worldbuilding. We will have some guests which we'll introduce to you as their weeks,. This first week, we're generally going to take some writing topic, general topic, and attack it from worldbuilding directions. So we're going back to a kind of familiar how much do you do upfront, how much do you do as your writing, and how do you work those two different styles together. But we're talking specifically about worldbuilding this time. So let me ask you guys. How much worldbuilding do you do upfront before you start writing a given story?

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it varies. I will either… Like, I usually have some idea of sort of a general shape of things. Then it's not until I get deeper into it that I start to go, "Oh. Maybe I should really know about…" Which I find is actually very similar to the way that I do research for historical stuff, that I sort of have broad picture ideas, and then I refine my research. It's just that when I'm doing worldbuilding, the reference library is my own brain.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] I do enough worldbuilding… I worldbuild… I mean, with Schlock Mercenary, I am often appending to the worldbuilding, adding politics or whatever. I worldbuild until I have reached an interesting question.

[Brandon] This is for a given story arc [garbled]

[Howard] For a given story arc. An interesting question, an interesting character twist, something that I feel like I could explore for an entire book. Then I begin outlining the story. Usually within the outline process, I'll realize, "Oh. I need to answer some more questions, I need to keep worldbuilding." But that first point, I worldbuild until I found something that is a really fascinating question. When I say question, like a moral question. Like what if or why or…

[Brandon] You can't… Could you name any of those off on the fly, so to speak? I don't want to put you on the spot. I know when people asked me questions like this for a specific example in my lines, I always him like, "Oh…"

[Dan] You're like, "Yes, I do this all the time, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head."

[Howard] [chuckles] Sure. If immortality technology is freely available, where is the pain in death?

[Brandon] Okay. That's a good science-fiction question.

[Howard] I mean, as soon as I ran into that, I realized, "Oh. The stories are going to tell themselves. This is awesome."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] As the stories, as I write, people are answering that question, characters are answering that question for themselves. They are finding their pain points. I'm discovering that. As I discover them, there are related pieces elsewhere in the worldbuilding that I know I'm going to need to lock down.

[Brandon] For me, a lot of my worldbuilding upfront that I'm doing is searching for those points of friction and conflict. I'll often be looking for what's going to make a problem for the characters, what's going to make a problem in the world. An example of this being Stormlight Archives, it's pretty obvious. I started with the storms. This is going to change all life around it. That's the sort of thing I spend a lot of time worldbuilding upfront.

[Mary Robinette] I find that… It's similar for me. There's often ramifications and ripples. So I've talked before about in Ghost Talkers that Mrs. Richardson was not… She's not in my outline it all. Anywhere. But as soon as I have… I just had her knitting because I needed something for her to do with her hands. Then I learned about knitted codes. That gave me all of these ripples that went through the world. This is a thing that all say often happens that you'll… Sometimes you'll discover something deeper in and then you have to go back and do revisions. I'm actually going to flag one that you all may have noticed which is that I introduced myself as Mary Robinette. This is an example of worldbuilding, that when we set up to do the podcast initially, I introduced… I had to make the choice, do I introduce myself as Mary Robinette, which in the South is a double-barreled name, or do I introduce myself as Mary, which is easier. I made that choice because I'd given up decades ago. But the ramification of that is that no one… Everyone thinks that Mary is the correct thing. So I was like, "Uh… Let me adjust my worldbuilding." But it has this ripple effect on everything else. That's one of the things that I think is really interesting when you're looking at… When you're looking at your novel, you'll discover something about a character or about the world, and then you have to go back and make it consistent.

[Dan] Fix it all. So we're retconning the podcast now.

[Mary Robinette] We're retconning the podcast.

[Dan] So that you've been Mary Robinette for…

[Mary Robinette] The whole time.

[Dan] Like 12 years.

[Howard] Except we're not… I mean, you're making a joke, and it's funny, and I like that, but we're not [garbled]

[Dan] Thank you, Howard.

[Howard] Most deadpan…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That was actually a very good joke, Dan, you should write that down.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We're not retconning it, though. What we're doing by now naming the person who used to be Mary, Mary Robinette, is exploring an aspect of Mary's character which has always been present, but which, for various reasons, Mary has not floated up into the foreground of the story. Now she is, and the audience learns new and exciting things.

[Dan] There we go.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's also… It's a hanging a flag on it technique which we use a lot, too, when we have those moments where we're like, "Ah…" Because sometimes I will do this, too. I've discovered a thing, and rather than going back and fix it, I will justify why no one has noticed it up until this point.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I have never done that before.

[Dan] Never.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let me ask you, Mary Robinette, then… When you discovered the knitting thing. At what point did you go and study that, and at what point did you put it into the story? So when you were creating this character, you're adding knitting to their character… Did you write the whole book? Did you stop? Did you worldbuild and then go back to the book?

[Mary Robinette] So what I did was I made a note to self in brackets and then kept going. Then… A couple of different points where I'm kind of waffling on something anyway, I'm procrastinating a little bit. I remember very specifically going back and adding her bringing a sweater. That someone in the circle was now wearing a sweater that she had made for them. I remember going back and adding that to highlight the importance of the knitting and bring it to the foreground. So that was… But the… She'd already knit wrist warmers for everybody.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because… I think that was actually… So that was actually why I made her knit, was because I wanted to… It was a worldbuilding detail that I put in to talk about how cold it was, because of the spirits. So that worldbuilding… So that's one of those…

[Brandon] Oh. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Details that, like, totally ripples down. It's like they all have wrist warmers…

[Brandon] Right. You need to show that it's cold, not just tell us it's cold.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Brandon] You need a character, therefore, who is doing this thing. You hit on that… I love it when that comes together in a story.

[Dan] Yeah. All these other things pop up. One of the worldbuilding details that I completely made up late is how the monsters work in the John Cleaver series. I did not actually codify it until book four.

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Dan] Like, I personally didn't even know how it worked until book four. We started, and I turned the first one in. My editor, Moshe, he said, "Well, you need to make sure for the rest of the series that there's some kind of consistent element." So on his recommendation… That's when I had all the monsters dissolve into tar, basically. Eventually, in book four, I realized I have to know how they work. I have to know how they function. So that is something that I had to make up throughout the series. I kept throwing in more details, and finally had to sit down and go, "Okay, let's define this."

[Howard] One of the reasons that that was so effective… Because what you were writing is horror. If, as a writer, you've already determined how the demons work and fallen in love with it, you are more likely to reveal that detail early rather than late. By saving… We don't know through the entire first trilogy, and that keeps the first trilogy scary in a way that the second… The second trilogy, you had to do different things because we now had an understanding of how the demons work.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Although… With the caution, dear listener, that withholding of information from the reader is usually not as interesting as giving them information.

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

[Mary Robinette] So, our book of the week is The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. In this book, there is a big Galactic Empire, and people travel from point A to point B through the Flow. What is happening is that the Flow is suddenly shutting down. They don't actually know how it works. It existed before they got there. So this Empire, that's basically built on these… Well, we'll call them wormholes although they're not… That's built on being able to travel these vast intergalactic distances is collapsing. It's wonderful storytelling about what it's like to be on a world where you know that you are not going to be able to leave that planet.

[Brandon] You're used to the idea.

[Mary Robinette] Used to the idea of being able to… Specifically, the way it's collapsing in on itself, you can go to the planet, but you cannot get off of it again. During this period. So it's a really interesting thing. Part of the reason that I thought this would be a good example for our listeners for this particular episode is that I know that John had those big ideas about the Flow and the idea of it collapsing. But I also know that he is very far on the pantser end of the spectrum, and that most of the other details, a lot of those other things, he figured out as he was writing it. You cannot tell which is which.

[Brandon] Excellent. So that is The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi.

[Brandon] So I'm really interested in this specific idea. I think on the podcast in previous years, we've talked a lot about how to research and do your worldbuilding, but I'm really interested in this idea of times when you're in the middle, in the thick of it, and then you stop and realize you need something, and how you actually go about doing that. For me, it is almost exclusively coming from character, because character's the thing I do the least upfront work on. When I'm writing the book, often the passions of a given character and their interests and how religious they are or whatever on whatever axis we're looking at suddenly drives me into saying, "Well, I need to have these steps." A lot of times, even though I'm an outliner, I will just keep going and say, "Make sure you know more about this when you come back to the story." Even as an outliner, I do a lot of that. A lot of the asterisks, a lot of the make sure you add this in here sort of thing. Do you guys do that?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no. Never!

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are two categories of questions for me. Category one is I don't remember how many ships they actually had in that one fleet or I haven't determined how many ships they have in that fleet. Anything I write now needs to be in brackets [Howard figure out what this number is] or it needs to be a strip that allows it to continue to be nebulous. Then there are places where… There's a recent strip that was a good example of this. If I don't have the fact exactly right, the punchline doesn't work. I cannot write this scene until I have that piece of information. In which case, I will stop writing in order to go research a thing or figure out a thing. In this case, I had to email Myke Cole and ask if an executive officer… The joke was the captain goes down with the ship, the executive officer musters the dead. Because the XO… They're in a place where the dead are recovering in a virtual space, and the XO is taking roll. The XO musters the dead. Myke's response was, "That is something that an XO would say. I've never heard it before." I was like, "Oh. Oh, Myke, thank you so much. That is perfect."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is exactly the ground I want to be on. I could not have written the joke, though, without somebody telling me that.

[Brandon] Any other examples? Specific ones from your books or stories?

[Dan] Well, in the Mirador series, my cyberpunk, I did a lot of upfront worldbuilding on the kinds of technology that I wanted to have and… Drones that did everything and everyone has a computer in their head, and started writing and realized that I had inadvertently created what was either a post scarcity or an incredibly wealthy society in order to have that level of ubiquitous technology. So, kind of the off-the-cuff worldbuilding that I had to do was to figure out, well, I don't want that, how can I still have all the toys without… While also having economic pressure? That is where the idea that robots have taken all our jobs and that there's nothing left for humans to really do. That's where that came from, was me trying to patch the hole and make the rest of the worldbuilding work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I'm familiar with those holes. One of the things that I've got in the Glamorous Histories is that I have… I decided that… And I've talked about this on the podcast before, that the glamour does not actually cast light. Because if it does, then why would you have candles and all of that? But astute readers will notice that I also refer to a warming charm, and that… The problem is that if you can actually generate heat with this, that a lot of different things start to unravel.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] By the time I realized that, the book was already published. So then I had to justify it. I'm like, "Well, okay. So why… Maybe it's really dangerous." But if you can do this heat transfer… That was what, more or less, like that was what caused the cold mongers to happen. Was having to justify this decision that I had already made.

[Brandon] There's a… There's an adage that the game designer, the head designer of [garbled Magic: the Gathering… Magic uses?] Which is restrictions breed creativity.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Which I've always heard, and I'm sure he got somewhere. I think a lot of times people are afraid that their worldbuilding is going to have holes. But you're going to inevitably have holes in your worldbuilding. Learning how to take that and kind of roll with it can often lead to stronger and more interesting storytelling later on.

[Mary Robinette] There's a saying in puppetry, "If you can't fix it, feature it."

[Brandon] Yeah. That's a great saying.

[Mary Robinette] At the same time, there are times when you're like, "This makes complete and total sense." People will still see it as a problem. Like, in Calculating Stars, I have an email that you can write to me and say anachronism that. I genuinely want to know. But the number of people who have written to me to complain about the transistor radio… I am like, "I've launched satellites…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We've got three satellites in 1952 already in orbit. Part of the reason that we did that was because actually transistors come in a little sooner, and the reason a transistor radio is there is to let you know that. But it reads as a mistake.

[Brandon] Right, right. Yeah. I would say one of the most interesting aspects of this for me was… I've spoken about this a lot. With The Way of Kings, there was a main character in the final product who was not a main character in the original draft. His name is Adolin. What happened is I needed to split off a bunch of chapters from a different main character because they were feeling to at conflict with themselves. I needed two strong characters who had strong opinions, rather than one character who was vacillating between two opinions. That's the easy way of putting it. So I said, "Well, I'm going to make his son a viewpoint character and give his son the other perspective." It ended up working really well. But then the son, who's a duelist and very interested in high-fashion and things like this, made me say, "Well, I need the stuff that he's passionate about. I need to know this." He's become a very big part of the books, because of this thing I changed in the first book. I think that a lot of times, writers are scared of this, when they don't need to be. Certainly you do want to try to not have holes, but you're going to anyway. So learning to roll with them is the way to go.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes even when you don't, people will think you do.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Well, something we've talked about before and you can see a lot in writing is when the characters are driving the story and when the story is driving the character. I think characters like Adilon… One of the reasons that he is so interesting is because you built the rest of the characters first, and he came out of the world. He was developed more organically, because he had to be, because the world already existed.

[Howard] So he's native. Everybody else moved in.

[Dan] The world drove him in a way that he didn't… That it didn't drive the creation of the other characters. I think that that… You can tell.

[Brandon] Right. It creates, in some ways, a much stronger… Well, strong in a different way…

[Brandon] We are out of time. But Dan has some homework.

[Dan] All right. So, we decided we were going to gamify this for ourselves to keep this fun. So, because we've been talking about kind of improving your worldbuilding, we are going to give you three worldbuilding elements. Then you need to write a scene incorporating them. So these are set for you in advance. The rest of the worldbuilding you have to make up on the fly to patch all the holes.

[Brandon] Dan doesn't know what these are.

[Dan] I don't know what they are. The three of them have written something down on these little cards, and I'm going to read them. Here are your three worldbuilding elements. Red food is taboo. Hairstyles are important. Different species or races of sophont who cannot interbreed or share food. All existing in the same space. So there you go. We have two food related ones. That's kind of cool. So there are your three elements. Write a scene using those. Fill in the rest of the holes as you go as they appear.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/08/13-27-characters-as-foils/

Key points: A foil is a character in a story who acts as a contrast to the main character, externalizing a point of conflict or contrast. May be a sidekick, two side characters, or even two protagonists. Sometimes the foil fills in weaknesses. Beware of flanderizing a foil, reducing them to a flat character. The best foils make both characters more rounded as they change in interesting ways. Foils can be good for exploring knotty topics, showing more than one opinion or view. Often, the foil can hang a lantern on the discussion. Heist novels can be an example of a group of foils! Specialists, weaknesses, and plenty of interaction playing on those weaknesses and the cracks in the process. Foils are a natural with teams who are just meeting, but they also can be good for introducing the long-term relationship of a couple. What keeps foils together? Family! Also, try using the Kowal relationship axes -- mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Keeping the morals aligned can help keep a couple together. Manners are a good place for friction.

( Just between you and me... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Characters As Foils.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We've talked a lot about building really interesting characters, giving them arcs, having them changes they go along. Now let's talk about them messing with one another.

[Oo… Yes. Laughter]

[Brandon] What do I mean by a foil?

[Amal] I thought you were going to say what do you mean by messing with each other.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Okay. So, a foil is a character who serves within a story to act as a contrast to the main character. This is not a character who exists to stop their forward progress, which is what the word foil sounds like it is going to be, because of "Curses! Foiled again." But this is more like… Often a role that you'll see occupied by a sidekick character. They're someone who allows the character to express themselves, so that they are getting some of their internal thoughts outside, and also to provide usually a point of contrast or conflict surrounding an internal conflict that the character has within themselves.

[Brandon] It doesn't have to even be main character/side character. I've done it frequently with two side characters that in order to make them both more distinct in the reader's mind, I make them have some point of friction or contrast, which then as they discuss, they argue about, or… Just offer examples of one another in that way.

[Mary] Like one of the examples we were talking about earlier was Abbott and Costello. In which they are actually kind of foils of each other.

[Amal] Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite things to read or see, is when you have a rivalry, for instance, and you do have two protagonists. But you can… In order to establish what they each are like, you use the other character… You use that contrast as opposed to another element of the environment or other characters. Instead, it's almost like you're making the differences between them a character as well. That kind of grows from the fact that they are… They don't even necessarily have to be opposites. They can just be complementary, they can be contrasts.

[Maurice] I spoke a while back about one protagonist, whose sole object through the course of the story was to just be left alone and get high. That character's name was Sleepy. Now his foil is one of my favorite characters I've ever created. Just to put that out there. His name is 120 Degrees of Knowledge Allah.

[Laughter]

[Amal] That's amazing.

[Maurice] The reason why they work so well together, and why Knowledge Allah is his foil, is because in a lot of ways they were like polar opposites. Knowledge Allah was an activist, Knowledge Allah knows what he believed, why he believed, and in a lot of ways, Knowledge Allah also played straightman to some of Sleepy's antics. So, Knowledge Allah actually became the motivating force to help drive Sleepy's story and drive his arc in a lot of ways.

[Mary] I think that goes to the thing that people talk about a lot, which is opposites attract. That frequently what the foil is also doing is they're filling in the weaknesses of the main character. Which is why a lot of times you will see husband-and-wife couples in a foil relationship. In The Thin Man, which is one of my favorite series of films, Nick and Nora, they… Well, and actually Asta sometimes acts as a foil, too… But they act as a foil for each other. Although given the way the films are structured, Nora is much more in the foil role then Nick is, because he, as the detective, is often driving the action more than she is.

[Brandon] So let me ask you this. Do you design this specifically, or do you let this grow naturally or some combination of the two?

[Amal] The best example from my own work is this novella that I cowrote with Max Gladstone. The working title of which is This Is How You Lose the Time War. It was totally baked into our concept. It was that… We recognized that Max and I had super different writing styles and writing paces and methods. We wanted to make a virtue of that necessity and have these two characters that were going to be very opposite. One called Red and one called Blue, and have them be agents of opposite sides of the Time War. Everything about those… Like, everything about these differences became part of the plot, part of the texture of the book, and the development of it. But ultimately, the point of those contrasts was… Ended up being more about how they're each not great representatives of their respective sides. The more that they engaged with each other, which they do because it's an epistolary story. The more they engage with each other, the more they realized how alike they were in spite of coming from these places that are literally opposites.

[Brandon] It's really easy to, I feel like, flanderize one of your foils. Which is this concept that we use where a character, over time, becomes more and more focused on their quirks, rather than more and more rounded. More and more flat, hitting one note. But when a foil is done correctly, I feel like it, in the best films and books where I've seen it, both characters become more rounded over time because of the friction between them changing them both in interesting ways.

[Amal] Exactly.

[Mary] I think that I often, because of that, because of the way it allows you to flesh out a character… The times that I plan ahead to insert a foil… Most of the time, they develop naturally. But the times that I plan ahead are when I'm planning on tackling a topic that is particularly knotty or weighty, because it gives me a way to explore multiple aspects of that topic by having two characters whose contrasting opinions and views on it show that there's… It's not just a single side. So if I were telling a story about the merits of hamsters, I might have a character who is very, very pro-hamster and her best friend would be anti-hamster. Their conversations illuminate a lot… Not just about the topic, but also about how much of this is just the nature of the character versus the nature of hamsters.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the reason I do a lot of foils is actually because a lot of my stories tend to deal with some of the weightier topics. So by having that foil who's like the opposite of whatever character I'm working with, helps me from sliding into a screed at any point. Because then… Now I have to look at the other side. I have to embody another school of thought, and let that play out more naturally.

[Brandon] You have to… You have a natural motivation as a writer to hang a lantern on what's going on, the… You're speaking… You start into kind of a lecture, that other character's going to be like, "Oh, you're lecturing us now?" It's very natural. It works really well.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and break for our book of the week, which is Breaking the Chains of Gravity.

[Mary] Yes. So, Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel is a phenomenal nonfiction book, and it's one that I came across when I was working on The Calculating Stars and Fated Sky. This is about the space program before NASA. So it starts from the very early days of people just like "Let me see if I can get this rocket off the ground…" And lots of people getting blown up.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It carries you through to the very early days of NASA. One of the things that I just had no idea about was the sheer number of women who were involved in it, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And also like… It also… I don't want to minimize the fact that many of the early… And the book does not. That many of the early rocketry pioneers were Nazi war criminals. But it does highlight the fact that they began as a teenage rocketry club in Germany that got absorbed by the German army, which I didn't know. That does… It certainly changes your view of rocketry when you begin to look at its past. But there were just so many people, and it's a fascinating, incredibly well-researched book. She's got a real grasp of narrative, so it's an engaging read at the same time that it's filled with really cool factoids.

[Amal] Has… This is… Can I piggyback on that recommendation? So, there's this amazing poem by Sofia Salatar called Girl Hours. It's dedicated to Henrietta Swan Leavitt. It's a brilliant poem. It's basically as if… Written as if it's preparing to be an essay on the subject, but then broken up, so like the top part is actually notes and says, "In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as human computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars. I didn't know about this until I read this poem, and it's absolutely gorgeous.

[Mary] So I'll put that in the liner notes as well. So you should check out this poem which is called…

[Amal] Girl Hours.

[Mary] As well as Breaking the Chains of Gravity.

[Brandon] So. Let's talk around foils. We often view them as the kind of A character-B character interaction. Have you ever designed a group where each character is meant to kind of be a foil for the same concept, or a foil for one another in a big group dynamics?

[Mary] This is what a heist novel is!

[Laughter]

[Amal] Yes! Yes. I want you to talk more about that, because I loved reading when you were writing about how you did research for a heist novel by watching heist movies.

[Mary] Yeah. I watched a lot of heist movies, but I also read as many variations on heist novel as I could. Scott Lynch's… I want to talk about something other than my own book. But Scott Lynch's Red Sea under Red Sky and lies of Locke Lamora… These characters all act as foils for each other. Each of them has a weakness, and there is another character in the group who needles them on that weakness. That weakness represents both what their skill set is as well as what their personal failing is. So having that conflict externalized allows for the book to be a lot more dynamic. One of the things about a heist, in particular, is that it's a group of characters each of whom has a specialty. The thing that a foil does in this case is remind you that they may have an area of specialty, but there's… That area of specialty means that they have a ton of other weaknesses. So it prevents the group from feeling just like a flat one-sided gro… Collection of experts. Which then is actually no fun to watch. Like, if you watch a group of experts go in and accomplish something, it's actually not very interesting. Just as an example of this, I was talking with Kjell Lindgren, who's an astronaut. He was talking about actually in space, he always felt very safe, because they had practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced everything that they were doing. They over prepare before they go up there. So, you go out, you do a thing, and it goes… And all of the acceptable variables, because of the amount of prep time that you've put in. So that, in a book, is not very interesting. But if you throw a foil in there, that suddenly offers you a lot of places to insert cracks into the process.

[Amal] That's true. I love that. At the same time, I was… While I completely agree, I find myself thinking of how I really actually really love watching people who are super good at stuff doing stuff. But…

[Mary] But then, the story is very short.

[Amal] That's true.

[Mary] It's like we go in, and we accomplish the thing, and then we leave.

[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. I mean, even the Food Network, with experts cooking delicious things, they have to generate some kind of drama somewhere. Oh, no, the pickles are sour. I don't know. Something like that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Pickles are usually sour.

[Mary] That's exactly why Gordon Ramsay is so prickly when he's dealing with adults, but if you've ever watched his kid shows, he's not. Because his role there is not to be a foil to the child.

[Amal] Exactly. It's to actually be a teacher, it's to actually embody that role.

[Brandon] Well, they do it for different cultures. If you watch the British version, he is way less of a foil than in the American version. Yeah. Anyway.

[Amal] [garbled]

[Brandon] [garbled] slightly different tactic on this. I've noticed there's kind of two general groups of foil. There is, when you're writing a book, there is the team who have… Are just meeting and you find that everybody kind of hates each other. Then there's the long-term couple who you use their foil nature at the start of a story to establish a long-term relationship. I happen to like both of these. I really like how the second group can really easily show that these two characters know each other so well, because they know how to push each other's buttons in just the right way, but they also know how not to go too far on pushing those buttons. It makes both characters usually more relatable, unless these two people just don't get along at all. Which happens sometimes. Which brings me kind of to a question. How do you make sure, when these characters are pushing each other's buttons, that the reader understands why they are together in this situation? What tactics do you use to make it so that they don't just say, "Well, we don't get along. We're not good for each other. We are not good teammates. We're going to break apart and go separate directions."

[Maurice] Well, the easy cheat for me has been, [garbled I kind of] go back to that combination of those two groups that you were talking about, and we call that family.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] I was just realizing that, in the scene I was just writing this morning, I was just like, "Why are these people to… Oh, they're brother and sister, and they're kind of stuck with each other, aren't they?" But they do. They know how to push each other's buttons, but they're still kind of stuck in this relationship, like we're not going anywhere, so how do we now accommodate one another?

[Mary] I use a tool that I talked about last week, the Kowal relationship axes, which I will recap for those of you who are listening to just this episode. Which is that basically, there are six kind of sliders, axes, upon which relationships are built. The more you have in common with a person on these, the less friction there's going to be. So, mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers, which represents sense of humor. This is a theory my mother-in-law came up with for describing dating.

[Amal] This is amazing.

[Mary] It's actually really, really phenomenal. So what I do is that I try to make sure that for the most part that my characters' morals slider is really well aligned. Unless there is a reason that I want to specifically explore that. But if they have to go on a process together, their… That is a place that they have to be in agreement, if there both committing. Their mind can be out of alignment, their sense of what money is for, their sense of manners… Their sense of manners is usually one of the ones that if I want them to… If I want there to be a lot of friction, that's one of the ones where I will slide them apart, and give them very different backgrounds, so that they have different ideas of what is polite.

[Amal] That is fascinating, actually. The idea that… This has less to do with writing and more from experience, but it's… I'm Canadian, and I went to live in the UK for six years. The culture shock that I experienced was almost entirely to do with how people treat you when they like you.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I was… I just… I have a very thin skin when it comes to sarcasm and being teased. Which made things very difficult when I suddenly found myself in a country where the more people like you, the meaner they were to you. I just couldn't… Like, I could not wrap my brain around this. I just… I like you, and you're my friend, why are you being horrible to me? They didn't see it as being horrible, they saw it as being familiar. Whereas if they were polite and distant to someone, then that would be someone who they weren't friends with.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap this up with some homework. The homework I'm going to give you is I want you to take a famous soliloquy, like from Shakespeare or something like that, a monologue, a single character saying something, and I want you to insert a foil. It doesn't have to be comedic. It probably will, from the nature of this assignment, but someone who is contrasting what they're doing, and interrupting this. Or go the other direction. Take a famous comedy bit, like Who's on First, and remove one side or the other. Take out Abbott, or take out Costello, and maybe replace them with someone who completely plays along, and see how far it goes, and see how it works when both characters are trying to one-up each other to the joke. Or just take one out and see if the… It works on its own. So, this has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 18: How to not repeat yourself

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/27/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-18-how-to-not-repeat-yourself/

Key points: Balance continuity and similarities with new stuff. Watch for reuse on small details and for reuse of themes and storylines. Try different takes, outcomes, characters, directions. Hang a lantern on reuse -- let the reader know that you know you are doing it. Try recombination of disharmonious elements and random jumbles to make yourself stretch.

( doubletalk... )
[Howard] No, no. But you pick several... you pick among one of these several sentences and then you roll the dice for nouns and adjectives and whatever. It's like MadLibs, only when you're done, you realize, "A Princess is trying to eat a pie and the magic frog doesn't want her to." You come up with story seeds, from which you could go...
[Brandon] Well, we have a writing prompt.
[Howard] Okay. Writing prompt. A princess is trying to eat a pie and someone is trying to stop her.
[Brandon] And the fate of the world depends on it.
[Dan] [musical interlude -- dun, de dun dun...]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.50: The Unreliable Narrator
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.37: Outlandish Impossibilities
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front or On the Fly!
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 18: How to not repeat yourself

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 18.50: The Unreliable Narrator

Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing

Writing Excuses 14.37: Outlandish Impossibilities

Writing Excuses 14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front or On the Fly!

Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 18: How to not repeat yourself

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August 2025

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