Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

Jun. 19th, 2019 10:08 am
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue
 
Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]
[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.
 
[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.
[This potted plant…]
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"
[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.
[Laughter]
[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.
[Brandon] I can…
[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.
[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…
[Howard] Info heist.
[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.
[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.
[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.
[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.
 
[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.
[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.
[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.
[Brandon] Right. Whereas…
[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.
[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?
[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.
[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.
[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.
[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…
[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…
[Howard] Are two completely different things.
[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes…
[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…
[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.
[Margaret] Oooo!
[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.
[Mary Robinette] That's true.
[Margaret] Oh, yeah.
[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.
[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.
 
[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"
[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.
[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?
[Howard] Go.
[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.
[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.
[Margaret] Exactly.
[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.
[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.
[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.
 
[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.
[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.
[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.
[Margaret] Da.
[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are

Nov. 1st, 2018 11:01 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are
 
 
Key points: To write a character who is super clever, amazingly smart… Gift the character with your indecision. Show the character going through the process of thinking, then show the character making logical jumps. Clean the brain vomit off the screen, but keep the key portions. Give the reader enough clues to understand the problem and try to solve it themselves, so they participate in the intelligence of the character. Brainstorming, pacing, and cleaning it up. Letting the reader arrive at a conclusion before the character does is satisfying, but don't overdo it. Make sure the key clues are all out there for the reader. In mysteries, the reader is one step behind the detective, but in thrillers, the reader is one step ahead. It may take the writer some time to figure out a clever answer, but if the character does it in seconds, the reader is amazed at how smart they are! Similarly, if all the other characters react as if this character is very smart, the reader will accept it, too. If the character knows they're smart and displays that confidence on the page, the reader sees it. Also, borrow expert knowledge from other people. Sometimes, for instance in a heist novel, later revelation of how something gets done works best. But when you reveal the monster, make sure it's horrifying! Lastly, consider Dave and the fizz buzz test.
 
( Bits and pieces... )
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Amal] And we're not… That… Smart? Are we smart?
[Howard] We… Okay.
[Amal] We're pretty smart.
[Howard] We are rejoined for this episode by Amal El-Mohtar, who I personally believe is very much that smart.
[Hah!]
[Howard] But even at that level, if she takes time… Yes?
[Mary] We should actually introduce all of ourselves.
[Howard] Oh, damn.
[Dan] He's just demonstrating how not smart we are.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm just… 
[Laughter]
[Howard] I was so excited to be able to do something right.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then Mary told me I didn't.
[Dan] You know, at some point, the opportunity might arise again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm thinking 2020…
[Mary] What's er name?
[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.
[Mary] What's your name?
[Howard] My name? Or her name?
[Mary] Your name.
[Howard] My name. I couldn't hear you. I said, "What's her name?" I was missing like a little piece of the syllable.
[Mary] He's Howard. I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan. 
[Howard] I was going to start again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Hey, you know what, we're keeping it.
[Amal] We're keeping this?
[Howard] We're keeping it. I was going to pre-roll over the whole beginning again. Amal, thank you for joining us. I'm so sorry for how not smart we are. It's so nice to have you back.
[Dan] Because you are.
[Amal] It's a pleasure to be here.
 
[Howard] Thank you. One of the trickiest things to do in any of our writing is to write a character who comes up with a solution that is super clever, amazingly smart, in just seconds, and we try to write that in the same amount of time, or even in 10 times that amount of time. We try and write characters who are far cleverer than we are. What are the tricks that you use to make that happen?
[Mary] One of the things that I often use is actually gifting the character with my indecision. Because what I find is that there are two things that will make a character seem smart. One is watching them go through the process, and the other is watching the logical jump. Strangely, I often find that watching them go through the process, especially early in the piece, will make the character… Make the reader think, "Oh, this character's smart," because they can see all of the logical chains. So when I'm struggling, like how would you solve this problem? Having a character who is thinking, "Okay, I'm stuck in a room. How do I get out of the room? Do I try that door? No, that door has killer bees outside.
[Hah!]
[Mary] Do I try this door? There's someone with a drill outside it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Whatever it… Okay. So, I know, I will open this third door, and there's a balcony, and I can hang glide from it. Whatever that process is, that gifting… Basically what's happening there is I am brainstorming on the page in the voice of my character. What the reader is receiving is a character is thinking logically through the problem. Then, later in the story, I don't have to do that. I can brainstorm off the page, and just have the character jump to that, and the reader will then assume the character has exhibited all of those smarts, because I've laid the groundwork earlier.
 
[Dan] Yeah. When you write that kind of brainstorming scene, and I do it a lot as well, I find that I almost always need to go back and clean it up a little bit, because you don't want to have the full brain vomit all over your screen. But keeping the key portions of it, do… They set it up so your audience trusts you that the character is figuring out all the rest of the things that you don't have to show.
[Amal] I think that… What you're describing there too is sort of a pacing issue more than anything else. There's a difference in demonstrating an intelligent character's intelligence in film and television which I think we're really used to seeing at this point with… Especially in genre with Dr. Who and with Sherlock and with all the iterations thereof, we're used to this kind of fast-paced banter stuffed with things that you the audience can't keep up with how smart the characters are. But on the page, I think that for that effect to be achieved, there's a certain degree of working the readers through the situation. So what you were describing, both of you there, is that giving the reader enough cues to understand the problem and get to solving it themselves as they're reading it is, I think, a big part of sharing in the intelligence of the character. I think part of the question here is not only how do we make our smart characters smarter than us, but how do we make our smart characters have smartness that the reader participates in in a degree that is enjoyable, and to what degree we want that joy to come in. There are… Like I think of… There are narrative level joys there where you have a kind of meta-experience of it, and there are character level joys where you're tense and nervous and wondering how you're going to get out of that locked room as well with this character, and a big part of that is seeing how impossible it is to do that. So it feels like… Like it's… The pacing of it is kind of the middle of the Venn diagram between the brainstorming it in the first place and then the cleaning up of it afterwards that you just described.
 
[Howard] There's also a piece that if you're… I'm going to go back to the escaping the room. Where you have something that many savvy readers will already know. A character says… Grabs one doorknob, "Oh, that doorknob's really hot. I'm going to need a towel. No, wait. Doorknob's really hot, I shouldn't open it, there might be a fire on the other side.
[Right]
[Howard] Because the reader might already know that thing, and the reader arriving at the conclusion before the character does is very satisfying for the reader. This is the… That's a quick thing that you can give them. You might not want to give them that for the whole book, because then, oh, they totally saw it coming.
[Amal] Exactly. Oh, the doorknob's really hot, I'm going to use it to burn the ropes that are holding my hands together before I do anything else, and so on.
 
[Dan] I love what Amal said about characters… Or the reader participating in the character's intelligence. That, I think, is really important. You can look at mysteries, which I think are a fantastic example of this. Because there's always… For me, the very disappointing mysteries are the ones where the key clues that solve it are stuff we hadn't heard before. Or something that the amazingly brilliant detective has pulled out of the air. We're like, "Well, I didn't know about that offshore account. I couldn't have solve this mystery." Conan Doyle does this really well with Sherlock. One of the reasons that Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic character is because, for the most part, he does give us all the clues. We can look back and go, "Oh, it was all there, and I could have done this." One of my favorites is in The Redheaded League, where he has an entire interrogation of the character, and we think that that's important, and then, at the very end, as they're walking away, Watson says, "Well, what did you learn?" He says, "Oh, it doesn't matter what I learned. I was just there to look at his knees. They're dirty." We don't know why that's important, but we start to think about it… 
[Wow]
[Dan] And we realize his knees are dirty. He was kneeling in dirt. He was digging through into the next building.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's so cool. That makes us feel smart. Which makes us think the character is smart.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] One of the things… I'm glad you brought up mysteries, because one of the things that I often go back to is that there is a difference between the thriller and mystery, which is that in mystery, you're one step behind the detective, in thrillers, you're one step ahead of the character. So when you're looking at whether or not you're making the character smart, part of that participatory aspect is whether you let the reader figure it out before the character, or if they figure it out after. I think if you want the reader to feel like this character is supersmart, you let them figure it out one step after the character. It doesn't have to be like pages and pages later, but if you let them figure it out just a little bit later. One of the tricks that I will do sometimes with that, I will gift them with my uncertainty, but with what Dan was talking about, about cleaning up afterwards, I'll sometimes pull steps out. Because that allows my character to figure it out a moment before my reader does.
 
[Howard] Let's pause for our book of the week. Dan?
[Dan] Yes. Our book of the week is a really fantastic nonfiction, called What If by Randall Munroe. This is the guy that does XKCD, which is a really cool science-based web comic. He did a book that I believe is subtitled Ridiculous Answers to Serious Scientific Questions. He will take… People will ask him things like, "What would happen if you had a mole of moles?" Then he will go through into exhaustive detail all of the actual science behind if you had literally millions of moles, the animal, just floating in space in a giant ball, and how would gravity affect them, and what would happen to them? And things like what would happen if a submarine went into outer space? All of these things. In the process of answering these questions, you learn so much about the science and you learn it in a very engaging way. It's something that I have continued to go back to as I write my fiction, because there's really good science in there, presented in a really intelligible, accessible way.
[Howard] There's good science in it. It's quite funny.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] What would happen if the pitcher threw the ball at the speed of light?
[Hah!]
[Howard] He begins by telling you, "Okay. Bad things are going to happen once we're moving at this speed. So, let's assume that a moment after he releases the ball, it accelerates to the speed of light. Because that way, the bad things are going to happen in a more interesting way."
[Laughter]
[Dan] He's got one where somebody asked if the planet in The Little Prince could actually exist, and have its own gravity, and people could live on it. In the process of exploring what would happen to a planet like that, what would it have to be like, how dense would it be, what would the gravity be like, I have gone back to that exclamation over and over as I write my outer space science fiction because of the way he explains gravity. So, What If, by Randall Munroe, is a really great resource. We recommend you look it up.
 
[Howard] Okay. Coming back around to our tricks for writing characters who come up with solutions that are bit more brilliant than we've come up with. Have there been moments where you've been stuck and the solution you've arrived at is one that you're particularly proud of and would like to share with the class?
[Dan] I do have one. In the first Mirador book, Bluescreen, I've got the characters caught in the middle of a drive-by gang war. Two rival gangs are shooting at each other, the main character needs to stop them, but she does not have combat powers. She is a gamer and a hacker, and I wanted to make sure to solve that problem with intelligence, rather than her just picking up a gun and going Rambo on everybody. I had to stop and think about it for a couple of days before I figured out, "Oh, okay. I think some of those seeds that I've earlier put in about how pop up… Everyone has a computer in their head, and pop up ads will come and kind of intrusively come into your vision." So she was able to use that advertising system to blind all of the gang members essentially, so they weren't able to attack each other. It took me a few days to figure that out. She does it in seconds. I'm very proud of it.
[Howard] DDoSed with pop-up ads.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] That's horrifying. While you guys… While you all are thinking about the answer to the question, I want to clarify something. This episode actually airs just three and a half weeks from us recording it, because it's a replacement episode. So, Amal, you're not appearing a season later than you appeared before, you're appearing right in the middle of the season in which we're already enjoying episodes with you. The thing that feels weird is that Dan and I have not had the opportunity to record with you.
[Amal] This is true. This is a delight. I have now recorded… Well, when we are done recording, I will have recorded with all the core cast of Writing Excuses.
[Dan] Hooray!
[Amal] Which is really awesome.
 
[Howard] Any other boasting you'd like to do?
[Mary] So, with Calculating Stars, one of the challenges… And Fated Sky… One of the challenges that I had is that I have someone who can do math, who's a mathematician, and I am… I have dyscalcula. I like legit cannot do math. Not in the math is hard, but like I… Geometry? Fine. Absolutely. My spatial awareness, wonderful. Arithmetic and I are, wow, we are really not friends. We have not been on speaking terms for decades…
[Laughter]
[Mary] At this point. I have this character who is a computer, who is a calculator. What she does is she does math. So my problem was I don't. I'm not actually that interested in it. So what I did was I treated it like a magic system. Rather than having her do all of the math that I need her to do in these books, I laid the groundwork ready early that Elma can do math. Then I decided that Elma can do math in her head and that she visualized it. Which is the same thing that they do in the television Sherlock Holmes films, series, that the BBC series. Where you get to see… Things whipping around him, that's the visualization. Because that way, rather than having to explain the logical leaps, it's like, "Oh. Magic system happens. Math is magic."
[Hah!]
[Mary] So I am particularly proud of that, because it allows me to get around my own weakness in this area. While at the same time, because early on, I have every other character treating her as if she can do amazing calculations. Actually, through the entire book, everyone is like, "Oh, yeah. No one is faster at math than Elma. She can do amazing math in her head." Everyone reacts to her as if this is a truth in the world. Which means that I can just put the conclusions on the page. I don't, in that case, have to step through the process to get there.
 
[Amal] Similarly, so I have this novella, which… I've talked about it… No, I haven't talked about it yet. Oh, no. Sorry.
[Howard] You will have talked about it…
[Amal] I will have talked about it.
[Howard] In an episode previously recorded.
[Amal] That's exactly it. That's exactly it.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I wish I could… I wish I were smart enough to make that seem like something that I just know from understanding times…
[Howard] It's happened to us enough times, that I already have all those parts of speech.
[Mary] They are used to our time travel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Amal] So, Max Gladstone and I have co-written a novella that is coming out in probably… I think it's… Probably, I think it's July 2019. It's a book of two dueling time traveling super spies. One written by Max and one written by me. I have a number of insecurities in this regard because, first of all, I mean, they're time traveling super spies, they have all of time and space at their disposal, they are the best there… They are the best there are at what they do. But Wolverine quote, "And what they do is not very nice." Etc. So, they're brilliant, and they're constantly outsmarting each other and one upping each other. I am not a time traveling superspy.
[Howard] Probably.
[Mary] What!
[Amal] Probably not. But… The thing was, the insecurity I had around this, is I also haven't read a time of spy fiction. Like, there are, I think, a lot of protocols around this genre, that I only feel glancingly familiar with. So what I started to do, I realized, was writing this character… And especially because Max has a lot more of those protocols than I do. He is far more savvy with all of the kind of… Especially Cold War era stuff. He's literally writing a serial for Bookburners… Not for Bookburners. A serial for Serial Box, which is not Bookburners. Which is the spy… The witch that came in from the cold. Anyway, it's literally Soviet era spy stuff. So what I found myself doing was kind of the opposite of what you described at first, Mary Robinette, of the… Of giving… Gifting the character the uncertainty. I had my character strike constant confident poses. That confidence, like that maintaining of I know I'm a brilliant superspy. I know that I can outsmart you. And stuff. And to just kind of dwell in the affect of knowing that she is that brilliant helps to overcome those hurdles. So I feel like it was like a sustained thing across the whole project, to just find the confidence to display that confidence on the page was the [fall] for me in that situation.
 
[Mary] One of the other things, like that confidence and the I don't know this thing, that I also find that I use is expert knowledge from other people.
[Uhum.]  
[Amal] Ah. Yes.
[Mary] Which I have talked about in other places. That I am totally comfortable with going to someone and just leaving blanks in my manuscript, and going to someone who actually is an expert in this field, and then having them fill in my blanks, so that my character is literally smarter than I am, because they're talking about things that I know nothing about.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] Whether or not that's one of my astronaut friends.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Wait, wait. Do you have astronaut friends, Mary?
[Mary] I do. I know, I know, it's shocking to everyone.
[Howard] You want to know something funny?
[What?]
[Howard] This episode airs immediately after Writing Excuses interviews an astronaut.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That's so great.
[Howard] We couldn't will have timed this better.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Well, that was exactly why we did this. Will have done this.
 
[Amal] There is one quick thing I wanted to say, too, just about things that we've been discussing. It occurs to me that some of the things that we've touched on are kind of generic distinctions between… In ways to talk about… To convey the smartness of characters who are smarter than we are. Because I think of… So we've talked about mystery, we've talked about other stuff, but I… If you're writing a heist novel, for instance. I have to assume that part of the way you display the smartness of the character is by revealing afterwards how a thing was done. What you're doing, instead of showing how smart they are, is showing how impeded they are throughout, in order to then kind of just reveal at the end the way that those things fell together. It feels like writing kind of backwards the things that we were initially talking about.
[Mary] I think that gets into that thing we were talking about earlier, about whether or not you want the reader to be ahead of or behind the character. You were going to say something, Dan?
 
[Dan] Yeah. The more that Amal is talking about this, I'm kind of coming to this epiphany, that a lot of this intelligence that we see in characters follows the same principles of a horror movie when you finally reveal the monster.
[Oooo]
[Dan] Right. It's the monster…
[Mary] I'm shocked that you refer to this as…
[Dan] I know. Isn't that weird that I would go there?
[Laughter]
[Dan] If you've been building up the monster as something horrible, and then you finally show it and it doesn't live up to our expectations, then it feels very disappointing. It feels so much worse than if we'd never seen the monster at all. If you're doing this, if you're building up your character's confidence or intelligence or capability, and then we finally get to the point where we see them, for example, do some math and it's like super simple math…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Then that's not going to impress us, and we're going to be like, "Really? That's the math that Elma's so good at?" So that's one of the things I thought, for example, that Elma did really well, that you did well with Elma, was when we finally saw the monster, so to speak, when we finally revealed that capability that we'd been hearing so much about, it lived up to, if not superseded, our expectations.
[Mary] And because… The reason it did that was because I was using someone else's math. The one scene in the novel where I actually have her talking at length about a formula is when she is at the Congressional hearing, and there is a formula, and she is explaining it to the Congressman. That formula comes out of Wernher von Braun's Mars, A Technical Project. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern rocketry.
[Dan] Modern rocketry.
[Mary] So… And that formula, by the way, is ridonkulous.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It is so long. So she explains the first maybe 16th of the formula. It is that… Again, it's like I don't give the reader everything. But I give them… It is competence porn, is basically what we're dealing with.
[Dan] Well, one of the reasons, again, that that particular scene works well is that she is presenting it to a group of very smart, very capable, very competent people, and they can't follow it. So we're seeing not only her own intelligence, but her comparative intelligence.
 
[Howard] There is a… A test, a quiz, that's often administered to people who are hiring for programming jobs. It's called the fizz buzz test, which is write a program that prints the numbers one through 100, that if it's a multiple of three, you substitute the number with fizz, if it's a multiple of five, it's buzz, and if it's a multiple of both three and five, do fizz and buzz. Write a computer program that will do that. Elegant is good, writing it quickly is good, writing it so it is tight is good. Solve this problem for me, let me see what kind of a problem solver you are. My friend Dave had an interview in which the guy asked this question. Dave said, "Well, first thing I'd do is I'd write a program that says call FizzBuzz.lib from whatever this hub is because somebody else has already solved it."
[Laughter]
[Howard] The guy laughed and laughed and laughed. Then Dave provided his solution. Then, that night, Dave went home, wrote a very elegant, over the course of about four hours, fizz buzz program that he uploaded to the library, so that when his boss to be came in the next morning to look it up, he found it and saw who wrote it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is smart.
[Howard] That is brilliant and beautiful and kind of hilarious.
 
[Howard] On that note, I would like to offer our listeners some homework.
[Mary] Yes, please.
[Howard] Time. Is. Your. Friend. Your character might not have a lot of time, but you do. Write a solution, off of the top of your head, to a character problem that you are currently facing. First thing you can think of. Now, over the next couple of days, it might be two days, it might be a week, it might be longer, spend time researching on the Internet, in books, from friends, anything even tangentially related to that problem. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's climate, maybe it's geography, maybe it's pop up ads. Research these things and as you are doing the research, write down the solutions that come to you. Then, after you've done all this, order these solutions in a list of what you think is dumbest to smartest, and see how much smarter you are able to get with time. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Because this is Writing Excuses. And I got those out of order. I'm terrible at this.
[Laughter]
 
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Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

Jul. 12th, 2018 01:28 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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 11.51: Ensemble As a Sub-Genre, with Lynne M. Thomas

Dec. 23rd, 2016 02:35 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.51: Ensemble As a Sub-Genre, with Lynne M. Thomas

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/12/18/11-51-ensemble-as-a-sub-genre-with-lynne-m-thomas/

Key points: Heists are often thriller or mystery plus ensemble. Sports dramas often are ensembles. Adding ensemble as subgenre can change the solutions, often adding other approaches. Ensembles often are big. Sometimes ensembles give the main characters a rest, as we follow the rest of the ensemble. Ensembles can provide the strange to mix with familiar main characters. Ensembles also can provide a framework for many small stories of another subgenre, or as the background for a series. Horror stories may use an ensemble is a cast of characters to kill. Ensembles can help avoid polemic and Mary Sue's. When introducing the members of your ensemble, work hard at compressed, good storytelling. Don't bury the reader in back story. Ensembles work best without superpowered main characters. "Bad decision theater is how great ensembles happen." Give the ensemble an arc.( Hiding in a subgenre, we find... an ensemble! )

[Brandon] Excellent. Well, Mary, you are going to give us some homework.
[Mary] Right. Since we are talking about ensemble as a subgenre, what I want you to do is look at some of the elemental genres that we have already discussed. See what happens to them if you introduce ensemble into it. Like, if you introduce ensemble into an issue, if you introduce it into a mystery, or into a thriller? What does it do to that story if you introduce the ensemble?
[Brandon] Excellent. We'd like to thank our special guest, Lynne M. Thomas.
[Lynne] Thank you. Lovely to be here.
[Brandon] We would like to thank our Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] And I'd just like to take a moment to say we have really enjoyed doing the elemental genres with you. We only have a couple more weeks left of the year. We will be doing a Q&A on ensemble, but that will be the end of the elemental genres for now. I will encourage you to get excited and get ready because we will he introducing the new season to you and a couple of weeks.
[Howard] 2017's going to be pretty cool.
[Brandon] Look forward to that. And you are out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

Jan. 21st, 2016 11:47 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/17/11-03-layering-the-elemental-genres/

Key points: Borrow elemental genres (ideas, emotions) from other stories and inject them into your stories as subplots, character arcs, or mashups. Layer your elemental genres to create sequels that are the same, but different. Let each character's arc be a different elemental genre. You can use design elements, set dressing, to keep the story together, and mix-and-match elemental genres underneath that to tell different stories. Check your underpinnings -- what is the feeling you like? Drill down into the elemental genre behind the design elements. Turn your wall into a trench, or darkness, or... with a great unknown hidden behind it.

( Is there icing in between the layers? )
[Brandon] We're going to leave you with some homework. Mary's got the homework for us, and it relates to the homework we gave you last time.
[Mary] All right. So last time we asked you to identify the major driving emotion of the story that you are interested in working on. What I want you to do now is I want you to think of a contrasting emotion. So essentially what you're doing is you're creating a foil plot, a foil emotion for your primary emotion. Because this is going to allow you to showcase ever... Or do a contrast between the darkness of one and the happy emotions of the other. So think about not the design elements, but think about the emotional elements and think about... You don't have to worry about our proprietary vocabulary yet. I just want you to identify the emotion that you want to elicit in yourself if you were hacking your brain.
[Brandon] Now by this point, we will have all 11 of the ideas we've come up with put on our website and we will post them such... We will put them in a place that they are easy to find each week, if you want to come glance over them again. As you can tell from this episode, we're still getting used to this terminology ourselves.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Hopefully, across the course of the year, we'll all start really using the same terminology. This is the purpose...
[Howard] I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say that by the end of the season, we will have altered some of the terminology and changed the list, because it just makes more sense.
[Mary] Yep. You guys will probably be better versed in it that we will, because we just talked about it once.
[Brandon] All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 7.25: Writing Capers

Jun. 19th, 2012 02:47 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.25: Writing Capers

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/17/writing-excuses-7-25-writing-capers/

Key Points:
-- Capers, or heists. Start with a job to do, a mastermind/leader, a team of experts to collect. A talk to set up the plan, and the execution. And then there are twists and breakdowns.
-- Two big variations: don't tell the reader the whole plan, and then twist it into something different at the end, OR reveal the whole plan, then have something go horribly wrong.
-- Almost inverse: knowledge of the plan and degree of things going wrong. Note: not revealing the whole plan can be difficult in writing tight third person.
-- Capers have plenty of witty banter and dialogue, partly to carry the reader through the large amount of setup. Use jargon to make readers feel as if they know more than they actually do.
-- Heist plots aren't always about stealing -- it's the team, plan, preparation, and execution.
-- Don't overload the characters, but give them clear roles.
-- Consider the Xanatos gambit, turning evident failure or things going wrong into victory.
-- Plotting can be complicated, because capers require characters and plan to interlock. One approach is to figure out the plan, then work backwards to the necessary characters. Another is to start with characters, then tailor the plan to their skills.
( Putting the team together, planning, preparation, and pulling it off -- the four Ps of capers! )
[Brandon] But we're out of time. So, Dan, give us a heist...
[Mary] Related writing prompt.
[Brandon] Sort of writing prompt.
[Dan] Okay. Your characters need to perform a heist in reverse, and put jewels into a safe without anyone seeing them.
[Brandon] Nice. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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