wetranscripts | Entries tagged with horror

Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-13-first-person

Key points: First person. What does it do well? Direct address to the reader, the aside. Subjective unreliable point of view. Intimacy. What is first person not effective at? Clarity, complex scenes. Multi POV ensemble cast! Mirror moments, what does the character look like? Tools for first person? Avoid navelgazing by adding a activity. Multiple senses! Cadence. Why use first person? Proximity, emotion. Genres of the body, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Tapping into emotional subjective experience. Plot reveals! Character change. Coming of age stories. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? When character's goals shift. What is the lie that the character believes?

[Season 20, Episode 13]

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

[Season 20, Episode 13]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] First person.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are beginning today a small cycle of episodes in which we're going to talk about the lens of proximity, how close you are to a character and how much you get to know about that character's reactions and motivations and so on and so on. We're going to begin today by talking about first person. First person feels as if it might be the most natural way to tell a story, because that's the way we talk about ourselves. Though obviously, the other persons that we will discuss in future episodes are also and equally useful, just useful in different situations. So I want to start by asking what is first-person good at? What kinds of situations do we love first-person? What does first-person do well?

[Mary Robinette] I think the direct address to the reader, the aside, where it's like, this is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm feeling in the moment. It's not just about the internal thoughts. It's one… It's a… The thing that I've found that first-person can do that kind of nothing else gets to is hang on, let me just explain this one thing to you. So that kind of direct address of here's some exposition. I think one of the things that it has is that it immediately connects it to why it is important to the character and that is it's sometimes harder to surface things.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about first-person is it's a thing that you can do in text, in prose, in a way that's incredibly difficult or artificial to do in other media. You can have first-person asides, like the aside in theater, being… Or a soliloquy, and you can sort of fake it in films through voiceovers and things like that. But in a novel, you can have it in direct access into the interiority of a character in a way that you can't in almost any other medium. So there's something really special about the ability for prose writers to use that first-person perspective to say explicitly here's what the character's thinking, here's what the character is perceiving. And when you want to root someone very much in a subjective unreliable point of view, first-person is the go to in your toolkit.

[Dan] Well, that unreliability is so fun to play with, too. Talking about this direct aside to the reader… You could do that in third person. But in first-person, it feels like there is no artifice there. It feels like you're getting it much more directly. But… Of course there's artifice there. Because you are telling this through some other person that you've invented. It's the first person. It's not actually me, it's John Cleaver or whoever I'm writing about. So there's still a lot of artifice, there's still a lot of kind of artificiality about it, but it feels truer, it feels more direct, and that allows you to be unreliable and shaky and shenaniganry.

[Erin] I also think it creates a feeling of intimacy, or it can create a feeling of intimacy between the character and the reader. Because it's like… Like the direct aside, it's like somebody has sat down and said, okay, I'm going to tell you something. I'm just going to tell you, the reader, this thing. And nobody else in the story will understand how I feel about this at the core, nobody else will know my internal thoughts except for you. One of the reasons I love writing in first person is because you can really lean into the voice in a way that I think third person can do, especially third person where it's very close, but it doesn't have that quite the same feel as, like, a friend sat down. And part of what I'm trying to do as a writer is to capture that friend's voice and how they would tell the story in a way that nobody else could.

[DongWon] There's something really, really interesting about first person, because it is both our oldest form of storytelling, because just the way that we tell a story is I was walking down the street the other day. I was going to the store. The dog jumped out in the street, and I chased after it. Right? Like, that is just how we tell stories, and the way people have told stories as long as they were telling stories. But as a literary convention, as a part of the novel, it's one of the newest forms. At least in a dominant way. Like, there are examples that go back. But in terms of being so dominant in terms of how it exists in the contemporary novel, it is very much a thing that arose in, like, modern days, in like early mid twentieth century. Right? So one thing that I see people struggle with, when people push back against first-person, which I still see kind of a shocking amount. But when I see that pushback, it's… There's like an artificiality to first-person that can be a tough hurdle for some readers to get past. Because you're reading a text, but the text is being told to you as if a person is narrating it. So who is narrating it to you in that moment becomes a question in certain reader's minds. So there's like a… There is both an incredible immediacy, intimacy, and familiarity to first-person, and a layer of artificiality that requires one extra jump for the reader.

[Howard] And… That's weird, because I will accept that there is magic and spaceships and vampires, but I'm really struggling with the fact that there is a book.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's not so much that it's… Like, I can think of a bajillion examples of first-person. Because the novel would often start… When you're looking at the trajectory of the novel as a travelogue. Then you're looking at Poe, who often used first-person.

[DongWon] It's like where does epistolary end…

[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly.

[DongWon] And first-person begin is a we… The distinction that you and I are drawing here. But [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. But… But I think the thing is that one of the reasons it fell out of fashion is that people started to get hung up on the… But really did they have time to write this while they were being dragged away by eldritch horrors?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Yes. Always yes.

[Dan] Yeah. At what point in the story is this account being given? Well, I like you mentioned the kind of newness of it. It is… First person is going through a huge Renaissance right now in certain corners of the market. A lot of book tubers, books to grammars, book talkers… There's a big trend going around. I see where they will just flat out refuse to read something unless it's in first-person.

[DongWon] Huh.

[Dan] That's obviously not everybody, and it's not the whole market. But it's kind of having a heyday right now, which I think is really interesting. I want to ask the question what is first-person bad at? As long as we're talking about it, what can you not do very effectively with it?

[DongWon] Clarity.

[Howard] Avoid the capital I.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I think first-person… It can be harder to truly communicate to the reader what's happening in a complex scene. Because you're anchored to one perspective and one understanding of what's happening in a particular moment. So there's an immediacy to that. But when you think about your subjective experience of a large event, you're not getting the full picture because you're only seeing a little piece of it. Right? So I think we think of first-hand experience as the most true, but in a lot of ways, the way we consume information about what happened is somebody explaining from multiple perspectives. So when you're limiting yourself to one POV in a story, you are removing access to a lot of tools that you have that you would have in cinema, for example. You think cinematically, all the things the camera sees are just what the character's actually seeing, what the character's seeing is very different. Right? So you're much more constrained. So if you want real true like grounded clarity about feelings, emotions, what happened in a complex scene, first-person's pretty tough to make that happen.

[Howard] Your multi POV ensemble cast…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In a heist thing… Yeah, that's difficult to pull off in first-person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I think, first-person… You can cheat when we get to third person, you can cheat to show us what a character looks like even when you're in tight third person, but when you're in first-person, unless they step up and have a mirror moment, which… I was walking down the hall and I stopped to regard myself in the mirror.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I had curly red hair, bright green eyes, and was extremely buxom.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I think that everyone thinks about themselves [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[Erin] Just in that tone. Well, I agree with it. Like, clarity is part of it, and also just knowledge. Like the characters… A lot of times, you have, like, but the reader knows and what the character knows. In first-person, they get… They are the same. Because… Unless… Now there are ways to cheat out of this, but in general, you only know what the character knows about the world, about the situation, about the experience. So if there's something that you really need, like description, self-description, the reader to know, but there's no reason for the character to know that, you're going to have to figure out a workaround. Even in unreliable… Like, one of the things I really like doing in pieces with unreliable narrators is setting up a reliable outsider that is… That can be established, like, because they hold a position of authority or you see them being reliable in several scenes, and can point out through dialogue or through their own actions what's happening outside of the first-person, that character's first-person experience.

[DongWon] They can also…

[Erin] They can then misinterpret what that reliable person does, but the reader… It's clear enough to the reader, like, what happens. I think about a scene I wrote in my story Wolfy Things where the mom is crying and the sun misinterprets it that he's like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] She's trying to salt the food with her tears. Like… Because no one's going to do that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, you, as a reader, know that seems unlikely. Probably she's just crying over the soup.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But he cannot accept that. But because it's something clear enough to the reader, it comes through. But it requires a lot of work to do that. Where is in a third person, you could probably just say, like, she's crying and then you would know.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You could cheat that also with chapter bumps. You insert in universe material that appears at the top of the chapter, and then the first-person account either accounts for that or doesn't account for that. That can argue with the character just fine.

[Dan] All right. Let's take a moment here to pause, and when we come back, we'll discuss this further.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is yoru opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Dan] All right. So we've talked about things that first-person does well and does less well. Let's talk now about how. How can we use first-person effectively? What are some good tools for using first person as a perspective?

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about one of the traps of first-person is a way of bringing us around to an effective tool. One of the traps of first-person is navelgazing. So it is, I think, one of the things that it does really well is that you can get into the character's interiority, but you can, like, have a character just sit in a room and think about themselves and never move on. So, for me, one of the tools that I often try to use when I'm doing that to combat the navelgazing is that if I have a scene where my character needs to think about something for whatever reason, I try to pair it with an activity that is somehow plot related. So, like, if there's this is a conspiracy, I think a conspiracy thing is happening, I will have them trying to repair a rover. Then, as they're repairing the rover, and having conversations, different things will then trigger for them. It's like hum, I think this is… You just said something very fishy, and what's going on with your face right now? But it is… Having that interaction with the outside world keeps… For me, keeps my navelgazing to a minimum.

[Howard] Yeah. It's the multi sensory approach. Only saying what the character is thinking about is just the navelgazing. But, I'm thinking about this. I'm seeing that. I smell this. I heard that. I'm touching this. My heart is pounding or I have a headache. I have… There's a whole huge spectrum of senses that you can tap into with first-person. If you don't use at least three of them, I feel like you're leaving too much unsaid.

[Erin] A tool that I really like that… To play around with with first-person is cadence. What the rhythm of that person's thoughts are as they're driving things. Because it tells you about the emotions. One thing that's really… You can have a very self-aware first-person character, but a lot of times they're not sure what's going on, exactly. They're afraid, but they may not say, like, I am afraid right now. They may just be experiencing fear. But what you can do is go with a faster Kayden. All of a sudden, like breathing heavy, like the heartbeat racing, when you're afraid. They're noticing things that are fearful, but also, the entire cadence of the piece as that sort of taut feeling to it, and then when they're safety, the cadence slows down. It gives a completely different feeling without you needing to signal it from the outside.

[Mary Robinette] Also, that is something that is extremely apparent when I'm doing audiobooks. When I'm narrating and the author is thinking about that, it shows up on the page and you can really hear it. It is much easier to [garbled]

[Howard] [garbled] makes your job easier.

[Mary Robinette] So much easier. I actually think that that's one of the reasons we're seeing the surgeon audio, in first-person narratives, is because they do better in audiobook. But there are times when I have to narrate something and the writer has not paid attention to the Kayden, and attempting to get the emotion into that scene is significantly harder, even though you have the added layer of I do cool things with my voice. It is undercut by the cadence.

[Howard] One of the reasons, Mary Robinette, that your first half of the episode mirrors scene was so humorous is that it breaks the true cadence of that person. That is not the pattern that you would use, that is not the cadence of… At least not of my inner voice. When I look in the mirror…

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] My inner voice… Well, I'm not saying mirrors scenes are bad. I will look in the mirror and the cadence for my mirror scene is, Howard, you gonna go outside looking like that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yep. Then I'm off. Now the reader has an insight into how I feel about how I look and how much I care. That's all we need.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, most of my mirror scenes would actually be…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] How did you sleep on your hair to get [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like that.

[Dan] So, if we are using first person as a lens… Let me rephrase. If are using proximity as a lens, this is how we want to look at our work and we… What are some of the reasons we might choose first-person then? What is going to guide us? What… I guess this kind of comes back to the question we asked in the beginning of what does first-person do that the others can't. But what are some situations where we will say you know what this really needs? First-person.

[DongWon] It's so intimate. Right? We're talking about proximity. Right? First-person is… You're right up on that perspective, you're in their head with them. So when you need anything that is raw emotion. Right? That's why it works so well in YA, why we see it there so much. That's why you see it a ton in what I think of as genres of the body. Right? So, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Right? Like, horror in particular, first-person is just so valuable there because as a person is experiencing disruption, fear, sensations in their body, all of those things, are stuff that you can get to so quickly and so closely as first-person that can take extra work when you're having to do the work of third person limited or omniscient of describing a broader scene. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I think whenever you want to tap into someone's like emotional subjective experience, first person does so well for that. I think that's why it's doing so well on things like book talk right now.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] When you've got a plot reveal that that moment, first-person can do that so well. Because we are right there. The Revelation of whatever it is, the plot twist, the monster, the whatever, the reader is getting that reveal at the same time the character is getting that reveal at the end. Yeah. Immediacy and proximity. And, as a writer, that lens of proximity… You may choose to look at your reveal's pacifically at the reveal you have in mind and say, you know what? This is going to work better in first-person than anything else I can do. So maybe that's the way I need to shape the rest of the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that a lot of times, I think of first-person stories as stories of perspective. Because you've chosen to use this particular… That character is the lens into the story more than anything else. Because you are filtering everything through the way that character experiences things. So, choosing it when you're going to have a reveal that shifts that character's perspective, where they understand something they didn't understand before, that they couldn't understand before, is where something… Where it really appeals to me. Where there is a reason in which that person as a filter is the best filter for the story.

[Mary Robinette] That ties into one of my absolute favorite things that you can do with first-person that you cannot do with any of the others. It's the proximity thing. That you can have the character change by the act of telling the story. Like, some of my favorite stories are ones… It's one of the reasons I love the John Cleaver books so much is that John is not the same person at the beginning is at the end, and the way John is relating to the reader has changed. That is so… I think that's so interesting. It works really… I think, really, really well in coming-of-age stories. I think that's one of the reasons we often see first-person paired with younger protagonists, because you more commonly have a coming-of-age story with them. But it is something that is just so delicious, so intimate.

[Dan] Yeah. I know that we are kind of running up against the end of time here…

[Erin] The end of time!

[Dan] The end of all… Not necessarily all time, but the end of our time for this. I do want to get back to…

[Mary Robinette] As I was sitting on the couch, Dan told me that I was running up against the end of time. I paused to look in the mirror…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Are you really going outside like that?

[Dan] This is part of the lens of where and when.

[Erin] Exactly. At least I'll look good during my final [garbled]

[Dan] I do want to circle back to unreliability. Because not only… That was something we mentioned not only as a strength of first-person, but it's one of the things that is… One of the downsides of first-person. Not necessarily a downside, is that it's really hard to not be unreliable with it. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? This isn't really an unreliable narration episode, but it's so closely linked to first-person. You were talking about the John Cleaver books. That's leaning so heavily on that, the idea that what he is telling you is what he thinks is true, not what is actually true. That dramatic irony of being able to listen to him talk about himself and know, oh, dude, you are wrong about so many things. What is the value of unreliability and why might a reader, an author, I mean, choose to put that into their story?

[DongWon] I mean, going back several episodes to goals and motivations. Right? A character's goals often involve them lying to themselves a little bit because they think they want X, but what they really need is Y. Right? So the movement from understanding what your original goal was to what your new goals are is one of that unreliability coming to the fore so you realize that, like, oh, my understanding of the world is shifting. The reason why first-person is sort of inherently unreliable, because character growth necessarily changes what is quote unquote real for the audience experience. Right? So you're shifting… Which is both what makes first-person fun and so challenging is that it's always already moving around you at all times.

[Mary Robinette] There's the idea that we talk about periodically, what is the lie the character believes? There's a bunch of different forms that that takes, but I think one of the things that you can really play with in first-person is that you can reveal character by what the character is lying to themselves about and how they are lying to themselves and the lengths that they will go to to preserve those lies. That's something that's, I think, much easier to do in first-person because of the navelgazing. But because they can do a soliloquy in ways that a third person really can't. Then, that in itself, can become a form of conflict as they are struggling with the fact that all of their reasons are breaking down.

[DongWon] I call that narrative parallax because the slight shift in perspective lets you reveal more.

[Erin] Something that just occurs to me as you asked this question is that the reason because I love unreliable narration. It's like my favorite thing ever. I think it's because I like characters that don't necessarily change or grow. Which means that the forward momentum in the story has to be the reader realization of the truth of who that character is. So, like, if they're not, like, because if they were doing… They externally sort of do the same things, but you… They understand more about the world, you understand more about them. It grows in context, as opposed to in action. Sometimes I think unreliability works well because it feels like you're moving forward as they continue to misinterpret the world, even though they don't do anything different. It still gives it a sense of a forward lean in the reader's mind.

[Howard] I think two of my favorite examples of unreliable narrators are in first-person our books where you don't realize until the very end that this is a single POV that has been telling you a story in multiple POVs. The Fifth Season and Player of Games by Iain Banks. Fifth Season by N K Jemison. You discover late in the stories, oh, this story has a first-person narrator who is part of the action, and they been lying to me about their involvement the whole time, until the very end. That's not really a first-person narrative, and maybe that's a segue into how we mess with proximity later.

[Dan] Well, now we finally have arrived at the end of times…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, it's homework time. What I would like you to do is go pick up a book that you love, something that you enjoy. Find a scene that you think is really great that is not in first-person, and take a crack at rewriting it in first-person from the point of view of one of the characters in it. Pay attention to what types of changes this requires you to make, how information comes across differently.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-40-an-interview-on-tension-with-p-djeli-clark

Key Points: Multiple influences. Make it a people story. Food is an unsung hero of worldbuilding. People live in color. Relax with a meal, then a monster comes. Fight scenes in places that shouldn't have fights, like schools, hospitals, playground, kitchens. Clues and seeds in the beginning, then bring them out later. Tell a story that sings to people and can change them. Write something for yourself. Absurdity, trauma, and horror.

[Season 19, Episode 40]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we are joined by our special guest, P. Djèlí Clark. We hope that you've been reading along and listening as we've been talking about this phenomenal book, Ring Shout. We've brought him on to talk to us about the ways in which he tortured us through the tension. Phenderson, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?

[Phenderson] Sure thing. Thanks for having me here. I'm Phenderson Djèlí Clark, people probably know me as P. Djèlí Clark. I write stuff. Mostly science fiction when I can. Apart from my day job, where I'm an academic historian. So, this is how I attempt to let off steam. Thanks for having me.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much. So this was… I've talked about this with the listeners before, that this was a really difficult read for me, because you do crank up the tension quite a bit. There's a number of scenes that we will… We will discuss. But one of the things that I'm wondering about, when you sat down to work on this, were you thinking about, like, the historical era, or were you thinking about how can I make people super uncomfortable? Like, what kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What drove you?

[Phenderson] Yeah, that's a great question. I think perhaps a little bit of both, one subconsciously, one consciously. Certainly, I was thinking about the historical era. As I said, I'm an academic historian, and one of the classes I teach is Slavery in Film. So I've gotten to know Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the 1915 film where the Klan are heroes, quite well. I was trying to figure out a way to bring that story to people in the genre I love. So, Ring Shout came about from that central focus, as well as, as we can talk about, a lot of other little interesting ideas from ex-slave narratives that I've read, from stories that I've liked when I was younger, people may catch some Miss Whoozits, Miss Whatzits, what have you, from A Wrinkle in Time, down to the aesthetics of Beyonce's Formation Review.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] There were multiple inspirations that I threw into this big pot of gumbo and hoped that it would work.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] Absolutely. I love that. Like… I will say, I did not catch all of that, or most of it, probably. But I remember when I… The Birth of a Nation comes really early, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see what he's doing. He did this thing, he did this other thing, it's and he puts them together into this thing." It really made me feel good. It made me feel like, okay, like, all the time that I've spent, like, watching like, sad narrative slavery [garbled twenties] and all those eyes on the pride where my parents were saying, like, it's all [garbled] like, paying off, which I thought it was a really, really fun thing. But I have to wonder, like, does that… I mean, does it ever feel like too much? Do you ever feel like I'm trying to juggle all these influences and not get overwhelmed by them?

[Phenderson] it's Well, yeah. When I was… To answer your question, when I was doing this, when I finished it, I was, like, well, this is a mess. I was like, this is just way too much going on here. I want to just throw some space aliens in here while I'm at it. Right? There's just so much going on. I didn't know if this thing would work. I always say, as writers, sometimes you create something that… I didn't have a full genre for it. I was like, this is all over the place. I didn't know how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even, at times, that you guys liked this. Okay. Great. So, it's one of these things where you take scotch tape and you put together this giant thing, you don't know if it's going to work, and it did. I don't even know if I could re-create it again. Because it was such a in the moment type of creation.

[Howard] Say, you're looking at your editor, you're like, "Wait. You took a heat gun to the scotch tape? No, are we supposed to fix that?"

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] So, I have to ask this question, did you still feel like it was a mess when it went to print?

[Phenderson] Again, luckily, so many people had read it and given it all these great… I was like, "Oh. It worked. Pshew." I guess what I was going for worked. I was so surprised, I still am surprised, at how many people like it. How much it's liked. All the countries that people have read it. When it was something that I wrote kind of as a stopgap. For my first novel. [Garbled] remember, hey, this guy's a writer.

[Howard] Okay. I'm here to tell you that whatever that gap was…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] You stopped it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.

[Phenderson] So it worked. I'm happy. Right? I… Certainly, anything, I think, of any writer, you certainly have these deeper meetings. But I didn't know if anybody would get them. Like, Erin was saying. I didn't know if people would be able to latch onto those things. People really did. I'm just grateful.

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things that we talked about when we were… Earlier, when we were discussing the idea of the narrative versus contextual tension. That there's the tension that happens on the page in the story, and then there's the tension that the reader brings to it, the contextual tension, that the reader brings to it by what they know about history…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] And what they know about the larger world. You do a really good job, I think, of making sure that there is narrative tension there even for people who do not have a deep understanding of the contextual tension. I think that's why it works when you go to another country that is not as familiar with the history of American slavery and oppression. Were you thinking about that? Like… When you were structuring scenes, that you were like, oh, I need to make sure that there's something here for people who are a little clueless?

[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] I mean… I could hold forth and have a very long discussion, like Max Gladstone on how things work. I wish that I had, like… That I had that ability. But really so much of my writing is from the fact that I love reading, I love listening to storytellers, I come… My mother was an excellent storyteller. My mother could give you directions and it was riveting.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Right? She would build up tension… You're like, oh, man, I got it, which Lane I'm supposed to switch into. That's amazing. So I think I've brought some of that to this. It's just… I mean, I want to tell the largest story. Like you said, about ideas of oppression, about being in slavery and everything else, but I also want to make it a people story. I wanted the characters to shine. I wanted it to have their own lived experiences and how I would imagine people dealing with everyday life. Having a love life. Not getting along with the people in your little monster fighting group. How you would butt heads with people that you have to work with. I wanted to bring all of that to the story as well. In some ways, to make it more human, so people could relate to it. Also, to show that in the midst of this oppression, people still go to a juke joint. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] People still talk about sex and all these other things in life. That it's not just fighting the oppression, it's people living their lives. I wanted to make sure I got that across as well.

[Erin] Oh, my God. I…

[Howard] There was a lot of joy in that book for me.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I… Gosh, I can't remember which scene it was. I remember which scene it wasn't. It wasn't the scene in the butcher shop.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]

[Howard] But there was a scene where I literally had to go make some jambalaya. Because you made me hungry for…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] The food of my people.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.

[Phenderson] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think food is one of the unsung heroes of worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] There's a way that I think food can evoke things. I've been in moods before where people like show a plate and I can hear people behind me going, "Mmm. Mmm."

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] I heard someone's stomach growl once in a film. I think it was in the movie Soul Food. Somebody's stomach growled in reaction. You know what I'm talking about, Erin, when they show that one plate…

[Erin] Yes.

[Phenderson] And I'm like… They're like, "Mmm. Mmm." I always thought it was ironic, though, the very plot of this movie is that food kills. Anyway.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] People do love their food. So I think there's a way that… I'm glad you said that, that… I know that… I think I know the scene you're talking about, like, when they're sitting down to eat. Because I just wanted to show that that communal experience of eating and enjoying these things after having a hard-fought battle… What's better than sitting down… Like, in the first Avengers movie. You go and you have some [garbled]. Right? There's something about that that is just very real. I… So, yeah. I think food is the unsung hero. I tell that to writers all the time. Don't neglect your food.

[Erin] If the food is bad, that tells you something too.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] You get out there, with [garbled vibration] plate after [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] It's not a good thing.

[Phenderson] Exactly.

[Erin] [garbled] When you were talking about oppression versus the real life, it may be think of one of my favorite things to do is to look at old black-and-white photos where they actually colorize it. Because I think people forget, like, people were living in color. You know what I mean? Like, well, instead they like put them on the wall, like they're not…

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Erin] Real. When you see them, like, I just think I saw one the other day, I think it was like Martin Luther King looking…

[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?

[Erin] Yes!

[Phenderson] They've re-announced it. People are like, "Whoo, they was fly." [Garbled]

[Erin] It was…

[Phenderson] Did you think they dressed in black and white? I think that's so true, is a historian, how people think of the past. It's hard sometimes for people to think of the past as these were people. Right? All of these events were happening, but they were still people, living their lives, bickering, getting along, joking. They were just people, and yes, they dressed in color. They matched the things. [Garbled] it was just, I guess, my gray drab suit. My other drab suit, now. No. It was… But there is something about that, how it brings it to life. I'm so glad you brought that up. I saw that effect in this. [Garbled] I understand that. It's still… It's something human about seeing those colors that makes you understand, like, yeah, these are people.

[Howard] When you… Coming back to tension for a moment, being able to sit down to a meal. That's a relief. That is a…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Relaxing thing. If you let your leader… Your leader? Your reader relax…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Into some food that they are imagining and you're describing it and they're getting the smells and the tastes…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] And the sounds and all that. And then you spring a monster on them later. It's going to be even sharper. It's going to work even better.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I loved that. I don't know if you were doing it deliberately, but as I had gone upstairs eating the jambalaya, I was thinking, I may have walked into a trap here.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I may have walked right into a trap. I'm letting my guard down. Something terrible's going to happen very next.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I think that's good points you're making. I don't even know if I do it deliberately, but I think, like, I'll tell you, there's some stories I read and there's so much action and, like, do people stop and go to the bathroom? Right, you gotta stop someplace. Give me a pause. Right? I'm really big into if I'm reading a story, I want to pause. I want people to [garbled] I want people to stop. I think… It's okay if they don't have a big scene, I want a pause. Nothing like that communal, like you said, this way that people let their guard down when they're eating, especially if they feel they're in a safe place here for people. Then there's also still a time… That was my time to let people… For Sadie and Maurice to still have their little bickering bit. All right? But also to show that they're closer than people know. Right? Also, the juke joint, right? I could have easily made this a weird mean girls thing where they just don't get along, but I wanted to show that, no, underneath all that, they absolutely love each other. Right? That Sadie will tear down this world for Maurice even if they also bicker. I think there were those scenes that allowed me to do that. I really liked it… Like I… When I started the story, for instance, starting there, that conversation. I didn't worry, because you know we're taught, like, oh, the story should start. Don't have them… Don't have people in conversation. I was like, no, I want this conversation. I want this convo in the very beginning to start the story off. I thought there I could build a little tension between this group, and then the tension explodes, and, oh, there's a monster.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!

[Erin] I also think in real life, I think we talked about this on the episode, like, we all are much more, like, going to have tension in our conversations than because monsters attack us. Like, that's a kind of tension we understand. Like… I don't know what you all do in your spare time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] But, in general, so it's like it feels so real, and then you're like and it goes to 11. It's sort of… I was thinking about, Howard, what you said about the food. When you read a food scene, it's like your nose opens up. Like you suddenly think about how things smell. Then, if the next thing you smell is like monster, like, you are… You're taking that in with a soul whiff, you know. Because you're in that moment.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] You're ready for it, and all your senses are already being engaged, versus, like, sometimes when you know tension is happening. As a reader, like, you'll tense up. Your hands will curl, you won't take in full breaths because you're in the moment. So I kind of like the idea that there's enough slowdown, that we're just chillin', laying back, and then [crunch].

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I… It's one of my favorite things also that… The… Making the reader feel like, oh, no, you're safe now. Everything's all fine. All fine… Then very not. Very, very not. I actually… Since we were talking about that first scene, I had a question as well. That kind of… I been thinking about it while I was reading it, but then when Howard said, oh, no, this is a trap… There are potential narrative traps as a writer in some of this… In some of the things… Any time we're writing. One of the things that I was… When I was reading it, I was waiting for the parade to turn on them. Because that's something that I would have seen in cinema or…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In the hands of another writer. You take us a very different place.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With, hello monsters, and then going into the warehouse, which, like, is full and should not be full, and, like… So you keep ratcheting up the tension, but you avoid the obvious one. Did you avoid that because you were just not interested in writing it, because it was a little bit of a trap, or… I realize that's asking someone to tell us… Tell us what you were thinking when you were writing this however many years it is after you wrote the book is like monumentally unfair, and yet I'm still asking.

[Phenderson] Well, you know, as a writer, it's also like a ret con. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Like, people are always asking you to figure out why you did the thing you did. I end up coming up with an answer, and I'm like, "Is that true? Or am I…"

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Just [garbled] like, am I imagining that was what I was thinking at the time? So, I know that's interesting that you say that, that you thought the crowd was going to turn on them. Right? Because they're in this dangerous place, that certainly was a Klan march. Right? So I don't think I ever thought of the crowd turning on them. I knew that they were going to be doing something away from what most people could see, only because what they have to do is so wild that everyone can't see this. Right? It has to be like this is the secret underground world. Like Blade. Like, nobody knows I'm fighting vampires. Right? This is what I do. This is the… What does he say in the movie? There's the candy coated world, and there's the one underneath. Right? I wanted to get that idea of, like, there's this underneath world that most people are simply unaware of. For that, to me, it had to happen away from the main crowd. It had to happen away from the main block of people for them to be able to have this open warfare. So, yeah. The warehouse came to me, I mean, this is where I literally had a… I've been to Macon, Georgia, but I had a map and I had a warehouse that was actually there. That's from an actual warehouse. It was… I have photos of it. It was actually used to house cotton. So it gave me the… It gave me something from the landscape to look down upon. Then I would be, like, I want a fight in a warehouse. That's a great thought. All right. So I like having fights in places that you just shouldn't be having fights in, right? Like in schools, hospitals, warehouses. It's just like that's not what this is for. But this is what we're going to going to turn it into. [Garbled] So, yeah. That's how that came about.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Now I'm sitting here going what is for having battles in…?

[Erin] I was just like… I was like playgrounds, playgrounds are really…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] That's a top place.

[Phenderson] Some of the best fight scenes, right?

[Howard] There really isn't a good place to have [garbled] battles

[Phenderson] If you like Star Wars, like, they're constantly having fight scenes in industrial centers. Hey, we're working here. [Garbled] with light sabers running around. They're just trying to get this work done.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.

[Howard] We are on a space station. If you break that, everyone dies.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Does ownership know what you guys are doing right now?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Every time there's a battle, a fight scene, that runs through a kitchen and the cooks just keep on cooking while they're going through…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, what? How does that…

[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Table 17 needs…

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] They're more scared of the chefs than they are…

[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.

[Howard] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Basically.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of interrupting things when fights come running through, we're going to interrupt right here and be back in just a minute to talk a little bit more about tension.

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. Head to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

[Phenderson] My thing of the week is… I am always late on TV shows. I say this to everybody. We live in a golden era of television. There's more fantastic TV that has ever existed in my lifetime. I no longer have to choose between the A-Team, Knight Rider, and Auto Man. That was like a weird show about a guy who turned into a car. Very ridiculous. In the eighties, eighties was a wild time. But now there's so much TV. But I'm always late. So what I've decided to watch this week is something that came out in 2019. It's a series, a short series, called The Terror. It is on Netflix. It's about these two British ships, the Erebus and I think it's the Terror, trying to find a way to the Northwest passage, and, whoo boy, these strange things begin to happen. I've long wanted to watch this film, then it went away. Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix, it's returned. I'm able to watch it. When this is over, I'm going to enjoy another episode. As I do constantly. So, yeah. That's my thing. Some of you have seen it. If you haven't, The Terror. Watch it at night.

[Erin] No.

[Mary Robinette] Making mental notes, do not take Phenderson's advice.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Here we are, back on the other side. The heroes have fought their way through our kitchen, and we have to talk about some more ingredients of tension. So, I was so pleased with myself for that metaphor, it's not really great.

[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. I appreciate you. Some of the other things that we talked about were things like anticipation and resolution. There's a bunch of stuff that you set up early on that then has a nice payoff later. For instance, talking about the film that's going to be on Stone Mountain. You talk about that right at the beginning of the book, and then it comes back and plays… It continues to play a larger and larger role as we move through the book. Did you always have, like, and we're gonna go to Stone Mountain?

[Phenderson] Yeah. I always knew we were going to Stone Mountain. We were always going to Stone Mountain, because part of the origin of this entire thing is the fact that in real life, the second Klan has its origins on Stone Mountain. Right? And literally is created after D. W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is where the Klan arose. By this time, the first Klan is mostly died out, because they got what they wanted. They've taken over… They've instituted Jim Crow. The second Klan comes about really based on the film. The film so inspires this guy, Al Simmons, in Georgia that he decides to create the second Klan. The second Klan now has… It's still hates black people, but it has a larger enemies list. Now it doesn't like Catholics, it doesn't like German immigrants. It really doesn't like Jews. In fact is the killing of Leo Frank, the murder of Leo Frank is very much tied up with the second Klan being born in Georgia. He goes to Stone Mountain and they do a ritual. The ritual is based heavily on the film, the Birth of a Nation.

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

[Phenderson]'s It would almost… I mean, the group is not a terror group. It would almost be funny to call the movie Klan. Because the way they do many of the rituals they do are based more on the film Birth of a Nation than the first Klan that comes about. Right? This second Klan, of course, is much more massive. Where is the first Klan was maybe tens of thousands, this Klan rises to some four and a half million. Where is the first Klan was mostly in the South, and also in California where they're harassing the Chinese, the second Klan is everywhere. It swallows up the Midwest. It's in Maine, it's in Connecticut. It's everywhere. They're running people for office. They're not even wearing masks, because everyone can be a member of the Klan. Right? So I always knew I was going to Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain was that symbol. To this day, Stone Mountain is still a place where Klan and white supremacists meet. It has these giant reliefs on their, actually, of Confederate generals like Lee and others. Right? So it's still this place, this tension. So I always knew I wanted to go there, and, yeah, I definitely seeded it in the beginning. Because I'm a believer that if you give somebody something late in the story, I want to see it later on, but don't just put it there. I like people… I like to give people clues so that they can know that it's coming. Like, when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan… What's the movie with Bruce Willis? In the…

[Howard] Sixth Sense.

[Phenderson] Sixth Sense. I love the fact that when we figure it out, we're like, oh, the clues were always there. Right? We just saw it differently. So I like to make certain that I've seeded things so that when they do happen, people aren't like, whoa, what are you doing on Stone Mountain? I want them to get these little hints before, and then take them back now. See, I gotta do it, I'm an academic historian, so if you ask me things, I have to plug the history.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] I was right there with you. I spent a lot of time in Atlanta, and as you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was… Went to Atlanta for a job and was picked up by his boss at the airport. His boss took him, the first stop they made on the way from the airport to the job was at Stone Mountain.

[Phenderson] Okay. It's good that people go. It's beautiful scenery.

[Mary Robinette] Well, yeah. Contextually, a little more challenging when the person who's showing up for the job is a young black man and it's an older white guy who takes him there.

[Phenderson] It's not the best place. Especially if you know the history of, like… Why are we here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, those are questions that are still being asked.

[Howard] So, one of the things that I love the most about Ring Shout… I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up in Florida. I have zero childhood knowledge of the history that you're talking about. That was all completely obscured from me. I… It's just been the last 10 years that I've been looking back and realizing, oh, wow. I know nothing. Well. Less than 50 percent of what was happening in that time. In that area. The way you wrote the novel, I was able just contextually to tell immediately, okay, this is P. Djèlí Clark creating fiction and this is P. Djèlí Clark telling me history.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] That dance that you did between the fantastic that you wove through your story in order to create a mythos that was brilliant and wonderful and horrific and full of scary meat versus…

[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.

[Howard] Versus the history which is… I am ashamed for not knowing it sooner. But that dance you did was wonderful. I loved the book for that.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Unfortunately, in Florida, they're trying to make it so that people will not know about these things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I just think that there is this way that I think you're hitting on the head, there are these aspects of American history that just aren't spoken of. I think about when HBO re-did Watchmen and they decided to do it from a perspective of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma is something that I've known about since I was a kid, because in black spaces, it's just talked about. Even if people don't know everything, they've heard of black Wall Street. They know what happened there. People just bring it up. My parents are from the Caribbean. So they didn't come here and tell like the late sixties, early seventies. They knew about it. I heard about it in a barbershop somewhere. This is just something I knew. But most people, even the show runner for that show. He was a 40 something-year-old black male. He had never heard of it. Right? Until, like a few years before. It fascinated him. He went to look for it. Therefore he knew he had to put this into the film. That night that it premiered, I think Google almost broke because people were googling what is Tulsa Oklahoma? What happened there? Now it's just become something that everyone knows, but there is this way that there are a lot of things that the national narrative doesn't like to talk about. That doesn't make us feel good. So these kind of things become knowledge to like a few people where it's just known in the black community, like this thing happened, but in the larger community, it's just completely unheard of. So, yeah, I wrote… Part of what I was doing as the historian in me, I'm trying to bring these things out by using fiction. Right? What inspired me, for a lot of this, what inspired the story, were actually the ex-slave narratives taken from the last generation of enslaved people who were living in the 1920s continuing into the 1930s, during the depression, the WPA narratives. They talk about this first Klan. They described them as monsters. When I first… I was like, whoa. That's amazing. Now they know they're not monsters. But they're using this notion of describing the Klan as haints, saying that they have horns, that they could drink tons of water, do these supernatural acts, that they have chains, and they would blacken their faces I always had this idea that the using this idea of storytelling to talk about the trauma that they were faced with. Right? Turning these people… Who they knew who they were. They're like, yeah, that's Judge so and so. I know who he is. He owned me, or I worked for him. But he dresses up and he comes and he terrorizes us. What better way to talk about your trauma then using horror? Which is what the scholar Kinitra Brooks, she always says this is what horror is. Right? It's about us trying to find a way to talk about trauma. So, all this to say, I took my cue from these former slaves using folklore to talk about this history, and saying, what if I did that as well. It was just me trying to… Constantly trying to make it not get to historical, so that people like, oh, no, it's history, I'm running away. But yet, imbuing it with the fiction enough to keep people there in the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think you just did a great job of walking that line. I also enjoy writing historical fiction.

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The tension…

[Phenderson] Very well.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. The tension that you can put on things by inviting the reader into…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like when you use real history, you are making space for the reader, because your engaging their curiosity.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In a way that is harder, I think with some other forms of fiction. One of the things…

[Erin] Oh, sorry.

[Mary Robinette] That you did…

[Howard] This might be a little on the nose, but I feel like our listeners at this point really need to be able to draw a line between the way Birth of a Nation as a medium, as a story, was so incredibly destructive… I mean, it was very influential on culture, but it was very, very destructive. And the stories that we tell now that attempt to correct that can be so corrective. Writing is important, and getting it right is important. Telling a story that will sing to people and can change them is important. This is a good work that you did, that we want to do. It is a good work.

[Phenderson] Thank you. Thank you. That's great to hear. I mean, so much of… Yeah, I can't say I didn't write this in a sense of this is a corrective or for my own catharsis. You know? People hunting Klan members? Yeah, it's cathartic. So, thank you, that's great to hear. I… Like I said, when I say I wrote this with the idea that a few people might like it, I still had this idea this is what I want people to get from it, and that people come away with this notion of it's a corrective, but also this… Giving them this inspiration to go, I want to find out more. As a historian. Of course, I want you to find out more, I want you to be able to look and say, oh, wow. This was a real part of history. This is a fictional part, like you said, these things actually happened. So, thank you very much. That's… You make me want to go write.

[Erin] Please do.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Please do write more. One of the things that I just wanted to draw a line under that Phenderson is talking about that Howard has mentioned is that Phenderson wrote this for himself. We talked about the idea of writing for… Of having a story that's written for an in group, a group that has a shared common experience. Then, knowing that people who are outgroup are also going to read it and engage with it. I want you to understand… I want you to bear in mind that this is something that he wrote for himself, and it is… When you are sitting down to write something, the thing that you can do to make it most true and most interesting is to write something for yourself.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think not be apologetic about it. You know what I mean? I think that there are… The world will tell you, like, oh, you need to approach this really carefully and you need to… It's not to say that you can just do whatever you want, but, especially when you're talking about things that are about what you know, what you grew up with, and things that your family talked about, things that are part of your history. I think it's what I really liked about this book is that it's bold. You know what I mean? It's not shirking from engaging the past. It's going all the way in. This is going to… I'm going to take a complete 90 degrees turn here for no reason other than I can.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Don't try to stop me! Which is that I also think tone is so interesting and important, because one of the things I always… I was about to say one of the things I always loved about the Klan, not an actual thing, but…

[Laughter]

[Erin] My favorite part is that one of the things that undercut them was when comic books started mocking them, that actually it was these are ridiculous people who took hate in the weird movie and decided to like cosplay evil. When that was being made fun of by like old-school comics, they were like, oh, we can't recruit as much because it turns out that our stuff… Like, we aren't able to get the recruitment. It's not scary anymore.

[Phenderson] Right.

[Erin] It just feels silly. So I think there's so many different tones, and I'm curious, like, what made you decide to go, like, all the way on horror? Because there's something ridiculous about it, but also something horrifying.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I thought that's a great… That's interesting. Thinking about recent happenings in politics, the notion that when you can make hatemongers and fascists, you make them feel weird and simply laugh at them, how much power does that rob from them? Right? The fact that you can do that. So that's an interesting point that you're making their. In this case, again, I was taking my cue so much from those ex-slave… To a great… You're… I mean, I should point this out, that I first read those narratives when I was doing a Masters degree. 10 years before I would sit down to write Ring Shout. Those ideas, I was introduced to those ideas there, I was introduced to the night doctor in those narratives. I kind of sat… I know, like I said, I want to do something with this. I didn't know what. So, it took me 10 years before I was, like, okay, I'm ready to actually approach this. So I want to say that I was really trying to honor… The fact that they gave me these wonderful ideas and trying to be truthful to it. Yeah, like, so much of it was I wanted to show the horror of it. Some of it's also absurd. Right? Like Butcher Clyde is absurd. But he's also terrible. I wanted to have that bridge between absurdities, but also it's frightening. Right? I just wanted to get that down. The notion that, you know, there's a point where Nana Jean says, like, "The Klan members we haven't turned yet," and she calls them, like fools. Right? I wanted to get this idea that they're dressing up and they're clowns. They're fools…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Right? But if they let that hate consume them, they can become this monstrous danger, that can destroy others. But she says of the ones who aren't, she just says, they're fools. Right? She said… She makes this distinction between the fools are the ones who turned. But I wanted to get that across. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, you just… I think you walked those lines really nicely. On the subject of the narratives, the slave narratives, you've got a bunch of the sections that are transliterated from the Gullah.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And… I loved… Like, I got… They're just so juicy, and I love them all. But I'm looking at notation 25 in particular, the shout Eve and Adam tell about them to that wicked snake and the fruit from the forbidden tree. That one, it's interesting to me the way it is talking about the shout and how you wind up using the shout later. So I'm curious again, like, having… There's so many decisions that go into making these kinds of interludes. There is the where you place it. There's the content. There's the tone of it. There is the… Like… How many of these are you jumping straight off of something that you had read, how many of them are you are completely riffing on your own? Tell us… I don't have a question there, I just want you to talk about them.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Because I don't get asked about [garbled] those parts are so important to me, because I thought they set the tone for each chapter, they set… They were able to say so much in their… In between interludes. I actually pulled a lot of that from, first of all, I looked at actual shouts. I wanted to know what the shouts were about. So each one is pulled from an actual different shout. I thought the shouts were so fascinating because I said this is philosophy. People are giving phil… And I even have something in their where somebody says how many intellectual philosophers were lost to the droning work of slavery, and so forth. How many did you lose? How many minds that could have thought up these fascinating things? I thought when I was… So I… There were the shouts themselves, and I read people who were interpreting the shouts. Some of these were Lomax and others who were first doing interviews. Later there are books that talk about shouts where people say, well, this is what the shout is about. As I'm listening to people, I'm like, this is philosophical. They're talking about how humans think about themselves and their place in the universe and how… It was all of that. Right? It's as deep as Kant and anybody else. That's what I wanted to get across here in these shouts by… So some of it comes from quotes that I've read, and I'm also adding my own take to it, and my own riffing of it, and trying to give an interpretation, but trying to let their voices come through there. I have this transliterated because if anybody noticed that supposed to be [garbled] not memory for name… Our favorite Jewish radical who's a member of the monster fighting crew. If anybody knows, those are her initials, she is the one who supposedly a hero throughout this. So I'm putting a little bit in there. I kind of have her as a Lomax or something, like, using that the way that they would write about what they saw. So it's a bit of that. But, yeah, each one was important, each one was supposed to be kind of linked to the chapter that was coming. And you should know that I also had little quotes that I wanted from the slave narratives themselves, direct quotes. They ended up having to go, because I think, like you said, if people were like, okay. You have the interludes, then you have the little narrative parts…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Phenderson] Of the chapter, it's too much. So it was one of those things, okay, it hurt, but I had to cut them all out. But I kept one. That is in the very… In my acknowledgments. The one about Oma. It was like the Klan came into her house and she whooped them one at a time. That's an actual quote. I love that. Because here she's talking about her mama's like… I mean, just fantastical that her mother's just… It's so Paul Bunyan, John Henry. Klan members came in, I'm home with the baby, I'm just beating each Klan member one at a time. I said, that's… I have to have… I have to keep this quote in here. So there were a lot of quotes like that, I wanted to get these voices of these ex-slaves. But I definitely kept that one about Ma. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome.

[Erin] I love the way you were thinking about… As you were talking about the shouts in the stories and the narratives, because so much of the way I took some of this actual story is that it's about the stories we tell ourselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's about the stories we allow ourselves to tell, the ones that we hold back, the ones we are afraid of, the ones we should fear. So, so much of it being rooted in you wanting to tell people's stories.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think is just really cool and deep and like an extra level, knowing that that was part of what went into it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When you said that the shouts were philosophy and about thinking about their place in the universe, I'm like, that is what this entire book is, Maurice trying to figure out her place in the universe.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, well done.

[Howard] This episode is titled discussing tension, and the real tension I'm seeing here is your tension that is relieved by writing this book.

[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.

[Howard] So, this was done and it was out and you told that story.

[Phenderson] I wrote this book in a few weeks because it was one of those things you know, as writers, you have this idea. I pitched the idea months before. It was due, like, in August. I hadn't written a thing. This is when I had the idea in my head. I'd been percolating this story for several years. But I just hadn't let it flow out. When it flowed out, like, I think it was like two or three weeks, I just wrote it. Let's get it all out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, this is where one writer says to another in a friendly collegial way, "You ass hole."

[Phenderson] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] There's something, again…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] wrote this award-winning book in just a couple of weeks.

[Phenderson] [garbled] The idea for it, like I'd taken this stuff like a decade before. It was sometime around… I would say around 2015 or so, I really started thinking about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I was on a fellowship. My last fellowship. I was working on my dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania, literally nowhere Pennsylvania. My wife came to visit me one time there, when she was living in DC. She's like, "I'm not going back again." I saw tractor pulls and people chasing greased pigs at a fair.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Okay, at a fair. So I would drive almost every weekend back to DC, several hour drive. I'd be driving through this misty mountain, I don't know if anybody listens to Old Gods of Appalachia, but it was that. Right? I was… So, while I'm driving, I'm listening to some shouts. I'm listening to these songs sometimes I'm just imagining. So there was a way where some of my built-up tension, I had so much of it in me, that when it came out, it just all poured out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Because it was something I'd been spinning with for so long that when I finally came to write it, I could just write it.

[Howard] So what I'm hearing is if you want to write a book in three weeks, think the book for a decade.

[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Erin] I find that reassuring. There are several things I've been thinking about for a decade, so, like, I feel like any day now…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I have… I've had things that I've had to sit on for a while. That's a question that we get a lot from listeners or early career writers who are like, "I have this idea, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice." I'm like, it's okay to sit on it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's okay to sit on it and think about it and noodle on it until…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And write other things while you're leveling up.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of leveling up, and writing other things, I think it's time for us to give some homework. Phenderson, I think you have homework for us?

[Phenderson] Yes. If anyone is really interested in building tension and storytelling over a short amount of time, I have something that you can go watch. If you seen it already, go to Netflix, I want you to find somebody else's Netflix if you need to, and I want you to watch Midnight Mass. I want you to watch a show that builds so many different areas of tension that by the time it all hits, you will have realized I haven't slept in 12 hours watching this show. And you are a balled up knot of tension watching and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. It's an amazing show. Midnight Mass if you haven't seen it yet. By Howard's face, Howard has seen it.

[Howard] That's awesome homework.

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Now go turn into a balled up knot.

[chuckles]

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-38-a-close-reading-on-tension-anticipation-and-subversion

Key points: Anticipation and subversion. Set something up for the reader, then send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. You don't have to go the exact opposite. Lateral! Lean into it! Support your subversion with something else in the text. First show you know what you're doing, then start subverting. Mini-subversions and Chekhov's whiskey bottle. Humor and horror. Mix it up, sometimes follow the trope, sometimes subvert it. Widening the lens can be a subversion. Use in text subversion. Use the POV character's attitude.

[Season 19, Episode 38]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite forms of tension is the thing where you set something up for the reader, and then you send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. It's something that P. Djèlí Clark does again and again in Ring Shout. An example from a different property... It's one that DongWon mentioned earlier in this series when they were talking about the... in The Candyman...

[DongWon] The Candyman.

[Mary Robinette] The Candyman remake with the opening the door, the long set of stairs, looking down it, and going, "Nope!"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, we are anticipating that, and that just subverts it. It's like, nope. We're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to go in a completely different way than you expected. So, when we're playing with anticipation and subversion, is it necessary to always go in the exact opposite direction when you're subverting or are there other options?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think there's so many ways to subvert. Right? There's the complete inversion. Right? But then you can also just sort of sometimes make a lateral move. Right? Like, the nope example is the complete subversion, but to stay on the Jordan Peel tip for a second, the movie Nope make sort of a right turn instead of a complete inversion. What originally feels like an alien invasion story is still about aliens, but it has morphed into a monster movie instead. So he is very carefully subverting our expectations over and over and over again throughout that movie. In general, he's a complete master at this. But the turn into the more adventure and monster tone that that movie goes into, I think is such a great example of how to be very playful with your audience while still honoring the core experience that people showed up to your movie for.

[Howard] Another really great example of that is the hotel desk scenes in the original Beverly Hills Cop and in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F where Eddie Murphy pretends to be someone he's not in order to get a free hotel room. In the second movie, he starts into it, and then stops, and says, "Oh, I'm too tired. Do you have any open rooms?" The woman says, "I do." "I would like a room, please." Yeah, complete subversion. Then she quotes the price, and he gives us the same deadpan I'm going to accept this price that he gave us in the first movie. So it's a… It's almost like it's a double subversion.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I think is fun is that you can subvert something by moving away from it, but you can also subvert something by leaning into it more. I'm going to go back to that butcher shop scene. Because we get… We get this… She has this really horrific nightmare, where she sees this butcher and he's this redheaded man and he's got mouths all over him, and then she wakes up and it's horrifying. You're like, "Well, that's a really bad dream." Then she goes to the butcher shop and what I'm expecting to happen is for that dream to have been a metaphor for something else. It turns out, no. In fact, he is a redheaded butcher who is covered in mouths, and then we lean into it even further because each of those mouths is a separate individual creature. That is all composing this one horrific person. So it is… It's not the thing that I thought it was going to be. It is setting it up and then it's going I'm just going to take it further than you thought it could go. That's another way that I think you can subvert something.

[DongWon] Well, the subversion can lean into the thematic core…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of the things as well. Right? Because thematically, it's not one evil person. It's not one dude doing this. It is the host, it is the collection of all the different perspectives, all the different people that that represents, all the different intelligences that make up the butcher. Just the sheer horror of realizing you're not dealing with one guy, you're dealing with a system of people, a way of being.

[Erin] I think when subversion works really well, it's when it is supported by something else in the text.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] So it doesn't feel like you've just gone out completely on a limb. But it's a limb to a tree that is being supported by your story. In this case, it is that her sword is also a multitude of voices.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So you've got the multitude of voices that are good, or not good, but that are in support and the multitude of voices that are apart. That becomes more and more apparent over the course of the story until it eventually, like, in the climax, that becomes, like, the song versus anti-song, becomes like a huge part of the climax. So, leaning into it and subverting it also is the story that's being told here on purpose.

[DongWon] Also, it's very important to think about patterns here, too, because when you want to subvert, you kind of have to show that you know what you're doing first. If the first move you make is a subversion, then it sometimes will just feel like you don't know what you're doing. Right? But if you look at Ring Shout, that opening fight is a sequence of promises that are delivered on. Maybe not delivered exactly how you expected. Like, he knows how to draw the beat out, draw the tension out. Right? It's not the bomb that kills them. Because the way that scene unfolds, where the explosion is the start of the fight, which then resolves inside the warehouse. Right? So, what he's doing, over the course of that scene, is setting up all these beats, all these reveals, by making us promises, and delivering on them. Right? Setting up the anticipation, and then saying, here's the thing. So that when later he wants to start messing with us and providing that subversion, which is adding extra layers to it, which is pushing the book in different thematic directions, where it's like, "Oh, this isn't just a we're going to have sword fights with monsters book, there's more going on here," we're open to it because we have the competence, he's proven to us that he knows what he's doing.

[Erin] I also think there's some interesting mini-subversions in that scene. Like, for example, there is a whole, like, we're in a cotton warehouse, like, in a story about the South…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But it's not important. Like, it's just that's just what's there. And they find the whiskey, and I was like, "Ah, this will be key to everything, this whiskey." It's not. It is just…

[DongWon] No, they're just mad because they're competitors.

[Laughter]

[Erin] They're just like, "No." It does actually matter in the course of the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But it isn't like, oh, this is going to be the key to figuring it all out. What I like about that is it says, "Oh, like I need to pay attention. I can't just check out and be like, oh, this is going to check these boxes…"

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's going to follow the steps. I don't need to worry about it, and I can kind of half pay attention. It's like, no, the things that you think may be key are not. The things you're maybe not paying attention… As much attention to are in fact important. I love that because it makes you lean into the text.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like it's going to be Chekhov's whiskey bottle, but… Like that is a thing that you expect. It's like you set it up in Act I, it's going to go off in Act III. And Chekhov's whiskey bottle does not, in fact, have to be consumed.

[DongWon] Sometimes a whiskey is just a whiskey.

[Chuckles] [laughter]

[Howard] Okay. So we're laughing… We're laughing at this. I want to point out that the whole principle of anticipation and subversion is one that horror and humor rely on incredibly. I'm going to put a stake in the ground here and say if you want to write good humor, become a student of horror. If you want to write good horror, become a student of humor. Because learning how people use these tools for things other than what you plan to use them for is how you'll get better at using them.

[DongWon] Horror writers are some of the funniest people I know. Like, their ability to dig into on the one hand, very dark material, but also that gives them so much of the toolset to deliver a great punchline, tell a great story, and things like that. So…

[Mary Robinette] Which reminds me of this really important point. But we're going to take a break right now.

[Laughter]

[Erin] No…

[DongWon] No one writes a story like Kelly Link. There's such an odd pacing to them, and I find in that to be endlessly enchanting. Her worldbuilding, character work, and deep interest in what makes people people keeps her at the top of my list of writers of short fiction. She has a new collection called White Cat, Black Dog. This shows that she remains at the peak of her abilities. Rife with creepy encounters, fairytale retellings, and even just strange creatures, this is a unique and rewarding read that I cannot recommend highly enough.

[Mary Robinette] Now, the pattern from Writing Excuses over the years is that coming back from the break, I'm going to tell you what that important point is. But I have another question for you. When we are looking at Ring Shout… I'm certain that someone out there is like, "No, she's making this up." No. When we're looking at Ring Shout, and one of the other things that we had talked about with that, that anticipation and subversion is the thing with the girl. That we keep anticipating that this is going to be important, and where it finally is revealed, it is in a different way than we expect, and also exactly the same way. Do you think that there are ways that he could have subverted that more than he did, or do you think it's important that he follows the pattern there?

[Erin] We're stumped.

[Howard] That's a difficult question, because I was so enamored of the beauty of the resolution of that scene that I'm reluctant to suggest any possible change.

[Mary Robinette] So, this is one of the things that I wanted us to be thinking about for our listeners is that when we're talking about this anticipation and subversion, that a lot of times someone can see a tool and be like I want to use that all the time, and that actually the reason it works is because there are patterns that are set up and followed through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you don't know which ones are going to be subverted and which ones are going to be like oh, that's kind of the payoff I was expecting. Which means that everything then becomes tenuous and tense.

[DongWon] Exactly. It's how you keep it from feeling quote unquote trope-y. Right? Like, I get a little frustrated when people say that a book is trope-y as a criticism. In part, because, again, returning to my whole patterns thing, books are made up of tropes we've seen before. They're all just combined and recombined in different ways. But those little subversions, having the little subversion of, like, the girl isn't the age that she was when that event happened reveals itself to mean something else in that moment. But those little moments helped disrupt the sense of oh, I've seen this pattern before, even though we absolutely have. Right? I think including small moments like that, not fulfilling every single pattern you set up, having some make a right turn, having some of them invert, I think adds the kind of texture and nuance that people are looking for from a book that make it feel like it's not just paint by numbers.

[Erin] I think in that particular example, like, the subversion is in the widening of the lens. So, sometimes the way that you subvert things is that you create a pattern, and then you're like it's a much broader, a wider pattern then you even realize. One of the things that I love is that I had the same thought twice during that sequence of the girl. There's the one where she is a little girl, like, I think, like hiding under the floorboards. And she feels guilty, and I think, "Of course she couldn't do anything." Then you realize she's 18 and I thought, "Of course she couldn't do anything."

[Mary Robinette] Ooo...

[Erin] Like, that difference in context, nothing has changed in my understanding, really, but the broader context just made it like hit me so much more.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think having that…

[Mary Robinette] Yah...

[Erin] Earlier moment of sympathy made that sympathy carry through, and made it so much more tragic when I understood.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That is a really good example of that kind of widening of the lens, of different ways of subverting. What are some other ways that we can… That we saw this being subverted?

[Erin] I have one other one which is I love that there is an in text subversion. So I like when subversion is happening, it's happening in our minds, it's happening in context, but the belief that what she would be offered was to have her family live again…

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is a belief that I also considered as one that the story would do. But I love that she considers it on page and is told her beliefs and her anticipation is subverted in the text. Because it is an interesting way, like, it's subverted for me as well, but then I also get to see the emotions play out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How do I feel about that? How does she feel about that, is an even better question may be to be asking. By subverting it on the page, I get a chance to experience it, both from my reader perspective, and also from, like, the parts of me that is identifying with her as a POV character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, the fact that as we go into that scene, we are not told what her decision would be. For that… That she thinks she's already made the decision. I'm like, "Oh. Are you going to turn that down?" Then, when she gets the actual decision, and is… Like, the actual offer, and the temptation that she has… I'm also, like, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the temptation that you're having right now.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think the core inversion of the question of what does it mean to be a hero in that circumstance. Right? The question of is the sword good or is it a curse? Right?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Is really core to it. And her relationship to the haints and things like that… Like, we are so conditioned as the reader to be like, "Oh. You're the chosen one. You're getting all these cool magical powers. You have the magic sword. You're the hero of this." But we can see how corrupting that is on her. Then, when the offer itself is subverted, that leads to us recontextualizing and questioning all of her choices about the story and what future she represents for this community, for herself, for all of these… All of the people that she holds and represents in a very literal way.

[Howard] There's also a subversion of the overall meta-, which is… This looks like a story about good versus evil, and when we get to our resolution, it's… Well, there's good and there's evil, and there's something else. All of these things are on the table and in play. That was the point where I got chills…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Like, oh, this is neat.

[Erin] Yeah. I think it's also, just like the subversion of good versus evil. One thing that I… Not my favorite thing is that you will have like forces that like all evil forces line up together and they all agree on…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I guess the evil of it all. But what I like here is that each set of folks, like each group here, has their own perspective on each other.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Like, the haints are like, "I don't know about this, like, lady."

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And the woman is like, "I don't know about going to the night doctors." They're all sort of, and in some ways, she needs them all. I think in a story that's ultimately about communities…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Communities for good, communities for ill. The fact that there is a community of people working together, none of whom are quite good or evil, but each have their own perspectives and needs that can align for this moment is something that's really power subversion of the overarching trope.

[DongWon] Like her going to the night doctors is such a hero's journey in a certain way. Where we're expecting her to, like, go on this quest, rebuild the sword, like, she's literally like reforging whatever Aragorn's sword's name was, I forgot it all of a sudden. But, like, whatever. She's off to the quest of re-forge the magic sword, all of these things we're expecting in this regard. That just takes such a hard right turn into something completely different. The night doctors scene was probably my favorite in the book, just because it is… It just feels almost like it's from a different story. But still is so in conversation with the thematic's, with the characters, with the world, that it felt like it's from a different story, but in a good way. Not, I mean, parentheses complementary. Right? Being able to subvert expectations that way, of just like making the hard 90 degree turn into something else for a second, I think made the world feel so much more expansive and rich and nuanced than if we just stayed with the haints and the butcher.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As you were saying that, it made me realize that there are two places, two different worlds that she portals into.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The contrast between those two is really interesting and fun to play with. Something else that I was also thinking about in terms of subversion is that one of the ways you can subvert something is with the hero's attitude towards what they get. So that sometimes your hero achieves the goal that they were going for and they're unhappy about it. That's a way to subvert a victory. Sometimes they lose something, and they're like, "Oh, thank heavens I lost that thing," and they're happy about it. That's… The attitude of your POV character is one of the ways that you can subvert things.

[Howard] That sounds like it might be homework.

[Mary Robinette] Ah, it's pretty close to homework. So, this is a time in Writing Excuses when we normally offer you homework. This has been Writing Excuses…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The homework that I have for you is I want you to take a trope and I want you to write for different outcomes for it. One of it doesn't deliver the trope outcome. Just like the nope. Just doesn't deliver it. One of it inverts the trope. It goes in the opposite direction of what you're expecting. One of them has an unexpected kindness. And one of them has an unexpected cruelty. And now…

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

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. Private instructions here includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-35-a-close-reading-on-tension-an-overview-and-why-ring-shout

Key points: Tension: how do you create, build, and release it? Various forms, contextual, in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution. Lizard brain or primal tension, intellectual tension, emotional tension. Discordance. Historical fantasy pits what the audience knows about history against the tension of the story and how you have changed the world. Tension as potential energy, the rock on the top of the hill. It's going to roll! Tension can be horror or suspense, released by the jump scare or awful revelation, but it can also be released through a joke or comedic drop. Sometimes we braid physical, emotional, and intellectual tension. Tension: someone walking towards an open manhole. Tension plays with pattern recognition, tapping into narrative inevitability, patterns and expected resolutions.

[Season 19, Episode 35]

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 19, Episode 35]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week, we are continuing our close reading series by looking at Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. We wanted to talk about this book in particular because as we're looking into the segment on tension, and how do we talk about how you create, sort of build, and then release tension over the course of a story, we realized that shorter works can be really useful in examining how these techniques work in the best ways to go about doing that. So we wanted to pick a novella, and this is a very tense, very dark novella that we want to talk about in a little more detail.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I particularly found compelling about it is that it uses tension in more than one way. We'll be talking about a bunch of these throughout the next couple of episodes, contextual versus in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution, but you're also seeing it in terms of the speed with which the tension is deployed, and many of the tools that he's using from the character to the situation. It's got a lot of good examples for us to use.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I also think it's just really cool as a… To compare with our other novella from earlier in the year. Because This Is How You Lose the Time War is about fantastical, imaginative landscapes and this is a very grounded, very sort of feels like it's got a foot in the real world, but still fantastical story. So I think it's really important to think about how do our tools work, both when you're creating something completely new and when we're drawing from something that we know maybe a lot better.

[Howard] I loved reading this so much that I read it all in one afternoon. Maybe that's because the tools were just used so well to keep me tense that I couldn't put it down until I was done with it.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say, for those of you who are a little bit jumpy, I was listening to this audiobook, and I had to stop because I needed to be able to skim over the parts that were too much for me. I can't do horror. While this book is not actually horror, it's a straight up monster book. It's monster hunting, and it's basically an adventure novel. There are parts of it that are using tools from horror to create tension, and I couldn't listen to it in audiobook.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It was really good, and I was like, I have to stop. This is not okay.

[DongWon] As the cover might indicate, it is also dealing with a lot of real-world trauma and tension. A lot of this is pulled from actual history or begins in actual historical events, and then adds a fantasy layer on top of it. So, just a heads up to all of our audience, that we're going to be getting into some pretty heavy topical topics and conversation here.

[Erin] Be ready for it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Or as ready as you can be. So, but it is good to note, especially if you're just starting to read the book now, so that you're not… So that you have some preparation for what is to come. But who can really prepare for tension in truth?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] No. No. That was… That's actually one of the things… We'll talk about this deeper into the episodes, but one of the things that I particularly appreciated and why it was so hard is that I would see the tension and I would brace myself for one kind of problem, and then it would be something else that was sig… I was not prepared for.

[DongWon] The bait and switch is such a useful technique.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] One place I'd love to start, actually, as we're diving into this conversation, is actually to not start with the writing itself, but to start from a publishing angle, because I just touched on it briefly, but I think the cover of this book is absolutely brilliant, and does such a fantastic job of signaling the kind of story that we're going to be engaging in, and already increasing the tension there. It really hits on the thing that you were just saying, Mary Robinette, of you have this figure of the white hood, which is very iconic and symbolic and menacing. But then when you look closer, Erin, you and I were talking about this right before we started, you can see the teeth eyes… The teeth in the eyeholes, which again, I think is for you, like, expecting one thing and then realizing, oh, there's another layer here that's upsetting and difficult.

[Howard] Okay. I didn't even look at the cover. I was… Admission, I read this on assignment. I had not picked it up before I knew we were going to record it. But then I picked it up and immediately just opened it up and started reading. Sat down and started reading. The first time I stopped and set it down and looked at the cover, I looked at it and went, "Ewww."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because they… Because now I knew what might be there and, whew, boy, it was fun. It's very stylized. It's not like…

[DongWon] The cover. Yeah.

[Howard] You're looking at something graphic. It's just… That's just cool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to admit that I was reading it in the airport and I had the thought of this book does not look like the book that I'm reading to someone who does not know what this book is.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That creates another additional tension. That I think is very intentional tension.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's a book designed to make you uncomfortable in a number of ways. Some of that is the contextual elements in terms of the packaging and the design and how it was published and some of that is the content itself.

[Erin] Yeah. I just keep thinking about the teeth eyes.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Sorry, I'm like…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The teeth eyes… I have a… Uhn Uh.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I love that. I always think… This is a slight tangent, but I think there's something about putting things together that just don't feel like they could ever belong together that creates like a visceral lizard brain tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I think that we can have tension, like, in the front of our brains, where it's like this is an intellectual tension. Why is it like this? But then there's like the part of us that's like, "No. Eyeholes with teeth? Bad!"

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Erin] Like the parts of you that would have been afraid of, like, a wolf back in the day is activated. I love when stories are working both on that primal tension level…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And the intellectual. And the emotional tension level. I think this one does all three, which is so cool.

[DongWon] Yeah. For me, one of the big things for me is like a kind of discordance. Right? So if I'm watching supernatural horror, I could ride with lots of gore, lots of violence, doesn't throw me at all. But you put me in a real-world context, like a home invasion story, or somebody using something that's not meant to be a weapon as a weapon, I'm deeply unsettled and very uncomfortable, and often have to bail. There's a memorable scene in a movie called [Taten?] Involving a knitting needle that if anybody's seen it, I was like, I'm done. I gotta bail on this movie. I very rarely bail on movies. But sometimes that discordance, being able to lean into a kind of tension where you're making people uncomfortable by creating things that shouldn't go together can be so powerful and disruptive.

[Mary Robinette] It is one of the best tools to use when you're writing anything that's set like any sort of historical fantasy. Because there is the tension of what the audience knows about the history that is in conversation with the tension of the story that is also in conversation with the tension of the way you have changed the world. These three things can cause the story to become wildly unpredictable to the audience, and for them to also bring their own… Like, the places where they're putting their own pressure on the story from the outside, from a… Which this does great things with.

[Howard] I sometimes think of tension in terms of potential energy, the rock at the top of the hill. I know that there isn't much keeping this from rolling, from heading down the hill, and I think I know which way it's going to roll. It doesn't have to be frightening. It doesn't even necessarily have to be uncomfortable. It just has to be this awareness that this state of things cannot hold. Something is going to move. I don't know what's going to move, but it has to move, because this can't keep up. That's every other page for me on the way through Ring Shout.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Love it!

[DongWon] Well, this is something you talk about a lot, Howard, is that tension can be multiple things. Right? We're talking about tension in a horror context, or, like, a suspense context, because of this particular book. But tension also can be released through a joke. Right? You can use a comedic drop instead of the jump scare, or the reveal of something awful. That's still tension building the same way. I think about the movie director Jordan Peel, being such a brilliant horror filmmaker, because he's a brilliant comedian, too. Right? So many of the skills that go into one can go into the other. There's a moment in the Candyman reboot that they did a few years ago where a woman opens the door down the basement stairs, and it's like these long stairs descending into darkness. This is like this incredibly tense moment. It just feels awful. Then she just goes, "Nope," and closes the door.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] The theater I was in just burst out laughing completely. It was like a perfect use of tension and release in that moment, although, even though in a horror movie, not for a horrific purpose. In a way that, as we're talking about this, I want you to think about all the different ways in which tension can be deployed as a narrative tool, even though, because of this, we're going to be focused on the dark side of it.

[Erin] Yeah. I think we often like braid the different types of tension, and just… Like you're saying, call them all tension. But, thinking back to kind of the, like, physical, emotional, and intellectual tension, I was thinking about it again when you are talking about the rock at the top of the hill, because I'm thinking, if you're watching a snowball go down a mountain and you're at the bottom, like, intellectually, you know it will gather speed and eventually crush you. Eventually, it will come close enough that you will really know that it's about to crush you…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Also… I don't know, your mom's standing there. So you have to save her from the avalanche that is about to come up on you. But, different people will react in different ways. Like, some people can see the most terrific physical, like a slasher movie, forever…

[DongWon Yep.

[Erin] And it will have no impact. They will not feel any tension. They're like, I don't care about physical danger, but emotional danger gets me.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] Like, somebody being embarrassed to me is harder to watch than somebody being hacked into bits.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] So, if you're thinking about all the time where are you deploying each of those types of tension, then you'll get the widest audience possible feeling tense.

[DongWon] Yep. Speaking of keeping balls rolling and moving things along, we're going to take a break for a moment and we will be right back.

[DongWon] Late last fall, Netflix released a new animated show called Blue Eye Samurai. I was initially skeptical, but was completely won over by the stunning animation style and impeccable action choreography. Frankly, I expected a simplistic good time, kind of like a John Wick thing, but was surprised by how thoughtful the show is about race and Empire and violence. It's one of those hyper kinetic action shows, but one that knows when to slow down and ask questions about its hero and the world she inhabits.

[Howard] Mel Brooks famously said that comedy is you falling into a manhole and dying. Tragedy is me with a hangnail.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] When I think of tension in terms of this, you see someone walking and you see an open manhole and there is tension, but you don't yet know if the resolution is going to be comedy or tragedy, because you don't know what's in that hole. That's part of… That unexpected aspect of it. I mean, there's the tension of the potential energy of something is going to fall, but there's the unexpected, the darkness of that manhole. It might have a very silly octopus in it. It might have a very ferocious octopus in it. I don't know.

[DongWon] I talk a lot about pattern recognition when it comes to fiction. Right? I think tension is a thing that is very consciously playing on pattern recognition. It taps into something I think of as narrative inevitability. Once you start setting up a certain pattern, people will expect that to conclude in a certain way. They'll expect a resolution of that. Right? The example I was talking about earlier of heroine opens the door to a dark basement, you're like, "Oh, she's going to go down there and something bad's going to happen." You expect that resolution. That's where the tension, that's where the dread, that's where the energy in that scene is coming from. As you're talking about, Howard, it was a release in comedy instead of in horror by her closing the door in a very funny way. But it was the refusal to resolve that tension as opposed to giving into it, I think, is a thing to think about as you're building it. So, how do you actively use the patterns of storytelling to manipulate your audience's emotional state?

[Mary Robinette]. It's something that we talked about in a previous episode… Previous season, when we did a dive into tension. We talked about anticipation and the patterns that the listener… Or the reader, recognizes. As we're talking about Ring Shout, one of the things that I want to point out is that you'll hear us using different terms than we used previously. That's because the terms of art for tension, there are so many different ways to apply it, that all of the things that we're talking about are basically us attempting to apply a lens or some sort of words to "this makes me feel some feels."

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Tension's about emotion is the main thing to think about here.

[Erin] I'm feeling some kind of way [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Erin] Expressions. I also think it just occurred to me that, like, thinking about the manhole. There was a recent question put out in the writing world, of whether or not twists make sense. Because the theory is if the twist is actually completely unexpected, it actually feels like a trick. Like, if you could not anticipate it at all, it feels like the author being clever at your expense. But I think one way you can actually get around that, if you want to have the truly surprising twist, is by making the emotions carry through even if the facts don't. So if you're walking down the street and there's a manhole cover, the, like, open hole in front of you. But you step on it, it turns out it's an optical illusion. It was just a sidewalk artist doing it. So the audience is, like, "Aha. You fooled me." Then the person takes another step and gets hit by a truck.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The hitting by a truck makes no sense, maybe, but you were still in that moment of tension, right at the moment that something happened. So it feels more earned.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even though the truck came out of nowhere.

[DongWon] Yeah. The example I always think of is the red writing from the Game of Thrones. Right? It's like this moment that is such a famously twist moment, of, like, "Oh, my God, nobody anticipated that," but it made so much logical sense and emotional sense where the characters were at, that you could see how it was inevitable in retrospect. Right? So tension can also be… I'm talking about narrative patterns, and you know something is going to happen, but it's fun to hold that back, of understanding exactly what the event will be that will release the tension. Right? So it's another way to think about that.

[Howard] One of the things that I want to point out before we wrap up is that as part of the close reading series, we want you to read the book before you listen to the episodes. When you are doing this… Read the book. Do a close reading of the book. Think about why the book is making you tense. Think about choice of language, the choice of point of view, what decisions are being made. By all means, enjoy the book. But read it closely and try to learn from it. That's… At the beginning of the episode, why did we pick Ring Shout. Because we can learn from it. We can learn a lot from it.

[DongWon] That dovetails very beautifully with my homework. Which is, I basically want you to do what Howard described to a book that you love or a movie that you love. Take a suspenseful story that you really enjoyed, that you feel the kind of feelings that were talking about. Either anticipation or dread or that kind of emotional tension. What I want you to do is write an outline for that work. Create that outline. Note where that tension was coming in for you and how it was resolved. Right? From that, you'll have a little bit of a map and a little bit of a key to begin to understand some of the stuff we're going to talk about in the coming episodes.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-41-deep-dive-erins-short-fiction-extravaganza

Key points: I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story. Genre can be bookseller's version, where do we shelve it, the critic's version, what is the cultural lineage of this, and the reader/writer's version, what's useful, important, what does it feel like? Is it horror if the writer didn't intend to scare you, they just wanted the character to do a horrible thing? What drives speculative fiction in short form is the power of clear and simple metaphors. There are horror stories where the protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens. In these stories, our protagonist is the horror, doing things that we are horrified by. The antagonist is trying to prevent bad things from happening, and fails. Short fiction packs a lot in a small space. In a Myers-Briggs of writers, there are long and short writers.

[Season 18, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] 'Cause you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I have managed to put off my deep dive until the very very very last, but the time is here.

[Dongwon] You were very very determined to go last.

[Erin] Right.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Very determined to go last. I have no idea why, but I'm really excited to talk about my work, I guess…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But also to just give a… To shine some light on short fiction as a whole.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I am merely a conduit for the love of short fiction. But I want to talk a little bit first about why I picked the 3 stories that I asked you all to read, and then see if you have any questions for me, otherwise I'll just ramble about them at length. So, the 3 that I picked are Wolfy Things, is the first story that I ever had published, so I felt it really represented the beginning of the extravaganza when I was really just kind of getting things off the ground. I was just saying before we started recording that I can tell it's my first published story because I just can. Something about the way that it's constructed, I'm like, "Oh, it's early on." But I still love it. I picked Sour Milk Girls because it is my buzzy-ist story, I would say. It's the story that ended up in year's best collections and like almost made the Hugo ballot. So it's the story that sort of people know me the most for and were most excited about. Then, I picked Snake Season because I think it is the closest to where I'm going as a writer. I think it's like sort of the truest to…

[Howard] Oh, no…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, "It's the truest to my voice of murder."

[Dongwon] Let's go.

[Erin] Weirdly, it's also the one that's been translated into the most languages. It's been translated into, I think, Spanish and Portuguese and… Anyway. So, people can be horrified, I guess, in many different languages.

[Mary Robinette] Ha. You said horrified. You… I was saying earlier, we were having this conversation about whether or not Erin writes horror. I was like, "I think you do." She does not think she does. But, ha ha…

[Erin] It's you all. You brainwashed me into thinking it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] I think so much when I write, I think about what I'm writing as, just like one individual person's like troubled story, that I don't see like… What they're doing may not be… I would not use my protagonist as like life lessons. I wouldn't follow in their footsteps.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] If they told you to do something, I would say, "No." I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That I just decided not to write.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But I…

[Mary Robinette] Accurate.

[Erin] I just… Even though that's the case, for me, it's really, I think I get so much in their head and have to understand them in order to make them somewhat sympathetic on the page, that I can't think of what they're doing or what I'm doing as horror. Because I get why they did it, and I decided to make them do it, even though it may be something that is beyond the pale in the normal, like… In the normal life of things.

[Dongwon] I love this as a way of thinking about genre. I think one thing with conversation about genre get so muddy in a certain way, because there's almost 3 different ways in which we use the term. One is how I use it, which is very much the book selling side. Where do we put this in the store, what bisac code do we put on this, what gets… What comp titles do we use? Right? Like, how do we sell this? Then there's like the way critics use it, which is… I'm not even going to dive too deep into that, but it tends to be more about what's the cultural lineage of this. Then there's like how readers and writers use it, which is much more like what's useful to you, what's important to you, what does it feel like? So I love this idea that you separated out so much of your process from necessarily what the bookstore genre of it is because you need to access a space where you can look at it in a way that these are just people doing things. Yes, the things that they are doing are very upsetting, but they are doing things for relatable reasons. Right? So, I mean, even Sour Milk Girls where she does one of the worst things I've ever seen a character do in a story to another character. It's so upsetting the thing that she does to Princess, but it's so understandable and relatable, even if I wouldn't make that choice, I can understand why she does it in a way that I think, for you, I can see how internally, that's not horror, that's just a person. Right? That's a flawed person who lives in a deeply flawed world trying to survive in whatever ways that she can. Her experience and trauma and psychology all lead her to this place of doing this upsetting thing.

[Howard] The context in which… Ghost does things to Princess. Ghost is not doing anything to Princess that society has not already done to Ghost.

[Dongwon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] In reading that story, there is horrific revelation after horrific revelation. At first it just looks like they live in an orphanage. No, this is worse than an orphanage, this is… Something's being done to these kids. As we learn more about it, it gets… You experience horror. So in talking about genre, I always go back to our Season 11, Elemental Genres. I keep turning the page because I keep looking for the next horrific reveal. I experienced dread, but I'm sort of thrilling, reveling in it. It grows so nicely out of that symmetry between what society is doing and what the character is doing that when we get to the end, it is the perfect horrific inevitability. So, yeah, circling back around, yes, Erin, you're writing horror. Are they going to shelve it as horror? I don't care, I just want to read it.

[Mary Robinette] Something that I just want to circle back to, you said that your antagonist… Your protagonist is the antagonist in someone else's story.

[Dongwon] Great line.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… When I think about all of these stories, I'm like, "Oh, yes." One of reasons that these work, I think, structurally so well is that you have a character who has set out to achieve a goal. They come up with a plan, they have obstacles, they have all of the markers. It's just as a reader, I do not want them to achieve that goal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that is… I can see why actually you would make the argument that it's not horror, because in horror, generally speaking, bad things happen to the protagonist. In this case, you're like, "Oh, no, your protagonist is absolutely…" And I can see all of the stories that are written from the other character's point of view.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It is… I'm like, "Oh. Yes." Okay, I will grant your point about how these may not be horror.

[Erin]'s Thank you. I think it also comes back to, like, what… Intentionality…

[Mary Robinette, Dongwon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] So we were talking about, just before hand, in all the fascinating conversations we will reprise here, about that there's 3 different genres of the body. Humor, erotica, horror. They all try to make you feel something in a very visceral level. So, to me, to set out to write horror is to say I want to scare you. I want you to feel dread. I never intend… That's never a thought that goes through my head. I just want my characters to accomplish a horrible thing which might make you feel horror, but I'm not thinking. At the end, if you said, like, "I was totally fine with everything they did and I felt like I was like I'm cheering them on," I might have some questions about your moral compass…

[Laughter]

[Erin] But I wouldn't feel like I didn't accomplish my goal as a writer. Whereas, I feel like in a horror story, if you say like, "I wasn't scared at all," that you've missed something.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The same way that if you didn't laugh at humor…

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] Last night we joked during D&D, we joked about you being chaotic evil or what… This is more like chaotic IDGAF…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Chaotic WTF. I just… I am doing a thing and you're going to have experience, but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the thing.

[Dongwon] I will say… I will grant you what you're saying on Wolfy Thing and Sour Milk Girls. I will say I made the mistake of reading Snake Season…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Right before I went to bed.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yes. Bad choice.

[Dongwon] I was upset. The image of Sarah, the image of the donor, is just so upsetting to me. It's so emotional too, though. I mean, what drives speculative fiction in short form so well is the power of the metaphor. Right? One of the things I love in short fiction is it's so clear and simple about what the metaphor is. Right? In Sour Milk Girls, it's the state is robbing them of their identity and memories, because that's kind of what the foster system is invested in doing, is erasing who you were to be this person that can be entered into new situations. Right? So, just this mother's trauma over her dead daughter, over this monstrous thing that she's afraid of in herself and in… I don't know how to unpack all the things in that because it's so rich and textured and dense, like, that's the beauty of that image. But, yeah, I'm very scared of that little girl. She's definitely haunting me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that also happened for me as we got deeper into the story was wondering how much of Sarah's appearance was actually just Mary's view of her, like, was this just a normal little girl who just wasn't a baby anymore, and that that's something that she couldn't stand. Like, the fact that I don't know and there's just enough ambiguity in there? I mean, I feel like she's… It is… She is horrifying and also what if she's not?

[Dongwon] Yeah. Exactly. Because do you know something, maybe she's fine?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] On that disturbing note, we're going to take a slight break. When we come back, I have a question to ask you all.

[Dongwon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week and it's a way I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave you with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a whole meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty, time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.

[Dongwon] My thing of the week this week is Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap. In my personal opinion, I think Isabel Yap is one of the greatest science fiction short story writers we have in the game right now. She's an incredible talent and this is her debut collection of stories. It came out a couple of years ago in 2021 from Small Beer Press. The work that she does in here is so wide-ranging and delightful and engaging. She pulls from her Filipino ancestry in bringing in some traditional myths and monsters in the story, and the way she blends fabulism and horror and supernatural elements with grounded relatable concerns of contemporary characters is incredibly powerful and wonderful. I think this is a phenomenal collection and I would love for all of you to go check it out.

[Erin] We are back, and my question is ready, which is, who do you see as the antagonist of these stories? Because I've been thinking about it, and I actually think there's a slight shift in the antagonist… In who I see as the antagonist of all 3 stories that I think makes Snake Season feel the most horrific. But I'm curious…

[Howard] Wolfy, the antagonist is Erin. Sour Milk Girls, it's Erin.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Snake Season, it's Erin like 3 times.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm upset at you in particular…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah [garbled] statements.

[Dongwon] No, I mean I'm not sure who the antagonist in Wolfy Things is, actually. That's kind of an interesting one. It feels much more like portraiture than really like a strong… Like this intense metaphor about society in a certain way. Sour Milk Girls is definitely the state. Then, for Snake Season, it's almost just like the world. Like there's a… She just exists in a world that is stacked against everyone in the story in a certain way.

[Mary Robinette] Like, she's… She has decided that the conjureman is the antagonist. Like… I think from her point of view, from Marie's point of view…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The conjureman is the antagonist.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] But I don't think that he actually… He…

[Dongwon] I don't think he's a good dude, though.

[Mary Robinette] I don't think he's a good dude. But structurally speaking, like, he does serve the function of an antagonist.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] She has…

[Howard] There are horror stories in which our protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens.

[Dongwon] Yep.

[Howard] Just in general. In these stories, I think… In all 3 of them, our protagonist is the horror. The protagonist is the one who is ultimately doing the things that we are the most horrified with. So the antagonist is the one who's trying to prevent bad things from happening. I'm just… In broad structural strokes.

[Dongwon] Totally.

[Howard] There is… That is a flavor of horror in which we are sympathetic with, we are following a character who is on a path, their goals are going to lead them into the horrible place, and the antagonist is the one who is putting obstacles in front of them, and the antagonist is going to fail.

[Dongwon] There's no Freddie, there's no Candyman, there's no [garbled]

[Howard] You stop thinking of antagonist is villain, and start thinking of them as the person who's in between the protagonist and their ultimate goal.

[Dongwon] Well, this is why I think it's so useful in certain cases to really let go of genre expectations and not think of it as a genre piece in certain ways and just follow the story where it goes. Right? Tonally, and voice wise, I may look at this and say horror. I think Howard's right, and you're right, when I break it down to the core elements of the story, horrific things are happening. I think you're right, though, that is not a horror story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Aha!

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] You convinced me.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I also want to say that I don't think that every story has to have an antagonist. In, I think Wolfy Things… I've forgotten the main character's name. I remember Lee's name, but I don't remember the POV character's name.

[Erin] Nikki.

[Mary Robinette] Nikki. I think Nikki is the protagonist, and the antagonist. I think he is both.

[Erin] I think… What I would say is that for me, or what I think I was trying to do, and it's interesting to go back and see whether or not that work. For me, I think, society, culture, the world, as it is is the antagonist. I think that a lot… I think that all 3 of these stories, to a degree, are my kind of thinking about, ruminating on the idea that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's [garbled]

[Dongwon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] And that ultimately the reason the society is the antagonist is that the protagonist is monstrous, but they are only monstrous because they are in a world that creates monsters. Therefore, in them trying to figure out the world and where they fit into it, they start with good intentions, but they ultimately are kind of in like the classic tragedy sense, unable to escape who they are and how they've been made…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what has created them. I think that Snake Season is the place where that is the least clear.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I love that.

[Erin] Like, the culture is like much more, like, hopefully like the culture of the town and their hatred of wolves is pretty clear, and the state's direct like manipulation of these poor girls is pretty clear. But in Snake Season, it's a lot less like it's just kind of the world in less of a directly antagonistic way and more just like how do you fit into the world as it is.

[Mary Robinette] But it's also like in Snake Season, at least to me, it was about how she only felt like she was supported after her child had died.

[Dongwon] Yeah. The only time people came out in a sympathetic way for her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Instead, she had the conjureman who's like bossing her around, and her husband who's not there. And she's alone. She's alone with a child that she's trying to raise by herself while her husband goes off and works. The only way she gets people to come out is if a child dies. She's not conscious of that, I don't think. Not like… Or she's… That is the lie she is telling herself.

[Erin] She's not, like, waking up and journaling…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] No one has visited me for months…

[Dongwon] Time to kill a baby.

[Mary Robinette] Kill a baby.

[Erin] That would be horrible.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Erin] But you can't say that to yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So you create a world in which that is what's happening for you, so you can get the emotional joy… Or not… The emotional comfort that you want.

[Howard] As we explore these structural interpretations... I love doing this. I could do this all day. It's important to recognize that a large part of this comes from us, within, what we bring to the table, what are reading experience was. When I read Wolfy, I at first thought the wolf was the antagonist. After reading it, I feel like Lee is the antagonist. Because there's a moment when I was reading, when I felt like, "Oh. Nikki's objective has changed." Nikki wants to talk to the wolf, meet the wolf, learn who the wolf is, and Lee prevents that from happening, by falling on his own knife. Lee, you klutz. Nikki's goals change and he follows through with the original plan. But that is an interpretation which… Okay, in critical senses, maybe it's wildly invalid, but based on what I brought into the book, that's the experience that I had. That's one of the things that I love about short fiction in general is that it's so tight that we have all of these experiences so close together within 30 to 45 minutes of starting the story. It's easier to unpack, easier to talk about, and I talk about it for way longer than I would on a 300,000 page…

[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to touch on this actually. Each of these stories implies a massive world. Right? World building, technology, magic, societal stuff… The amount that you get into 6000 words in terms of gesturing at a bigger world is truly extraordinary and breathtaking. But also, I think, especially Sour Milk Girls could sustain a novel length work, right, with what you have there. I could see something bigger possible in that space if you want it, but that's not what you wanted. You love short fiction. You like writing short fiction. You believe in it, as do I. I adore it. But I'm curious to hear more about your thought process, about why short fiction, why is that how you wanted these stories to unfold. Why do you like working in that space?

[Erin] So this is a great question, specifically for Sour Milk Girls, because of its origin story. So I actually wanted to, and maybe still do, want to write a novel about 5 different women whose lives have been screwed up by this memory, the memory as a commodity system. Ghost was going to be like sort of the protagonist, through which this larger thing happened much later in her life. Not much later, but like in her 20s. I was trying to get her voice. So, for me, as a writer, if I cannot hook into the voice of the character, I cannot write the story. Which is one of the reasons I'm extraordinarily slow writer. Because I will rewrite the first paragraph and the first page over and over and over until the character sounds right to me in my head and I have some sort of instinctive sense of how they see the world and then I can move forward. Then it gets much easier. But that process can take a long time. So I could not hook into the voice of Ghost. I kept trying and I kept writing these horrible things I didn't like. So I was like maybe I need to go back and do a writing exercise for myself of some pivotal moment in her life early on that turns her into the person that she was at the time that the novel that I was writing, which is kind of a compulsive kleptomaniac, a compulsive memory kleptomaniac. Why become a compulsive memory kleptomaniac?

[Howard] I forget.

[Erin] I was trying to figure out what is the thing? Like, why… Where did she start going down this path? So I wrote… Started writing this writing exercise. I was like, oh, this writing exercise feels a bit like a story actually. Let me finish it. Then I did. I was like I think I could publish this. So it's sort of an accidental story that comes out of me...

[Dongwon] I love that.

[Erin] Trying to understand the novel form. Because I don't get it. I have this theory that I've told people before that there should be a… Like a Myers-Briggs of writers…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Where, first, like introvert/extrovert, I think some people tend long…

[Dongwon] Yup.

[Erin] And some people tend short.

[Dongwon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] As writers. I tend short. I think I tend to just… The way that my sentences are constructed, a lot of times, I try to jam a lot in there in a way that won't… Wouldn't work. It would be a lot for like a longer work. You need to kind of stretch things out and dole them out differently. So I… When I try to write longer works, I often end up coming up with ideas that I then break off into shorter things. Because I'm trying to understand and trying to get to a place where I could write a novel. I also… Yeah, I think like it is a lot of it's about natural tendencies and my own speed because I'm slow, writing a short story is a much easier…

[Dongwon] Totally.

[Erin] Kind of thing for me to set out to do. But I think even… I'm the opposite. We're going to talk later in this deep dive about what happens when all your short stories, people are like, "That should be a novel." Which happens a lot to my students. Like, they'll be like writing this short story, and I'm like, "This is not a short story, this is a prologue."

[Dongwon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I have the opposite, where even when I come up with novel ideas they sort of come out in short story form. Because I think I'm so focused on one character. Part of it is that I get so into the idea of the single character that you need a broader cast a lot of times in order to make a novel work, and I want to be so much in this one person's head that it's hard to think about taking them on such a long journey.

[Dongwon] It's funny, you and I were chatting before recording, and you… Just talking about an idea that you had. I was like, "Oh. That actually sounds like a short story…"

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Not a novel." I think you would need to do something to make it more novel size. So it was really funny to hear you say that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, I want to sidebar with you and talk to you about how to fix that, because…

[Erin] Oh, cool.

[Mary Robinette] Because I've…

[Dongwon] Would you, because she needs to write the novel [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I know, I would like it too. Yeah. It's… You're right. You are so… Because I also went from short story to novel. So I know the thing that happens. But I'm pretty sure we can talk about that at some point later in the deep dive. Right now, we should probably pause for homework.

[Erin] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The homework assignment is take a line that you've written a while ago that you absolutely love and try rewriting it is the writer that you are now, because your style changes, your understanding of how language changes, your interaction with it changes, your taste changes. Take that original line, read it once, put it to the side, and then rewrite it as you are now.

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

[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple Podcast or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.

mbarker

Writing Excuses18.39: How To Write An Ending

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-39-how-to-write-an-ending

Key Points: When I wrote that title, I knew that the structure of this book needed to involve splitting up the cast and sending Schlock off on his own, doing something stupid and chaotic and destructive and ultimately heroic. This formula is super simple. You split people up, and then you bring them back together, and that creates a natural structure for a story, and it can be very satisfying. A frag suit that talks back to him so Schlock has a foil. And treating a synthetic intelligence as if it is an artificial intelligence, and having that entity become a person, is beautiful. It's very hard to be funny by yourself. For a storyteller, many things are driven by this is horrible. Go back to the well and fill your head with physics. Callbacks, retroactive foreshadowing. Joy!

[Season 18, Episode 39]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, Sergeant in Motion.

[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] I have begun unironically using the term magnum opus to describe Schlock Mercenary. Because I… 20 years. 20 years of my life, 20 books went into this. Today, we are deep diving into book 20, Sergeant in Motion. The title of which comes from a maxim, "A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on." When I wrote that title, I knew that the structure of this book needed to involve splitting up the cast and sending Schlock off on his own, doing something stupid and chaotic and destructive and ultimately heroic. Until about the time that I'd… Until I'd actually started writing strips, I didn't know exactly what those things were going to be. I had just blocked out kind of the positions of the cast members. As I mentioned in the previous episode… As I mentioned in the episode we recorded previously, we… Those both mean the same thing. It's early, and I'm tired. This formula is super simple. You split people up, and then you bring them back together, and that creates a natural structure for a story, and it can be very satisfying. I feel like that formula worked.

[Mary Robinette] You're also doing interesting things, like, one of the problems with the modern era is… In the old days, you split people up and it was fine because they were off on their own, and now, it's like you split people up and they have cell phones. In your world, they have sentient communications and all sorts of things. So I think that you did some interesting things there, like, to cause different ways that the comms communication was a conflict, like, when Schlock is dealing with a frag suit that talks back to him.

[Howard] Yes. The frag suit that talks back to him was a last-minute addition because I realized that I did not want to resort to thought bubbles to find out what Schlock was thinking. I had to have a foil for him. Giving him a foil who was a… In the Schlock Mercenary universe, artificial intelligence is a person, and synthetic intelligence is a clever set of algorithms that almost arise to personhood. Having him treat a synthetic intelligence as if it was an artificial intelligence, and having that entity eventually reach artificial intelligence felt really beautiful to me. You treat someone like a person, whether or not they quote unquote deserve it, and ultimately, one day, they become a person and thank you for it. That just… I was not expecting to get to put that in, and there it was.

[DongWon] One of the really important things about you deciding to add that character in, which is, one, it's very hard to be funny by yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] So, that gives Schlock such an opportunity to just bounce off of someone, and have punchlines and be goofy and also talk through what he's thinking in his process. The other is that [garbled] doing some pretty messed up stuff through a lot of this. He's eating sentient people pretty much constantly through the last book.

[Mary Robinette, Howard, chorus] Yeah.

[DongWon] So having an anchoring emotional thing that allows a level of sweetness and morality and all of those things, and gives him… He is treating this synthetic intelligence as if it's a person, and so we can see a side of Schlock that we wouldn't normally… Wouldn't be able to see if he was just chowing down on things for this length of that…

[Howard] In… I don't remember the book number. It's the book where Schlock ends up briefly jailed for a barroom brawl, and has this big emotional arc about immortality, and how immortality now makes him very worried because if someone dies, then some of the futures that could have been created by them are gone, even if you bring them back. One of the neighbor kids who reads Schlock Mercenary, friend of my kids, was over talking to my kids and came to me and said, "Why did you have to give Schlock a personality arc?" Because suddenly the amoral, not quite Everyman, but the id of the strip was now reflecting on who he was and was maybe less willing to devour things with wild abandon. The answer was because I know that by the end of the story, I have to have some measure of conflict there. He has to be asking himself a question before he devours everything in sight.

[Erin] But I do like that he devours… You know what I mean?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Everything in sight. Then, I was curious… I think you mentioned it in a previous episode, the idea that like somebody had said to you, like, Schlock eats it. That's sort of how the conflict is resolved. You managed to take something that is both like core to the story you're telling but also take it as such an epic scale. I'm curious, like, sort of how you got there? Because it's such a cool way of [garbled]

[Howard] Oh, there's a James P. Hogan series, the Giants novels. I can't remember the titles of the individual books. But in one of them, we do some archaeology and we discover that there was a race of creatures living on Mars, and as we do the archaeology and learn more about them, we realize that because of a quirk of biology, there were no carnivores. Because everything that was made of meat was toxic to eat to everything else that was made of meat. But plants were fine. That grew into their morality, to where they… Creatures never ate other creatures, they only ate plants. I remember thinking about that and thinking about Schlock and thinking about the dark matter entities and wondering what if the dark matter entities never learn to eat each other. Oh, no. Oh, no. Schlock has discovered how to obtain energy from his enemies in a way that's absolutely unthinkable to them. That made it more delightful and more horrific. As I've said before, in one sense, Schlock really is the… Really is a movie monster. He's a…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] He's a walking horror show.

[DongWon] You made one interesting decision around being able to eat the dark matter monsters, which is that they don't actually die, though. He doesn't digest them all the way. He takes energy from them, but they're still left at the end of it. What was behind that thought process, and sort of why you made that choice?

[Howard] Um, it felt to me like an outgrowth of the weird physics I'd arrived at. They had… In order to do battle with baryonic matter… baryonic matter, us, non-baryonic matter, things made of dark matter… In order to do battle with baryonic matter, they needed a way to recover from being destabilized. I've come up with this whole physics of metastable dark matter and stable dark matter and very proud of it. Not going to dive into the details of that right now. But they had a way where when they were destabilized, there was a copy of them made so that… They were stored as data. So that they could be regenerated, so the soldiers could go back to fight. I thought, you know, when Schlock is eating them, that will probably set off that mechanism and they will have a memory of being eaten and… Oh, that's even worse. Oh, I love that so much. Oh, not only are you dead, but you remember dying and what it felt like and… That was very delightful for me.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's funny how many things are… For a storyteller, are driven by, oh, this is horrible.

[DongWon] Yeah. Oh, this will make you feel bad. Yeah.

[Howard] I can't remember when I learned that lesson, but it was… It was fairly early on that I discovered that sometimes when you think of the worst thing that could possibly happen, and, as an author, that is your cue for… That is either the dark side of the soul or… But, that has to go in the book. Because your readers are going to think of that and they're not going to want it to happen. That's a tool in the toolbox. There are so many more tools in the toolbox that I want to talk about. But we're going to take a break first.

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[Erin] Have you ever felt like you were living the same day over and over again? And everyone around you is getting murdered? If you want to feel like that, you should play The Sexy Brutale, which is a really lovely game that came out two years ago for PlayStation, Windows, Xbox one. In it, you are trapped in a manor house and everyone around you is dying, everyone is being murdered, and you get to go through and stop each person from being murdered one at a time. It's an amazing game of looping and learning. Each time you go through the game, you learn something new about the characters and eventually about who you are and why you are stuck in this place. It is one of my favorite short games to play. So definitely check out The Sexy Brutale.

[Howard] Welcome back. I promised more tools in the toolbox. A big one for me was PBS Space-Time podcasts…

[Laughter]

[Howard] I watched this… I listened to this podcast or watched… YouTube show. Watched this YouTube show. There was an episode on ways in which the universe could end. One of them talked about whether matter was stable or metastable. It was this idea that during the Big Bang, things stabilize, but maybe we were like trapped in a little valley, halfway down a cliff, and sufficient energy might push matter into a new stable state and that state would propagate at light speed across the universe, destroying everything, and that would be the end of it all. Which is very scary and very depressing. Then I started thinking about dark matter and realized, you know, dark matter can't… The way we understand it. Real physics. It doesn't interact with matter, and it doesn't really interact with itself. It falls… There's gravitational attraction. But when to dark matter particles fall towards each other, they don't collide and interact, they just fall through. Because if they fell and interacted, there'd be an energy release that we'd observe. So I thought, well, dark matter doesn't work the way I want it to work. What if metastable dark matter as all of these interesting particles, but something about the Teraport is what… That thought cascaded from stuff I'd been writing 10 years ago. Teraport and Teraport area denial damages dark matter. Oh! It pushes it out of the metastable state into the stable state. It turns dark matter that's interesting into dark matter that's just foggy. Yes, that came to me… I think halfway through book 17 or 18, I realized, "Oh! Finally I understand how my universe works. I can write this conclusion." So, toolbox? Going back to the well all the time and filling my head with physics.

[Erin] Thinking about some of the things that you're talking about that you know that are beyond what we end up seeing, I'm thinking about sometimes we talk about worldbuilding as, like, it's an iceberg, and there's like the part above the surface and the part below. I'm thinking as you end a project, it's like your last chance to, like, chip pieces off the iceberg and, like, get them to float to the surface so that your readers will see them. I'm curious how you decided sort of what to end up putting on the page, and what will just sort of remain a fun fact that you could tell us, but won't actually be in the actual comic?

[Howard] Um. Well, see, that bit, I knew I needed it, but I couldn't figure out how to make it funny. Then I tried naming the particles…

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] That was so much fun, coming up with names for the particles. I realized, "Oh. Umbril. Umbral's a great word. And Umbreon. Wait, Umbreon's a Pokémon."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Oh, there's the joke.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There's the joke. Then, making a character moment out of it where two characters are arguing about how stupid it is to call them darkions or whatever. Suddenly, it's a character driven discussion that ends with an intellectual property 4th wall breaking joke about we… They are umbrions, not umbreons, because there's a Pokémon. Interestingly, the idea of breaking the 4th wall, that is… As my humor matured, I did that less. Because that increasingly is… That felt like a cheat. But breaking the 4th wall is something that appears in early Schlock Mercenary and I knew I had to include it in the last book as a… As sort of a meta-call back. Yes, this is the same story you started reading. See, I still make jokes about companies that are bigger than me.

[DongWon] Did you have a list of callbacks that you wanted to hit, or was it just sort of like ad hoc? You're like, "Oh. Here's an opportunity for a Pokémon joke. That's something I used to do that's fun." Or was it like, "Oo. I want to make sure. This is the last volume, I want to hit certain things."

[Howard] At some point in the prep for book 18, I realized that I didn't have a list and I probably wasn't going to make a list. But I should do some reading. So I went back and I just… I read through a lot of old Schlock Mercenary. There were bits that stuck out to me, and there were bits that I thought, "Oh, that would be fun to use," and then I literally forgot about them. Which actually, that's kind of a good litmus test. If you forgotten about it between day one and day two, maybe the idea wasn't that good after all. But the 4th wall jokes stuck out.

[DongWon] I did notice Schlock ends up in a tub.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Ovalkwik. I had to bring Ovalkwik back. That… We talked about retroactive foreshadowing. I think retroactive foreshadowing… For me, that means, "Oh, this thing that I already did, now I can turn it into foreshadowing, despite the fact that that wasn't my original plan."

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] There was a lot of that. There was a lot of that in the last book.

[Mary Robinette] I have a question that I feel like is probably a little personal for me, but did you include the Jane Austen quote for me?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because I felt very spoken to in that moment.

[Howard] Um…

[Mary Robinette] Just say yes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, no, there's… There was…

[Erin] I'm so glad you noticed.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I kind of had to because I realized that I had done a nod to Robert Jordan like at the beginning of book 4. I knew that I needed to make a literary… As a callback, I needed to make a literary reference and… Yes, the Jane… Because I am friends with Mary Robinette, Jane Austen was where I went first. Because that felt the silliest for Schlock Mercenary.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Also, when you're dealing with an intergalactic conflict, a truth universally acknowledged… It's like, well, actually that's not a hypothetical in this particular…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] We are making statements about the universe at this point.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] Going back to the toolkit, one thing I also wanted to emphasize here is, this is a visual medium. Right? This is not just writing, it's comics. So you're bringing in such big heavy worldbuilding in this volume, you're bringing in theoretical physics that I'd never heard of and I'm pretty up to date on a bunch of stuff. But, like, there was like really cool interesting aspects here. Then you decided… Then you had to figure out how do I render this visually. I can't remember if they're introduced in volume 19 or volume 20, but the first time we see the actual creatures inside the skeletons of these world ships, it was just such a cool visual design. Because we first see the ship, and it just looks like a… Looks like a dog toy, frankly.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] Almost… Like a ball…

[Howard] A wiffleball.

[DongWon] Then when we realize those holes are for their tentacles… I don't know. Just something about that visual reveal was so good and satisfying. How do you think about those kind of reveals alongside these big technical science reveals or character reveals? How…

[Howard] Sorry, I'm giggling because I remember that moment very clearly. There was a… I can't remember the scientific instrument that they used, but they were making gravitational maps of galaxies and looking at how the fog of dark matter was shaped actually differently than the whorl of stars. The whorl of stars, through a telescope, is very crisp. It's… I mean… It is such a golden age right now for…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Beautiful crisp glorious pictures of galaxies. I'm looking at that fuzz, and I wanted better pictures. I wanted more resolution. Drawing dark matter… I had done it in, I think, book 13, I had drawn a dark matter tentacles smashing through something, with the understanding that when concentrated stable dark matter smashes through something, it's only interacting with it via gravity. Several G's of gravity pulling on things in weird ways, which is very destructive, because it can reach through both sides of it. We don't build things for these kinds of stresses. Yeah, there was this image in my head of I'm going to draw something where we can't see the gravity, and then I'm going to draw something where we can, and the picture's going to be really crisp. I did have to talk to Travis about it and say, "The one thing that we can't ever do with the dark matter creatures is not knockback the line work. The line work can't be black. The line work always has to be colored. Which makes a whole lot more work for him. Because he couldn't just flood fill and then paint within the filled areas. He actually had to select the line work and put colors on that as well.

[DongWon] Travis is your colorist?

[Howard] Travis is the colorist since… Oh, gee. Since 2009, 2010. So…

[Mary Robinette] Um. I'm going to ask a variation of a question that I get asked a lot, which is about how many drafts and iterations. But, specifically, what I'm wondering about, since we're talking about wrapping everything up, how many drafts or iterations did you have to do for that very last strip?

[Howard] The very last strip. That's the one where Schlock is… Has stolen food from the dinosaur and is running away from it. That was all one go because it was an epilogue, and I wanted… How do I… Sorry, I'm articulating this badly. That picture was for me.

[Mmm]

[Howard] I knew that I just wanted to draw Schlock running away from a giant fluffy Tyrannosaurus Rex, and that the sergeant is in motion.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He has stolen someone else's food. But the dinosaur needs to be smiling and Schlock needs to be smiling, and Tagon needs to have kids… Murtaugh is pregnant. All of those elements, they were just there to bring me joy. If other people like them, well, awesome.

[DongWon] It was such a Bill Watterson image. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It was such a Calvin and Hobbes, of sort of Schlock has always been this sort of Calvin and Hobbes at the same time…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You know? But getting to have the T Rex in that sort of Hobbes role, it just gave it such dynamism activity. You love drawing dinosaurs so much…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.

[DongWon] Like, every time you put a dinosaur in a scene, I can just feel the sheer joy coming through…

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] That you…

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] There's a scene where what's-her-face is riding a dinosaur…

[Mary Robinette] Riding the dinosaur. I was just thinking of that.

[DongWon] It's the best thing. It's just so much fun.

[Howard] Sorlie is… Haley Sorlie…

[DongWon] What a big character.

[Howard] Yeah. Her story's a funny one. When I first introduced that character in book 15, Delegates and Delegation, the outline had her dying. I knew that this was a character that we were going to like, and she was going to do heroic things and then she was going to die heroically. About three quarters of the way through the book, I realized, "No. No." This is… There were some meta-reasons in there. Meta number one was I've introduced a female character who is probably one of the most compelling female characters I've created, and killing her off would be a bad move. Two, she's way too useful to the story. Way too useful to the story. Turning her, through the course of the story, into someone who has… This is subtext rather than… She has a familial non-sexual relationship with Landon and Tenzy. They cuddle, they are friends, but they're completely different species and completely different organic. There is this weird threesome there that I didn't overtly come out and say, "This is an asexual triple marriage." But in my head, I always drew them so they could be that way. I love her. She represents so many different things for me. Of course I had to let her ride a dinosaur.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Of course I had to let her ride a dinosaur. How could I not? I… Yeah…

[Mary Robinette] I love the moment when they're like, "You know, this is an actual meat space," and she's like, "That makes it even better."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I guess it does.

[Howard] Yeah. That was… The whole bit about them traveling all the way to some distant Matrioshka brain, I think is how it's pronounced. Coming up with that solution for Fermi's Paradox, that the great filter is mature species realize it is too dangerous to hang around where life might spawn, because it'll spawn and it'll be dangerous, so we're leaving. All of the grown-ups keep leaving. There's a point where Petey in the earlier book has aspired… Has apotheosis and in his moment of apotheosis, he looks around and he's like, "Where are all the grown-ups?" I loved coming up with that is a solution, and the fact that some of the grown-ups are Earth dinosaurs was just extra fun for me. So… I could talk about the end of Schlock Mercenary for hours and hours and hours. I love this thing so much. It was difficult to end it, for a lot of reasons. I think we'll talk about some of those in our next episode, Business Reasons. But, very unapologetically, I refer to it as a magnum opus because I spent so much time on it. It's been a huge part of me for 20 plus years now. Who's got homework for us?

[DongWon] I have our homework this week. I think, in theme with our topic today, what I want you to do is to go and write a one-page outline. Keep it relatively brief. Make some bullet points about how you want to end your current work in progress. Really, just think through what are the things that are going to provide the narrative resolution, what kind of callbacks you want to have in there, and what emotional beats you want to leave your readers on.

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

[Howard] To stay up-to-date with new releases, upcoming in person events like our annual writing retreats and Patreon live streams, follow Writing Excuses on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.27: Framing Stories

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-27-framing-stories

Key Points: Frameworks in fiction. A podcast being recorded by a character. A story told by a character, like in Frankenstein. Beginning and ending frames. Value? A sense of verisimilitude. Tools for setting time and place. Adding tension, structure, or information. A perspective of larger movements. Signaling genre. What's the meta? Framing can constrain you, or be unnecessary! Frame stories, like prologues, must be good on their own. Ending frames can twist our understanding. Frame stories aren't just beginning and ending bits, sometimes they are woven throughout the story. The frame can be resonant with the story. Ticking clocks, encyclopedia entries between chapters, epistolary. Frame stories are a 201 technique. Frame stories push the boundaries a little bit. They can add tragedy, horror, scale. Cartoon barbarians!

[Season 18, Episode 27]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Framing Stories.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Today we want to talk about frameworks in fiction. Dark One: Forgotten, the kind of central conceit, the inspiration behind that story, is that you are not reading a book or listening to an audiobook, you are listening to a podcast being recorded by one of the characters. So it's telling a story within this very specific framing. That changes the way that it's written, it changes the way that you would interact with it, and the way that we are able to tell that story. We thought that this was a really good opportunity to talk about frameworks in fiction, because this is something that's been around for a very, very long time. There's a lot of different frameworks that you can do. For example, if you've heard the term frame story, you have probably heard it in the context of something like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Wherein the entire story is being told to you by one of the characters. There's a little bit at the beginning where they say, "Now I'm going to tell you the tale of what happened to me." Then a little bit at the end that says, "That was the story. Thank you for listening." But there's a lot of other kinds of frameworks that we can do. Before we get into specifics, let me ask the group here, what value do we get by adding a frame like this, by casting our story in some kind of different frame or format?

[Mary Robinette] So, some of it… There's two different, I think, value areas. One is the reason that people started doing frame stories in the beginning was it gives a sense of verisimilitude. It's like, "This is a travelogue of a real place, you can actually go to," Gulliver's Travels. Spoilers, you cannot go to any of those places.

[Dang it. What?]

[Mary Robinette] I know.

[Dan] We want to go to that fourth one.

[Mary Robinette] This true crime podcast, this is the thing that actually happened to this person. So it gives this sense there. The other thing is that it often will give you some narrative tools for setting up time and place. Like epistolary novels can do a lot of heavy lift, because you've got a date stamp at the top of every section. So those are two kinds of areas that they can give you. But I think there's some others.

[DongWon] I have often suggested to clients, when we're doing especially early stage structural edits, if a book feels like it needs a little bit more tension or a little bit more structure or you need a way to give readers a certain piece of information that your protagonist may not have access to, the frame story can be an incredibly useful way to do that. Right? Whether it is a piece of… Neon Yang's The Genesis of Misery has this frame story, these two unknown narrators having a conversation. That comes up two or three times in the story that A) gives us the shape of what's about to happen, so once we meet the protagonist, we get a little bit of like the arc of what's coming and also a little bit of that perspective of greater pieces moving outside of the character perspectives. So big political things sometimes. The movement of history. Technology or magic systems that are operating in the background. A frame story can let you get that information in, which lets you punch up the tension in act one and lets you really signal heavily what genre you're in, what kind of story you're telling in a way that can be hard to do when your character is just… When you're showing what your character is doing. It's a way for you to like cheat and like tell your audience a bunch of stuff in a fun, cool way. I absolutely love a frame story. I think it can be so useful at the beginning, the middle, and the end, to just punch up certain moments where the story's getting a little confusing or a little flabby.

[Howard] I think it's… For terminal… Terminological semantic purposes, it's important to recognize that there's a lot of ways you can talk about this. Often, the way I talk about it is just by saying what's the meta? What's the meta for Dark One: Forgotten? Well, it's a podcast. It's a podcast. That creates a framework. What's the meta for Name of the Wind? Well, it's a framed story, someone is telling a story within the context of another thing that's happening.

[DongWon] Blair Witch Project's one of the best ones of all time.

[Howard] The Blair Witch…

[DongWon] Because they went very meta and convinced a certain set of the audience that this really was a documentary. Right?

[Howard] Yes.

[DongWon] I think it… There were people I know who watch that movie, there were 12 or 13, who were genuinely confused. That just amped up the absolute terror that they felt watching the movie because they were like, "This is a real thing. This happened."

[Howard] I just say this to clarify, because there is a story to be told in the meta itself, that this is a podcast. When we say framing story, sometimes we just mean, "Oh, it's like Scheherazade, the Arabian Nights," but sometimes we mean, "No. There is this framework we are working within that is in media res or whatever."

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned Blair Witch, because that's one of the things I wanted to mention about horror, specifically, is that a frame like this can heighten that sense of danger, because if you are listening… Dark One: Forgotten's a good example. It is not exactly a found footage movie, but it's playing with that same idea. Right? If it had been done as an audiobook, there would always be that sense of this is a story being told to me that creates, even if it's only subconsciously, a little bit of safety. You know that if… When something bad happens, that it's only happening two characters in a story. But if even just for a second, I can trick you into forgetting this is an audiobook and make you think you're actually listening to Christine Walsh's podcast, that she's recording on her phone while being chased by a serial killer, then when something bad happens, it's happening to a real person. Because we've tricked you.

[Mary Robinette] There is a danger, though, that you can feel like, "Oh, I'm going to add this frame story." It can constrain you, or it's just completely unnecessary. I went back and did a reread of Where the Red Fern Grows, which for a certain population of… A certain… Like, your sixth grade teacher read it aloud to you or you had to read it. It's devastating. I went back and read it. There's a frame story on that sucker.

[DongWon] There is?

[Mary Robinette] That I have no memory of at all.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] No memory. It does nothing. There's no… It just makes the beginning and end flabby, because it's this old man talking about I saw this dog in the street and it reminds me of this dog I used to have. Then he tells where the red fern grows. Then he finishes the story and he's like, "I wonder what happened to the dog I saw in the street?" It's like, "Wha?"

[Howard] Thanks for the story, grandpa.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, because frame stories are often used as prologues and epilogues, they get a lot of the same challenges that prologues do. Which is, they have to be good in and of themselves. It's your first interaction with this world, it your first interaction with the story. So if you're putting a frame around it, that is not just like a little thing that you dash off that's like, "Ooo, wasn't that fun?" It's like, no, that's got to do some heavy lifting. Right? So, pulling off a frame story, I think, requires real chops and real confidence in what you're doing. So, it's not… I often say that it's like added N edits, but it is… Which is often true. It's still, however, takes a lot of attention and focus to get that right. It's a thing that you should really dedicate as much time on as you're dedicating to any story opening, to any other major structural component of your story.

[Howard] One of my favorite frames… It's a half frame… Is in Larry Niven's… I think the novel is called Protector. The novel is about this guy who discovers that humans are descended from a race that had three lifetime cycles, and old age is actually immortality. There's a virus that can cause this to happen, and blah blah, and whatever. We get to the end of the story, and he says… It twists right at the end, it says, "So if you're reading this, I've infected you with the Protector virus, and you're going to become immortal. When you wake up, be fast. Because they are coming and they are angry and you need to be ready." Then it ends. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness. I want to be the sequel for that story." It was so much fun.

[Erin] I think ending frames, like where you find out, like, it was a frame all along…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Are such an interesting tool. Handmaid's Tale has like the sort of part I think everyone forgets, where it… There's like this was a research project sort of at the very end. One of my favorites is actually from Planet of the Apes, the book. Where at the very end of the novel, they're like, "This would never happen." And it's an ape family. They're like, "Humans? Talking?"

[Laughter]

[Erin] "No. Impossible." It's like so… It was kind of fun, because you're like, "Wow, it does kind of turn things on its head."

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Erin] I think that is always a [garbled]

[Howard] Well, I love how in the adapt… The movie or TV, I can't remember which one it was. Movie adaptation of that, they realized we need to do the twist… This needs to have a twist. That that twist… I don't think that twist will work. What will work? A Statue of Liberty sticking out of the beach? Sold! That's the one we all remember.

[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that those kind of closing frames can, by retextualizing part of the story, or recontextualizing, rather, they change your understanding of it. One of my favorite books of all time is The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is… It has two narrators. Some chapters are first person from the main character guy. Other chapters are third person. You find out at the very end, and I apologize for spoiling this like 40-year-old…

[What!]

[Dan] Book, that the third person chapters are all written by his granddaughter, as she is filling in the corners of his life story. It changes everything. It is so cool to have that experience that I've now ruined for you.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. One of my very favorite movies of the last few years is a film by Pedro Almodovar called Pain and Glory. There are these very artificial looking sort of… And you think it's just like memory that he's having, and again, I'm going to spoil this, I'm sorry. These very beautiful scenes of his childhood, that then turn out to be the movie that he struggling to make over the course of the film. So it's all the aging director and it's him reflecting on his childhood. Then, the final shot is really… You see the boom mic's coming in to the scene of the beautifully shot memory that he has. It just recontextualizes the whole movie. It snaps everything into focus in this way, and provides the catharsis for the character of like, yes, he managed to do the thing. We see him suffering for this whole movie, but he does make the thing that he's trying to make, and you don't realize you've been watching it all along until you get to the end. I cannot recommend that movie highly enough.

[Dan] All right. Let's pause for a moment, and when we come back, we're going to talk about different kinds of frames.

[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is a book that I just read that I am completely in love with. It's Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel. Katie Siegel does Tik-Tok's, and she did this Tik-Tok of a character who used to be a child detective, like an Encyclopedia Brown, a Nancy Drew, and is now a 28-year-old who doesn't do detecting anymore, but carries this baggage of everyone remembering her as a child detective. So she's adapted this into a really good murder mystery novel. It's her debut novel. It's a good murder mystery. But it's also this really compelling story about depression and friends and family and figuring out who you are. It's lovely. The character voicing is really good. I am just… I just really liked this a lot. I felt like I wanted all of these people to be my friends. It's very cozy. It's a very cozy story. So this is Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel.

[DongWon] We've talked about this a little bit before the break, but one of the things I want to get into sort of in this back half is the way in which you can use the frame story as a really integrated tool in the rest of your text. Right? It doesn't just have to be the thing at the beginning and the end, it can be a thing that is woven throughout your story that can change how you experience the narrative. We talked a little bit about how the final frame can sort of reflect backwards and change your understanding of what you've seen so far. But there are other cases where… The other thing about a frame story is often it lets you do direct address to your audience. It lets you do second person in a way that works really well, because it's either a letter written to somebody if it's epistolary, or sometimes it's a story being told to you. N. K. Jemison's The Best Season, this is a minor spoiler, but at some point in the book you start to realize someone is telling you this story. Then the question becomes who the hell is talking to you right now? Once you start to put the pieces together of what's actually happening, she's done this beautiful formalist thing over the course of the novel that you don't even realize is happening until you're about halfway through. So, sometimes the frame story… You don't have to be so rigid and think of it in that Frankenstein way or Lolita, where it's like here's a document that we found at the beginning, and then we'll return to it at the end. It can be a thing that's really woven throughout that changes your relationship to your reader and forces them to think about what's happening in the text in a way that like situates them as a subject in… That the story is happening to in a certain way.

[Howard] I think the first season of ABC's How to Get Away with Murder, the headliner there is Viola Davis, and she's brilliant in everything that she does. The in media res… I thought at first that, oh, this is just in media res. They begin by showing me the immediate aftermath of a murder. Looks like some college kids may have done something bad, and they're trying to cover something up. And now we go three months earlier, and they're in class. Okay. I think I know where this series is going to take me. Each episode bounces you into a different portion of the current, the just after the murder, it might be a little bit forward, it might be a little bit back. As we advance the clock of the story, three months earlier, two and a half months earlier, six weeks earlier. I watched this and every episode gave me chills, not just because it was well written and I love watching Viola Davis chew scenery, but because the form they were using was new to me. I had never seen in media res done this way. I can't yet figure out how I would do it in just prose or in comics. But I love it, and I love learning things.

[Erin] One of the things I love about that example is I think it also shows how the frame itself can be resonant with the type of story that you're trying to tell. So this is a story about getting away with something, it is about a ticking clock, it's about things compressing. Similarly, the frame itself plays with time, and plays with the clock ticking down. Another… Sometimes this works in a completely different way. I keep thinking about the sort of Encyclopedia Galactica…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Like the idea that you're like encyclopedia entries happen in between chapters, which is a form of like… A very…

[Howard] Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[Erin] A very formal frame. But it also tells you a lot about the world. This is a world with a centralized understanding of things, where people are documenting what's going on. This story that we're telling is a thing that may be documented one day. It's either very important, or, sometimes, like in Hitchhiker's Guide, very silly. You're playing off the fact that it's not the kind of story that would end up in this big encyclopedia. But it's doing something that is resonating with the story.

[DongWon] It allows you to introduce contrast in that way.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Dan] Yeah. A great example of what you're talking about, Erin, is the book, the Prestige. Where the movie is basically a cool movie with a twist, the book is an epistolary, which DongWon mentioned earlier. That's a story that is told primarily in letters or correspondence. Two people are writing letters back and forth to each other. One of the really brilliant things The Prestige does is one of the people writing the letters… Those letters are weird. There's clearly something going on, because some of the letters act one way, some of the letters don't, or they seem to have forgotten things that happened. This leads toward the same twist which I am hesitant to reveal because it's a massive spoiler. But it… Just like Erin was saying, the specific frame they have chosen allows them to tell the story in a certain way, to create a very specific feeling, lead towards a very specific moment of revelation, that wouldn't work in any other format.

[Mary Robinette] There's a wonderful book Code Name Verity which I listened to in audio. In audio, it loses one of the things that happens in the print book. Which is that the entire print book is a code. She's sending a coded message. She's a spy. So it's wonderful. It's one of the best audiobooks that I've ever heard. But that's a piece that doesn't translate over. It's an inherent part of that frame story.

[Howard] [chuckles] Yeah. We had a similar problem with the audiobook for Xtreme Dungeon Mastery second edition. Because in the physical book, there is, if you flip the pages, there's a little cartoon barbarian running and smashing things. We just could not figure out… That's not in the audiobook at all.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm so sorry.

[DongWon] One thing I think that is coming across in how we're talking about this is this is not really a 101 technique. This is a 201 thing. Like, doing a frame story is truly pushing the boundaries a little bit, in terms of the formal constraints of what you're doing in your text. That's not me discouraging you from trying. You absolutely should try it. But I think when you're thinking about do I want to add a frame to it, there's a lot of questions you will be thinking about of like, how is this adding tension? What am I adding in this moment? How am I using juxtaposition to create more tension, as we discussed several episodes ago? These are really opportunities for you to be very playful with time, with POV, with a sense of inevitability and dread. It's a way to introduce tragedy, it's a way to introduce horror into your story. I think that can just make things feel bigger. Right? The reason so many epic fantasies have that frame scope frame to them is it gives the sense of grandiosity, of scale, in a way that's hard to do when you're just staying in the characters perspectives. So it really works with certain genres really, really well. Crime, murder, tragedy, horror… Any of those things that are like trying to get across very specific ways of playing with expectations and dread and tension. So, something to think about as you're approaching it. I just want to encourage everyone when you start figuring out do I want to add a framework to this, really think hard about how you're going to apply it, and what techniques you're bringing to bear to make it happen.

[Mary Robinette] Also, what constraints it's going to place on you.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Because once you put that frame on, you have limited the paths that you can take. Sometimes that is like super exciting and a really good learning experience. Like, oh, can I convey this information if I do this entirely as a series of emails back and forth?

[DongWon] That's one of the reasons I generally don't like epistolary, because it locks you into such a very specific framework of back and forth. It's ironic that one of my most successful titles is entirely an epistolary novel. But I think sometimes the constraints that the frame can introduce will really bother a certain subset of your readers who are trying to logically make it work. So there are ways in which you can be playful, but do be careful about what it does to your world building.

[Howard] Talking about Xtreme Dungeon Mastery again, and the light came on. In the first edition, Tracy tells this story towards the end of the book about how in the room with the pillars of runes that couldn't be read, and he decided to role-play his barbarian and just smash down the nearest door, and drag the adventurers through the dungeon at high speed. It was when he learned how collaborative role-playing works. Early in his career. In the second edition, as we were preparing it and laying out the materials, I had a conversation with Tracy and I said, "What if we put that story first? Because it's early in your career, and we use it as an introduction. Then we take that barbarian and we have them smash down doors at the beginning of each chapter, and use the barbarian as a thread for the content of the whole book." That's why we put the little cartoon barbarian in the corner. Tracy loved the idea. You triggered this, DongWon, by saying, this is an expert level technique. When the first edition came out in 2009, I wasn't even able to have the idea, much less execute on it. When we did the second bit edition in 2021, 2022, Sandra and I and Tracy were able to look at things and begin editing and re-ordering material and make what might otherwise be a very dry gaming supplement about how to do stuff into a story, where the careening path of this barbarian drags you through the drier material.

[Dan] I'm really glad, DongWon, that you brought up this idea of constraints, or maybe it was Mary Robinette. The idea that once you have chosen to tell your stories in a framework, that locks you in. That can be difficult, but it also… The constraints themselves become another tool you can use. What I'm thinking of is the kind of Alias-style 72 hours earlier. Which is a framework. Right? The… If the beginning of your story is horrible thing happening or bizarre situation, how did we get into this, what's going on, and then you get 72 hours earlier, that… First of all, it allows you to start off your story with a bang, but really what's going on narratively, when this is used well, is we know this horrible thing is going to happen. We know that the character is going to get caught, or that this awful thing will happen. Then, that creates a ticking clock, it creates a sense of foreboding that you can use as a tool to play with your audience.

[Erin] Similarly, I think epistolary, one of the challenges of epistolary is that when you're writing a letter, you are presenting yourself in a specific way to the person who's reading the letter. You're not going to be getting the thoughts underneath. You're going to be trying to… Like, when you're writing an email at work, you're not going to necessarily put everything you think about your boss in that email. So if that's the conceit of the story, how do you get your seething resentment at your job…

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? Per my last email…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, but there are tools to do that. Then you can put things are… That things in your work that suggests that and suggest the tension in how do I want to present myself and what am I truly feeling. So then that becomes a tool that you can use in epistolary. So, similarly, it's both a constraint, but also something really cool that you can play with.

[DongWon] Yeah. One other thing I want to add to that is you don't have to let the framework overstay its welcome sometimes. Right? So I have a project coming up. It's still in development, but act two and three of the book are about a plague that hits the city and changes everything. Once you get to act two, everything really changes. So we had this problem in act one of how do we signal that this is coming. So what we ended up doing was introducing an epistolary component where every now and then, you would see a letter from this character who is one of the villains, a truly unpleasant person, talking about this things starting to happen and how no one was talking about it, whatever. Then, again, slight spoiler for a thing that no one has read yet, but, like, she just dies in a very comically horrible way towards the end as she gets infected with the plague after being like so scornful of everyone around her. In a way, that was like, yeah, she'd accomplished what we needed which was to signal this was coming. Her role was done. She's out. Then we can move on with the rest of the story. So you can really use a frame in very tactical ways. It doesn't have to be, again, at the beginning of the story, end of the story. It can be a thing that sort of gets you to a certain point, builds to a certain thing that you need to signal. It really solved a solution for us, or solved a problem for us, in a really just fun and elegant way.

[Dan] All right. This is been such a wonderful conversation. Let's get some homework.

[DongWon] So, what I would like you to do is take a thing that you have already written, either a short story, your work in progress, whatever it is. Try and add a frame story to it. Do this as a very traditional beginning and end. Add a frame, like a little prologue and a little epilogue. Then take a step back and think has adding that changed anything that happens in the middle of your story? Just experiment a little bit, play with it a little bit, and I think you will find that this is an interesting technique that you might be able to apply to this or future work.

[Mary Robinette] On the next episode of writing excuses That, we tackle how to make interruptions in your dialogue more believable, how to vocally furrow your eyebrows, and mumble core. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-12-the-long-shadow-of-unanswered-questions/

Key Points: How do you postpone answering questions? First, we haven't gotten there yet. More specifically, you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer, but it's the wrong one. Or you have an answer, but there's more to uncover. Try-fail cycles! Yes-but, no-and! Plan your information arc, where are they gathering information, where is it revealed. Hide the real question! Cell phones and Google -- I don't know who to call, or I don't know how to ask the right question puts a speedbump in the way. Let the familiar become strange. Go ahead and tell us, and see what happens then. Give us some information that is satisfying and compelling, and build the trust that you will tell us about the other stuff later. Let another character ask the questions the reader wants to know. Use red herrings, things that seem connected but really aren't.

[Season 18, Episode 12]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] There are questions that we have that are unanswered. In our continuing exploration of tension, one of the favorite tricks for tension is questions that are unanswered. This can take a number of different forms. You classically see them in mysteries, but you also see them in romance, like, "Will they get together?" So, let's talk about some ways to avoid answering questions without it being super gimmicky.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have mentioned before my use of my small dog, or of my character's small dog to interrupt questions as… For people not on the video feed…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Erin's cat is also providing a running commentary.

[DongWon] Which has completely prevented us from answering questions about unanswered questions.

[Erin] Her main unanswered question is, "Why no treats? I don't understand."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I think it's worth pointing out that when you write a book, when you're reading a book, fundamentally, information is being hidden from you because you haven't gotten to the end of the book yet. Just the ordering of the material is such that I'm not hiding the answer, I'm getting to it. We're getting there, we're just not there yet. You don't have to… The moment someone in the story or on the screen or on the page has the answer to the unanswered question, that is not necessarily the moment at which that answer would be revealed to anybody. Because the story unfolds at a pace at which that hasn't happened yet. So, I mean, that's the easiest tool.

[Dan] So, to be a little more granular about that, some specific things you can do to kind of stall that answer is you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer that turns out to be the wrong one. Or you come up with an answer that doesn't actually solve the mystery, it doesn't answer the main question, it just spends you off in a new direction, and then suddenly you have together more evidence and answer different questions.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, I think for a mystery type story, this is really the heart of the try-fail cycle. Right? The thing you are trying to do is gain more information. The way you as the author withhold that is you have your characters fail at that or get misleading information or only a piece of it. Right? I mean, this is, going back to another of Mary Robinette's favorite tools, the yes-but, no-and, you can apply that to yes, you now know this one piece of information, but there's a complication because that leads you down to a dead end. Right? So you can think about it in terms of… I think we often give try-fail cycles around action in terms of trying to rescue someone or trying to fix something. But you can apply that to information gathering, because when you're in a mystery, fundamentally, your main tool is the information that's in front of you right now.

[Erin] Yeah. I think the… One of the things I like to think about a lot when I'm writing is information arc as an additional type of arc in a story. Like, you have your character arc, maybe your plot arc, but where is information being gathered, it's where is it being revealed to the reader, and then maybe separately to the characters, really planning that out. Because I think where unanswered questions become annoying to readers is when it feels like you just didn't… You forgot you raised the question, or you just didn't bother getting around to answering it, versus that it was something intentional that you're doing about the way you give out information.

[Dan] Another great thing that I've seen done before is just kind of hiding what the real question actually is. We've used romance several times, which is another great source of tension. The first season of Bridgerton does this brilliantly. In a romance, we often expect the main question to be will these characters fall in love? Yes, clearly, by like episode three, that's answered. But there's more going on. Will they get married? Yeah, like by episode five, I think, they're married. But there's more going on. Ultimately, we realize the actual question that that season is asking is, will they be happy together? Will they resolve their other issues and have a happy life together? Which is just taking it much further than what we initially thought we were asking.

[DongWon] That kind of brings me to what I think is the greatest failure state of how information is released to the audience in a novel. One of the those things is when it's not connected to character. Right? I think one of the best ways to sort of appease an audience when you give them bad information or if they're not getting the answer that they wanted is making sure you're getting more information about who the character is and you're tying that process of trying to get more information into something revealing about who the character is. I'm thinking of like the game Hades, which is a fantastic game. It's a [rogue?] Like, so you're just… It's designed so that you will fail and die. Every time you die, you're rewarded with a little bit more story, as you get to interact with all the characters of this world. So the loop is, we're punishing you for the fact that you've failed, which you're supposed to do, and rewarding you by giving you character. So if you think about like how satisfying the loop in Hades is, think about that in terms of your reader going through the try-fail cycles of your book. Make sure that your rewarding them with something, even as the characters themselves are failing.

[Mary Robinette] That brings me to a great point that when we're talking about these questions, the unanswered questions, there are unanswered questions that the character has and there are also unanswered questions that the reader has. If you want to… I find that when you're trying to emotionally link the reader and the character, but if you give them both the same unanswered questions that that puts the character… The reader on the character's path. But sometimes you'll have a situation where the character knows an answer… This is my traumatic piece of back story… And the reader doesn't know the answer. So that… The reader tension is what is the character's traumatic back story? The character obviously knows it. So that's like… That's a way that you can ratchet the tension up by withholding something from the reader as long as the reader doesn't feel overtly manipulated. The I'll think about that later. That you have to have a reason for them to not think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of reasons to not think about the rest of that and how are we going to do it, I'm going to pose a question, which is, how are we going to keep people from feeling like they're overtly manipulated when they didn't get the answer that they want, and we're going to answer that after our break. Our thing of the week is Ted Lasso. It is currently a two season series. There is supposed to be a third season. I am eagerly awaiting it. It… On the surface, this is nothing that I would like. It is a show about soccer. I love this show so deeply, because it is a show about what happens when you make the kinder choice, ultimately. Because of that, and because of the way they are handling tension and tropes. It's as if they said, "What's a common TV trope? We're going to set that up, then we're going to subvert it by having the character make the kind and understanding response to it." It is funny. It is heartwarming. I care about soccer in ways that I have never cared about them. It has some of the best secondary and tertiary characters of anything that I've ever seen. Highly recommended. Ted Lasso. All of the seasons. If you're only going to watch one thing, that one thing should be Ted Lasso. Except DongWon will arm wrestle me about some other things. But…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So I posed a question before we went to break. That question was how do you interrupt a question… How do you withhold the question from the reader…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And make them feel not overtly manipulated? That moment when someone's like…

[Howard] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] Here's a thing that everyone in the room knows, but the reader is not allowed to know it.

[Howard] 15 years ago or so, there was this up ending of the whole industry of writing and plotting things, because suddenly viewers, readers, listeners, whoever recognized that just about everybody had the sum of all human knowledge in the palms of their hands and could call just about anybody. So if there was a question that couldn't be answered by the people in the room, but they knew someone else had the answer, they would just call them. Screenwriters and writers of fiction and writers of everything had to find new ways to say, "Well, why wouldn't they just call them?" The first answer was terrible, and that's, "Oh, I've got no bars. I've got no signal." There are 10 minute YouTube videos of people in movies holding up their phones and having no signal, because the audience needed to be manipulated, because we needed to not have the answer right now. The right way to do it is illustrated in what happens when someone else's Google Fu is better than mine. I don't know how to ask the right question to get the answer from my phone. I don't know what the right question is. I don't know how to phrase this so I can find the answer. I don't know who to talk to who will have the answer, but maybe if I talk to somebody else, they can help me. That starts putting speedbumps in the… In between me and the answer to the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was one of the things that I had to do in the Spare Man was… It is set in 2075 or 2074, I can't remember. Anyway. My own book. Whatever. Point being, everybody is constantly interconnected. So I had to come up with a reason to turn that off. It was fun, in some ways, because I made it a punitive thing that was being withheld from them. Because they were being falsely accused of a crime, so they were not allowed to connect to the Internet. But that also then allowed me to make it a strong character thing, because it then became a thing that had to be fixed. Also, the frustrations that go with I'm used to being able to just send a ping to my husband, and now I can't. Like, one of the things that I enjoyed was her constantly trying to contact him and not being able to. The reflex of it.

[Erin] I also think that communication devices, just that specific thing, as like the reason you can't get the answer, can also be a way to ratchet up that tension in kind of a similar way that if you're used to something, something is familiar and it goes to becoming unfamiliar, that's always I think a great source of tension in horror. The familiar becomes strange. So if you pick up your phone to Google something and instead your phone is doing something very odd, or you get a picture of a dead body, or something else that's both distracting… So, like, throw something shiny the reader's way. To distract them, for one thing, but also with something you thought was going to happen. You had an anticipation of getting the answer, then that was yanked away from you. That can provide new information and new questions that then the reader will fixate on instead of the one that you didn't answer in that moment.

[DongWon] I'm going to come out with a little bit of a chaotic answer to this, which is if you are really struggling how to figure out the key… How to keep your audience from feeling manipulated by withholding information, try just telling them the thing. Right? I think so often I see writers going through these back loops and just like contorting themselves to withhold information where I'm like, "No no no no. Just tell us what's going on!" It'll be more interesting if we, or even if your characters, know exactly what's happening and they still have to solve this problem. Right? I think one of the week parts of a mystery is sometimes knowing what happened doesn't actually change anything. To spoil Glass Onion a little bit, it has an aspect of this, where, like, the resolution of the mystery still leaves a really big unanswered question of like, "Well, what do we do about this?" In a way that is truly fascinating. Right? So I think sometimes if you find yourself stuck, and your like grinding on this question, try writing it from the perspective of just give them the information. Let their phone connect to the Internet. Let that person call person C and be like, "Hey, the killer is so-and-so." Then what does person C do? It doesn't mean they're going to survive. Right? It could make a much more interesting scenario for you and kick your book in an exciting new direction.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, that often I find that when I just let my character tell the other person the thing, that what actually happens is it just… It opens new questions and they're significantly more interesting questions.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which allows me to keep ramping that tension up.

[DongWon] If you're stuck, you might be asking the wrong questions, is really what I'm saying.

[Dan] So I see this a lot with doing chapter critiques and stuff at conferences and classes. We will be sitting around in like a writing group environment. We've read chapter one of seven different people's things. Especially with fantasy and science fiction, a lot of the questions are, "Well, I don't understand this. I don't understand X or Y thing about your story." I have to remind them, you usually don't in chapter one. There's worldbuilding, you have to give us time to settle into it. But what I find fascinating is that I usually don't get that question when the chapter is providing us a ton of other fascinating information. If you are giving us something that is satisfying and compelling and makes us… It's scratching that itch to know stuff, then those other kind of unanswered questions don't seem as pressing. Because part of that is the distraction that Erin talked about, you throw some shiny at us, but a lot of it is just you're building trust with your reader. You're giving them information, so then I know that you're going to give me this other information if I am patient and wait for it.

[Howard] It's super useful to anticipate the question that a reader might have and to give that question to another one of the characters. If one of the characters does a thing, and you know the readers are going to be like, "Wow, why did they do that thing?" Let another character ask that question. "Why did you do that?" The person who did it said, "You know what? That's a long painful story and we're not going to have that conversation right now. Right now we're busy running." Now I have acknowledged to the reader that there is information you don't have yet, you know who has the information, you know who isn't giving you the information, and everybody in the story to this point is behaving in character.

[Mary Robinette] I will flag though that you do need to make sure though that it is actually a long painful complicated story.

[Howard] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Because the number of times I have seen someone say, "I'm not going to tell you that right now. We don't have time." And really, all they needed to say was like a five word sentence.

[Chuckles]

[yes]

[Mary Robinette] It's… Make sure that there is a legit reason. There was one other thing that I was going to say. What was that?

[Pause]

[DongWon] I guess we'll never know.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I guess I'm going to have to…

[Howard] I have to say none of us know and all of our cell phones work.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, I know what… There was actually a thing. Red… I do want to just briefly touch on how to construct a good red herring. Because red herrings are one of the ways that you can… Are linked to the unanswered question, because they are the question… The line of questioning that pulls your detective down the wrong dark alley. In Glass Onion, it's one of the most blatant red herrings in the history of ever is wandering around in a bathrobe for much of the film. But what you're looking for is something that appears related to the story, that you feel like everyone else should be able to draw connections to whatever it is, and ultimately ends up not being connected. I have a red herring going on in Spare Man. The way I constructed that one… And I will attempt to discuss it without spoilers for the people who haven't read the book yet… Is basically, I did it was that I gave one of the characters a secret so they were clearly hiding something, which is obviously to the reader going to be related to the murder. But it had… That secret had nothing to do with the murder. So that's a real simple way to give… To insert a red herring is to give someone a secret, that's just not the right secret. Which then leads to more unanswered questions.

[Mary Robinette] And… Your unanswered question right now is what is our homework assignment?

[Dan] Well, as tempting as it is to just never answer that question, I will tell you. I will spoil the homework. What we want you to do is take a look at whatever you're working on right now, your work in progress, something that you're writing or creating, and figure out what questions you are asking to the reader. Sometimes that might be an overt mystery question, how does this thing work, where did this body come from, who did the thing? Sometimes it's worldbuilding questions. You've proposed some kinds of things about the way a technology or a magic or a society works. Figure out what those questions are. Write them down. So that you can decide later when and how or if to answer them.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-10-anticipation-is-more-than-just-making-us-wait/

Key Points: Forms of anticipation? Surprise, introducing an unexpected element. Suspense, delaying the action or answer. Humor, the joke is coming. Unfulfilled promises, waiting for the promised action. For anticipation, you need to know or think you know what is coming. Be careful about trying to build tension with unearned interruptions, withholding information. Inevitability, and genre tropes, can build anticipation. Subverted tropes, using the reader's expectations against them. Mix up the kinds and places of anticipation, and play them against each other. Horror and humor use the same anticipatory expectation, but horror fulfills it, while humor subverts it. Use your beta readers to check your anticipation. The twist in mystery depends on the reader anticipating something, and then you take them someplace else.

[Season 18, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So now that you've been anticipating something, let's talk about actually how this works. There's a number of different forms of anticipation that we can think about playing with. I'm going to mention four of them, but there are more. This can be anything from surprise, where you're introducing an unexpected element, suspense, where you're delaying an action or an answer, humor is often a form of anticipation where you know that a joke is coming, and then unfulfilled promises, where you… The reader is waiting for the thing that you've promised is going to happen. Like, in a previous episode, we mentioned going down the dark stairs, and you know that someone is going to jump out. You've just made that promise.

[Howard] Yeah. The title of this episode comes from the 1976 Heinz ketchup commercial where they're singing anticipation while the very slow ketchup comes out of the bottle. The whole idea being I really want to just eat the sandwich, but I have to wait for the ketchup first. Anticipation is inherently… There is an inherent tension there, and you can be anticipating something wonderful. Even the ordinary kind of wonderful like ketchup.

[Mary Robinette] That actually…

[Dan] I just want to say, an important part of anticipation is that you have to know or think you know what's coming. A very, very short version of a story I know I've told before. I was trying to teach this to a group of teen writers several years ago. I showed them the beach scene, the first beach scene in Jaws, where there's a bunch of kids out playing in the water. It is full of jump scares and all these things. It is just delicious mounting tension of which one of these kids is going to get eaten by a shark. But I, in my foolishness, forgot to tell this group of 12-year-olds that there was a shark. They didn't… They had no context for this movie whatsoever. So instead of a very tense scene, it was a really boring scene in which nobody got eaten by a shark. Without knowing that something bad was going to happen, there's no anticipation at all.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about that example is the… Is that you have to have that conversation with the reader. One of the things that I will see people do badly with anticipation is that they will hold onto a key piece of information trying to build tension by creating a mystery around it that is unnecessary. Where the reasons for interruptions are unearned. This is a… Like, this is, again, a thing that I played with a lot with Spare Man was that I would attempt to have… To create tension by having someone say, "Oh, well, the answer to your question…" Then I would use Gimlet, who is an adorable small dog, to interrupt the process. So, "The answer to your question… Is this dog allowed to have fries?" The reason that that worked was… Usually… Was that it was an earned interruption. It was an interruption that wasn't under anyone's direct control. There was also a different payoff, like that interruption was serving another function. Often, the interruption is just like someone comes by to drop a check, and they decide not to answer the question after all. That dropping the check? That is not serving any other purpose in the scene. It's not… It's an unearned, in my mind, interruption.

[DongWon] In a different way, you also used anticipation in one of the most clever ways that I've seen. Which is with the intimacy between your two leads. Right? There's this recurring sort of very funny thing where they're just trying to get a moment alone to sort of have an intimate moment, because it's their honeymoon. You're using those scenes to give us an enormous amount of exposition and information. You're having them talk through the mystery, and you're using them is what could, in other circumstances, be a very dry and boring dump, but by including this anticipatory element of like are they finally going to get to do the thing, it creates this very funny loop where you using the anticipation in this very like subtle background way that draws us into the scene and gives us a reason to care about what they're saying, while we're just like, "Can they please just make out now?" It's great.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you for noticing that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Or not. Maybe I don't want you to notice it. But, yes. But it is that thing which I think gets back to something that Dan said earlier, that anticipation, that there is an element of hope… That there is a thing that you're hoping is going to happen. I think that was Dan. It may have been Erin.

[Howard] It was Dan, and it was two episodes ago.

[Mary Robinette] Two episodes ago. Previously.

[Howard] Or, no. One episode ago. But, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Before. Someone said. I thought it was clever. But that element of hope, whether it's that there is an outcome that you're wishing for with anticipation…

[Dan] Now, one form of anticipation that I don't see on your list, though it arguably can be a part of suspense, is the idea of inevitability. If we have seen a character do a certain thing in a certain situation every previous time that that situation has arrived, then, all of a sudden, you can present us with that situation again, and we know what's going to happen. We know they're going to make the wrong choice or we know that they're going to kill the person. You can see this a lot in No Country for Old Men, for example. Where we suddenly find ourselves in this situation and we know what's going to happen because we've seen it happen before. That inevitability just adds so much tension into it.

[Howard] Genre also programs a measure of that inevitability into us. If you're watching a… Watching or reading a thing, and you realize, "Oh, this is sort of following Hero's Journey, and this character is the mentor… Oh, crap. I like this character and they're the mentor. Something is going to happen to them to prevent them from being useful. Oh, no." That's real. That's a thing that your readers bring to your book, even if you're not writing Hero's Journey. If you've dropped enough things that might telegraphed to the reader that it's Hero's Journey, the character they think is the mentor is the character they're expecting you to kill off. It's something that we need to be aware of any time we're writing in a genre.

[DongWon] Sometimes you can be really explicit about it. Star Wars has spent 20 years now milking anticipation as a narrative engine in all these prequel series. Right? I'm a huge fan of the cartoon Clone Wars, also known as the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. Right? We know what happens to Anakin. We spent five seasons with all these characters that we know aren't surviving this series. They are not in the movies. We know what is going to happen when Anakin becomes Darth Vader. So the tension of that series is so much in wait, there are all these characters we care about. Are they going to make it out of this? How do they make it out of this? And those questions. Andor recently was such a fascinating series because we know where Cassian Andor ends up. We know… And the entire question of the series that we're watching is, how does he become the character that we meet in Rogue One? So they're sort of using this as a loop, over and over again, to answer interesting questions that the audience has, using our anticipation, using our sense of inevitability, to give us like these little Greek tragedy structured stories. Because we have certainty about where this ends up.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of inevitability and anticipation, why don't we take a pause for our thing of the week?

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Max Gladstone's Dead Country. This book is out March 7th, which should be a couple days from when you're hearing this, if you're listening to it when the episode drops. Max is returning to his most well-known and original series, the Craft sequence, with a new series of books that is telling the story of a war that is coming to the world of the Crafts. The first book starts with Dead Country. We meet Tara Abernethy, who's the hero of the first book, Three Parts Dead, returning to her home for the first time since she was chased out because she's heard the news that her father has died. So, we get to see this character that we've seen before returning home. It's this really wonderful examination of what we give up when we go out into the world, what ambition costs us, and how do we pass on the learning that we've had over the course of our lives. Dead Country kicks off a new arc in the Craft that is a much closer, tighter knit arc then we've seen Max do before. I cannot tell you how excited I am for everyone to see where he takes this universe over the next four books.

[Mary Robinette] So, as we're continuing this conversation about anticipation, there's… One of the other things that I particularly enjoy are subverted tropes. Where you are using the reader's expectations against them. Sometimes this is a… I will spoil a little bit… This is a thing that I used in Spare Man, when… You'll see this used a lot… Where you're like, "Aha. I think that it is this person." Then they become the act two corpse or something else happens that causes you to decide, "Oh, I guess I was wrong." Then, either they have fake their own death or they have… There's something where you subvert the reader's expectations. You use their anticipation of the ways they think it's going to go to toy with them.

[Howard] One of the best examples I can think of, just off the top of my head, is Samuel L. Jackson's St. Crispin's Day speech in 1999's Deep Blue Sea, where he is riling everybody up and saying, "Yeah, these sharks might be smart, but we're human beings, and we're…" He is ramping up to awesome, full-blown Samuel L. Jackson. Then a shark comes out of the water from behind him and eats him. Now that… I mean, it's 20 years later, we kind of expect that kind of thing. Now that it's been done a few times. But at the time, it was both hilarious and horrifying and was brilliant. So, I look for ways in which I can do something that looks like it's delivering what people are anticipating, and then twists and delivers something else that makes them laugh and makes them scream at the same time.

[Erin] One of the things that I love about that is that it plays with the different types of anticipation. Not in the way that Mary Robinette has set this up, but just the different strands. You can have physical… Like, the anticipation of physical pain, the anticipation of emotional change. Like, I'm going to have a breakthrough, or a relational change, we're finally going to make out. What I think is cool about that example is it's an emotional… The anticipation is of this emotional release, and then a physical thing comes in and interrupts it. So one thing that's really fun is to play around with the different types of anticipation or the different kinds of places in which anticipation can happen, then layer those in among each other.

[DongWon] Mary Robinette kind of mentioned this earlier, but I think horror and humor really rely on the same overlapping anticipatory impulse. Right? This kind of goes to what Erin was saying as well, in… There's one type of anticipation that sort of drives that flip. There's a moment in the recent reboot of Candyman. It's a tiny little moment, where one of the characters opens a cellar door and looks down a dark stairwell. We have this horror anticipation of she's going to go down there, something bad's down there, it's not going to go great. She just says, "Nope." and closes the door.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It becomes this comedy beat. It's a delightful beat. I was in a theater. We all just lost our minds at this. But it is the thing of humor can be that subverting the expectation, and horror can be about fulfilling of the expectation. The horror version is she goes down there and something bad happens to her. The humor version is she's like, "I ain't doing this. I'm out." and closes the door and walks away. So, I think how you resolve the anticipation can sort of determine what genre space you're in. But the same impulse is there in terms of the feeling we have going into that.

[Mary Robinette] The… One of the examples of how you can really use anticipation along these lines is in the Expanse, in the first episode, we meet… I think it's the first episode… But we meet a ship's captain and he has this wall of collectible cat figurines.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The main character is like, "So what's with the cat figures?" He's like, "What?" He clearly refuses to answer, there's something there. What you're anticipating is that later he's going to be… There's going to be a telling moment, a compelling moment where they… He shares why he collects the cat figures, or you're anticipating that one of them is going to be broken, and he's going to feel… The main characters going to feel really bad about having broken it. Instead… Full on spoiler… What happens is we just blow the entire ship up, and we will never get the answer to what is going on with all of those cats. But it creates this little bit of tension there that it's like here's… We're anticipating something… That these are going to be important for some reason. We're anticipating that they're Chekhov's gun, and then they are not.

[Noise]

[Mary Robinette] The other… Go on.

[Dan] If I can interrupt really quick, that's also an example of that combination of anticipation and hope. Just giving those little cat figurines humanizes that character in such a tiny but vital way that suddenly we care about this person. We care about getting the answer to that question. We find them to be more interesting than just standard captain on a doomed ship. So, when the ship blows up, we care in a way we wouldn't have without that little element.

[Howard] I want to call out one of my favorite go to tools for anticipation. That is the beta reader. I will ask my beta readers at the end of each chapter to tell me what is it that you are anticipating? What is it that you are dreading? What is… Tell me what you think is going on. Not so I can second-guess you and write the story so that you're wrong. I want to know if the anticipation is working. Because it's very difficult to know if it's working when the only person who's reading it is you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's very true. Which actually brings me to how you can use anticipation with a mystery. We mentioned that one of the main beats in a mystery is the twist. The twist does not work unless you have the reader anticipate something else. That's one of the things that you have to do when you're setting up the mystery is you have to build in anticipation. Then, at the twist point, you take them somewhere else. Speaking of taking us someplace else, think let's take us to our homework assignment.

[Howard] I can do that. Have a look at your current work in progress, and ask yourself, are there genre tropes that you can subvert? Can you payoff reader anticipation by delivering something other than what the genre you're writing in has led the reader to expect?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-03-an-interview-with-erin-roberts/

Key Points: Erin Roberts. Working nonprofit communications, then science fiction, fantasy, and horror. MFA! Short stories, and beyond. Telling stories about the way the world is, and the way it could be. The black experience in the American South. Game writing, letting people play in your world. It's all storytelling and worldbuilding. Getting paid? Be scrappy. Check out grants, residencies, and scholarships. Look at projects for creative nurturing, setting you up for the future, and it pays well. Love the work you do.

[Season 18, Episode 3]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Erin Roberts.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So today we are talking with Erin Roberts. We're going to find out a little bit more about her background and where she comes from and the perspective that she's bringing to the podcast. So let… I kind of wanted to start with you've said that you're kind of the early-stage writer here among the five of us, and you're bringing that perspective to the podcast. So let's just dive right in. Where did you get your start? What was the thing that brought you to writing as a serious thing that you were pursuing?

[Erin] Great questions. So I often think of myself as a little bit of a late bloomer, because I was just going about my life, living, working the nonprofit field, doing my thing. In New York, there's the Gotham Writers Center. They were having a class on writing science fiction and fantasy in person, which was like the first time they'd had it in person ever. I decided to take the class, and had a really great professor who just… Was actually, "You're not bad at this. Like, you might want to look into this some more, like this writing thing. It could work out for you." Which is why I love teaching, and why I think teaching is so important, because you just need somebody to kind of believe in you and say, "Like, this could work." So that was not that many years ago. I think it was 2014. So, 2014, 2015. I had not been doing any writing or other than in the margins of my notebooks during boring work meetings. So I just decided to mainline writing. Basically, like think of me with an IV with writing [garbled] coming into it. So I went off to Odyssey writing workshop, I went and got an MFA, I listened to Writing Excuses podcasts…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I did everything that I could to just try to learn about it. But I really kind of came sort of out of nowhere in my life and decided to take this kind of radical shift.

[DongWon] That's such an exciting transition. When… What was your first sale? Like, how long did it take you to get to that first professional sale?

[Erin] My first sale was in… I think it was 2016. It was actually while I was at the MFA program, which was great because it forced me to write all the time because I had to turn in things to my professors or they would beat me.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Not really. They… So I was turning in things all the time and working on stories. I think actually the first story I sold, Wolfy Things, was something I wrote during Odyssey, and then reworked a bit during my MFA, and then sold to PodCastle. Go, PodCastle. Just really… It was just like a couple of years for that to happen. Then I just kept writing and had a few more sales. I had a few things out in 2018. Then blah blah blah pandemic. I've been doing a few other things with my time as well, but I continue to love and work in the short story form.

[DongWon] Was that the first place you had submitted to or had you submitted to several places before you got there? Like, how long did it take you from the time that you're like, "I think this is good enough to send out," to it ending up on PodCastle?

[Erin] That one took… It took a little bit of a journey. It went around the world. You know that old song? "Been around the world, and I, I, I, I can't find my baby." It's like that, but with short stories. So, I think it was maybe the 10th or 11th, it took a while for that one to sell. That's how it goes a lot of the time.

[Mary Robinette] I was wondering, because you talked about the MFA. I know that you're a science fiction, fantasy, sometimes horror. I always hear people talking about how difficult it is to do science fiction and fantasy in an MFA program. Did you have any pushback? Is that where you started? Like, what was that like?

[Erin] I specifically picked the Stone Coast MFA program because they are science fiction and fantasy, horror, friendly. I will say that from the time that I went to the MFA program, which was like 2017 2018 to now, programs in general have become much more friendly to speculative fiction. I see that now as somebody who teaches at a university, the people that they're looking for as professors, the classes that they're offering. I think people were like, "it was a fad. It'll go away." Then they were like, "It didn't go away, and our students are going to write it. So we might as well bring people on who know about it, and who don't turn up their noses at it." So I think we're actually coming into a really rich, amazing hero for learning about speculative fiction in an MFA program, if that's the thing that you want to do.

[Howard] Okay. So, in 1999, my next-door neighbor had just gotten out of medical school and started an OB/GYN practice at age 45.

[Mary Robinette] I cannot wait to see where this segue goes.

[Howard] He had no idea… He'd been a gym coach…

[Erin] [garbled to me]

[Howard] A collegiate gym coach, and then decided, "No, this isn't what I want to do with my life." It was super inspiring to me. I quit my day job doing software middle management to become a cartoonist. I've seen in my own life that there's a huge effect on my writing that comes from all that stuff that happened before hand. So the question for you… Yes, you say you came to writing late. There's nothing wrong with that. You frontloaded with all of this information, all of this life experience. How has that colored, how has that altered, how has that affected the things that you create?

[Erin] Oo, I love that question. In part because I don't really know. I think it's something that… It's something good to think about more. I think it's something we all could think about more. Because you are you. Sort of like if your face changes every day, you don't notice it. It's when you go and you look at someone else and they're like, "Oh, my gosh, your face has shifted." How this is happened, I don't know. But you see yourself differently than other people see you. So the experiences I've had to me are just the experiences that I've had. But I've had a lot of fun times. Like I… There are things that I've learned in working the nonprofit sector, in working in the social justice philanthropy, this really… That really impacted the way that I think about how writing can create positive change in the world, the ways in which we see the world. One of the things that you learn a lot when you work in nonprofits, and I worked in nonprofit communications, is that there are well-worn paths that we have in our thinking a lot of the time. Part of what you try to do when you're in my job is to shift that path a little bit, and say, "Hey, you know, the world could be a little different if we go this different way." Writing can do that, fiction writing does that as well. Every piece of fiction is telling some sort of story about the world, the way it is, the way it could be. I think that having thought about that differently outside of the fiction world really helped me think differently about how fiction does that as well.

[DongWon] Great. Let's take a break for a second to talk about the thing of the week, and we will be right back with more from Erin Roberts about how to build a career and how to build a life in the writing world.

[Erin] All right. Our thing of the week is Dungeons & Dragons, y'all. It is Journeys through the Radiant Citadel which is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure book. It's a compilation of different adventures, including one written by me, yours truly, Erin Roberts, that's about horror and Southern Gothic and black folks. But what's really important and exciting about this book is in thinking about the different perspectives that we all bring to the table in the way that it shapes the world's that we create, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a D&D book, an official out from the Wizards of the Coast D&D book that was written entirely by people of color. Bringing our own lived experiences and perspectives to the page and saying, medieval European fantasy, awesome. But what else can I bring to the table? For me, it was what can I bring about the black experience in the American South. For other folks, it was what can I bring from Mexico. From other folks, it was all around the world. So people were really bringing themselves to the table and saying, "Play in our world. Experience our adventures. Just have a good old time, in a D&D way." So, it's Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, and it's out from Wizards of the Coast.

[Dan] All right. So I have a question for you. As someone who has also worked in the gaming industry, I'm really fascinated to hear about your game writing. How did you get into that? What are your plans for it in the future? Do you see yourself as primarily a game writer, primarily a fiction writer who does games? Tell us about that aspect of your career.

[Erin] Sure. I'll start with the second part first, which is that I think of myself as a storyteller. Really, what it's about is figuring out what's the best venue to tell each story. So there are times when you want to control the story, you want to know exactly how the person is moving through it. That's what prose is great for. That's where you're trying to control everything from where somebody takes a breath to what they think of the characters. Not always successfully, but that's a little bit of the dream. In game writing, you're letting people play a little bit in your world. Part of it is creating a backdrop for other people to tell their stories. So it's just a very different type of storytelling. But it's all storytelling, and it's all worldbuilding, which is one of my favorite parts of just storytelling as a whole, and why I've always liked science fiction and fantasy and horror. For me, I got involved because a very kind person, I told them I really wanted to do some game writing. Ajit George, an amazing game writer himself, he passed my name to a few folks, and then I wrote for them and they were like, "Come back and write more. And write more, and write more." Because as… If you're ever a freelancer or someone working in a field like that, getting the first job is hard, getting the second job is harder, and the third is the hardest. Because that's where you really have to prove that you've got your mettle, and that like it wasn't a complete fluke. So I will continue working and going forward and doing more game writing and doing more storytelling in all forms.

[DongWon] That's amazing, and that kind of segues into a thing that I'm wondering about. Because I'm a literary agent. My concern is how do we get people paid for the creative work that they do. Right? You've mentioned some creative sale… Or professional sales. Doing the game writing. What does that look like for you in terms of putting together a sustainable life that is centered around your storytelling, around your writing?

[Erin] I'm a scrappy, scrappy girl. So I'm all about making sure that I get paid, no matter where it comes from. One thing that I think we could all be is a little bit scrappier, actually. Obviously in… One of the great things about speculative fiction is that people are generally paid, especially in the short story world, which they aren't in other genres. But like I've gotten my local jurisdiction to give me grants. Like, I'm a big fan of grants, of residencies, of scholarships. There is money out in the world for people who… They're just like, "We want you to write more. We want to support that." A lot of times, they're not even getting as many applications as they could. So I'm taking all the money. I'm going to just ruin my life here by telling other people to like look and see what's available in your area. Even if you take the money out of my pocket, I want other folks to have it as well. But I've used grants, I've used freelance jobs, game writing pays. It's doing a little bit of everything to balance it out. One of my favorite things when I'm trying to decide what I want to do next and take on a project is something I saw recently on Twitter that apparently Dolly Parton says, which is to decide it's got to do two of the following three things. One, it nurtures you creatively. Two, it sets you up for the future. And three, it pays well. So if it does two of those three, definitely consider it. If it does all three, you probably want to do it if you can. Also, I would say, if you can like keep your own health and sleep at night and have relationships with other people. But those are the things that kind of I think about. But money is definitely one of them. So, get scrappy.

[DongWon] That is such fantastic advice. I love that so much. I just want to add one last note, just to tag onto that, is I so wish more science fiction and fantasy writers knew about the grants, knew about how to apply for residencies. It's a thing that's incredibly common in the literary world. I've seen writers really build a whole life for themselves, even before publishing their first story, even before publishing their first book. Really, just do some searching, learn how to write a grant application, learn how to apply for residencies. See what's out there, and there's a ton of opportunities to help you figure out how to build a life that is centered on writing that isn't necessarily about directly getting paid for the fiction that you're putting on the page.

[Howard] Okay. So, Erin, I don't know that I've got the dates right here, but sometime between 2010 and 2014, something happened where you went from doing the thing, or doing all the things, you were doing many things, and you decided, "Hey, I think I want to be a writer." What was it about writing that appealed to you? I mean, was it something you read? What planted the hook? What was it that so gigged you out of what you were doing before and pulled you into this horrible world we all live in now?

[Erin] Well, I'll tell you a secret about myself first. Which is that I love most things that I do. I think a lot of folks, there's this theory that you sort of have like your soul sucking regular life jobs and things, and then like your creative amazingness. I loved my work in the nonprofit field, and there's another version of me who's doing that now. But what I loved about it was the ability to… I love puzzles. I love the puzzle of figuring out how to take the story that's in your head and put it on the page. I just finished working on a story and I… There's the thing that happens where you're working on a sentence and you realize, "I've got it. Oh, my gosh, this thing is in my head, it now came out, and it came out the perfect way that it was supposed to." To me, there's magic in that. In really being able to… Who knows where it's happening in your brainstem, but that process is something that's so magical. Trying to capture that magic, even on the days when I want to like shred everything I've ever written, is part of what keeps me going and keeps me motivated from day to day.

[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. It's something that I think is unfashionable, the idea that we love what we do. The fiction of the "oh, the angst… Oh, it's so hard, my writing, my craft. I suffer for it." We never hear the "I love what I do. Look at that, I wrote something good." So, I'm delighted to hear that that is part of what guides you.

[Erin] Absolutely.

[DongWon] Yeah. For me, it's always like I think writers are their own best advocates. No one's going to fight better or more clearly or more cogently then you will. I think that starts with loving what you do and loving your work. Erin, it's just such a delight to hear you talk about that and about that aspect of it.

[DongWon] So, Erin, I believe you have our homework for us this week.

[Erin] I do. This has been an amazing time, because it's gotten me to think about what's brought me to where I am. So the homework is to think about what's brought you to where you are. When you write, when you read, you bring a bit of yourself to the table. So write down what are three things that have happened in your life that you loved as a storytelling conceit. It could be anything from the real world to the imaginary, that you think you carry with you and that you bring to the page. Either when you're reading or when you're writing.

[Mary Robinette] That's wonderful homework. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/13/17-46-monstrous-awakening/

Key Points: What does it mean to wake up monstrous? Body horror and body humor play with our fears of losing ability, of losing agency. That could be me? To be scared, to be horrified at helplessness, rope and duct tape could do it, too. Watch out for the sideswipe at disability. Think about ripple effects. Consider the metaphor of apartment life as a disaster! Pay attention to the point of view, and authorial empathy. Make sure your character keeps their humanity and agency. Don't grab that wheelchair, don't just help without asking.

[Season 17, Episode 46]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Monstrous Awakening.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are here to talk about this idea of monstrous awakening. One of the things that I'm going to ask you all to do before you listen to this episode is actually to pause and to go read an essay that Fran wrote that's called You Wake Up Monstrous. We will be here, and it's fine if you don't have time to listen to... to read that before you listen to the episode. Totally fine, you won't be lost, but if you have time, it will give you some important framing, I think. So, let's dive in and talk about this idea of body horror and body issues. Fran, and you kind of sort of for those who have not had time to listen, sort of sum up what we're talking about with body horror and body issues, using some of the metaphors that you use in your wonderful essay?

[Fran] Um… Yes. I can. I… So, body horror and body humor as well, and even a little bit of inspiration for it, all use these sort of there but for the grace of whatever universal entity is out there, that that happens to me. You see that in movies like The Fly, you see that in Kafka's Metamorphosis where the character wakes up and they are transformed into a bug. Or they are… They lose their… Not just their ability to speak, but their mouth disappears. In The Matrix, for instance. Those are all forms of body horror that play with and on sort of vestigal fears of losing ability, agency. They also play with the discomfort that we see each other go through when we become either ill or disabled.

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about these things, a lot of times, we see authors reach for disability as shorthand for evil or helplessness. But it doesn't have to be that way. What are some other choices that a writer could make?

[Chelsea] I have a slightly different angle for how to get ahead in advertising. I'm thinking about like the body thing. I was kind of just forming a thing in my head about Neil waking up with no mouth and that helplessness. Like, I was trying to connect it with something else. I was trying to connect it to, like, you can wake up and you can have no mouth and stuff, and all of a sudden, everything is very different and there's a bug on you, and all those other horrible things. It's like you're doing this because you want people to be scared and you want people to kind of be horrified at the helplessness. But I'm also thinking about like… If you want people to be horrified by the helplessness, that's fine. There's always like rope and duct tape. Then nobody is like missing a mouth. There isn't like this kind of this weird symbolism about other disabilities going on. But they are helpless, and it is scary, and that maybe thinking, "Do I need to do this in this way specifically or can I do this and not kind of take a sideswipe at disability?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. What you're talking about there is thinking about the area of intention, like, why are you making this choice? It's not that these choices are always forbidden and you can never make one of these choices. Because there are times and places where it's appropriate. But you have to think about it and not just default to it because it's something that you've seen in media, because you're not thinking about the larger ramifications of it. That's usually where people run into problems, is that they don't think about the ripple effects, and they don't think about those areas of intention.

[Chelsea] I honestly believe that if you take something like that, and you're like, "Okay, I saw it on TV," and you think about the stuff that is lying underneath it, and if that causes you to go, "Mm, no. I need to do this because this has entirely different things lying underneath it," you're actually going to end up with a story that you actually want instead of one that winds up going astray because you didn't think about, like, three layers of implications about a device that you're using.

[Howard] Let me approach this real quick from a different angle. If you totally un-ironically tell a story about a disaster in someone's life where they can no longer afford their mortgage and they have to move into an apartment and that is just a terrible disaster. You're playing it not for humor, absolutely un-ironically. Everybody in the world who already lives in an apartment and gets by just fine looks at this story and says, "Why is my way of life horrible or evil or whatever?" You've othered an enormous portion of your audience. I bring this up not to say that we should all live in apartments or we should all live in houses. I bring it up to say that this is how you need to think about these things so that you don't come across as age-ist or ablest, when you are trying to accomplish something else with your story.

[Fran] I think what Chelsea was talking about, too, about that implied helplessness, the lack of mouth, the lack of things, it does depend, in the story, on (a) the point of view, and also a certain level of authorial empathy. Not sympathy, but empathy. Because what a lot of horror tropes rely on is a sense of that other is not part of the human pattern anymore. They've lost their humanity, because they've lost their mouth or, to go back to a previous episode of Writing Excuses, they've lost their hand, and it's been replaced by another body part. But we have this opportunity to explore the fact that in… And this is something that actually Kafka does pretty well, is that because the point of view is internal, you don't see that character as, Gregor Samsa, as helpless. He's rationalizing how to get through this situation and just to have… Take a moment to think… When you're writing body horror or body humor, and think about what it feels like to be that other person and acknowledge their personhood, acknowledge their humanity, and the fact that they have agency in the situation as well, whatever the horrific situation is, they still have choice. They still have the ability to maneuver in different ways. And so does the audience who's reading this. Just like, to go back to Howard's apartment metaphor, in the essay I wrote a little bit about what it felt like to be wearing a back brace that was exactly the same as the back brace that was being joked about in the movie that I was watching. There's a character in Say Anything who's trying to get a drink of water out of a water fountain while wearing a Milwaukee-based brace with a neck support. I didn't have a neck support, but it's impossible. It becomes this long-running joke in the middle of the movie. I just sat there and felt like, "Wow. This… I was enjoying this movie until just this moment." Just like the apartment metaphor that Howard gave us, it really does not necessarily do service to your story to have a whole bunch of your audience suddenly feel like you're operating against them.

[Howard] Done well, it's R-rated for language and so much language, I Spy with Melissa McCarthy… I think. Maybe it's just called Spy. But Melissa McCarthy plays the chair guy, the chairperson, for a spy who is suddenly pushed out in the field. She is very competent, but she is very inexperienced. At no point in the show do we make fat jokes about Melissa McCarthy.

[Fran] I love that [garbled]

[Howard] People make fun of her clothing sometimes, because maybe the clothing choices are weird. But it is never about her being overweight. It is daring. It is a daring movie to make that choice. I love it because of how well it does it.

[Fran] Also, she's a fantastic actress.

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Fran] Her entire use of every inch of that screen is amazing.

[Howard] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we pause for our book of the week. That book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monstrous… Monsters and the Monstrous. Fran, you want to tell us a little bit about that?

[Fran] Sure. This is a collection of horror stories edited by Ellen Datlow. It came out in the late spring of 2022. It came out from Tor night… Nightfire. It contains a whole range of ways in which monsters, both familiar and new, interact with the world. A lot of them are intentionally horror stories, because that was the purview of the book. But some of them actually do some really interesting examinations of what it means to be monstrous in a human world. I really like that as well.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So that book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, as we come back in, let's talk about some things to do that are a little bit more interesting. One of the things that I have noted in stories where I feel like it's done a little better is that the person's disabilities are not the source of the horror, it's the people around them and the environment that they find themselves in. So it is someone else grabbing the wheelchair. That's the removal of the agency, it's not the chair itself, it's someone else trying to take control.

[Fran] Helping.

[Mary Robinette] Helping.

[Chelsea] Oh, it just gives me the shivers. The angry shivers.

[Fran] I had somebody without asking help me off of I believe it was a bus. I was just… I was moving slower than they thought I should be, and that I needed help. They pulled me by my arm and dislocated my shoulder. Which I then popped back in right in front of them to the most disgusting degree I could, because I wanted to let them know that they had not in actuality helped me at all.

[Howard] See, if you had a sword cane, you could have just [garbled] at them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Fran] [garbled] say, why does no one let me have a sword cane?

[Howard] The drubbing.

[Fran] But it really does… People think of themselves as providing assistance without asking. The grabbing of the wheelchair… The maneuvering of someone… It is a lack of agency is horrific. In… Again, in the point of view of someone who is experiencing a lack of agency, whether it is through cosmic horror or the deep and abiding horror of someone like Steven Graham Jones's stories where every house sort of seems to build out horror around his characters. I think that there are distinctive shifts in point of view and authorial empathy that can avoid some of the pitfalls and really build some… Like Chelsea was saying before, really interesting layers and depth in there. That's only going to make your story better and scarier, or, if you're doing body humor, funnier.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] A lesson I learned from Mary Robinette, gosh, eight years ago. It's one of the best ways to introduce that horror is not to make the removal of agency related to someone's weakness, you make it related to their strength. Their strength can serve them… It can do nothing for them in this scenario. The wheelchair is not a weakness, the wheelchair is a perfectly good mobility device. In fact, you're a Paralympic basketball player in that wheelchair. Then you are in a situation where that agency is removed.

[Mary Robinette] The… In The Spare Man, my main character's a cane user. She has chronic pain from an old injury. One of the scenes that I am… The day where she's like, "Oh, this is definitely a cane day," and she has to grab that, that's just part of her life. She grabs it, it's no big deal. When she gets to the set of stairs that is built to go up a centrifugal well, so they change angle every single step, and she has to climb them, that's when she's like, "Oh. No." That is the problem. It's not… It is coming from the environment and her need to interact with that environment.

[Howard] That is one spoon per stair. That's a…

[Chuckles]

[Fran] One of the things that I think about is… This is sort of elevating out of body horror a little bit, is something like Pat Cadigan's The Girl Thing That Went out for Sushi, which has body augmentation which we talked about last time and a little bit of body horror in it, in that these are people who are working in space and have augmentations done so that they can better work in space, so they become starfish and they become… They have… Different ways of gripping or different ways of appreciating which way is up that is really phenomenal. So I think that's an interesting thing to look at. Horror, especially, tends to end up with the characters and the reader trapped in a situation or trapped in that like depth of imagination where you're not sure if they're ever going to get out. Whereas sci-fi and fantasy find a way out quite often. Howard, you were going to say something there?

[Howard] Oh. Yeah. It's just I… For those of you not benefiting from the video feed, sometimes I raise my hand to let people know that I'm ready to talk when they're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was not trying to interrupt. Lois McMaster Bujold, I mentioned her in a previous episode, the novel Freefall. In which there is a whole race of people who have been engineered so that their lower legs are arms and so that their hearts and metabolisms and everything function really well, just fine, in zero gravity. This group of people, genetically engineered, and they have their own little space station and everything's cool. Then, artificial gravity, energetic artificial gravity is introduced, and they are sort of this little evolutionary dead end. They're still perfectly awesome in their own little world. When, in one point of the story, a couple of them end up on a planetary surface, yes, there is our lack of agency, there is our body horror, and it is from people who… Or it is experienced by people who, in their own environment, are perfectly suited and beautiful and wonderful and awesome. I like the way… I really love the way Bujold handles that.

[Mary Robinette] This has been a great discussion. Let's go ahead and talk about our homework. Chelsea, do you have our homework?

[Chelsea] I do. Your homework, if you should choose to accept it, is to rewrite a scene with body humor or body horror. It can be one of yours or it can be somebody else's. So that the character with the disability is not the butt of the joke or the source of the horror.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great homework assignment. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/19/15-03-self-publishing/

Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun!

[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.

[Nandi] 15 minutes long.

[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tamie] And we're not that smart.

[Bridget] But we are all self published.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]

[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]

[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]

[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]

[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?

[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.

[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.

[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.

[Howard] That's a solid number.

[Bridget] For my first year.

[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?

[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.

[Howard] Tamie?

[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.

[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?

[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.

[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?

[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.

[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?

[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.

[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?

[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.

[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.

[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.

[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?

[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.

[Howard] Okay.

[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels

[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.

[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.

[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.

[Victorine] Yep. Yup.

[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…

[Howard] When you say three of us…

[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…

[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.

[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.

[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.

[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?

[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.

[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?

[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.

[Chuckles]

[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.

[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.

[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?

[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.

[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?

[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.

[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.

[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.

[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.

[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?

[Nandi?] Absolutely.

[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.

[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…

[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.

[Garble]

[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.

[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."

[Cheers]

[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…

[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.

[Howard] Who's got our homework?

[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.

[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/12/24/12-52-cross-genres-as-gateways/

Key Points: Cross-genre books can be gateways to get readers to read in new genres. People who don't read a genre often pretend it is monolithic, because the iconic stories in a genre do so well. But each genre has blends and hybrids and explorations of new directions and interesting things! Romance is the genre that other genres like to pick on. Set aside the notion that some genre is untouchable, start with an open mind. Young adult used to be not segregated by genre. Most Americans think comic books are all superhero stories. Gateway cross-genre books are fun! Give readers more possibilities for reading and enjoying. Listen to Season 16... no, make that 11! Elemental genres let you mix the concepts. But don't just do windowdressing, or paint on the walls, build your genres in so they can't be easily separated. Cross-genre stories can help reluctant readers find what they love. So mix it up! Science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, mystery... cross the genres and build gateways into new and fascinating world! The familiar, and the strange.
( Crossgenres and hopscotch? )

[Brandon] I am going to close us out with a writing prompt. Our writing prompt is I want you to write a story where one of the characters thinks they're in a different genre from what the story actually is. They think they're in a story from a different genre. How does it go? This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/07/30/12-31-what-makes-a-good-monster-with-courtney-alameda/

Key Points: The best monsters subvert the status quo and remind us that we are not the top of the food chain. Frightening means posing a threat to the protagonist or that culture. Some monsters are people, too. Subverting expectations. Monsters also reflect or represent other aspects of the stories. But beware of parallelism that turns into too on-the-nose, or pushing the subversion beyond fear into comedy. Building a monster? Start with folklore from all over. Look at the role of the monster in the story, themes, and symbolism. Think about fears, and what frightens you, and then spin that into a monster. Make the protagonist super-competent, but let the monster be powerful in ways that leave the protagonist incapable of responding. Look for the patterns that cross cultures, the fears that are universal (Yungian!). Then make them your monster. And shiver a bit.

( Did you hear something clank? )

[Howard] Well, on that note, we should probably wrap this up. Because we don't want to leave our listeners just terrified all night. Susan, can you give us a writing prompt?
[Susan] Yeah. It's funny, because Courtney actually mentioned the writing prompt that I was thinking about. Which is that Neil Gaiman's American Gods kind of envisioned like an American monster… I'm sorry, American Gods, like what using all of the different mythologies and kind of coming to America and kind of creating a uniquely American God. So I would like you to write about a uniquely American monster. Whether or not he has orange hair and [inaudible]
[laughter]
[Susan] I'll leave up to you.
[Courtney] Really great. I mean, really great.
[Howard] I love it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 12.16: Writing Crime Fiction with Brian Keene

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/04/16/12-16-writing-crime-fiction-with-brian-keene/

Key Points: Crime fiction is hard to classify. Try bad things happening to people. Crime fiction, like any fiction, is for entertainment. The reader empathizes with characters they should not be empathizing with, and wonders why. Good crime fiction makes you feel uncomfortable. Normal human beings in terrible situations, and how they react, and how you as a reader react. How do you get people to empathize with the wrong people? Remember that they are people, too. Put that character in a very bad situation and see how they react. Research -- talk to people! Tell them "I am an author" and then ask questions. Get the reader to empathize with the character, then write the ending that fits. Be aware that readers have their own expectations, too.

( Who shot the sheriff? )

[Howard] We are past out of time.
[Brian] I'm sorry.
[Howard] No, that's okay.
[Dan] We just loved listening to you and your words here. So, you said you had a writing exercise to throw out our audience?
[Brian] Sure. This week, instead of… Regardless of what genre you're writing, write something different. If you're writing romance, sit down and experiment with horror. If you're writing horror, sit down and experiment with a western. You don't even need to complete the story. But just work on it half an hour every day for this week, and focus on the character. When you're done, see if you can take that character and put it into the genre you're working on. It's a character building exercise.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brian] I think what you'll find is that regardless of genre, what matters are the characters you're crafting.
[Dan] I love it.
[Howard] Outstanding. Brian, thank you again for joining us.
[Brian] Thank you guys.
[Howard] Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
[Brian] Go write.

Current Mood: grumble

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Bonus-02: Horrifying the Children, with Darren Shan

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/31/11-bonus-02-horrifying-the-children-with-darren-shan/

Key points: What can't you do when writing horror for young adults? Set your be-careful lines for yourself. Sex and violence are big questions. Why write horror? Because we enjoy safe scares! Draw a line between fictional horror and real horror. Horror gives us a training wheel version of emotions and experiences that we need to think about and prepare for real life problems. How do you write horror? Organic process, use your gut instincts. Learn by doing -- i.e., write! Bad stories, mistakes, learn and improve. Advice for writing horror? Remember what it was like for you as a teenager, make it personal. Do stories that appeal to you. You can't control your ideas, but you do control the development of them. Ask questions, and see where those answers lead you. Why, why, why? You may not know your characters until you write, but at least get a guideline for your plot to start with. Ticking off what you have done can help give you a sense of progress, to get you through the desert of the big long middle stretch. Landmarks in the Sahara. Juggling books in multiple phases can be fun!

( Inside a Halloween pumpkin... )

[Howard] Who's got a writing prompt for us?
[Steve] I've got one from the crowd that says write a story about what scared you as a child.
[Dan] I like that.
[Howard] Okay. Reach back into your memories. Try and find the repressed ones. That's tricky. But that's where the big scare is going to be. Turn that into a story. Darren, thank you so much for joining us.
[Steve] Thank you, Darren.
[Howard] I really appreciated how much support you've given to a great many of the things that I've believed about writing.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It's very nice to find out…
[Steve] He makes us sound so much more intelligent, too.
[Howard] It just means I feel like I'm on the right path.
[Yes!]
[Howard] Anyway, thank you so much for joining us. Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: rambling

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.44: Project in Depth, GHOST TALKERS, by Mary Robinette Kowal

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/30/11-44-project-in-depth-ghost-talkers-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Key Points: Catalog pitch and sales pitch are often different. Catalog pitch is to get readers, sales pitch is the emotional core of the story, with spoilers. Even though you know an event is coming, when it happens can still be a surprise. Changing viewpoints, letting a character explain why he's a slimeball, can make them more real. Watch for the tension between who a character wants to be and who they are. Sometimes you can split a conflict into parts and play them at different points in time to misdirect the reader. Just because a story deals with horrific things does not mean it has to be a horror story. It depends on how the main character views things. Pay attention to what matters to the character. Emotionally powerful moments often combine two conflicting emotions at the same time. Also, telegraph that this moment, this goal is coming well ahead of time. Writing combines craft and internalized practice, and working on specific things at specific points. Use your revision to find and fix overused stuff, or places you left vague. If you know you overdo something, replace it with a different piece. You can keep a style book to help you with the colors of emotions, or other fine points! Don't be afraid to use friends and 7 point plot structures and other tools to help with outlining, and to help fix places with problems. Remember, your reader only sees the final version, they don't see the drafts and drafts. Don't judge your first draft by anyone's final version, even your own.

( A whole lot of words... )

Current Mood: drippy

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Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/28/11-35-elemental-humor-qa-with-victoria-schwab/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you add humor to a serious story without breaking the mood or how do you inject humor into a dramatic scene without breaking the building tension?
A: Humor can be a good pressure valve, to deflate just a bit. You can also have humor fall flat. If a joke relieves tension but makes the situation worse, you have relieved pressure and moved forward. Watch for gallows humor and similar emergency relief.
Q: My sense of humor consists only of dad jokes. How do I get real humor into my writing?
A: Really good puns are doing multiple things in a scene. Read better humor. Make sure the humor suits the context.
Q: How do you make sure your humor is really funny and not just funny to you?
A: Have other people read it.
Q: How does the culture of the world you write in influence the humor?
A: Pay attention to folktales, idioms, and humor. Watch for shared context jokes. Use jokes to tell the reader about the culture.
Q: When is humor necessary in horror? Can you write a horror book without humor?
A: Yes, you can. But you miss all the great jokes. And horror can be darker with a humor contrast.
Q: Where/what is the line between a book whose purpose is to be comedic and a book that could have funny parts in it?
A: Right through Terry Pratchett. What is your book driven by?
Q: How do you make dialogue sound natural but still funny?
A: You may not be able to. Funny and natural is usually character-based, while funny and wordplays are sometimes not very natural. See who can tell that joke naturally. Watch for natural cadence, and see where the joke fits. What function does this serve in the plot? Why would this character say this?
( Who's there? )

[Brandon] We are going to end with a writing prompt. Howard?
[Howard] I came up with this 3 1/2 minutes ago. Write a joke and have each of your characters tell that joke. Find a way for them to tell that joke in their style.
[Brandon] That is perfect. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: rhythmic

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Writing Excuses 11.21: Q&A on Elemental Horror, With Steve Diamond

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/22/11-21-qa-on-elemental-horror-with-steve-diamond/

Q&A Summary:
Q: If I want to make something ordinary, like peanut butter, terrifying without coming off as silly, how do I do that?
A: Start with the character's reaction. Then look at specific words you are using. When familiar things start acting in unfamiliar ways, it scares people.
Q: What is your personal line between good horror and gore-nographic?
A: Does it change the character? What is the purpose? What is the audience reaction? Remember, gore is not horror. Context.
Q: How do you avoid going too far?
A: Again, gore is not horror. Who are you writing for? Your first reader is you -- is it too much for you?
Q: In movies, horror is often communicated through subtle incidental things like lighting, sound, and music. How do those things transfer into the written word?
A: Details and mannerisms. Get into the character's head early and understand what makes them fearful. Word choice and rhythm. Establish the familiar, then change a small aspect of it.
Q: For someone who has written similar genres to horror, thrillers and suspense, what would be the best way for me to start edging into writing a horror story instead?
A: Write for your audience. Atmospheric details. Beta readers who love horror. Don't flinch. Lay out your plot, then find a way to force the character to make a horrible decision and deal with the consequences.
Q: How do you decide when to show the monster, and how does it change your story once you have?
A: When it fits your plot. After you prepare the reader to be scared, and when it will cause the most harm. When you show the monster, either make it different than we expect OR far worse than we expect.
( Questions, and more answers! )

[Brandon] All right. That's all the time we have. But Dan is actually going to give us some homework.
[Dan] All right. We gave this homework to one of our listeners. We're going to give it to all of you. We want you to plot out a story and build an outline that will force your character to make a horrible choice. Force them to do something they shouldn't do, to compromise themselves morally, to do whatever awful thing. Then build it so that that's the only choice they can make when the situation arrives.
[Brandon] All right. Well, thank you again, to Steve Diamond.
[Steve] Thank you.
[Brandon] Let's also mention Residue, his book, which you can get at fine bookstores everywhere, but mostly Audible and online is your best bet, right?
[Steve] That is the best bet.
[Brandon] And you guys are out of excuses, now go write.
[Chuckles fading into the distance]

Current Mood: frantic

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Writing Excuses 11.20: Horror As a Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/15/11-20-horror-as-a-subgenre/

Key Points: Why does horror make people turn the pages? Horror is universal. We recognize it, we connect to the characters in it, and we get a moment of catharsis at the end of it. We like to think that perhaps what we imagined is worse that what the author came up with. We want to know how it turns out and hope it will be a little better than we expect, but we're wrong. So in adventure, we want to see how they overcome, while in horror, we want to see how big the train wreck is at the end? Rubbernecking for horror? Yes, although some people want to be afraid, they want to be anxious. But still safe! You get people to keep reading by focusing on how the horrific element changes the story, the characters, the plot, the setting. Horror exerts profound change on characters, it illuminates and motivates the character. How to you transition to a horror segment? How do you get into the cave? Anticipation, dread, being afraid of the moment and what is coming. A horror segment can expose important points about the character. Don't forget uncertainty. And development. And loss of control. Oh, and visceral sensory details. Open the door to the basement, and it breathes on you. How do you hybridize horror? Loss of control. Beat, beat, stab. A moment of horror may be seeing the one thing that's out of place, realizing that this is a clue to something terribly wrong about to happen, and the emotional reaction to that. Look at the contrast -- horror in normalcy. Use the inescapable certainty that the character you love is going to do the wrong thing, because they have to. Horror can make the humor funnier, the action actionier, and the love lovier. Horror as a spice can set the reader up to really enjoy the good stuff.
( All the gory details... )

[Brandon] All right. It's been great. I have to actually cut us now, so that we can…
[Sigh]
[Brandon] I know.
[Dan] You have to cut us now?
[Steve] Wait a minute.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Wait! [Scream]
[Brandon] Mary, you have some homework for us?
[Mary] Yes. So we've been talking about using this as a spice, and the contrast that you can get. So I'm going to ask you to write two things. It's basically the same scene, but the first time, I want you to write it so that there's a funny element and then tragedy or horror happens. Then, I want you to take that and reverse it so that the second time you write it, the horror comes first and then the comedy.
[Brandon] The exact same things?
[Mary] The exact same things, but just reverse that so that those elements are in different relationships to each other. So that you can see what happens when you start flipping these pieces around.
[Brandon] Excellent. Once again, thank you Steve.
[Steve] Thank you.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza
mbarker - Writing Excuses18.39: How To Write An Ending
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.27: Framing Stories
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 12.16: Writing Crime Fiction with Brian Keene
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Bonus-02: Horrifying the Children, with Darren Shan
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.44: Project in Depth, GHOST TALKERS, by Mary Robinette Kowal
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.21: Q&A on Elemental Horror, With Steve Diamond
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.20: Horror As a Subgenre

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with horror

Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout

Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza

Writing Excuses18.39: How To Write An Ending

Writing Excuses 18.27: Framing Stories

Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts

Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

Writing Excuses 12.16: Writing Crime Fiction with Brian Keene

Writing Excuses Bonus-02: Horrifying the Children, with Darren Shan

Writing Excuses 11.44: Project in Depth, GHOST TALKERS, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab

Writing Excuses 11.21: Q&A on Elemental Horror, With Steve Diamond

Writing Excuses 11.20: Horror As a Subgenre

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