Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

Apr. 3rd, 2025 05:06 pm
mbarker: (Smile)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

Sep. 24th, 2024 04:10 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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 episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.14: A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling Through Voice

Apr. 11th, 2024 10:09 pm
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Writing Excuses 19.14: A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling Through Voice
 
 
Key points: Epistles, letters, and voice. What do letters do for voice? 2 things at the same time, what you plan to say, and knowing that it is written for a specific audience, how you present it. 2nd person! Can we be luxuriant and indulgent without epistles? Yes, using pacing, accent, attitude, experience, and focus. Try free indirect speech. Epistles let you concentrate it. Playfulness or humor in the midst of serious situations, like gallows humor. Epistles have a performative aspect, with the character conscious that their words will be judged. The signoff yours. Repetition and resonance! 

[Transcription note: I have tried to get the quotes from the book correct, however, I may have made mistakes. Please refer to the book if you want the exact wording or punctuation!]
 
[Season 19, Episode 14]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 14]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling through Voice.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] At the very beginning of our journey in this book, I talked about how much I love the fact that it used epistolaries, that it uses letters. So we're going to really dive into how voice is working within the epistolaries in this particular episode. I actually want to start before we get into a specific reading that I'm going to ask DongWon to do, just to…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Just to hear him do it, is that I'm wondering sort of what is it… Why do we use epistolaries? What is it that letters actually do in voice? I'll say, for me, one of the things I like about using letters is that there are 2 sort of things going on at the same time. There's what you planned to say, and the fact that you know you're writing it to a specific audience, that your character is writing it to someone. So they expect it to be read. That changes the way that they actually present themselves in the things that they put on the page.
[Mary Robinette] I do agree because I think that one of the things that that illuminates is very clearly what the character thinks of the other character. Because of the way they frame things, the… All of the subtext that goes into that epistolary letter. It is also, I think, one of the things that is fun because there is the epistolary that is the letter, and then there's also things that are… Like news articles, and these are very different because they are written to a broad audience, whereas a letter is written, as you said, to one specific person. That is, I think, that's fun.
[DongWon] The letter epistolary, the thing I love really about it is I'm such a sucker for the 2nd person in a piece of fiction. I love the you address. It plays with your subjectivity as the reader in such an interesting way, because it forces you into the position of the person on the other end of this. Right? So, in this case, switching between Red and Blue, and using the 2nd person… I'm put in the position where I have to identify with the person receiving the letter in a way that I think is really fascinating to me, and I think really deepens the connection to character in this book. It's a really clever trick that I really love.
[Howard] How do I know what I think, until I see what I say? I have operated on that principle for decades.
[Screech]
[DongWon] I find these so delightful is the letters can be quite silly in a way that's really good. So. Anyways, Erin is torturing me by making me read this.
 
"My perfect Red. How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored? Perhaps you'll tell me once you finished with this strand?"
 
[DongWon] Just like these little references and jokes layered throughout… It is so delightful to me. Then, there's a later line in the same letter that… This taunting voice. Right?
 
"A suggestion of corruption in my command chain? A charming concern for my well-being? Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal? And then we'd be at each other's throats even more. Oh, Petal, you say that like it's a bad thing."
 
[DongWon] There's so much dialogue here, there's so much voice-iness here. The characters are coming through. It's such this crisp playful way as, like, Blue taunts Red through this whole letter. We're going to see such, like, different evolution in the tone of their letters to each other as we go. But these early ones are such a hook for the audience.
[Erin] Yeah. I think I've been thinking since we talked about it a few episodes ago, why I find these to be so dense in some ways. I think it's because I'm responding to the denseness of personal indulgence as opposed to the denseness of poetic prose.
[DongWon] Oh, I love that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You know what I mean? Because these are the moments in which I feel like I get the best sense of who they are, because of the way that they're trying to present themselves, as opposed to… Which is like the splash of color against this beautiful backdrop of poetry. Which I absolutely love.
[Howard] Indulgence is definitely the right word there.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] The luxuriating and indulgent… That I can feel… I can feel in reading these how much Max and Amal just love to write.
[DongWon] Oh, yeah. And love to write to each other. Right? These letters… They wrote these, this novella, sitting literally back-to-back, passing a laptop back and forth. So one would write the letter and hand it to the other. I think that's where that sense of playfulness comes from. You can feel the friendship in this, you can feel the taunting, back-and-forth, as they're both trying to show off for each other in a way that I think comes through.
[Howard] Oh, you're going to go Blue du ba de...
[Laughter]
[Howard] Well, I got some draft punk on tap for you, baby.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] Hey, I've got some questions about how these epistolaries… Not just how they work, but how we can do the same sorts of things. Maybe even do the same sorts of things without being epistolary. But I think those questions have to wait until after the break.
 
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[Erin] I'm excited to tell you about a song this week. It's a song Story2 by the group clipping. What I love about songs, just in general, is that they have to get put so much story into, like, a really small space. In this case, it's through a character study of a guy named Mike Winfield. I won't tell you much more, because it literally takes 3 minutes to actually listen to the song. But one thing that I want you to listen for, maybe the 2nd time around, or as your sort of enjoying it, is how he gets so much about who Mike Winfield is, where he's been, and the tension of the current moment, all at once. The 2nd thing to look for is something that clipping does that's amazing is they change the time signature of the song as it goes and tension is tightened, which is something that you may be able to use in changing the tempo of your prose. So, look at how they decide when to change that tempo and what you can learn from it by listening to Story2 by clipping.
 
[Howard] Let me start with this question. The luxuriance, the indulgence, the loving to write. Can we do this without resorting to epistolary? Are these tools available to us in other ways?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. They're still using the same tools that we've been talking about for voice all along. They're still using pacing, accent, attitude, experience. Focus, even. But what they're doing is that, in the epistolary, it gives you a little bit more freedom… Just a little bit… To have some of those repetitions, some of the more colloquial language. You can do that absolutely when you're not in epistolary form. That's where we… That's where that free indirect speech that we've been talking about comes back in. That some of the things that are very specifically their phrasing, if you took that, and you shifted it to 3rd person and you put it into the middle of a paragraph of action, just a sentence out of that, you would get that same sense of the character, but you would get it spread out through the book instead of in this compressed place of the epistolary where it's isolated in form.
 
[Erin] I also think being playful in the middle of ser… In, like, a serious situation is something that we can all use. I mean, you are the humor expert, so you know this sort of better than anyone, but, I think, that that's something to think about here is that just because a topic is serious or a theme is serious doesn't mean that there isn't room for play. That room gives us a breath. It's like gallows humor. Even in the worst of times, people often use humor to respond to it. There's an episode of Deep Space 9 that I love where all the people are gonna die, and how they respond to it shows you so much about their character. One person gets quiet. One person jokes. One person plans. That shows a lot in the way…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I mean, you can do that in voice. Somebody who starts making a list at the… Imminent death is coming, is going to feel different than somebody who jokes about the different ways they could die.
[DongWon] The thing I love about the humor here, though, is… When I encounter humor in fiction sometimes, it's very frustrating, because it undermines the emotional beats of the overall story. Here, the humor never contradicts the story, it never contradicts the character beats. It is so clearly a character masking an emotion or taunting somebody else or being playful. But it takes the world seriously, and it takes the stakes seriously, and finds a way to be funny in the middle of that. Right? So I think the overall impression when people talk about Time War, when they think about this book, is of this lush romanticism, of this like deep character work and poeticness. But the experience of reading it… I often find myself laughing out loud at different beats of the book. It's much funnier than I think people remember after they come back to it.
[Howard] As a humorist, that is what I reach for when I'm writing anything that is not… Would not be categorized as humor. During a critique group for one of the shorts that I published in Space Eldritch, a friend said, "The jokes that you put in this scene kind of undermines a whole lot of tension and horror that's been happening." My response was, "I know. I got too tense and scared, and so I just did it." The rest of the group was like, "So did we. Thank you." I was like, "Oh. Okay." So this is a… It's not to everybody's taste, but I reflexively use the tool correctly. That's one of the things that so cool about these kinds of tools is that sometimes if you are getting too tense, you are getting too emotional, you realize, "Oh, I need to… I need to turn a phrase in a way that makes me giggle."
[Mary Robinette] This is also that… That sense is also something that your character will be experiencing while they are writing the letter. So there is a performative aspect to an epistolary section, where the character is conscious of the fact that their words are going to be judged, so they are trying to present themselves in a certain way. When we look back at that first letter from Red…
 
"My cunning methods for spiriting her from your clutches. Engine trouble, a good spring day, a suspiciously effective and cheap remote access software suite her hospital purchased 2 years ago, which allows the good doctor to work from home."
 
[Mary Robinette] It's like I'm just going to show off just a little bit. You think you've got me? No, no, no. Look at how clever I am. I set this up 2 years before you even got here. That kind of performative nature, I think, and how am I going to be judged, is, again, a thing that you can bring outside of the epistles into the way your character's moving through the world. How are people going to judge me, by the actions that I take and the words that I say in the text of a letter, it becomes very, very clear.
[Erin] Yeah. I think it really also is a great way to show character development, because the way you move through the world changes, and therefore the type of performance. You get better at performing, maybe other people get better at judging, they become more familiar with you. I know we wanted to look also at some of the letters from the very end, because how does the relationship change? I know, Howard, you had some thoughts about how the…
[Howard] Oh, Lord.
[Erin] Even the signoff changes from the very beginning to the end…
[Howard] Yeah. There's a…
[Erin] Of the letters.
[Howard] There's a technique, that I need to give a name to so that I can just call it a thing, in which you define the terms for your reader and one of the terms that gets defined, through these epistolaries, is the signoff yours. This is from an epistle that Red's writing to Blue.
 
"I am yours in other ways as well. Yours as I watch the world for your signs [epithenic as a horospeck?]. Yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery. Yours as I review your words, by their sequence, their sounds,, smell, taste. Taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still. I suspect you will appreciate the token."
 
[Howard] Then Red closes the letter.
 
"Yours, Red."
 
[Howard] Every letter afterward is closed, whether from Red or Blue, with the word yours. Now we know what that word means to them. Because Blue would not write yours absentmindedly. Blue would write yours saying, "Yes. All of these definitions you gave me and more." So, by defining the terms here, Max and Amal have lent weight to the word so that one word can do a huge lift all the way through the rest of the book.
[DongWon] I really love about this technique is it lets them be more directly emotional from the perspective of the character then you would get in narration sometimes. Right? In narration, you sort of have to have a little bit of a step back. Being able to fully embody for pages at a time the deeply lovesick romantic characters that we're seeing can lead to a more direct address. In particular, there's one line it that I've seen quoted many times, but I'd love to reference it here just to show how far we've come from the playful tone of the early letters to now in these, like, deep professions of love.
[Mary Robinette] As I read this to you, I want you to think about 2 tools that we're talking about, repetition, and then there's also resonance. That's where you recognize that there's a link between something you've said before and something we're saying now. So this section has some lovely repetition in it.
 
"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves, in skies, in my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets. I'll kill them all, and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands, it will be to you. But never again like this."
 
[DongWon] The thing I love about this passage… I mean, other than it's like heartbreakingly romantic and so beautifully written. But it's so clearly identifiable with Red. That Red's most romantic gesture is I will kill all the poets through all of time…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] And replace them. Like, that's her solution to making sure Blue understands how much she loves her.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It again resonates with that first moment when we met Red on the battlefield. The thing about this resonance is that it's one of the ways that you can allow the reader… That you can make space for the reader. That's something that is really important in stories, I think, because the reader inhabits half of the story. Like, the writer has the thing, and then we invite the reader to it. But you bring so much of yourself to it, your own experience. When you are imagining a voice, you are using your own experience to imagine that voice. So, having these resonant moments where you can insert yourself and you can feel that, where you're drawing the connections yourself, makes it stronger than the stories where everything is explained out completely. Those stories tend to get very flat.
 
[Erin] One other thing I love about this, and the mention of repetition and all that, is that one of the first things we see is the repetition, which we talked about in a previous episode. "She has won. Yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasn't she?" That is… Repetition can be both sure and unsure. Like, repetition's very interesting. Because sometimes you repeat something because you know it, and sometimes you repeat something because you wish you knew it. You want to convince yourself of it. Seeing Red move from this sort of trying to repeat the things I have been told and taught are important…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] To something I am claiming as important for myself is just a great way to look at how the same tool can be used 2 different ways, and is also a great way to show movement in the character as a whole.
[DongWon] This goes back to the previous episode, but in the way that Blue communicates confidence and vulnerability in her voice, we're seeing that come out of Red now. Red is much more confident in this scene than she's ever been in the early scenes. But that confidence is coming through an incredible vulnerability. An incredible moment of stress and distress in this letter as she's communicating how much she loves Blue, but also knows that Blue is dying at her hand in these moments. Right? So, the incredible complexity of what's happening here, but we're seeing a Red that is so much more certain and aware of herself and what she wants and who she is then we've seen up until this point in the book.
[Mary Robinette] She's also doing a thing in this where she is using some of the cadence of Blue with the listing. "I'll write it in waves, in skies, and my heart." But doing it with Red, short, punctuated sentences. So it's this thing where she is both reflecting the person that she loves and also truly expressing herself.
[DongWon] She's learning how to write this way. Right?
[Howard] The line, "Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something," is… Ah… I get chills.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] The confidence. The acceptance. The decision. And the… I'm in the chapter where Red is at a dead run trying to fix an unfixable problem.
 
[Erin] I think on that chill we will move to the homework for you. Which is to write a short note from one of your characters to another about something that's important to them. Then you're going… Make it short because you're going to have to do it a couple of times. Rewrite it as a text message. So you're going to change the format a little bit. How does that change the way that this note is happening? Then, right it is something that's going to be screened. Think about the ways somebody in prison might have their letter read by someone else who doesn't care about it before it gets to their intended target. So that changes a little bit of the context. Then, finally, right it as the final message they will ever get to send in their life. Which changes the stakes.
 
[Mary Robinette] 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 podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.
 
[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get [lit] on the Inner Loop Radio.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

Aug. 16th, 2023 06:19 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
 
 
Key points: Schlock Mercenary, a daily webcomic from June 2000 to July 2020. Why a daily web comic? Because Howard imagined it as a newspaper comic. Buck Rogers and Bloom County! Big save the universe plots and characters that we love with their own arcs. How do you balance those? Like a bumblebee, keep flapping!  The guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. Worldbuilding, character work, and the punchline. An outline to hit the ending? If you find yourself diverging, you may need to redo the outline. The drumbeat of the daily strip versus the graphic novel format. Humor and context. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 33]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive Prep: The Schlock Mercenary Finale.
[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 on the spot for this episode. Also, I think, for the seven episodes that follow.
 
[Howard] We're going to talk about... We're going to talk about finishing big things. And building big things. And... Um... Oh, boy, Schlock Mercenary ran from June of 2000 to July of 2020. Daily webcomic. Wrapping it up was one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I feel like a discussion of how I did it and why I did the things that I did could lead us into all sorts of interesting and wonderful places with regards to the things that we've worked on, the things that you might be working on, things we love, things that maybe weren't done so well. There's so much to cover, so much to cover when we talk about wrapping up big things.
[DongWon] Before we dive into the end, I'd love to rewind a little bit and talk about the beginning. So, I think to understand how you wrap this up, I would love to understand first, why did you make it a daily web comic? Like, what were the things that drew you to that format? And, like, what was… What did that… How did that wire your brain in a certain way to think about how to structure things when you're putting content out on such a regular cadence?
[Howard] The enormous power of the default. When I began writing Schlock Mercenary, I imagined it as a newspaper comic. I submitted it to a couple of syndicates and was told in both cases, "This is not what we're looking for." I don't blame them. I'm actually quite happy that it didn't get picked up. But I… Up until that point, I really only imagined a comic strip as being a daily thing in newspaper format. I mean, the default was so powerful that I literally didn't imagine other things. Why does Schlock Mercenary look the way it does? Because in 2000, Howard really didn't know very much about what was possible with the web.
[DongWon] I mean, you were starting in an era when I think a lot of web comics were like that. Right? They were all coming out of this model of newspaper strips. They all were very episodic, very serialized. Then, over time, I think we saw a lot of these like daily gag comics suddenly start to develop meta-plot and structure and like these huge events that sort of overtaking them. Was that something you knew that you wanted to do when you started Schlock or were you starting with more of a gag of the week structure? And then, suddenly realized, oh, there's plot here. There's story here. There's worldbuilding in a bigger, more complex way.
[Howard] My two biggest influences going in on this were a great big book of collected Buck Rogers comics I had from the… I want to say 1940s. It might have been the 1930s. Newspaper comics. Where it was definitely long form, and there was some Monday reminder of what we were doing Saturday, cliffhanger. There was some of that going on. But I got the feeling that back then the newspapers just assumed, no, everybody's onboard. They're just picking up this paper and Buck Rogers is what they're reading. We own this audience. It was very streamlined storytelling. And Bloom County. Which did gag of the day sorts of things, but they would string together themes. There was one where, during the Iran-Contra scandal, the Oliver North stand in was an alien puppy dog that was just big eyes and cute and he's there on trial and no one can prosecute, no one can come down on him, because he's a cute puppy, look at him. Look, oh, look at what his antenna do. So we got a week of those gags, and then we move on. I thought, "Well, I could tell a longform story that does this thematic sort of thing on a weekly basis, and plot arcs will probably last about a month." I was wrong. Plot arcs, I found, lasted about a year to a year and a half. It wasn't until about two years in that I realized I had sort of the makings of a mega arc. I did not know where it was going to go. But I knew where it was going to start. It was going to start with some of the injustices that were created by monopolies and by top-heavy power structures and whatever else. Because those are great things to make fun of, but the more I made fun of them, the more I thought, "Man. I want to topple these. What happens if I topple all of them at once?"
 
[Mary Robinette] At what point in the process did you know the end that you were writing towards?
[Howard] That wasn't until around book 10. That wasn't until around book 10.
[Mary Robinette] For the listeners who have not experienced it, how many books are there?
[Howard] 20. Yeah, right about the time… Right around book 10, I thought, "Yeah. I could finish this in five more books."
[Ha ha ha!]
[Howard] I could wrap this up in five more books.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Howard] And then I started noodling… I was just having so much fun with… I would
the thing and realize, "No, I haven't finished exploring this. There are more jokes to be told, there's more character development, there's… Oh. It's now been another 18 months. I'm on book 12 and I'm literally no closer to the conclusion I've envisioned than I was 18 months ago." But, yeah, right around book 10, I think it was book 3… The first book's called The Tub of Happiness. The second book, The Teraport Wars. Teraport wars is the one where we start seeing the grand Galactic whatever. Then, book 3 was Under New Management. Book 4, the Blackness Between was where I introduced dark matter as something that could have complex structures and life with desires that conflict with ours. Goals that bring us into conflict. Spoiler alert everyone. That's the piece right there which I think aired in 05, 06… That was the piece that ultimately needed to be resolved by book 20.
[Mary Robinette] Since you said the word spoiler, I do just want to let new listeners know that when we do these deep dives, that we go full spoiler. So we encourage you to read the material that has been linked to in the liner notes. Because later you're going to get all the spoilers.
[Howard] The good news is even if we spoil the big ending for you, there are so many beautiful moments… Yeah, I'm blowing my own horn here a little bit…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But as I read in preparation for this, I wrote this. Obviously, I know how it goes. I loved rereading it. I just had so much fun with the characters and with their individual plot resolutions. That was something that I learned fairly early on, which is, yeah, you can have a save the universe plot. But if we don't have characters that we love who have their own desires and their own plot arcs and their own disasters and their own recoveries from those disasters, the end of the universe doesn't really feel like it matters.
 
[Erin] You've mentioned a couple of elements, like the characters and all these things that go into it. How did you sort of decide in day-to-day when to devote time to the larger arc, when to devote time to an individual character moment or a great line? How did you balance that out over the course of one day going into the next?
[Howard] That. Feels. Like. The. That feels like the bumblebee and the laws of aerodynamics question. Because, very often I would stare at what was happening on the page and I would say I feel like I planned this. I feel like I did all of this on purpose. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Sandra is standing there next to me and saying, "Yeah. It's the bumblebee and the law of aerodynamics." Law of aerodynamics does not explain how a bumblebee flies. Bumblebee's job, keep flapping. So she would, right there, she said, "That's fine, honey. Keep flapping."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Since then, I have learned, one, the laws of turbulence in gases and liquids very nicely explain how a bumblebee stays aloft. It amounts to keep flapping. Two, I have become much more conversant with the sorts of tools I was unconsciously using. One of those tools was a prioritization of what is important… What is most important to have happen. For me, the most important, the guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. People have to be getting a reward for reading the strip today. So I would often begin with do I have a structure that is going to have a punchline at the end? There's a question that often gets asked, how do you know whose point of view to follow? The answer is I follow the character who is in the most pain. Because that's often going to be the most interesting. For me, it was, yeah, the character who's in the most pain is the most likely to be the one where there's going to be a good joke. But that's also… I'd rephrase the question. Who's going to be able to tell the best joke? We should pause for a thing of the week, and we'll come back in a moment.
 
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week, when we talk about very long-running series that have come to a conclusion, is a series of books by James S. A. Corey that is collectively known as The Expanse. Several of the books were adapted into a TV show as well. But the entire book series runs nine volumes, and wrapped up a couple years ago. It covers an enormous amount of territory, both in terms of story, character, and world. It starts very focused in our solar system, it's a big space opera. Then it continues to expand and grow in these leaps and starts that are endlessly fascinating and have endless complications with the characters. It jumps around in time as well as in space. I personally think that those two authors who cowrote the series stick the landing beautifully. It is worth going through the journey for all nine volumes that does a beautiful job of managing to balance the big ideas, the politics, and the individual character journeys. I adore these books. I'm very biased. I got the opportunity to work on the first couple of them. But watching where they ran with the thing from there all the way to the finish line was a thing of beauty, and I highly recommend everybody check out The Expanse books.
 
[Howard] I would like to return to the question Erin asked.
[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.
[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.
[DongWon] If you don't mind me jumping in. It's more of a compliment than a thought, actually. One of the things that I thought that you do beautifully in this is really balancing three different toolkits you're using. I could see how you do that in a daily way. Right? I was reading these as a big block, not as a daily strip, but you have… The three tools I'm seeing in your kit here is, one, you have the world building, which gives you all this like big ideas stuff. Right? Whether that's dark matter being sent in, whether that's a civilization structured around this idea, whether it's like these digital heavens spaces that people get teleported into. You have all these high concepts that are sort of driving the metanarrative that's thematic. Then you have deep character work and relationship work that is driving the minute to minute plot of the story that keeps things flowing in such interesting ways and interesting dynamics and people are making choices rooted in who they are. But then you have the third tool in your kit, and this is what a lot of people don't have, which is, as you were talking about, the need for the punchline. So, on a daily basis, you have a structure of we need to get to that joke. So you're able to rely on the motivation of the joke, the guiding rails that you're on because of the character work you've done, and then the overall target, which is these huge intellectual world building structures. I think those three things operating in sync, almost in tension with each other a little bit, just… I can see it like laser targeting you towards that finale that you're getting towards. It was really fun to watch that unfold.
[Howard] Thank you. That's… It took me a long time to figure out that was kind of how I was doing it. One of the things I found out… And this is returning to Erin's question of how did you select which pieces you were working on. I realized that the way I had been creating individual strips and individual story arcs was not going to work for creating the ending. I needed to outline my way all the way to the very end with some big structures so that I could start aiming things. Otherwise I was going to ramble. I mean, the ramble was fun. We'll talk a little bit about in a future episode about that. But…
[DongWon] When did you realize you needed to do those outlines?
[Howard] Putting a year on it, that would have been 2015, 2016. I knew that I needed it and I wanted each of the last books to be about a year of comics. So it was…
[DongWon] So you're like two or three volumes before…
[Howard] Late 2017 is when I'd… When I was committed… When I actually started the last of the three books. That was… The way I structured it was I wanted to treat the ending as a trilogy. I want the first book of the trilogy to set up the final conflict and to bring all of the characters and put them in good… Get all the pieces on the chessboard and end us in a way… End that book in a way that feels triumphant but also propagates a disaster into the next book. That structure served me really well. If I'd tried to do it in five books, if I'd tried to do it in one book, I don't think I could have pulled it off.
 
[Erin] I feel like I hear people a lot coming to this realization, who are writing longer works, where they're like, "I started out, and I was just doing a thing. Then, outlines came upon me, and it turned out I needed them." I'm curious, how did that change… Did it change your process at all? Did it make it easier? Was there anything that was more difficult once you realized that you had to do that for the ending?
[Howard] For my own part, and I begin with that phrase because I don't want to force discovery writers into the same path that I was in. For my own fart…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Fart.
[That's it for… Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I mean, you were talking about the gaseous nature…
[Howard] For my own part, I felt very… It felt very precarious to me. I was very worried that by outlining these things, I was going to break a portion of my process and wasn't going to be able to follow through. Fortunately, I was, at the time, hanging out with some really strong writers of outline and fiction in short form and longform and whatever else. I count their friendship and their examples and their instruction is critical pieces of getting me passed the fear of the precarious and into the understanding of Howard, you've got the toolbox. You've figured out that it's turbulence that makes the bumblebee fly. Now flap that direction, and it's going to work.
[DongWon] How much did you stick to the outline?
[Howard] The bigger part… The biggest part of the outline, I stuck to it. Five nines as accuracy. I know this book will feature this cast, this book will feature that cast, last book will have people split up and they come back together. So, at that level, yeah, very, very accurately. At a lower level, there was a place in the second book where I realized I had diverged wildly from what I'd originally imagined, but I really loved where it was going. So I sat down and re-outlined things and was pleased by with what… Where that went.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've definitely done that too. I'm partway through a book and I'm like, "Oh. I'm going to do a different thing than I'd outlined." One of the things that I was struck by was the difference between the way it reads when you're reading it as a single strip versus the way you're reading it on… When you're reading it in graphic novel format. I wond… I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, about the way you think about it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for us now, the way you're thinking about…
[Howard] Sure. It's… The way I think about it is it was a horrible, horrible compromise. I worry still about people who read it in the longform. That's because the pacing of reading one strip a week… The pacing of panel panel panel punchline panel is very, very… It's like a drumbeat. When you read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it's the cognitive equivalent of just a constant pounding that I'll admit was not necessarily pleasant for me. But the pacing here is weird. I keep pausing for punchlines. Why am I doing that? Oh, because that's how this was constructed. That's just what it is.
[Mary Robinette] So what's interesting for me is I have a different experience. So when I read it… When I'm clicking through and read it strip, strip, strip, I get the beat, beat, punchline, beat, beat, punchline. But when I'm reading it as a full-page, as a graphic novel, the size of the jokes vary, and the other thing that happens is that I start to have… I start to carry context with me across the things. One of the things, like, that is so difficult about humor is that so much of it is contextually based. When you're writing something where you need to land a punchline, you've only got the context for those two or three previous panels. But when you're doing it longform, a lot of the… You're able to have a lot of the jokes that are landing for me bigger, because I'm carrying context through the whole thing, than when I'm doing it in an individual beat. For me, that was an instructive thing when I'm going back to my own stuff, which is in a completely different form that I can… To think about the way context is carrying across and having the jokes that are… Where the context only needs to be like one line before, but then also the ones where there's like a page off, that you've been setting up for pages and pages.
[Howard] Yeah. That was always difficult for me because, I knew, on any given day, the way the Schlock Mercenary website was built is when you arrive at the website, the most current strip is there. So I always wanted the most current strip to give you enough context that when you got to the last panel, there was a reward. Maybe you didn't need the whole joke, but you needed some of it. But if you went back and read more, then obviously there would be more.
[DongWon] Well, that's what I really love about using humor in this way, in the rhythm of that humor being at the end of every strip. Then you have the longer Sunday strips or whatever it is. But that rhythm… Because humor is fundamentally… Or not maybe fundamentally, but often about changing the context of information you have. Right? You're given information, the punchline is the abrupt recontextualization of the information you have to see it from another angle. Which, when you're trying to get your readers to absorb an enormous amount of complex worldbuilding it's such a useful tool. So the end of every four or five panels, I was getting not just the information that was given to me in a complex way, but then you would have an opportunity to tell me, "Here's the important thing you need to take away from this." It was like gathering the executive summary at the end of every strip in the form of a punchline, which really helped me absorb all the stuff that I was looking at. Because it's quite dense. Right? But it's... 20 volumes of complex military science fiction worldbuilding means there's a lot of information that you need to be having in your brain as context for why is this character making this choice, why is this civilization invading X, Y, Z. So the humor and that rhythm of the daily joke, I think, was an enormously beneficial tool for you in being able to deliver that in a way that if you had just done a straight graphic novel may have been incredibly dense, like Alan Moore style, like what am I looking at at this point? So I think that structure actually was… Ended up being a really beautiful tool in your kit
[Howard] Well, thank you. I… I'm admittedly self-conscious about it. The very first Schlock Mercenary book, Tub of Happiness, the only reason it got printed was that Sandra said, "Honey, people want to give us money for it. We can just put it in print." I'm like, "I can't even look at those strips and lay them out. They're so awful. I want to redraw them." She said, "Then don't look at them. I will lay out the book and we will sell it. Because I would like to eat." So there is a huge measure in my heart, there's this huge measure of it is what it is. Compromises were made. Which of the words between Schlock and Mercenary says that I won't sell out my art in order to feed my family?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Howard, if you didn't grow between volume 1 and volume 20, I think I'd be more concerned than you looking back at volume 1 and being concerned.
[Howard] Yeah. But, yeah, I love the perspectives that y'all are bringing to how you're reading it. One of the things that we're going to cover in a later episode is writing endings and how, from about book 10, I was laying the groundwork for what I knew was going to be the resolution to the conflict. I kept that piece. But I ended up being wrong about what the real satisfying piece of the resolution was. That, to me, feels like a great place to end the episode.
[Mary Robinette] Maybe we should actually do homework before we end.
 
[Howard] You know what? Let's do some homework about ending things. You may have seen on YouTube there's a little series called How It Should Have Ended. Where they take a movie and then they give you an ending that actually makes more sense. The one that leaps to mind immediately is using the eagles to fly the ring to Mordor. Take a thing that you love. Something that you've really enjoyed. Try to write a new ending for it. Something maybe that makes more sense to you, or that maybe it fits your head canon better, or you would just be happier with. But outline a new ending for somebody else's thing that you love.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

Mar. 8th, 2023 02:10 pm
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler

Feb. 9th, 2023 04:10 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler
 
 
Key points: Changing as a creator over the 20 year span of Schlock Mercenary? Three parts. First part: Better as a storyteller in terms of craft, better artist in terms of composition, and better humorist. Second part: I learned I was writing social satire. Third part: What I am doing matters. People have changed as a result of my work. Transition from joke-a-day to long form? I had an idea that I needed to lay down parts for that took longer. By working several weeks ahead, I had time to mull new ideas and mash them together. What's next? I'm working on it. Are you looking for a new tool or challenge? Yes, but chronic fatigue means I can't afford a long learning curve. I have so many stories I want to tell that I'm prioritizing using a medium and techniques that I already know so I can tell as many as possible. Low bar, but I cleared it.  
 
[Season 18, Episode 6]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview With Howard Tayler.
[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 the guy with his feet in the fire.
[Dan] Haha!
[Whoohoo!]
 
[Dan] Howard, I've been looking forward to this one, I'm going to ask you the hardest questions. So... I actually am not. I'm going to ask you some things about stuff that I assume you've been thinking about a lot, because I've been thinking about it a lot. You, as you've said several times, you've just finished your magnum opus. 20 years of daily web cartoons and all of these wonderful books and stories that have come from them. I would love, if you could condense into just a little nugget for us. How do you feel like you changed as a creator from the beginning of that to the end of that long process?
[Howard]  Ooo. Three-part answer. Part one, I very quickly got better at all of the pieces that were involved. I became a better storyteller… Just the craft. Better storyteller in terms of craft, better artist in terms of composition, better humorist… I treat that is a different skill than the other two because it's such a specific mechanic. I got better at all of that. So that's part one. Part two is I realized, and it was when we first started recording Writing Excuses… I say first started. 2009 we had an episode, or maybe it was late 2008, where the question was, "What have you learned from Writing Excuses this year?" My answer was I have learned that I'm writing social satire. Which I had been doing for eight years now but didn't know it. Once I knew it, I got a lot better at it, because I recognized which jokes didn't fit, which jokes did fit, which scenarios did fit, which scenarios didn't fit. That was actually a huge change for me. Similar types of changes have happened since then where I have realized, "Oh, this is what I doing. This is the name for the thing that I'm doing." So that's answer number two. Answer number three is the squishy one. It is I have learned that what I'm doing matters. There have been people who have emailed me and said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I would wake up every morning and just not think I could go on and was ready to end it and then realized but then I will miss tomorrow's Schlock Mercenary update." I realized, "Okay. That's way too much for me to carry. Please don't put that on me." But… I'm carrying it, and I will. Thank you for staying with us. On less life-threatening sorts of notes, people have described things that I've written that have woken them up in some way or another, that have changed the way they think about things. Even though I write silly stuff, it matters. Yeah, I mean, it's social satire, so at some level, you step back and say, "Well, of course, social satire matters. That's how we understand where society is broken. Blah blah blah." I don't go around thinking that that's my job, but… At some level, it is.
 
[Dan] That's great. So I think that there is a phenomenon that I see in web comics a lot, but I think it's more fair to say that every creator, every writer goes through this, where they decide that they have a really big idea, and they want to get it out there into the world. The reason this stands out to me in web comics is because in that particular medium and art form, you're kind of tap dancing live in front of everybody. Right? So, comics that started as joke a day kind of stuff or very small stories eventually hit this point, and I've seen this dozens and dozens of times, where they decide they want to tell a very long, very epic, very involved story. I have never seen any of them pull it off as successfully as you can. I wonder if you can point to any particular decisions or tools that helped you make that transition from joke a day into what was by the end of it an incredibly powerful and epic science fiction story time?
[Howard] Um. Pfoo, Pfah. I remember picking up my sister-in-law, Nancy Fulda, from the airport, and being in the airport, and just thinking about sci-fi and travel, and had this whole idea of what if the worm gate network, the reason they want that as a monopoly, is not because of money, but it's because of information, because they are able to gate clone people and quietly interrogate them and find out all of the stuff, and then just quietly murder the gate clones and nobody knows anything else. So that idea came to me, waiting in an airport. In order to tell that story, I knew that I needed to lay down some pieces that were going to take longer. Up until that point, I'd had this idea that I was going to do it a little bit more like Bloom County did it in the newspapers back in the 80s. 80s, early 90s, which was Berke Breathed would run a story… He was also doing social satire… He would run a story that ran for a week. Or maybe two weeks. With Opus as interludes on Sundays. So I had this idea that in terms of framework, yeah, I can keep people's attention with a story for a week or two. But, the fact is that on the Internet, people could page back. Start from comic one and could just read it straight through. I thought, "Hey, you know what, I can go for more than a week or two. I can go for maybe a month. But a month really needs to be the limit."
[Ha ha]
[Howard] Then I had this idea about the Teraport breaking the monopoly and the worm gate and the cloning and all that. By that time, I had five or 10,000 regular readers who had stuck with me, and I decided, "All right, I'll try making it a little longer." As I'm sure most of you have experienced, when you're writing something that takes several months to write, during the course of writing it… Maybe I should ask it as a question. Do you ever have ideas for other things to write?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because that is exactly how it went, is that I would ask, "But then what happens? But then what happens? Oh, wait, there's this thing out in pop culture that I want to talk about because it's so much fun…" And, "Ooo, and then what happens if I mash these things together?" Because I worked ahead… Because I typically worked three weeks, minimum of three weeks, sometimes as much is 6 to 8 weeks ahead, I had time to mull these ideas over before I started throwing them down on the page. I was never drawing comics the day before they aired. That way lies madness.
 
[Dan] We… I have a lot of questions to ask about what is next. But first, we're going to pause for our thing of the week.
[Howard] Schlock Mercenary ends with a trilogy of books, called Mandatory Failure, A Function of Firepower, and A Sergeant In Motion. The thing of the week is these three books. Because coming up with the ending for the twenty-year mega arc of Schlock Mercenary was super fun for me, but those three books online will really only take you about a day to read. If you read them, we'll do… Or even if you don't read them, we'll do a deep dive on that sometime later this year. So, three books. Mandatory Failure, A Function of Firepower, and A Sergeant In Motion, found at schlockmercenary.com, and the URL at the end of schlockmercenary.com is 2017-09-18. Because it started on September 18 of 2017.
 
[Dan] So, Howard, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about what comes next. You've finished a lifetime worth of web comic, science fiction, but you're still creating an you're still working and you're still doing new things. What comes next?
[Howard] I was going to ask you guys that.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because I… Oh, boy. Yeah, sometimes… Honestly, sometimes, I just don't know. In the tag cloud, the career and lifestyle episodes… I could talk about this for a whole 15 minutes, which is waking up in the morning and just not being sure what comes next. Because for a solid 18 years, 18 of the 20, I would lie down in bed and as I drifted off to sleep, the voices in my head were talking about what happens next. The story was unfolding for me all the time. They're quiet now. I know that sounds kind of sad. They've stopped talking. But… I left them in a good place. I hope. I've done some prose writing. It's gone well. But it got interrupted… It got interrupted by stuff. There's lots of interruptions. For the next year, we are spending most of our time getting the final Schlock Mercenary books, 18, 19, and 20, getting them into print. That's what's going to pay the bills for 2023 and most of 2024. By the end of 2023, Dan, I need to have an answer to your question and it needs to be a good answer that's already generating revenue. So, um, yeah.
[Dan] Sounds to me like you might need that answer a lot sooner than the end of 23.
[Chuckles]
[Yeah, yeah.]
[Howard] Perhaps.
 
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I remember you talking about in a previous episode, Howard, is that when you started Schlock that you kind of didn't actually know how to draw. That you had this idea, you wanted to do it, and that you taught yourself the tools that you needed to, in order to move forward with the story. I guess when you're thinking about what is next, you're playing with prose, but that's a tool you already know. Is there a tool that you're looking at and going, "Hum, that's a really interesting tool. I would like to know more about that, please."
[Howard] Um… Short answer, yes. Longer answer, long Covid and chronic fatigue have constricted my energy envelope to the point that if the learning curve is steep enough, I can't afford to do it. I don't have… I can't put in a 12 hour workday anymore. I can barely put in a four hour workday, a six hour workday, of just sitting and getting this stuff done. It's difficult. I mean, one of the things that I've loved is when we were doing the role-playing games streams for Typecast RPG. I loved creating Twitch overlays and the idea of streaming and having video conversations that mixed… I've got all the gear, I've got all the tools to do the pushing of buttons and having pictures change. I had this great idea for a Twitch stream that's Howard and his artist friends. Dual cameras, switching between various… I'm waving my hands around, and the audio is just not going to pick that up.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Swapping the camera pictures. The whole show would be titled Everybody Draws Better Than Howard Does. I would have other artists on and we would talk about what we were each working on and I would shower them with praise and we'd plug their work and it would be silly fun. I don't have the energy for that. That's… I just don't have the energy for that. But I have had the energy for sitting down and writing. I've got so many stories I want to tell that it is fair for me, I think, to prioritize and say I would rather pick the medium, pick the techniques that I already know so that I can tell as many stories as I can. I can say as much of what I've got to say before my timeline eventually runs out, then for me to try and learn something new and slow all that down. I know that sounds kind of morbid and whatever, but… Um… Hey, maybe the CFS will get better and I'll be putting in 12 hour days when I'm 70. I'd love that.
[Mary Robinette] I really like that, though, the idea of picking… We do, I think, tend to go for a hard setting all the time. The number of writers, and I know… Hello, listener, I'm speaking directly to you, the one that listens to the homework assignment and says , "Humpf, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to make it harder." Or, "They told me that you can't possibly do a story about zombie unicorns? I'm going to do a story about zombie unicorns, and submit it to the editor who told me they don't like it."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I know that that is a temptation, that happens to a lot of people. But I think there is something really beautiful about saying I'm going to use this tool that I love, that is familiar and comfortable, and I'm going to tell the best stories I can with tools I already know how to use, and I'm just going to refine them.
[Howard] Yeah. That's… Um… I think it was 2008, 2009, about the same time the podcast started, I really got on this kick of the focused practice, the whole concept of focused practice. The idea that you practice the things that you're bad at so that you stop taking shortcuts and going around them. For me, it was I didn't know how to draw hands. So I practiced drawing hands. Ended up drawing Curtis Hickman's hands doing magic tricks in the first Xtreme Dungeon Mastery book. Curtis came back to me and said, "Howard, these are the best illustrations of these tricks that exist anywhere. Because all of the others are grainy photographs in black and white of an old man's hands and you can't tell what's going on." So, low bar, but I cleared it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] So I was on this kick. Now I look at things and I say, "Yeah. There are things that I am not good at. But there are a lot of things where I've spent years refining my skills, and, yes, I could develop the skills further. Obviously. But I'm good enough at it that maybe I can just focus on that, and now that path is the easy path, but it's not the shortcut. It's falling back on the craft that I've spent 20 years learning.
[Dan] I… This is going to sound like a joke, but I mean it sincerely. I'm going to make "low bar, but I cleared it" my mantra for goal setting for the year.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Like, simple things that I can finish and feel good about myself. That's fantastic.
[DongWon] Under promise and over deliver.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
 
[Dan] Howard? What's our homework today?
[Howard] Okay. I want you, fair listener, who you are probably heavily focused on prose. I want you to take a moment and explore some of the tools in my toolbox. Take an index card. For each key beat, each key moment, in a scene that you've written, and illustrate that beat. Just using stick figures and smiley frowny angry faces, just whatever skills you've got, so that you have a camera aimed at a very scribbley blurry version of that scene. Do that for the whole scene and see how that changes the way you eventually edit it or rewrite it or write what comes next.
[Mary Robinette] All right. You have your homework assignment. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

Nov. 17th, 2022 04:04 pm
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye

May. 5th, 2022 04:59 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye
 
 
Key points: Take expectations and twist them. Be the anodyne for the evening news. Exaggeration. Tweak the standard tropes. Break the rule of three. Move the boundary between violation and the benign. Tragedy plus time or distance. Puns. Juxtaposing the modern with the ancient or the fantastic. Absurdities and anachronisms. 
 
[Season 17, Episode 18]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye.
[Jody] 15 minutes long.
[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dan] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Jody] I'm Jody.
[and there was no Howard there!]
 
[Dan] We are so excited... Jody, we have known you for so long, and we're kind of shocked to realize we've never had you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
[Jody] Well, I write science fiction and fantasy, most of it with a humorous bent. I have been writing since I was a small child. But I started getting read by other people in the late 70s, early 80s. I played Dungeons & Dragons long enough ago that I'm playing now with the grandchildren of some of the people I used to play with.
[Chuckles]
[Jody] I… Let's see. I do calligraphy, I do baking of fancy cakes, I like to travel, I like photography, and of course many people know that I love my cats, and most things are all about the cats, and everything goes to feed them.
[Dan] Just so that the audience understands like the sheer level of genre godmother that you are, you helped edit some of the initial Dungeons & Dragons books. Correct?
[Jody] Not exactly. My first job in publishing was typing the players guide monster manual in DMG for Gary Gygax from his original notes. Correcting spelling and bits of grammar and things like that, that, my boyfriend at the time who was one of the founders of TSR said, "No, no. Don't change anything." I realized then that they weren't going to be able to tell.
[Laughter]
[Jody] So I made it a little easier on the final editor.
[Dan] Awesome. You also helped start Dragon Con, correct?
[Jody] I was there early.
[Dan] You were there early. Okay.
[Jody] I was… I think I have been to all of them.
[Dan] Nice.
[Jody] So, Dragon Con is a wonderful convention to attend. It is the largest fan run convention in the world. It is a… Let's… A small place, but still cozy in its own way. It has as many as 50 tracks of programming, something for everybody. There are skeptics tracks, science tracks, many kinds of writing tracks. There's even a puppetry track.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Jody] Anyone can find anything to participate in.
[Brandon] It's a giant fun party.
[Dan] Yeah, it is.
[Jody] It is Mardi Gras for nerds.
[Dan] Mardi Gras for nerds.
[Jody] That's its nickname.
[Brandon] The last convention I did before the pandemic was being Writing Guest of Honor at Dragon Con. So…
[Jody] You and I were on a panel together. That was fun.
[Dan] Now, we are here, live, at a much smaller convention. LTUE.
[Cheers]
[Dan] We're so excited to be here.
 
[Dan] Howard is not here with us, and yet, Jody, you have pitched to us how to be funny as an episode topic.
[Brandon] It's always more funny when Howard isn't here.
[Dan] I know.
[Brandon] See, Howard always gets on the panels whenever we're going to discuss funny and says, "Nothing is more boring than talking about humor." That just really sets the stage.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] For being funny. So, we're doing this without his knowledge, because we… We're the kids playing when the master of humor is away. We're going to be funny, darn it!
[Dan] I don't know if we're going to be funny, but we're going to talk about how to write funny stuff. Jody, you've written a lot of very funny books, a lot of humorous books. Let's start with the question of when and why do you decide, well, this book I'm going to make sure that it's not just a fantasy or not just a science fiction, but it's going to be a funny one.
[Jody] I like to take expectations and twist them. I like to go for something that people have probably seen a lot too much of, and go with it. I have written now, with Robert Asprin, many, many books with him and in a couple of his series since then. The MythAdventures of Aahz and Skeeve.
[Brandon] No relation.
[Jody] No relation whatsoever. They don't even look alike. In spite of the green stuff.
[Brandon] Yeah.
 
[Jody] Right. I always wanted to be the anodyne for the evening news. I wanted to give something to cheer people up when they were devastated at having turned on the news, realize that 800,000 gallons of oil has just poured down Main Street, and you're going to be stuck in traffic for eight hours. When you get home, pick up one of my books. It'll make you feel better. So that was my sort of reckoning, my idea. I like humor. I was brought up on the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello, Saturday morning cartoons, comic books. All sorts of things alongside real books. There weren't enough funny ones. So…
[Brandon] Yeah, you say that.
[Jody] I am filling that gap.
[Brandon] Real books… I've… I'm on record…
[Jody] Yes.
[Brandon] Talking about Pratchett, saying that I think humor is a higher art form than other forms of literature. Because it adds another aspect that you have to do. Really good books, like Pratchett or the MythAdventures still have… They're going to have character arcs. They're going to have narrative, they're going to have plot, they're going to have literary styling. You have to do all that, and be funny. It just makes it harder. When it works, it is just that much better.
[Jody] Oh, yes. Pratchett is amazing. I thought that… I think that he was our Shakespeare, because he understood everything about human nature in the same way that Shakespeare did, and liked us anyway.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Yup. Yup. You always feel like… That's a good thing to bring up. There's like… There's all kinds of humor. It's all valid. It doesn't… Whatever you find funny. But Pratchett, I always felt like his arm's around my shoulder, pointing at things that we all do. But he's not laughing at me, he's encouraging me to laugh with him at me. Which is different. We always say, "He's laughing with us, not at us." He is laughing at us. But he's got his arm around your shoulder, and you don't feel bad. When I read his books, and he's making fun of something that I do, I feel better about myself after having laughed. I just love that aspect of his humor.
[Jody] I have seen… I have known people that he poked fun at, that he's put into the stories, such as, I know two of the three witches, the originals. That when he talks about Magrat, for example, who became Queen, that she was shaped rather like two peas on a shovel, well, the lady upon whom Magrat is based is a plump lady who is by no means just two peas on a shovel. She's tremendous fun. Gisa North who is Gytha Ogg, Nanny Ogg, is in fact, personality wise, quite a bit like her literary counterpart, but a complete opposite bodily. Of course, when he decided to create Lady Sybil who was one Anne McCaffrey crossed with Barbara Woodhouse clone, Anne McCaffrey absolutely adored it. She loved being sent up in that way, because he got her. But it was also quite a bit of Barbara Woodhouse, who is famous for… She was a dog trainer. She would command dogs, "Sit!" in this huge stentorian voice. Not unlike Anne who was trained for opera and also had a huge voice and could make people sit down, too.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Now, I do want to point out that not all humor has to be gentle or kind or loving. A nice counterpoint to this story, I had the chance on a book tour to go through Roald Dahl's hometown in England. The librarian there told me, just giggling through her hands the whole time, that when he wrote the witches, everybody in town knew exactly which ladies he was making fun of. They all hated it, and everyone else thought it was hilarious.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Let's pause here, and give you a chance to pitch one of your books to us. What do you have out that's recent or that you would really like people to go look up and read?
[Jody] I am…
[Dan] And buy, which is key.
[Jody] All right. I am very fond of my latest series, which is the Lord Thomas Kinago books, which are humorous space opera, which are essentially P. G. Wodehouse in space. They are the feckless young lordling and the sensible, self-effacing gentleman who more or less keeps him out of trouble. The names of each of the novels… Lord Thomas is far too wealthy to have hobbies. He has enthusiasms. So, his enthusiasm of the moment is connected to the title of the book. So, View from the Imperium is about photography and image capture. Fortunes of the Imperium is about superstitions. It's not that he actually believes in any of them, but he loves the trappings. He's got a fortuneteller's tent and a crystal ball and a phrenology chart. Rhythm of the Imperium, naturally, is about interpretive dance.
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] Of course. That's perfect. All right. So, let's talk about how to be funny. Making people laugh at dinner is very different than writing a book that is funny. So, when you set out to do it, how do you add humor to something? How do you be funny on command?
[Jody] There are so, so many facets to humor, but in Lord Thomas's case, exaggeration is one of the ones that I like to use the most. He is very, very wealthy, so he can do what he likes. He is very, very overprivileged, and so are all of his relatives who, pretty much, except for a couple of his cousins, are odious people. But they are exaggerated in the same way that P. G. Wodehouse pictured a lot of the aristocrats that Bertie Wooster palled around with. In fact, Lord Thomas has aunts in the same way that Bertie Wooster had aunts. Some of them he could stand, some of them he could hide behind when the others were raging at him, and some of them were just terrible people altogether. But that's half the fun of it, is the exaggeration. There's a lot about the standard space opera that, with just a tweak, could be extremely funny. I played with a lot of those tropes. But at the same time, they're… It's a fairly serious story because he has a lot of elements of him that he's very sensitive about, that a great deal of the bravado is to hide the sensitive person inside. So I had to tell a good story at the same time writing a science fiction story that also had humorous elements to it.
[Brandon] Something you said earlier that I would like to emphasize here is playing with expectations. Right? A lot of our humor comes from there's a thing you expect, and then it is broken in a way that makes us laugh. The most obvious of this is probably the rule of three, right? You'll see this all the time in humor. In normal narrative structure, you often want to use the rule of three to emphasize in some way. So you will list three things, instead of two, and the third one is the most powerful of them. Even if you're just listing reasons that someone wants to go to dinner and it's not supposed to be funny. But you can use that third one as a twist when they're expecting growth. That's one of the ways to be honey… Funny. It's like, oh, these first two are building on each other and getting increasingly more relevant, and then the third one is completely irrelevant, and it makes you laugh. But you can also use that to say something about the character, which is always a lot of fun.
[Jody] Sort of faith, hope, and nattily.
[Brandon] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I love that. So, Howard is not here, but he has a whole class on humor that he has taught on our Writing Excuses retreat before, that talks about how humor is like the intersection between something that is benign and something that is a violation. Often, the process of telling a joke or setting up a punchline is moving one of those circles in order to create overlap. That this would normally be far too violating or horrific to joke about, but I have nudged it just far enough that a corner of it has dipped into the benign circle on our Venn diagram. Then, all of a sudden, I can say it in a way that makes you laugh instead of makes you shocked or horrified.
[Jody] Such as… There's a saying that comedy equals tragedy plus time. You're in an awful situation, and quite a lot of situational humor… And I'm not talking about sitcoms which have become not very funny things that have laugh tracks…
[Laughter]
[Jody] That say you should be laughing here even though you don't want to. But it can also be comedy equals tragedy plus distance. Something that is happening far away could be a lot funnier, especially keeping the nasty bits out of the view of the audience, so that you can laugh at the circumstances around them.
[Dan] I do love Mel Brooks version of that, where he says tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in a sewer and die.
[Jody] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Jody] I was going to use that very same…
[Brandon] That's playing with expectations right there.
[Dan] Yeah, it's playing with your expectations, because we think we know what it's going to be. It's adding distance, because it's not funny when it happens to me, but it is funny when it happens to you. It's also… If I just said it would be really funny if this guy in the front row fell in a sewer and died. Like, that would not be funny.
[Brandon] Oh, I think that's hilarious.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Well. Telling jokes to sociopaths is an entirely different process.
[Laughter]
[Jody] They think everything's funny.
[Dan] When you set it up properly, and say it in that form, then it moves that violation far enough that the benign can take over and it can be funny.
 
[Brandon] I've got a question for you, Jody. When I'm working on humor in my books, and I don't generally write humorous books, I write books with humorous elements occasionally. One of the things I've found is that sometimes the things I think funny just do not land with certain members of the audience. The way I mitigate this is by trying to have different kinds of humor. So that nobody will find everything funny, but somebody will find something funny. Do you have any advice on different kinds of humor that work well in books?
[Jody] Well, puns, depending on the book, puns work well. Puns are a very intellectual form of humor. No matter what some people might say. Because you have to understand the context in which they appear. Juxtaposing the modern upon the ancient or the modern upon the fantastic can be a lot of fun. For example, take Shakespeare in Love, where you had Shakespeare going through all the rituals of writing that quite a lot of us have little rituals that get us in the mood to write, and also the fact that he was seeing an analyst, which was completely modern. Certainly there would have been nothing like Anthony Sher doctor in real life in Elizabethan times. But it worked so well. There was a beauty to it, that they were able to present that kind of absurdities and still make it seem as if it was a historical kind of story. So, that kind of anachronism is often funny.
[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, we talked about Pratchett. Like, a good third of the humor in those books is that exact joke, just done again and again in different and interesting ways.
[Jody] Yeah. He was tremendously good at that. It is very hard to do slapstick in a book. But we can also play with timing, so that we can, using punctuation, capital letters, italics, spacing, and making sure that you have to turn the page before you get to the punchline. Ellipses are your friend. So are m-dashes.
[Chuckles]
[Jody] You can place… You can make the audience breathe so that you can get your punchline in there. Then, the line that follows it should be benign enough, just sort of carrying things on, so that they laugh at the joke and they don't actually miss anything important. So it is setting up a joke as if you were telling it out loud.
[Dan] Well, that's great. Thank you so much for being on our show today, Jody. We love you, we think you're so smart and wonderful.
 
[Dan] What is our homework?
[Jody] Your homework, since we were talking about humor, is to take something that you have written before. Take one of the scenes and make it funny. Draw out what it is you can exaggerate, make absurd, minimize. Give these incredibly important stakes to something that would otherwise seem trivial, and have fun with it.
[Dan] Great. Well. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores

Dec. 11th, 2019 11:23 am
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Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores
 
 
Key Points: Truth is stranger than fiction, consider child widows on the banks of the river Ganges, Thimithi firewalking, vulgar rhythms in Mexico, gourds for clothing, and open containers and paper bags for alcohol. In stories, how y'all use y'all can get you in trouble. Don't overdo it, one or two wonky details are enough to make a society feel alien. Give us the norm, then show us how it is broken. Showing characters breaking customs and reactions of other characters is good. What we do is normal, but others do is weird. Why do we shake hands? For most characters, why is just that's the way we do it. Use obviously different things to make readers think about it. Using a different point of view allows you to explore or showcase the culture, and use it for conflict and fun. Consider a cat and you walking through your house in the dark. Flavoring a war story that takes decades with cultural details makes it interesting.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 49.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Customs and Mores.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.
 
[Brandon] Customs and mores.
[Dan] Yay!
[Brandon] Dan. You were an anthropology major in college.
[Dan] I was.
[Brandon] Tell us what I… What the word mores means.
[Dan] A mores is essentially… It's a manner of interacting in a culture. It is a specific thing that a… The way a culture does something. So one of the ones that Brandon mentioned before we started was shaking hands. There are some cultures that greet each other by shaking hands, and there are some cultures that don't. That's just the way in which we, as a society, have decided to say hello to each other, and often goodbye. It's different from society to society. That can apply to essentially every form of interaction that we have, there's some kind of mores that governs how we do it.
 
[Brandon] Let's start with some of our favorite kind of real-world mores or customs that seems stranger…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Than fiction. Just to kind of put ourselves on the right foot here.
[Dan] Okay. Go for it.
[Mahtab] I can start. I do not have to look further than India…
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] For some of the most weirdest stuff I've seen.
[Howard] That's really far for us, but go on.
[Mahtab] Okay. Well, let me share it with you. One of them. This one I do not like, but it's the way things are done. Widows, no matter what age, they are… First of all, there used to be a lot of child marriage. If for… And the kids used to be married to older men. If the men died, the child was a widow. There was no remarriage. There is a beautiful movie called Water, which was made… Produced by Deepa Mehta, which just talks about a child widow who has to live on the banks of the river Ganges. Love is forbidden. Any kind of comfortable amenities… They just have to live a really harsh life. So that, I found, is really weird, to kind of give up your life. Whereas here, I mean, if a spouse passes on, you are allowed to find happiness. That is not allowed in our customs. The other thing which I just recently found out. It's called Thimithi, which… It's actually Timothy, which is a firewalking festival, which happens just before the Hindi New Year of Deepavali. It has its origins in the Mahabharata, which was the war which was fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. But basically, one of the groups insulted the wife of the other group, and to prove her innocence, she walked on coals. She emerged unscathed. Men, not women… Men, in a little village in India, walk on coals to prove their purity. They have to walk really, really slowly. I found that really strange. It still happens.
[That's great]
[Mahtab] That's just two. There are a lot more, but I will…
[Dan] So here's one of my very favorite ones. In Mexico, there is… Every culture has their curse words, and their swearwords. In Mexico, there is a rhythm that is considered incredibly vulgar. It's the rhythm of shave and a haircut. I know, now that I've said this, people are going to come up to me at events and signings and whatever, and knockout shave and a haircut on the table. It's incredibly offensive. Just the rhythm by itself. I've never encountered that anywhere else before. It's fascinating to me.
[Brandon] My favorite one, since we're going on these, is penis gourds.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] If you're not aware of this, in some South American indigenous tribes, men will wear a gourd on the tip of their penis to be clothed. To us, they just look naked. But to them, that is fully clothed. If the gourd is off, then they are naked and it is taboo. But if the gourd is on, then they are not considered naked. That… I love this one, because what it really says is a lot of our taboos in cultures, which are related to mores, are really social constructs. Right? What we consider vulgar, obscene, or honorable or pure or whatever is a social construct. Playing with these things in fantasy and science fiction books is one of my favorite things to do.
[Howard] We have the same gourd here. It's in a different place. It's the open container law for drunk driving.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah.
[Howard] Is the top on the bottle? The top's not on the bottle, you're going to get a ticket. Because the bottle's naked.
[Dan] Well, a lot of states still have the paper bag law with alcohol as well. That if you are walking down the street with a bottle of alcohol that everyone can see, then you get arrested. But if it's in a paper bag, even if we can see you drinking it and we know what's happening, it doesn't count.
 
[Brandon] So, how do we go about creating these in our stories? How do we use them? Truth is stranger than fiction, how do you convince people that these things are real? One of the most difficult places I've gotten myself in the most trouble with social mores was use of the word y'all in one of my books.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Because I found that there is regional variation in how y'all is used. I used it a way that is the less widely used method. I have heard many, many times about how I got that wrong. It kicks people out of the story, even though it was right for that character. How do you use these?
[Dan] I don't know.
[Laughter]
[Howard] The hardest thing to do is to, in your own life, distinguish between the things that you have to do and the things that you don't have to do. The… Finding serial killers, finding patterns and what they do. What are the things that that they did that didn't have to be done? Why did they do those things? Well, those are incredibly significant. Does the killer think about it? Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. What are the things in my life that I do that I don't have to but I'm going to do it anyway? I hadn't asked myself that question before right now, so I don't have an answer.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But it's a great question.
[Dan] I would say, for the most part, unless you are writing a story that is very specifically sociological or anthropological, don't overdo this. Pick one or two things. For example, in the Stormlight Archives, the women have the safe hand that they always keep covered, and the women aren't… They don't eat spicy foods. That's… Those are the only two I can remember. I'm sure there might be a couple others. But you throw those in, and then the rest of the society is surprisingly familiar. But it feels very alien, because the setting is different, and because there's those two details that stand out as wonky.
[Mahtab] The way I like to see it is customs are important because it shows you how that particular race or culture behaves. It's but a great way to use this is give us the norm and then show us how it is broken. This… The example I want to share is not really a fantasy example, but it's done really well, which is Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Which is where a group of boys crashland on an island. All customs, social mores, just basically breaks down, where the boys just forget about all laws of how to behave. They're all kids. There is complete lawlessness. There are two leaders that kind of try and draw the boys to each other, so there are two groups. Their weapon of power on that island is one of the boy's glasses, because that's the only way they can create a fire. It completely breaks down, where one of the boys is killed, and everyone comes to their senses when a patrol ship comes looking for them and they're rescued. Everyone kind of comes back down to earth. But it's a fabulous example of when there is no… When social customs and mores breaks down, you could have a fabulous story. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. He's expressed it really well. So, the point I was trying to make is find one or two customs. Show us what the norm is. Then break it completely. That'll give you so much of your story.
[Dan] Showing characters break it, and then the reactions of other characters, can lend it a lot of gravity. So, like, we don't necessarily understand why they have to do this one particular thing in their society. But as soon as we see the horror in everyone else's eyes… Oh. Now I don't necessarily feel that that's important, but I can tell that it is.
 
[Brandon] You bring up the safe hand in the Stormlight books. One of the more common questions I get asked is what's the deal with that safe hand? Why do they have that safe hand? Which, as a writer and having studied anthropology myself and things, that question always seems really weird to me. As a writer. Because it is expressed by the outsider looking at a culture, saying, "Why are they so weird?" It displays a shocking lack of self-awareness about the way that human beings work. Now, I understand why they do it. Obviously. I'm not saying that the readers are weird. But this is how we are as human beings. What other people do is strange, and what we do is normal. We don't ask ourselves, "Why do we shake hands?" Maybe someone does. Maybe somebody… I'm sure someone has traced back where it came from.
[Dan] I can tell you.
[Brandon] Yeah?
[Laughter]
[Dan] Look. We shake hands because it is a way of signifying whether we do manual labor or not.
[Brandon] Oh.
[Dan] So it is a direct enforcement of the caste system. That's subconscious, but that's kind of what we're doing is "Hey, look how smooth my hand is. I'm rich."
[Brandon] Yeah. Um... That's awesome.
[Dan] But it's not important.
[Howard] I'm not even going to let you touch my hand. I draw with it.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] It is, but it isn't. Right? Because I do want to talk about creating these things and having purpose behind them, but one of the things to understand is, to the characters in your stories, to the vast majority of them, there's not a why.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Brandon] The why is because it's the way it should be done. This is what's appropriate. Why do you wear this and someone else wears this? Well, in most cases, it's just this is what's familiar. This is what we wear. This is what's right to wear.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week.
[Mahtab] I'd like to recommend The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. She is a British writer. This particular novel actually won the Costa book award in 2015. The premise is very intriguing. It's… In her… In… So the protagonist is a female. Her name is Faith Sunderly. She's a 14-year-old girl. What… The premise of the novel is that in trying to discover who murdered her father, she discovers that he was trying to shield a fossil. A tree that feeds off lies. Then the fruit that it bears actually gives the person the truth. So she… So it's basically [fertilizes], those laws are spread throughout a certain community, and the tree bears certain fruit. The language of this story… Her language is just absolutely exquisite. So, it's kind of a part horror, part detective, part historical novel. You should all go read it.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Howard] I like the conceit, and I want one.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So, going back to this idea of customs and mores. Stormlight Archive. Why do I do what I do? As a writer, I can say why I do what I do. Why did I come up with the safe hand? I wanted to indicate this is a stratified society, a deeply sexist society, and I wanted to have social constraints that readers from our world reading it would be like, "Wow, that is too constraining." The flipside of that is men aren't allowed to read. Right? Men don't read. There are these… Like, these restrictions that I knew my readers would read and just bash their heads against. The purpose of that is to indicate it's a different culture. It's also a very constrained culture in a lot of ways. I wanted the reader to feel those things.
[Dan] Well, one of the values of doing that in a weird way is that it forces readers who live in patriarchal or sexist societies to confront it, without it just… Without being comfortable with it. There's a lot of the sexist things that we do in our society that get carried over accidentally into fantasy, and a lot of people don't think about them when they read them. So, a custom like the safe hand is weird and it is shocking. It forces us to go, "Oh. Okay. That's different. Now I see what I wasn't seeing otherwise."
[Brandon] Why else do you use these in your stories? What purposes do you have for them? How do they enhance your stories?
[Howard] The piece I'm working on now, the protagonist is an AI who desperately wants to be able to understand everything that's going on around her. She manifests as female. There are aliens everywhere. When she is talking with aliens, when she is communicating with them, she is observing everything, the body language, she's listening to what they're saying. Some of it she can interpret and some of it she can't. Some of it she will get wrong. There's a fight scene that I've written and somebody comes down and breaks up the fight. The fight started because she didn't want the bird with the long tongue to lick her. The person who breaks up the fight says, "If you want the licky birds to not lick you, ask them. Don't touch their tongue." I loved that moment because it inverts our idea of personal space. Well, of course, you're not going to lick me, and if you're going to lick me, I'm going to slap your tongue out of… No. You have to ask in order to not be licked by the licky birds. Also, the word licky bird is just inherently funny.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Having it delivered in that way told a nice joke. But it allowed me to explore the inverse of this concept of personal space in a culture that has lots of aliens in it who are struggling to figure out each other's cultures in order to live together comfortably.
 
[Brandon] Mahtab, you wrote an entire book about the cultural differences between India and America. Why were you doing it the way you did? What did you gain from it in the story you were telling?
[Mahtab] Well. For one, I wanted to showcase India, but from a totally different point of view. So the point of view for this particular book, Mission Mumbai, is from the American's point of view. For him, it is a huge cultural shock, because he's never been there before. Now had I made that point of view from the Indian boy, half the jokes would not have worked, half the plot points would not have worked. Just basically showcasing it from someone else's point of view who's never been exposed to it, it helped me set up a lot of, as I said, humor, a lot of plot points, a lot of… Showcasing the Indian culture as well, and an appreciation by a person who was non-Indian. Because there's also a lot of stereotyping as far as a certain place is concerned. That's perpetuated by movies. You see certain movies on India and you just think, "Okay, there's a lot of poverty. People don't speak English out there." When I first came to Canada, often I was asked the question, "How is it that you speak so… English so well?" I just wanted to give them the Matrix answer. When I came in, at Immigration, they asked me, "English or French?" I responded with "English."
[Laughter]
[Mahtab] So… But, so one of the reasons of using this as a setting and having a totally different viewpoint talk about the culture was to not only showcase it, show the weirdness of it, but also use it as a good place of conflict and fun.
[Howard] If you look at the difference between you walking through the house in the dark and your cat walking through the house in the dark. The cat knows where everything is. A lot of things are taller than the cat. The cat has a completely different perspective of that room. Your experience with that room is going to be banging your shins, and tripping over the cat. Both examples… Both points of view can tell you about the room. The one that involves pain is often the more interesting one. It's also, to my mind, more quickly going to tell me where all the furniture is.
[Dan] My very favorite book series is the Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. I talk about it all the time. One of the things he's doing in there is he's telling essentially a war story that takes place over decades and decades. The middle Saxon period. This portion is generational warfare. But by setting it up… I mean, it's historical, but setting it up so that it is Saxons versus the Danes, we get a distinct sense of who the cultures are. So the way the two armies fight is defined by their background and their culture. The way that they maintain the territory that they win changes from culture to culture. So you get… Bringing out all those cultural details add so much flavor to what is otherwise just a war story that takes a really long time.
 
[Brandon] Mahtab, we have loved having you on the podcast. This is your last week with us. So, thank you so much.
[Mahtab] Thank you so much for having me. I've always loved Writing Excuses, so it's a pleasure to have shared this.
[Howard] Wait, you've listened to us before? Ordinarily we don't let fans into the room.
[Laughter]
[Mahtab] I have not taken anything. But anyways, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
 
[Brandon] We are going to end with some homework from Howard.
[Howard] Yes. Um. That pause was me remembering what the homework is. Take a culture… Take a cultural quirk, a mores… Something that is weird and preferably really annoying to you. Take that thing and extrapolate upon it. Build a whole set of culturalisms, of mores, of behaviors that just bug you. But that are logically connected in a way that this culture makes sense. Your goal is to create a culture that is very different from anything you'd want to live in, without creating a strawman.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off

Mar. 8th, 2019 09:51 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off
 
 
Key Points: Showing off awesome worldbuilding and podcasting skills? No, just how to make infodumps interesting. As you may recall... How do you let characters explain the world without it being a boring infodump? Let the character interact with the information, give it emotional weight. Beware of "As you know, Bob," but an argument let's you slip in lots of information about characters and whatever they are arguing about. Use "Bob, you idiot!" Giving directions also can help. Humor makes the moments of worldbuilding go down easier, too. Sex positions, mixing sex scenes and exposition, might work for you. Convincing someone who has given up lets you summarize everything that has happened, and what we need to do. Ephemera! Establishing shot, relationship shot, insets, pictures! Worldbuilding that is important impacts the story, so the impact gets mentioned in the story. Maps and grand poems. People in a bar talking about what they watched or did last night can tell you what's important in this culture. Newspaper clippings, broadcast transcripts, a character overhearing a snippet of a news clip... all good ways to let the reader know "Today, the ocean is boiling." Consider when to deploy ephemera and what effect you want it to have on the reader. Watch for the gorilla in the phone booth.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Nine.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Showing Off.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We are going to show off our awesome worldbuilding skills for you…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And our awesome podcasting skills.
[Howard] That is not what you told me we were going to do. Now I'm nervous.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Um…
[Mary Robinette] As you know, Brandon…
[Dan] He would've dressed totally differently. 
[Laughter]
[Brandon] As I know, we're going to talk about infodumps, but we're going to make the infodumps interesting. Basically, this whole podcast is 14 seasons of infodumps.
[Laughter]
[Howard] As you may recall, we've been talking about worldbuilding all year.
[Brandon] Yes, we have, Howard, and did you know…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. So. My first question for you guys is how do you make characters who know a lot about the world talk about the world without it being an infodump, or without it being boring?
[Mary Robinette] So, I had to deal with this a lot in Calculating Stars because I have this mathematician pilot astronaut, and there's oh, the amount of information that you need to… No, I didn't really think about it when I'm like, "I'm going to write hard science fiction." Huh.
[Brandon] You're going to not just write hard science fiction. You're going to mix it with alternate history.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Which are the two most research heavy sub genres of sci-fi fantasy.
[Mary Robinette] It was a good choice there. Also, I'm going to make my main character a mathematician, and Jewish. None of which I am. So… But what I did was very much what I talked about last month, which was the interacting and having emotional weight to the information that the character is conveying. So, if I need you to know how to fly an airplane, when I… And I want you to know this airplane is a really cool airplane, then I have her walk in and go, "Oh, who has the T35 and how do I become their best friend?" That immediately tells you that this is interesting. Then, she can start to list all the things about it. What I'm doing for the reader is I am completely infodumping all of this information, and I'm tying it to emotion. So it is using POV…
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] But it is very specifically about that interaction with the thing and masking it as an emotional state, rather than a "Please, here's my knowledge."
 
[Brandon] Well, and you say as an emotional state. A lot of the ways that this has been done historically, and it still works very well, but it's where the cliché "As you know, Bob," came from, is to have two characters have an argument or discussion about the thing. Saying, "I like this sort of gun," and the other character says, "Oh, those guns are crap. I like these sorts of guns." Suddenly, you've got an argument and you're getting information about both characters, their preferences, and the guns.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Brandon] It's a great way to go about it. How do you do it without it sounding like, "As you know, Bob," that sort of thing?
[Dan] Well, the reason that the argument works well is because it isn't "As you know, Bob," it's "Bob, you idiot."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Then they're not telling each other things they already know. That's when it really is awful.
[Howard] I did almost that exact… I mean, it wasn't guns, they were talking about the floating cities in the… One of the places. It ends with a joke. It's very much an introduction of characters. There's a ring of giant floating cities going all the way around the planet. "I grew up on Venus, I've seen floating cities before." "Okay, but the bartender… He makes these drinks inside other drinks." "Depth charges. I've had those before, too." Then they look out the window and everything is gone. "Where are all the cities?" "Where are we going to get drinks?" It's just a brief moment of insight. I now know that Jengisha is, one, from Venus, where there are floating cities, but I needed to introduce… This is the first time we've been to this place in the book, and I'm showing the reader what isn't there. So I have to describe what was there, in order to then have it be gone. [https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-29]
 
[Mary Robinette] Oh, giving directions is actually a great way to do that.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, you drive down the road where the old school used to be…"
 
[Brandon] I just realized something. That is that we always joke that Howard cheats because he has pictures for his worldbuilding. But he cheats twice, because he also has jokes to make us laugh in between the moments of worldbuilding. You're just a cheaty cheater.
[Howard] I am a cheating cheater, and I could talk about how the humor lowers your defenses and allows me to slip information in there. But that's… That goes beyond cheating and into evil.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that the number of sex scenes in Calculating Stars are there because I have a ton of exposition that I needed to get across, but…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Sex positions.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Call it what it is.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly what it is.
[Howard] I am so glad I didn't try to make that joke.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Oh, wow. All right.
[Mary Robinette] There's multiple layers of that joke. We're just going to move on there.
[Brandon] How do you make your worldbuilding interesting?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Sex position. So, here's an example of something that you should not do. I read… As research, I read Mars, a Technical Tale by Wernher von Braun, which is labeled as a novel, and it is von Braun… He's the father of modern rocketry. It was him saying, "Let me tell you how we could do a Mars mission." It was his idea to get the American public… Or just get the public excited about the idea of Mars. There is a chapter in there in which we literally have the professor says, "Let me tell you about Mars, the professor began his exposition." That's an actual sentence.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Then, the next line is, "Mars is the fourth planet from the sun." It is a chapter of as-you-know fact dump. There is no… Oh, it's… There's charts and graphs. It is worth picking up just so you can go…
[Dan] To see how not to do it?
[Mary Robinette] It's really… Oh… It's very, very useful for reference, and it is really challenging as a novel.
 
[Brandon] One of the best plot recaps I've ever read is in A Night of Blacker Darkness.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Which is a lengthy plot recap so that we can get caught up to remem… Getting it straightened out what the characters need to do, what they have already done, and what their goals are. It is the facts conversation. Tell us about this, Dan.
[Dan] The facts… Well, A Night of Blacker Darkness was me trying to write a farce, which I learned is so much easier to do on stage, which is why I eventually went back and did it on stage. But one of the problems with farce is that it is very information dense at a very fast pace. So I got halfway through the book and realized that a lot of the writing group had either missed important details or had forgotten them because 900 other important details had happened. So let's take a minute and get on the same page and make sure we know what's going on, all done as a conversation between the characters. One of them has decided it's not worth carrying on and wants to give up, and the other two are trying to convince him, no, we can still win. That gives them an excuse to run down all of the plot points that have happened.
[Brandon] Now, what makes this scene really work is the fact that I came out of it understanding, but the facts are all really complex and funny. So how did you not lose us in the thing that was supposed to reorient us as you were making jokes about how convoluted the plot was?
[Dan] Um. I numbered all of the facts, and that's why it's called the facts conversation. If you talk to people who've read the book, almost everyone this is their favorite chapter. What I did was I knew that there were three, maybe four, very important facts. They were really driving all the action. But numbering, I think at final count it was 17 or 18 total facts, made you think that there was a lot more going on than there really was. So you're kind of in the middle of this whirlwind and they always refer to the facts by number rather than what they are, except for the four important ones.
[Oooh!]
[Dan] So you know, "Oh, okay. Running away to Rome, so that we don't get murdered by a vampire…" That's fact whatever it was. That one they will say both the number and the title. The rest of them are all just numbers.
[Mary Robinette] That's very clever. I mean, that's a really common stage technique which you are transposing directly to the page.
[Brandon] And then back to the stage.
[Mary Robinette] Very nice.
[Dan] That's why it was so much better on stage.
[Brandon] It occurs to me that you probably repeated the four important facts a number of times?
[Dan] A lot of times.
[Brandon] Where the other ones were only one-offs.
[Dan] Yeah. There's a lot of times in the conversation where they'll say, "Which brings us back to fact four, blah blah blah. There is a vampire trying to kill us," whatever it is. So that hammers home the important stuff and lets you have the joy of being confused by the unimportant stuff.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week.
[Howard] It's not a book. It is not a YouTube University, but he calls it Shadiversity, s_h_a_d_i_versity. This is a guy who, Shad is his name, vidcast… Deconstructs scenes, ideas, technologies, things from fantasy and science fiction pop culture, and talks about the historical underpinnings, why they're getting it wrong, why they're getting it right. I mean, one of them is this thing that we keep calling a tabard. It's actually a monastic scapular. Tabards didn't look anything like this. He's got an episode called Best Medieval Weapons to Use against Elves.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Then a follow-up episode, An Even Better Way to Fight Elves. What he's doing is digging into actual historical combat, warfare, construction, whatever, and layering the pop culture we consume over that. It is fascinating and educational. You can find it on YouTube. Shadiversity, or you just Google Shadiversity and you'll be there.
[Brandon] Awesome.
 
[Brandon] So we're getting back to how to show off your worldbuilding in ways other than viewpoint. Because we covered viewpoint really well last month. For the last part of the podcast, let's dig into ephemera. Nonnarrative parts of the story. How do you use this, Howard? Let's talk about pictures.
[Howard] Um. Okay. The… There's several kinds of pictures categorically in Schlock Mercenary. One of them is the establishing shot, where I tell you… The narrator will tell you where we are. You know what the name of this spaceship is, but we will have… Often have an external shot that shows you what this spaceship looks like. Or it's a city. Or it's a landscape, whatever. There are then relationship shots where I'm showing you where the characters are standing in relationship to each other and what is in the room with them. Are there props? Are there things that are going to be important? Then there are the panels that I call insets where I'm just zooming in on faces and showing reactions. I've talked about comic syntax in other podcasts. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, that's going to give you more information than I can ever give you. When there is a critical story piece, I always make sure that it is showing up in an establishing shot, and then within the same page, within the same week of scripts, it's going to show up in one of the relationship pictures. It's going to be mentioned in the dialogue, so that we know that this is a thing that we are going to come back to.
[Brandon] Are there ever things that you rely exclusively on the pictures for with the worldbuilding? Or do you always use a footnote… Always is probably too strong a term, but…
[Howard] [sigh]
[Brandon] Is it a rule of thumb that you're going to… You said you mention it in dialogue?
[Howard] Mentioning it in dialogue… If it's a piece of worldbuilding that is important, it's probably impacting the story in some way. So what is going to get mentioned in story is the impact. There are places where I can do things with pictures that… Obviously, you can do this with prose. There's a scene in which… It is a scene between person A and person B, Kevin and Jengisha. Ellen, whose husband is the other Kevin, the time clone, who is dead, is in the very background. She is being pulled out of the room by two of her friends. She has an expression on her face that looks bewildered and sad. It is one shot. I knew when I was putting it in there that I needed it because I'm going to show her having a conversation with the cloning tank where her husband is going to be coming back. But I have to have people know that there's this relationship. I got mail from people who were like, "Oh, my gosh. That thing you did, that little tiny half a square inch of panel, I got the feels from that." These are the sorts of places where a comic, I can put things in. It's not explicitly worded, it's easy to miss. With prose, I feel like it's harder to hide those things because the words are all usually read in order. Does that make sense?
 
[Brandon] Yeah. This is kind of hard for me, because I know my books are going to end up in audio books, but I love ephemera, and worldbuilding through them.
[Howard] Sticking them in the middle of paragraphs?
[Brandon] Yeah. Well, usually it's on an opposite page. I'm talking like the maps.
[Howard] Oh, them. Okay.
[Brandon] The maps from [garbled lights].
[Dan] Like the grand poems.
[Brandon] Yeah, the poems. The poems will get read.
[Dan] Things like that.
[Brandon] But the maps, for instance. There's like seven, eight maps in Way of Kings. What we do is have a big, gorgeous painted map, and then we have the survey map that says at the bottom, created by His Majesty's Royal Surveyors. Then we have a map scrawled on the back of a turtle shell sort of thing that somebody has been using to get around the camp. We have like all of these different maps that I put into the book to kind of show different ways that people are orienting themselves.
[Howard] So the Planet Mercenary sourcebook is a 250,000 word ephemera.
[Laughter]
[Howard] With an unreliable narrator.
[Dan] Sold separately.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Exactly.
 
[Dan] In the Mirador series, I… One of the basic worldbuilding premises was this is a world where e-sports have replaced regular sports. I never wanted to, and never did in the series, come out and say, "E-sports have replaced regular sports." But instead, we just have… They fill the same role. People in a bar all talking about the videogame they all watched on TV last night. Things like that. When the second book came out, I had a chance to do a bunch of ephemera. I had logo drawn up for the main team, I had a bracket of the tournament of all the players that we posted online, and things like that. Which all helped everyone to get into this mindset of oh, this game is important, and everyone's excited about it.
[Mary Robinette] I used newspaper clippings at the head of the chapters in Calculating Stars. That is a… That's a very useful thing. Because…
[Howard] Chapter headings?
[Mary Robinette] Chapter headings, the ephemera that shows up at the top, which is a newspaper article or a transcript from a radio play. But I'm going to say that you can actually use that technique without having to go to that… Of the newspaper clipping or the television or something else. You can use that to get your worldbuilding across without actually having to have chapter headings. Because you can do that same thing by having it be something that a character overhears. Having a little bit of a news clip playing in the background can allow you to just have an announcer literally tell you, "And right now, the ocean is boiling." You can do that. It's effective. You don't want to… Like any technique, you don't want it to be one note and that's the only thing that you use, but it's really useful.
[Brandon] Can I say, I really like your news reporter voice?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] For when you read those books? There are different ones. But you got that sort of…
[Mary Robinette] Ladies and gentlemen…
[Brandon] Yes. It's that. You know… It's that.
[Dan] Yes. Ladies and gentlemen. These marshmallows…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Are delicious.
[Howard] Not actually her voice, but…
[Mary Robinette] But it does tell you things. That's… That is actually a thing that we do have to navigate when I'm doing audiobooks, is if I just do a straight read of that and have that in the same voice as Elma, as the rest of the narration. You have to come up with something that's going to distinguish the two.
[Brandon] Right. It just… It sounds like it's coming from the old radio broadcasts that people would do. It is very distinct. You know exactly what it is right away.
[Mary Robinette] March third, 1952.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Pertinent to this conversation, I just sold a historical thriller. A Cold War book that I talked about a couple of times. I just sold that to Audible. It's going to be an Audible Original. I had created essentially as ephemera a bunch of codes. It's about a photographer in 1961. So there are number codes and there are replacement codes and there are ciphers and there are all these things all over the book. After we sold it, the editor and I looked at it and realized most of these aren't even going to function properly in audio. So we had to really rethink. We're still figuring out exactly how we're going to convey all that stuff that was invented as ephemera and ended up being important to the plot, and now we're… Now we're in a hole.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… We can… You and I can talk about that later, because there are in fact ways to handle that, because I've had to deal with that. I actually had that problem in Fated Sky, because there's big chunks of code.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah. I'm… This is off on a tangent, but I have, at the beginning of a chapter in one of my books, something that just looks nice on the page, that is just a bunch of… A random string of letters because it's… A character who went through a period of pseudo-madness, and this is their scrawlings, right? The reader just read all those letters, and the audiobook listeners came to me and said, "That chapter. It was just going on and on and on…"
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] "With the letters." So these are things to be aware of.
[Howard] Oh, man.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Often… This is actually getting into something that I… That is completely pertinent to the kind of infodumping that you do and the kind of ephemera that you create. That's when you deploy it and what effect are you trying to have on the reader? So with something like that, what you're trying to convey to the reader is that there was something not right going on with this character's head. That there were all of these things. So there are other ways to do that vocally, but you do have to shift when you go to the different medium. One of the things that I will see early career writers do, and sometimes in published work, is that the infodump just comes in the wrong place. They aren't thinking about the effect of the information on the reader.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] There only thinking about this is information.
[Brandon] Yeah. I often use the phrase gorilla in a phone booth… Which… There are times in your story where something's going to be really interesting to the character. You often in the podcast use the puppet metaphor. What the puppet is looking at, the character looks at. You have the puppet look at something cool, but then you start giving us an infodump on something else. We're going to say, "Nononono. You turned our attention toward something cool. You can't infodump me right then." But you could infodump me a little bit later on, once our mind can come back to this sort of thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.
[Howard] Years ago, David Kellett did… I think this was for the podcast that he did with Scott Kurtz… And impersonation of a New York taxi driver doing the audiobook version of Garfield. Saying, "Oh, you guys. This last panel, he's sitting in the pan of lasagna. Sitting in a pan of lasagna." I was rolling, because I know that the Schlock Mercenary audiobook is really just never going to get made, but that problem, bouncing off of that problem, at that level when you've got the ephemera which are… on one level, what you would call ephemera is 90% of my product. The translation into audio means it would have to be completely rewritten.
 
[Brandon] We're going to have to stop here. Mary Robinette, you have our homework.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So for your homework, I actually want you to write some ephemera for your world. Write a transcript of a news program or a newspaper article… Some ephemera that fits into your world. Have it be about a fact that you've been struggling to get in there that you want people to know. Then try, because it's ephemera, see how concise you can make it. So you're only allowed one paragraph. No more than 75 words.
[Brandon] And, like, we are only allowed 15 minutes that became 22…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] You are out of excuses. Go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab

Aug. 31st, 2016 04:06 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
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.
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Writing Excuses 11.34: Humor as a Sub-Genre

Aug. 23rd, 2016 04:45 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.34: Humor as a Sub-Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/21/11-34-humor-as-a-sub-genre/

Key Points: Situational comedy relies on characters struggling in an unfamiliar situation. Good for release. Think Lucille Ball on the candy conveyor belt. Physical comedy? Think punching, think pratfalls. How does the character react? Farce is the extreme pursuit of a ridiculous object. What is the hammerlock that forces these characters into this situation? Don't forget the soda! Linguistic comedy, wordplays, puns, and unexpected but accurate descriptions. May be tied to a particular character's view of the world. Making unexpected connections, forcing the reader to imagine something they didn't expect. That's the sparkling gun of linguistic comedy. Which can make us like a character who holds that gun to our head. Watch for the transition between character humor and relationship stories, especially with odd couples. Put them in a crucible, turn up the heat, and see what happens!
( Once upon a time... )

[Brandon] We are completely out of time. We need to move on. I'm going to give us our homework which is I want you to take some of these things we've talked about. At least three of them. The types of humor. Physical humor, situational, character, farce… Whatever it is, or find your own. I certainly don't think we've covered all types of humor in this short podcast. I want you to take a scene and try to write it with an overabundance of one of the types. Then pull it out and try to write the same scene using situational comedy. Pull it out, try to write the same scene using word plays. See how you can do these. You're going to overload on one of these types in order to practice it and see what it does to your scene. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.32: The Element of Humor

Aug. 10th, 2016 02:49 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.32: The Element of Humor

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/07/11-32-the-element-of-humor/

Key Points: Talking about humor ain't so funny. Why do we turn pages for humor? Because we enjoy laughing, and hope that it will happen again. Every joke is a story. Look for the twist at the end that recontextualizes everything. Lots of classes of humor, but the techniques get applied to everything. Make sure you are laughing, that it amuses you. Don't play with a doll, be funny for the audience. Use comic drop, a change in status. Payload, then pause (put the funny just before the break, so we can laugh). Rule of 3, beat, beat, punchline. Reversal, give us a surprise. Use callbacks, referring back to jokes you have already made. To make a whole story out of humor, look for key elements, and make promises to the reader that you are going to be funny. Set something up, have something happen later, and then pow, deliver it even bigger (aka rule of 3 in action!).

( Knock, knock... )

[Brandon] We are out of time. We will come back and talk about this in a few weeks, but… Howard? Why don't you give us some homework that they can work on during that time?
[Howard] Okay. Yes. I want you to get something funny. A book, hopefully, that you can actually make notes in. Outline… I say outline. Underline, highlighter… Look for rules of three. Look for places where there are three things in a list, look for places where three similar things happen. By the same token, look for comic drops. Circle or underline any place where characters' statuses change. As you go through this, I have no idea what you're actually going to find, because I don't know what it is you're reading. But as you go through this, try and figure out what the pattern is to this story that makes it work. Why are these elements working, working so well? Ultimately, what you want to be able to do is you want to know how to apply these tools in your own writing. So you have to look for them specifically in someone else's work.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.20: Horror As a Subgenre

May. 19th, 2016 01:46 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
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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Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

Jan. 6th, 2016 01:14 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/03/writing-excuses-11-1-introduction-to-elemental-genre/

Key Points: Season 11 is going to be different! Elemental genres. Each month, expect the first week to be an elemental drill down, second week to be a wild card, third week to be using the elemental genre in subplots, and the fourth week will be Q&A. Elemental genres are the things that make you read, the emotional resonance that drives a story. Not bookshelf genres, but elemental genres. The 11 elemental genres planned are wonder, idea, adventure, horror, mystery, thriller, humor, relationship, drama, issue, and ensemble. This is a framework for talking about what makes readers turn the page and have emotional responses, not a hard-and-fast set of categories or rules. Elemental genres let you mix-and-match underneath the veneer of the bookshelf categories.
( Underneath the veneer, they found elemental genres! )
[Brandon] But I am going to give you some homework today. Your homework is actually to take some of the films and books that you love, and I want you to try and drill down to... You don't have to really define the elemental genre, because we haven't defined all of these for you yet. But what I really want you to do is start looking at what the emotional impact of that story is. What the people who made the story are doing to you. How they're hacking your brain. Try to relate... Try to strip away the veneer and dig down at it for yourself. Pick three of those, books and films that you love, and see if you can do it. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode One: Types of Humor

Feb. 21st, 2011 02:37 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode One: Types of Humor

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/01/11/writing-excuses-4-1-types-of-humor/

Key points: there are many different types of humor. Character humor depends on knowing the characters, and can be used in many different kinds of fiction. Cognitive humor depends on the reader filling in the punchline. Consistent character humor reinforces characterization. Physical humor is very subjective. Non sequiturs need good setup. And maybe a little cold medicine.
( Bellylaughs? )
[Brandon] All right. This is been Writing Excuses. Do we have a writing prompt?
[Howard] Yes.
[Brandon] All right. Howard?
[Howard] Write something funny using non sequiturs and cold medicine.
[Brandon] All right. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 27: Mixing Humor with Drama and Horror

Feb. 19th, 2011 01:45 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 27: Mixing Humor with Drama and Horror

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-27-mixing-humor-with-drama-and-horror/

Key points: To blend humor and drama, start with the drama, identify the key points, then add humor. Humor is good while reading, but drama and character make readers come back. When the humor detracts, excise! Be careful about humor that pushes readers out of the story. Make humor fit the character -- don't break characters for a joke.
( Chunks of humor, drama, and horror )
[Brandon] All right. Howard, we're going to make you do the writing prompt because you're the expert on this.
[Howard] Okay. Take the most intense character tragedy you can imagine for a character that you've already got and find humor in it for another character to point out. Whether or not it's appropriate, find humor in that tragedy.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. [The podcast cut off at this point. We can only assume that Brandon provided the tag line "You're out of excuses, now go write."]
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Writing Excuses Episode 21: Humor

Jan. 31st, 2011 10:48 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Episode 21: Humor

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/06/30/writing-excuses-episode-21-humor/

This episode is about humor, how to make people laugh, with a particular focus on writers. How do you write humor, why do we write humor, more suggestions about how to write humor, and a writing prompt to get you started. Now if we can include cute, naughty, bizarre, clever, recognizable, and cruel elements in our jokes, we'll get the laughs. Like a brick doesn't.
( Watch for laughing bricks . . .  )
And the writing prompt: write something funny in which strong profanity is appropriate but doesn't happen.

See you next week.
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