wetranscripts | Entries tagged with idea

Writing Excuses 19.08: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Working with an Editor

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-08-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-working-with-an-editor

Key Points: Working with an editor or agent! First, your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team, trying to make your book a better book. What's an edit letter? There are stages of editing, starting with developmental or structural. This tends to be broad structural questions. E.g. this character arc doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the book. These are often phone conversations, not letters. Edit letters should be a compliment sandwich, starting with what is good about the book, and ending with more things that are working. When the editor asks you to do something, can you say no? Absolutely. That helps the editor or agent know what is important to you. When the editor or agent offers a suggestion, they are asking whether you can come up with a better idea. Sometimes they offer ideas that they know are not good ideas, to help you react and find a direction. Suggestions identify that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Ask questions! Sometimes "no, this is a terrible idea" shows that you are tired, and it's time to take a break. Editors and agents are people, too. Alignment comes with asking questions.

[Season 19, Episode 08]

[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 08]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Working with an Editor.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Ali] And I'm Ali Fisher.

[Mary Robinette] Now, I am very excited about this episode. Let me tell you what we are about to do. I'm about to ask DongWon and Ali all of the questions that I wish I'd been able to ask an agent and an editor before I had published a novel.

[Ali] [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] We are so excited to answer these questions. I wish I could transmit from my brain all the information I know about how this process goes to every writer in the world. Because that's the whole point of this. We want them to feel comfortable coming into the process and see how it's not scary. Even though it is difficult at times, that we're all pulling for the same goal at the end of the day.

[Ali] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. I will say, one of the things that's straight off the bat, dear writers, that you should know is that your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team.

[Ali] Yes. It's true.

[Mary Robinette] You're all trying to make the same book a better book.

[Ali] Amen.

[DongWon] One of the reasons I wanted to have Ali on in particular is that we are working together on several projects at this point.

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Having a sense of Ali's perspective, but also so that you guys can hear a little bit of the working relationship between an agent and an editor working together. I think there is this idea that is the agent versus the publishing house sometimes, and that it's the author versus everybody sometimes. The more that, I think, if we can find ways that… To be clear, that we are all trying to accomplish the same thing. That doesn't mean that conflict doesn't happen, that doesn't mean that there aren't problems. But at least we're starting from a place of understanding and conversation and alignment in what our goals are.

[Ali] Yeah. Yeah. Which doesn't mean that your agent won't advocate for you when needed and it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be conflicts of sort of ideas or like [garbled thoughts on] campaign, etc. Like, that's just smart people working together. But when it comes to the book itself and especially… I don't know, overall, I think, there's no question that success of the book is a win win win for the whole team.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. So, writers, you've probably heard that at some point you're going to get something that's called an edit letter. What's an edit letter?

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Never heard of it. Sounds suspicious.

[DongWon] Sounds like to me…

[Ali] Well, DongWon, do you want to start with the types of, like letters or calls you do before I do?

[DongWon] Yes. So, I think, there are different stages of editing. Right? What we sort of think of as developmental or structural. Then, sort of like editing. What I tend to do is very much on the developmental stages. I love to be involved early in a project. Or when a submission comes to me, and it's a debut, then I'm doing a lot of structural edits working with the editor to make sure that the book is in a great place before we send it off to the publishing house. So I'm asking… I tend to be asking incredibly broad questions, like big structural questions, word count questions, of, like, can we add 20,000 words? Can we cut 30,000 words? Right? Like, that's scale of question tends to be what I'm doing. So, often times…

[Mary Robinette] Can you give some examples of what a structural question is?

[DongWon] Yeah. So, a structural question can be as much like, "Hey, I'm not sure this arc for this character is lining up with sort of the central themes of the book." Right? I'm being a little bit abstract. I'd say it more specifically of like, "This character's situation feels really disconnected with our protagonist's situation. Can we make that feel more connected, or should this be here?" Like, what are… What was your intention with writing this character into this book, and how are they tying into the rest of it? So that might be a structural question I'm asking that could affect an entire character arc, which is… A solution set could be rewriting that character's entire central conflict so that there arc ties more closely in. It could be cutting that character entirely, because we all realize that they're extraneous and were vestigial from a previous draft. Or it could be changing the central thematics of the book, because that character is actually really important and their arc is more important than the protagonist's arc, and we need to make those pull into alignment in a different way. Right? So, when I'm asking these structural questions, they are kind of that big and that broad about, like, "Hey, the pacing doesn't feel great here. The act two turn, the big reveal, isn't landing in an exciting way. This character isn't feeling like they're exciting and connected. This romance isn't working right, these 2 characters don't come together in the way that I kind of wish." So that's kind of what I'm doing at that stage. Because they're such big broad questions, and because I really do frame them as questions, not like, "Hey, do XYZ," I tend to do that is a conversation. So I'll get on the phone with the author. I know, everyone's dreaded phone call. I will have edit conversations that are 2, 3, 4 hours, sometimes. As we're really just talking through the book, like, what were you trying to do, what… How does this work? What are possible solutions? For me, those are some of the most exciting, most fun conversations I have. They're very difficult and stressful for me, and for the author, but in ways that I think are really energizing when they go well.

[Ali] Yes. So, not dis-similarly, by the time it comes to me, normally, it's in more polished condition or it is… It fits more firmly within the expectations of the types of things that the house that I work at publishes. Right? So, like, it tends to be in a state that is quite recognizable to me. Then I do a lot of the same things. I'm a different reader, different eye… A different sense of… Understanding about where the author's coming from or, probably a lot less understanding of where the authors coming from, and probably just a lot more sort of like generic reader experience. I'll ask a lot of the same questions, very high structural things. You mentioned worst-case scenario twice, and we never saw it. Which made me want to see it. So, something like that. Right? Then, all the way down to sometimes through sentence level style questions or suggestions, mostly for matching things up or, like smoothness, that kind of thing. Just, for anyone out there who's curious, I am an acquisitions editor and an editor, and not a copy editor. Bless them, because I am not nearly qualified enough to make sure a book could actually go to print. But, so a lot of the same things, a lot of the same questions. So brace yourselves, this is also a part where, I think, the agent turns into a little more handholding as someone's going back into…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Revisions after they felt like we just finished, and then we went out and the book sold, it's so exciting. So, sometimes that happens. Similarly, I also… I love and I offer a phone call as often as I possibly can because an edit letter, even though those are really fantastic, and I've also obviously found that authors with audio processing issues or who just need the time… They just need to read it, they need to think about it, and otherwise it's just not a free flow conversation. Happy to write it down. But if we get the chance to have that conversation, you avoid sort of the asynchronous issue of my assumptions running through the entire thing, whereas there can be a quick, like, "Oh, I actually intended this," and then that changes a lot of my responses. Right? So, I guess all I'm doing is sort of pitching the concept of if you can muster the confidence or the desire to get on the phone with an agent or an editor, I do think it's a really helpful thing. If you can't, that's totally fine too. Edit letters themselves look really different, editor to editor, and, for me, book to book. Sometimes it is… I go through… I have big chunks that's like character A, character B. I'll have worldbuilding questions. Then, sometimes, they're 2 pages long, and it's like bullet points of, like, this is where I cried, this is… My one big question is this. And can you add like a whole section where she's getting from here to here? Because I was desperate to know more.

[DongWon] Yeah. Sometimes they can be really brief, like you were saying, like, one or 2 pages. I think my longest edit letter, back when I was at Orbit, I think was 25 pages.

[Ali] Whoa!

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think sometimes…

[Ali] Oh, my God.

[DongWon] Hey, I know people who wrote longer letters. You ask [garbled] sometime what the longest letter she wrote was…

[Ali] No.

[DongWon] So, sometimes, like having… Sometimes you just need to dig into lots of detailed things. Especially if you're going chronologically through the book, of, like, chapter 1, Chapter 2, like, breaking things down. Depending on the writer and what they need and what kind of conversation and what kind of changes you're suggesting, sometimes, a lot of details was called for. But the long edit letter, I think, is very rare, don't let that scare you. That was something that was produced in conversation with the author, I didn't just spring that on them.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But one thing that I wanted to point out about edit letters that's really important is what I think of as the compliment sandwich. Right? Where you start your letter with talking about the things that are good about the book, and hopefully you end the letter also with reminding the author, here are the things that I liked about the book, here's the things that are working. Right? I think… I see sometimes younger editors, newer editors, skip that. I think that's a huge mistake to do so. Because it's not just… We're not just like blowing smoke and we're not just complimenting you for no reason. It is… Kind of going back to what we were talking about last episode, it's showing that we are in alignment about what your intentions with the book are. If I'm telling you, here are the things that I think are working, and you read that and say, "That isn't the book I wrote. That's not what I was trying to do." Then nothing in between that compliment section matters anymore. Right? Because I don't understand what you were trying to accomplish, so all of my critiques aren't going to land now. Right? So those alignment sections are… Perhaps as important if not more important than all the critical stuff in between. It's not just to make you feel good. It is to make sure that I understand as deeply as I can what it was you were trying to accomplish, so I can help you write the book that you meant to write. To make it the best version of the thing that you want it to. So don't skim those compliments, don't cut them, don't not give them, if you're an editor yourself. I think they're really, really important and really interesting, and very fruitful conversations come out of them.

[Ali] Also, that's… I think I flagged this in our last episode, so we share credit, but it's also where I say, like, please don't cut this. Like, I love this. Like, I might be telling you to make some sweeping changes, and this could get caught up in that, and I don't want to lose it. So those are genuinely… I find those very important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As a writer, I can also say, that now I recognize that those compliments are some of the most useful things, because it is telling you what I'm doing well, and, as writers, we are spectacularly bad at understanding what our strengths are, because those strengths are usually things that come easy to us, so we don't acknowledge them as being valuable. Having someone else recognize that allows us to be like, "Oh. Okay. So that's something I'm good at. I should look for more places where I can do the thing that I'm good at."

[Ali] Yeah. It… A lot of parts of the process to focus on what could be improved or, like, what opportunities are there that aren't here yet. So it's very important to focus on the things that are there and that are working and can be expanded, like you're saying.

[DongWon] Yeah. Again, flagging the things that, like, this is great. This made me cry. This made me laugh. Like, as you go through the manuscript, are just really helpful, because getting… Somebody telling you the stuff that doesn't work about your book over and over again for a long period of time can be quite demoralizing. We understand that. So I encourage any people who are trying to be editors or agents out there to really remember that. Even [garbled] just like have your little notes of like, "Yay, thumbs up," like, this part is so important just to make the whole process go more smoothly. Whenever I see an edit letter that's like too harsh and sometimes even sarcastic a little bit, it's like, "Uhh, this is not working, we can't do this. We gotta switch up how we're approaching this writer."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, when we come back, I will ask my 2nd question.

[Laughter]

[Ali] My things of the week are 2 incredible podcasts. One is called Rude Tales of Magic, and the other is called Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Both of these podcasts just so happen to feature me regularly on almost every episode. So if you like the sound of this, what's happening now, I simply must recommend Rude Tales of Magic and Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Rude Tales of Magic is mostly fantasy. It's a collaborative live-action role-playing…

[DongWon] I believe the phrase I said earlier is that it's a collaborative improvised storyteller podcast that is…

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Roughly using the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to lightly flavor the type of story that you're telling.

[Ali] Correct. Then, Oh These, Those Stars of Space is the science-fiction version of that. Also, we have so much great merch. Go to rudetalesofmagic.com/store, get a sweatshirt, and don't listen. It's entirely up to you. The sweatshirts are so soft. I'm wearing one right now. Thank you.

[DongWon] I can attest to the quality of the merch. As someone who owns some. I'm a huge fan of the podcasts myself. As you can tell, as I'm stepping all over Ali's pitch here. But, Rude Tales in particular is a really wonderful podcast if you like things like critical roll and Dimension 20, then absolutely you should check out Rude Tales. It is much more irreverent than those, but it is a group of truly hilarious comedians and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

[Ali] Yes. Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I… As… I'm just going to flagged here for our listeners, even editors can be really bad pitching their own stuff.

[Laughter]

[Ali] What do you mean?

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Yeah.

[DongWon] I promise we're all better at talking about other people's stuff…

[Ali] I know.

[DongWon] Then our own stuff.

[Ali] That's… Other people's stuff…

[DongWon] That's why we do what we do.

[Ali] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Anyway. All right. As we come back in, I'm going to ask another question. So, we talked about what the edit letter is. One of the things I just wanted to draw a line under is that a lot of the edit letters that I get and that you all have talked about is really about the editor asking questions rather than giving an answer to the author. It really is about the… A trust between the editor or the agent and the author. But when you're a new author, you don't necessarily know that that trust is there, and you don't know what the rules are. So they've asked you a question, they've asked if you can add more of this and more of that, can you really say no?

[Ali] [deep breath] I don't know. What do you think, DongWon?

[Chuckles]

[That's really tough]

[DongWon] No. Absolutely. Please say no. [Garbled] people say no all the time. You have to say no. It's your project, you know it better than us. Know what you… This goes back to what I was saying earlier about loving your darlings, know what you can change and what you're not willing to change. Right? Know what the things are that are untouchable to you. That's fine. We will work around that, because what we want to know is what do you care about and why have you written the book that you've written and how can we make that the best version it can be. Right? So we will constantly be poking at stuff, and you say, "No. Actually, I don't want to do that." My best case scenario is I make a suggestion of how to fix something and the author does something completely different. They do answer the question, but they just run off into the distance and come back with something wildly different. That's always more exciting than whatever stupid idea that I had.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Yeah. Oh, 100%. I have a piece of text that I put at the beginning of all of the edit letters that I send to new authors that I'm working with. I really hope it gets through. This is what it says. It says, "I'm trusting you to safeguard what makes this story for you. When I offer you suggestions for changes and opportunities for deeper exploration, I'm hoping to initiate your creative process. I fully expect you to come up with better ideas than the examples and suggestions I come up with to illustrate my thinking." Because that is really how I think of it, which is, when I'm offering a suggestion, or like a directly actionable specific recommendation, I'm really saying, like, "can you think of something better, actually?"

[DongWon] I love that so much.

[Ali] This is kind of what I mean, is, really what I'm trying to say.

[DongWon] There's a thing that I'll do, and this sounds worse than it actually is. But there's a thing that I do sometimes where I will suggest something that I know is not a good idea because… And that the author will also recognize is not a good idea. Because then, they'll have a reaction to it. Right? When you have a reaction, now you have a direction. Right? I do this a lot with titles most clearly. I'll just start suggesting the worst titles in the world…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So that they'll bounce off of it, and in bouncing off of it, a direction is going to start to emerge, because, like, they keep running in this direction, like, "No, that's too comedic, it has to be more like this…" Then I'm like, "Okay. Now we have more information that we can start building around." So, the… When I make a suggestion about an edit, I mean, usually it is sincere of, like, what if we did this, what if we thought about it this way, but really what I'm looking for is a reaction to the suggestion, not an execution of the suggestion.

[Ali] Yes. 100%. Did you see Hannibal? The show?

[DongWon] Not that much of it. Only the first few episodes.

[Ali] Okay. Well, in the first season, there's an episode where Hannibal commits a murder in the style of a murderer…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] To show Will Graham, like, what it isn't. Like, what is actually special about that. I think about that all the time. How I'm committing bad murders to show…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] How their murders… This other murderer to try to figure out that's actually like this.

[DongWon] If you take nothing else away from this episode, please remember that we are the Hannibal to your Will Graham.

[Ali] Yes. That's all I'm saying.

[Mary Robinette] That's beautiful, and I'm making notes about being alone in a room with both of you.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… I will say that, as an author, the thing for me is, is that suggestion, for me, it identifies that there is a problem that I need to address, and the suggestion is usually wildly wrong. But the problem is usually one that's present. So, when I don't understand why a suggestion has been made, I will go back to the editor and I will ask clarifying questions.

[Ali] Beautiful.

[DongWon] Yes. I think if there's anything you truly do take a away, not joking this time, is that if you don't understand what the editor is asking you to do, or if you don't feel it's right, just ask questions. Just start a conversation.

[Ali] Yes. Please.

[DongWon] Whether it's your agent, whether it's your editor, if you feel that you cannot go to them and have a conversation about what is going well and what's not going well, then there's something that needs to be tweaked about that relationship. Because it's your book at the end of the day, and you should feel empowered to make sure that your writing the book that you want to be writing. That means asking questions, advocating for yourself, advocating for your ideas. If there is something you really care about that they're really pushing back against, then that should be at least a conversation, if not an adjustment that everyone's working around what your goal is.

[Ali] Yeah. I remind myself all the time, it's your name on the cover. Right? Nobody else that you're working with, their name's going to be on the cover. So, that's your… It is your vision, it is your job to safeguard things and to also, like, keep your ears open and be really honest with yourself if something causes friction within you. But that discomfort might settle into a realization of an opportunity. Right? So, sometimes our initial reaction can be really intense, and we thank you for your 3 day waiting period before telling us.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right. That too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, I'm going to give writers a quick moment of perspective from some of my experience. And then a tool that's extremely valuable. The first is that, with my first series, I would hit things that my editor would say, and I'd be like, "No. This is very wrong, and I'm doing this for a reason, I'm going to keep it." I only did that a couple of times, but without exception… Without exception, my editor was right, there was a problem, and that is a thing that got [garbled] in reviews, that people would say… It would get brought up. So, my editor's suggestion on how to fix it was the thing that I was objecting to. I didn't recognize that at the time. But now, when I get a suggestion and I don't agree with it, I will ask for more clarification, but I will see if I can dig into it and find a way to do something that makes me happy that addresses whatever the problem is. The other piece of that is that sometimes the reason that you are having the no, this is a terrible idea, is just because you're tired. You're feeling a little bit defensive, because your baby… Someone has come in and told you that your baby is ugly. So if you hit 3 editor notes in a row that you think are stupid, walk away from the edit letter. Go take a walk. Go do something else, you're just tired and angry.

[Ali] I mean, clear your vent. Tell them how stupid we are. Get mad. Be… It's…

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Ali] It's totally, absolutely appropriate and shows that you give a shit about your book if you're mad at… Like, suggestions that don't feel right immediately.

[DongWon] I would encourage you to do that in private.

[Ali] In private.

[DongWon] And not on Twitter or Blue Sky.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Ali] yes.

[DongWon] That is a thing that I don't recommend you do.

[Ali] Ideally in private. Rage in private. But then come back and then see what still feels bad. Or feels different.

[DongWon] One more thing I just want to point out that may be too obvious to bring up, but editors, agents, are people. Right? There individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, I know, we're…

[Questionable]

[DongWon] We're all just robots and… Yeah, very questionable. But have their own personality quirks, have their own modes of communication, have their own styles. Right? One thing that may be happening if you're feeling really frustrated is an editor might just have an abrasive style or a style that just doesn't vibe with you. Sometimes I will get an email from a client being like, "Hey, I got notes from this editor. Can you take a look at them and tell me what's happening here?" Sometimes the answer is, "Oh, they're missing XYZ," or sometimes I'm just like, "They just kind of talk like that, and that is rubbing you the wrong way." I've seen that both go in the too harsh and too nice directions. Right? I've seen both send up a flag for the writer. So much of this is matching personality, matching style, matching how we communicate, how we connect. Again, that alignment stuff I'm talking about, this is where it becomes really important. So, sometimes, if your editor has left or you didn't choose your editor or for whatever reason, you might be stuck with someone for a second that… And you need to find a way to work it out. But other times, it is a question of, like, make sure that you're working with someone you're excited to work with. Don't just be taking the first thing that's offered to you or the biggest number that was offered to you when you don't like the person. The connection with your team is so important to making sure that everyone is happy with the end result.

[Mary Robinette] So how do you get that alignment with… Between the writer and the editor on a project? Like, are there tools that are useful to make sure that everyone's actually on the same page?

[DongWon] I mean, I think it's asking questions. Right? We kind of keep coming back to the same things in certain ways, but it's that… The compliment section of the edit letter, not to sum up what's wrong, but talking about what's going right. Sometimes it's taste stuff, right, like sometimes even talking about other books, other movies, and things that you both like can be really useful, because then that gives you a shared language of, like, "Okay, we both love Hannibal. So our series [murder] like, we want it to feel more like Hannibal than we do like Scream." Right? So having that shorthand of vibes that you both are feeling can be really, really helpful to think about it.

[Ali] Yeah. Even on that… If you have that initial call with an editor who's interested in your book, you can ask mildly irrelevant questions. Obviously, nothing like to personal or inappropriate, right. Because that's probably not your business. But you can ask questions, because the more someone talks, the more they display their values and their interests and their thoughts, and, like, it's kind of just reaching out and touching someone else's mind for a little while and seeing if you like it.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Well, with that, let's segue to our homework as we try to touch the minds of our listeners.

[Ali] Yes, yes.

[Mary Robinette] Not creepy at all.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Not creepy at all.

[Ali] For my final style…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[DongWon] So, I have our homework this week. I would like you… Thinking about this alignment question, I would like you to take a work you haven't written, and come up with 3 questions you would ask the writer to help them clarify their intention in the text. Whether this is a project your beta reading for a friend, a short story, even like a movie that you've seen, take a piece, a story that you engaged with and really figure out what are the questions I would ask the creator of this to really help them understand better what it was that they were going for. Then, for bonus points, I want you to apply those questions to your own work in progress.

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

[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations. Also, let us know. We'd love hearing from you about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/04/17-49-bodies-are-magical/

Key points: There's a common trope where a disability becomes a superpower. This also often makes the character super useful. And depersonalizes them, too. Be careful of plot relevant abilities. Write your people as people. Do your world building so that your characters can have agency without their abilities becoming a plot point.

MICE: In a milieu story, often people will have someone live in somebody else's body or have a temporary disability, which makes the disability exotic and the person non-human. Idea stories often focus on "What's wrong with this person?" This often reveals an invisible disability, and shows that we are better people for knowing about it. It also makes the person non-human, again. Character stories often mean the person is trying to solve themselves, and focus on dissatisfaction with self. Very inhuman! Event stories often start with a diagnosis that disrupts the status quo, and looks for a cure that either restores the status quo or sets a new status quo. Q.E.D., try to avoid making the disability a plot point, a driver for the story.

Superhero comics often focus on what happens when A and B fight. This is not a good model for exploring abilities or other characteristics.

Final summations:

Chelsea: As speculative writers, try to imagine environments that remove barriers for people with disabilities.

Fran: If you have a disability, or acquire one, write your experience, write your story.

[Season 17, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies Are Magical.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we're going to be talking about bodies are magical. This is the thing where someone with a disability, suddenly, that disability becomes a superpower. Which is not necessarily the way things work.

[Nope, nope, nope]

[Mary Robinette] As we've discussed, there are times when the modifications that you have in the ways you've adapted, that those can be useful, but the disability itself… The classic one that people point at is, of course, Daredevil. Where losing his eyesight gives him magical powers on multiple axes, because all of his other senses have become heightened.

[Fran] Elsa Sjunneson, who we've talked about before, with her book Being Seen, but also online in different essays, has some great breakdowns of the Daredevil problem, by the way. You can Google those, they're amazing, we should probably have a link to that. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] But it is a very, very common trope that you'll see. Sometimes it's also a thing that people will do as a form of overkill. That they're like, "Oh, I don't want the person with the disability to be weak, so I'm going to give them these extra things."

[Chelsea] What I find is that when you have that character with the disability who has the disability, but then they have something that makes them super extra ultra powerful, it also conveniently makes them super extra useful to the narrator and other characters. It de-persons them in a lot of cases.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Fran] Plot relevant disability and plot relevant superpowers both have that same icky feel to them. One of the things that I tend to do is I have a lot of disabled characters in my fiction, but people don't notice them, because they're doing things on the page like protagonizing and antagonizing and making things and breaking things. Their disability doesn't necessarily have to jive with that or be part of the plot, it's just part of who they are. Having that sort of superpower that's utterly convenient to the plot or, unfortunately, sometimes the disability that is plot relevant, really does… It de-personalizes, like Chelsea was saying. What we have been talking about this entire series is seeing people as people and writing people as people and finding places for empathy rather than any other approach towards writing people.

[Mary Robinette] So, these things, let's unpack what we mean about it not being a plot point. What we're talking about is, like, it will absolutely affect the way the character moves through the world. Just the same way that the fact that I am 5'7" affects the way I move through the world. Fran is…

[Fran] 4'10".

[Mary Robinette] 4'10" and one of the things…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That she said to me when we saw each other in person for the first time is that one of the nice things about masks for her was that she could no longer see people's nose hair.

[Fran] Please, please trim. Anyway…

[Mary Robinette] But that is… Like, that's not a plot point. As Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Strokes his mustache. That is a mustache. But the point is, like, that affects the way we move through the world. We see different things, we experience different things, but it is, someone's nose hair or lack thereof is not, like, a plot point. I hope. I mean, maybe. Go for it. If you feel the urge.

[Howard] To use an example that is perhaps less abled in nature, someone with very long hair on a windy day without a hairband, the hair gets in their face. That doesn't mean they're Rapunzel.

[No]

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Fran] On the other hand, just to use the height thing for a different reason, one thing that impacts me directly is when I'm at a stand up cocktail party. Most of the conversation happens directly over my head. I will miss things because people are talking above me. If I have everyone sit down, which I tend to do, then everybody's talking out my level, which is, like, the same thing with Zoom. It was great. Except that people now insist on coming up to me and saying, "I had no idea you were so little. You seemed so…" They want to use the word normal. I'm glad that they stop themselves. I'm really proud of people who stop themselves from using that word. But the aspect of… Like, Zoom is a great leveler for lots of people, but not for others. None of these things are necessarily a plot point, but you can use them as a way to express how you move through the world.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, an example of this… Turning this height thing into a superpower…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Would be… A superpower plot point, would be that if Fran is at a cocktail party and discovers a special clue that only she could discover because she happens to be the right height to look under the table without anyone…

[Fran] Exactly the right height.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly the right height. That's the kind of thing where… I can hear people going, "But sometimes you do need a character who's smaller." It's like, yes. But that can't be their only purpose in the plot. That can't be… Like, every time there's a problem, it's like, "Let's get the small person in."

[Howard] A bomb could also be discovered by the horrible creeper who has a mirror taped to his shoe.

[Fran] Eew! Okay. Eew.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks for that, Howard. Thank you.

[Fran] I'm uncomfortable now.

[Howard] I'm sorry. Hey. You know what. I'm 5'6". I traveled a lot on business. It really did feel like a superpower that I could be comfortable flying coach.

[Mary Robinette] I mean… Those chairs. But at the same time, those… The headrests on those chairs are not built for someone with a short torso.

[Chuckles]

[Fran] To go back to the phrasing that you used, Mary Robinette, where you said, "But you sometimes need someone who is smaller as a character." That idea of, "Oh, I need a person who is like this so that the plot can do X," has… There are points at which that thought process is useful, but when you are constructing fully rounded characters without bias, taking a look at why you feel like you need them for this is an interesting exercise in self examination.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment and pause for the book of the week, and then I… When we come back, we have more to say about this. Our book of the week is…

[Fran] Is not a book!

[Howard] Not a book.

[Mary Robinette] It is not a book, it is something that Fran has been wanting to talk about the entire time we've been recording.

[Fran] Yep. This is the TV series Killjoys. It came on the air in 2015, 2016, and ran for three or four seasons. A couple of those seasons get a little nebulous and a little weird, but then it brought itself back. What I want to talk about with Killjoys is that the premise in definitely season two, especially with an episode called Dutch and the Real Girl, is sort of what we've been talking about. This is an episode with a character who has been hack modded into something where her arm is a gun. But, also, she's got lots of other mods and things, and there is a whole discussion in there about being human, but also having a different role to play in both the series and in society. One of the things that I love about Killjoys, and there's a lot to love about Killjoys… It's got some cyberpunk elements. Victoria Modesta, the model that I mentioned with the prism for one of her legs, is in the show as a special guest for season two. The hack mods are part of a marginalized community group that is a long running theme through this show, Killjoys. One of the things that Killjoys did with this is they hired actual disabled people to play the hack mods. So you've got this amazing… I think Killjoys hired more disabled people to play roles on the show then all of Hollywood at that point. It was amazing to see. It's fantastic to see these actors operating with just the plot points that they have, playing lots of different characters. It's a great show. Especially Dutch and the Real Girl, that's one of my favorite episodes of all time.

[Mary Robinette] So. This is Killjoys, which apparently everyone needs to go watch. As you were talking

[garbled]

[Fran] It was actually produced in Canada, as many good things are. It did run for five seasons, started 2015. Hannah John-Kamen plays the lead in that. She's also in the second Antman as Ghost. So she's all over the place.

[Howard] Cool.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking about that, I'm going to take us a little bit off topic and then bring us back. The… You made me think about discovery. I'm doing a rewatch of parts of it, but in season two, there's some good disability wrapped in that. There's just [background characters]… Just, like, you're watching and somebody just rolls through in a chair, there's… It's really great. None of these are main characters. None of these are main characters, and also, when you look at the bridge, it has steps just built into it.

[Fran] Yep.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So this is a world in which…

[Fran] Also, all of the chairs are fixed. So that character that rolls by can never actually sit at the bridge.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep. That's a great point which I had not thought about.

[Mary Robinette] So part of what we're talking about here when were thinking about bodies are magical and not being plot points, is also, like, the world building that you're doing so that your character can move through this world. So that whatever it is that you have, however you have designed this character, that they can have agency in this story without becoming a plot point. So. I do want to dive in a little bit into what I talk about, about what I mean personally when I'm talking about having it become a plot point. People who are longtime listeners know me and my fondness for talking about the MICE quotient. So, here, the MICE quotient is this organizational structure, right. So, in a milieu story, it begins when you enter a place, and ends when you leave it. Often what you'll see is that you'll see someone have a character… They want to explore disability by having someone live in somebody else's body or they'll have a disability that is a temporary disability. That, basically has the problem of making that disability exotic and it's very, very othering. The idea structure which begins when you ask a question and ends when you answer it is like, "What is wrong with that person?" That's another plot point that you can see… Sometimes see where people will have someone who has like an invisible disability and it's all about, "Oh, now we discover it. Oh, we're better people because we know the answer to this question now."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Again, it's othering because it becomes… That person's the character. Character stories begin when the character is unhappy with their role, some aspect of themselves, and it ends when the character becomes happy with the role, which then means that they are having to… The problem that they are trying to solve is themselves. Which is, again, it is setting a very specific form of normal and having somebody be dissatisfied with who they are. As a plot point, that can be, again, very othering. Then, events begins with a disruption of the status quo, which is often diagnosis. It ends with restoration of the status quo, or the establishment of a new status quo, which means that you're always looking at a cure.

[Howard] Can I just say that I love that in a minute and a half, you've taken the MICE quotient and used it to explain how to do everything wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep.

[Howard] This is beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Thank you. So this is why when you've got a character with a disability, you actually don't want it to be a plot point. You don't want it to be a driver, because if you do… Or, if you do, you have to know that that is the story that you're telling. You're telling one of those versions of stories. You don't want to do it. If you're going to do it, you don't want to do it unintentionally, for certain. But if you want a character and you don't want them to be like, "Hello. I have this magical superpower. I am here because I am useful." Then, it needs to be decoupled from the plot and just affect the way they move through the world. Which is different than these are the story questions that we're trying to solve and answer.

[Howard] It's… While we are chewing on that amazing deconstruction, which I'm again going to say that I love, it's worth pointing out that a lot of where we see disability as superpower done wrong is in comics. One of the tropes of comics, and you see this in especially the ensemble MCU movies, is that at some point there is an idea milieu element which is what happens when Hulk and Thor fight? What happens when Thor and Iron Man fight? What happens when Iron Man and Capt. America fight? Comic book writers… This trope, everybody at some point has to fight everybody else, that is not a great model in which to explore ability, disability, age, old age, youth, whatever, because it is going to be inherently othering for a large portion of the audience.

[Fran] This is where I get to shout out to Marieke Nijkamp who wrote the Oracle Code, which is the story of Barbara Gordon. It's a graphic novel. It was published in 2020, before the rest of things happened. It's fantastic. Marieke is an amazing advocate for disability and disabled writers. Just wonderful to talk about. But if you get a chance to check out The Oracle Code, it is worth your time and does exactly the opposite of what Howard is talking about.

[Howard] To be sure, or to be clear, I say comics. What I mean is the superhero genre. Obviously, comics are a medium which can be used to tell all kinds of stories.

[Mary Robinette] Well, we are approaching the end of our time together. So, before we go into our homework, I just want to check to see if Chelsea or Fran, as our guests for this series, if either of you have any big takeaways that you want our listeners to carry with them before we give them their homework.

[Chelsea] I mean, I think the thing that I've been talking about mostly in all of these episodes is how very much I want us as speculative writers to take the opportunity to imagine environments that are… That basically take away barriers to people with disabilities. Because they're… Well, I'm just going to be opinionated about this… Designed properly.

[Fran] I'm going to direct my comments to those listeners who have a disability, as well as those who may, in the future, have a disability, and just say, "Write your experience. Write your story. In whatever way you want to tell it. If you have the opportunity to reach for empathy, go for it." This is a really important thing, but find… Finding ways to put your story down is actually a wonderful way to just feel present in a way that doesn't mean you're educating people, it's just you're telling a story, you're doing a thing. It's… Please, please write. I would love to see everything you write.

[Mary Robinette] Well, with that, we come to our homework. For your homework assignment, we've had this conversation that at some point, everyone is going to be disabled. So, look at your cast of characters for your work in progress and decide what disabilities your characters have. Some of them will be visible. Some of them will be in visible. Some of them will be things that the characters themselves don't recognize as a disability. Decide what those are, and then make sure that none of them are a plot point. That these are characters who just get to exist and have adventures the same way all of the other characters do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/08/17-19-working-in-a-collaborative-environment/

Key points: One part of collaboration is meetings and suggestions. One reason to collaborate is to tell stories that you just don't have the time to tell. Sometimes the other people can bring things to the story that you can't. One nice thing can be ideas and advice. Beware creative squabbling, making creative disagreements personal. To collaborate effectively, you have to let it go.

[Season 17, Episode 19]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Working in a Collaborative Environment.

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

[Meg] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Meg] And I'm Meg.

[Dan] We have Meg Lloyd with us today, who is one of my favorite people. Meg, tell us about yourself.

[Meg] Well, I am a storyboard artist and a screenwriter working in animation out in California. That means I'm one of the first wizards on call when it comes to making movie magic. It's usually my job to take the scripts from the writer and then turn them into the pictures, the designs, the sets, and the camera work that will be turned over to the other departments in order to make a final animated scene.

[Dan] Cool. What are some of the things you've worked on that our audience might be familiar with?

[Meg] Yeah. So, some of the stuff that I've worked on… Well, a lot of it is still a secret because since I'm at the beginning of the process, I don't get to talk about it until a couple of years after it's all done and out of the way. But some of my released work includes boarding on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and Star Trek: Lower Decks. This week, Nickelodeon finally title dropped a show I worked on for them called Transformers: Earth Park.

[Dan] Whoa. Awesome. So, we are going to talk about creating in a collaborative environment. Whether that is authors collaborating with each other, like Brandon and I are doing, or you working in a whole company full of creatives who are constantly having to be creative together. How is… This is such a dumb question. But, how is that different from just making something on your own?

[Meg] Well, I get a lot of other people telling me what I did wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] Instead of being able to gauge that for myself. One of the things is where you're positioned on a creative project, because… I've directed as well as like boarded. There is a very clear chain of command. It differs from show to show on how much you're allowed to pipe up in a meeting and make suggestions. Like, I've been with some directors and some heads of story that really welcomed jokes and riffs in a meeting. But I also remember with a great fear my very first job when I raised my hand and made a suggestion, and the supervising director, and then later my director, and then one of the producers pulled me aside, one by one, and said, "You can't talk in a meeting."

[Laughter]

[Meg] I was like, "Whah?" Which is like a real shame, because I talk all the time.

[Dan] So conducive to the creative process, as well, is, like, telling people to shut up.

[Brandon] Yeah, I've… Hollywood's this weird place where it feels like everyone knows the rules but you. I've been in some of those meetings too, and I'm like, "How do you know?" And it's different in every meeting. Yeah, I don't envy you trying to navigate some of these things, because it gets really weird.

[Meg] So, animation and just moviemaking in general is one of the biggest team projects that there is. There's a reason why our credits are 10 minutes long. If you're in a short schedule hi rush production like TV, you only are going to be touching an episode for a specific amount of time, and then you have to pass it down to the next person. The only thing that stops this from being an absolutely garbled game of telephone is the people who are sort of steering this ship, which would be your director and your head of story. So, a lot of times you have to gauge the water yourself, to be like, "Okay. Can I… What can I bring of my own flair?" Or what do they need me to just get done and pass on to the next person?

[Dan] Let me ask Brandon, you have recently, in the last few years, started to do a lot more collaborations.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] With me, with Jancey, with others. What prompted that decision, and kind of what got you into that frame of creative mind?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, this was kind of a very specific thing, which involves the explosion of audiobooks, and several of the audiobook producers, the companies, coming to me and saying, "Hey, Brandon. We would love some exclusive content. Is there something of yours that you can provide?" Meanwhile, I had been having various stories that I wanted to write for years that I'd never been able to get to. The one I'm doing with you, the one I'm doing with Mary Robinette, these are stories that I had outlines for. I'm like, "Someday I'm going to write this story." Then, other demands just kept taking me away from them. These two things intersected, where I said, "Well, maybe if I brought on a friend, I can take one of these stories that I really think is really cool that I've wanted to tell, but I just don't have the time for because the Cosmere's dominating more and more of my attention." So, for me, collaboration was a way to tell more stories that I just don't have the time to tell.

[Dan] So, question for both of you then. Can you think of something that the collaborative process brought to a story that you hadn't seen there or you wouldn't have come up with on your own?

[Brandon] Well, I definitely have one, but I don't know… I'll go ahead and go first, then you can. The story I wrote with Mary Robinette, we'll just bring that up because she's one of the other cohosts. So, this is a story about a woman, who, for reasons mysterious, has murdered her husband. Right? She… A clone of her wakes up, with missing… Her whole life she remembers except the week that led to murdering her husband. The clone's like, "I would never do that. I love my husband. Why would I ever do this?" They're like, "Well, that's why we brought you. Your job is to figure out why you would do this." It's that kind of story. Never having had a husband, Mary Robinette was able to… Like, I wouldn't have been able to approach this from the same direction she could.

[Dan] She has had a husband, but you have not.

[Brandon] I have not.

[Dan] Okay.

[Brandon] So, she was able… Like, in the mindset of a woman in her… She's in her 30s. Mary Robinette isn't, but she has been a woman in her 30s, which I never have been. As a writer, we're trained to get in the heads of people that aren't like ourselves. That's what we do. That's one of the main things. But in this specific case, I knew I couldn't write this story as well as she could, and that she would bring certain things to it that I could never approach. Lo and behold, when I read the story, I'm like, "Those are the things." I could point to them. Say, this is what Mary Robinette brought, that I didn't even know I was missing. Otherwise, I could have maybe faked it.

[Dan] Yeah. A lot of times we just don't know what we don't know.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] What's the name of that story, if people want to go look at it?

[Brandon] It's called The Original.

[Dan] The Original.

[Meg] Something that's been really hard during the pandemic is working all alone at my house with my cats who don't know the first thing about moviemaking.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] Because I usually get to do it at a studio with all of my friends who are very good at making movies and TV. So I really like working in a collaborative environment with other artists because when you just get stuck on something, it's really easy to reach over and be like, "Hey. What's wrong with this picture?" They can, like, literally tell you, "Oh, your composition's off." You need to like lower your camera, or fill it out, or all these other jargon thing that I could fire off 50 times in a row.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] It's very fun because at the storyboarding level, we're all on even footing, we're all like this portion of the team is we're [off and days?] Oh, wait. Am I allowed to sing copyrighted…

[Dan] You are totally allowed to sing copyrighted things.

[Meg] Probably not. So one of the things I value the most out of collaboration is building elements of trust with the artists that you know and admire. That it's easy to ask for advice and it doesn't feel like they're criticizing you when they give you ideas and feedback.

[Dan] Yeah. That's something that I've seen with Brandon as we worked together on Apocalypse Guard and now on Dark One. We know each other very well, we know each other's creative process very well, and we know each other's strengths very well. So it's easy for me when he says, "Hey, the ending to this absolutely doesn't work." I can think, "Yeah. You're right. It doesn't. You're better at endings than I am." That's one of the reasons why we work so well together.

[Brandon] Yeah. You shore up one another's weaknesses. Right? Like, Dan is really good at voice. The reason I went and brought him onto Apocalypse Guard, which we haven't released yet, but we're going to…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] Is the voice was broken. Dan's the best person I know when it comes to writing narrative voice for a character. So I went to Dan and said, "Dan. Help." In that specific case, because the book was broken and I'd pulled it from the publisher because I couldn't get it fixed. Now the ending of that one was also broken. So Dan fixed the voice, but Dan's like, "I don't do endings."

[Laughter]

[Dan] I mean, I do, just… Technically. But…

[Brandon] You have lots of really great endings.

[Dan] What I don't do are Brandon Sanderson endings.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Which are distinctly different in flavor. So, to make sure that works. We're actually… Now, we forgot to tell you this in our intro. We are currently at LTUE.

[Cheers]

[Dan] That was very hesitant cheering. We actually read from… An excerpt from Apocalypse Guard at this con two years ago.

[Brandon] Two years ago.

[Dan] It's still not published.

[Brandon] Still not published. This is my fault, not Dan's.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Dan kicked it back to me and said, "I fixed the voice. The ending's still broken. You need to fix that." I'm like, "I do."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But the whole point is I don't have time to work on things anymore.

[Dan] Yeah. Which makes it tricky.

[Brandon] Which makes it tricky. But we will find a time.

[Dan] Okay. Now, Meg, we did not prep you in any way for this, but we do want to do a thing of the week in the middle. This can be something of yours you've worked on. It doesn't have to be a book. It could be a book you've read by somebody else. It could be whatever you want to recommend for people to go out and see.

[Meg] Okay. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but I deeply enjoyed Arcane on Netflix.

[Dan] Yes.

[Meg] I mentioned before about how TV schedules are so crunched. They had five years to do their storyboards for their episodes. I only get six weeks at a time per episode. So I was both blown away by the artistry and also incredibly jealous of like the flexible creativity everyone showed. I would check out Arcane. It's an animated series inspired by the League of Legends videogame, and it's on Netflix now.

[Brandon] They cheated though. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] When you have League of Legends money, which Riot did, and they just said, "We're going to make our own show, and you're going to publish it." People are just like, "Okay. We don't have to pay any money for it. Do what you want." So they just… They spent through the roof, and just made the cool thing that they wanted to make, because they wanted to make a cool thing. It's off a budget that no one would ever pay for that.

[Meg] Yes.

[Brandon] Except for the people who are like, "We don't have to care. We have League of Legends money."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, it shows. It's… The music in that show, and just how they integrate the music original songs by big bands and thing. It's just really cool.

[Meg] [Provo loco], Imagine Dragons.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Now, kind of germane to our discussion, usually when someone roles in with a ton of money and says I'm going to make whatever I want to make and screw you all, it often turns into a very self-indulgent kind of piece of nonsense. It didn't in this case because they were willing to listen to each other. They didn't have to listen to Netflix, but they listened to each other and said, "Okay. Let's tone down these things. Let's make sure that everything lands as perfectly as possible."

[Brandon] Yeah. That's what made it work. Right? Like, League of Legends is… Has the advantage that it's not one person rolling in with a bunch of money, thinking they know how to tell a story and then not doing it. It's a videogame company, which is another big collaborative environment where everyone knows and understands they need to collaborate, deciding to make something together and therefore being willing to collaborate to make it good.

[Dan] Yeah. So, Meg, let's ask then, what are some of the pitfalls of collaboration? How can it go wrong, and how can we avoid those things going wrong?

[Meg] It's very easy to disagree over creative thing. Because all creativity starts internally, and it's very hard to make it something external from yourself. I think the biggest pitfall is… I don't want to say infighting, because that sounds way more dramatic than it is. But...

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Squabbling.

[Meg] Yeah. Taking a creative disagreement and making it feel personal. Sometimes you just have to take one or two steps back from what you're making. It's almost like you have to shut the feelings… Turn down the volume on the feelings part of your brain in order to talk things through with someone. I don't think great art comes from argument. Great art can become an argument. But if you're not enjoying your collaborative process, you will forever look back on the thing you made with the same negative feelings that were stewing while you created it.

[Dan] Brandon, do you have any collaborative pitfalls?

[Brandon] I mean, that's a really…

[Dan] Juicy stories about when you and I went at each other?

[Brandon] Good one. Well, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We don't, actually.

[Brandon] [garbled] The first thing I had to do in order to collaborate effectively was I had to let go. Right? The first of these I did was The Original, which I pitched earlier. This was an interesting experience for me because I had had the story in my head for years. I had been planning to write it, I had an outline, and I just could not find the time, couldn't justify it. For whatever reason, it was never the right project to do. Then I thought of this, and then there was a moment that I'm like, "But if I do that, I don't get to write it." That actually is… It's… Painful is the wrong term, but there is something there where it's like giving the other person permission to let it be theirs, too. This is a different kind of collaboration, because I have a thing and I'm giving it to someone else. But I think this is a really important thing. If… Our mutual friend, Kevin J. Anderson, once tells the story of collaborating… I'll leave out the other collaborator. But Kevin was going to write with another author. He wrote with this author, and he came up with something really cool, and he gave it to the other author. The other author's like, "Nope." Put it aside and wrote it again from scratch. Kevin's like, "Why did you bring on a collaborator if you're just going to do this?" The other author's like, "I realized that I just can't let go. I know how this story's supposed to go in my head. You can't do it because it's not in your head. I just have to do it my way." So you have to be excited by the prospect of what the other person's going to bring, not expect the other person to do the things the way that you exactly would do them.

[Dan] Exactly. I would add to that, that clear definitions of responsibility or domain have also helped a lot. If you know that it is one person's job to do the outline, and a different person's job to do the first draft, or however it is that you divide things up… The way that Brandon and I are like, "Well, you are going to do this ending, and you're going to do this other part." Then we know that we're less likely to step on each other's toes.

[Meg] It's very enamoring to think of the idea of a solo, solitary creator that's an absolute genius. Everyone else around them is… If we're talking about filmmaking, that you have a director who's just head and shoulders above everyone else, and everyone on the team just bows to their will. There's no way that a single person can create every aspect of a movie themselves. Even if they have a say in everything that goes on, there's no way they can fabricate all the costumes, there's no way they can location scout all of the places. So the idea of a genius solo creator on a collaborative project is a myth. Because they're not a creator, they're a dictator.

[Dan] Exactly. That is a great note to end on. Meg, what homework can you give to our listeners?

[Meg] Listen, you're going to have to find a buddy.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] So, your homework is to find one of your friends and pull up an old idea that maybe you haven't been able to get off the ground, or the nugget of a new idea you're not sure which direction to take it. It's to sit down with them and talk it over. Figure out with them what the next step on your story is going to be.

[Dan] There you go. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/20/17-8-the-alchemy-of-creativity/

Key Points: The Alchemy of Creativity, aka how do you translate from one medium to another and keep the original spark. How do you turn the movie in your head into compelling prose? How do you take a script you are handed and turn it into comics or storyboards? Movie in your head people, remember that prose needs room to breathe. Pay attention to the difference between ideas and execution. Sometimes you need to write down what the movie in your head shows you. How do you transform ideas into thing and keep the excitement? Rough draft! Use 10-year-old boy watches a movie outlining! Write the part that excites you. Dessert first writing! That's one way to capture the lightning in a bottle. Sometimes drafting is the slog, and revisions are where you put the lightning back in. Sometimes you may need to change the POV or tense to make something work. I.e., find the right framework so you can execute it. Make sure your bottle is shaped right to catch the lightning.

[Season 17, Episode 8]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Alchemy of Creativity.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[Howard] The Alchemy of Creativity. How do you translate things from one medium to another and keep the original spark? Meg, you pitched this to us. How do we do that? What are we even talking about? I'm confused.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Okay. So this isn't me saying, "How do you turn a book into a movie?" Because I'm sure we could talk circles around that for hours. But on a smaller scale, how do you turn the movie in your head into compelling prose? Or, how do you take a script you're handed and turn it into something like comics or storyboards? What are some of the things you have to personally consider when you're going from one form of a story into another?

[Kaela] Okay. So I am a very movie in my head person, which I think most people have… Recognize when they read Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls, because it's a very visual book. Now, one of the challenges that this gives me is that sometimes I get… What's the word? Micromanage-y about everything that's happening. Because in prose there needs to be room to breathe. You can just say someone crossed the room, you don't have to say exactly how. You try to deliver the exact experience that you're seeing in your head, it will overwhelm people and it will ruin the delivery. Because I'm like I want to tell you every little twitch of their facial expression, because I see it so clearly in my head. But doing that robs the reader of the opportunity both to see it in their own way and it over crowds… Like… It completely over crowds the delivery. So that's something I really have to watch. I have to pull myself back.

[Sandra] That's fascinating to me, because I do not have a movie in my head.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] I have a feel of the scene or an emotion of the character. So… Then there's also the sound of the words in the feel of the words in my head. So it's all about the words and the feel and the interaction of those things for me. So, right there, we've got a difference in alchemy and approaches which I love hearing about. Because until you said that, people talk about having movies in their head or how they read a book and see it in their heads, and I just don't. I don't see things. I don't visualize. But I feel it. I feel whether the words feel right, whether the character's emotion is correct on the page or whether my theme is being expressed.

[Megan] So you have to translate this more spacious emotion into words. How do you go about doing that?

[Sandra] This is where I wish I'd thought that through before…

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled One of my?] Favorite things about Writing Excuses is having an epiphany in front of the microphone and then not being able to follow up on it, because it's still an epiphany. I can't take this apart yet. Let me say this. Another way to articulate what we are talking about here is the difference between ideas and execution. It doesn't matter where I get my ideas. I'm full of ideas. I never run out of ideas. The movie in my head is always running and it has a soundtrack and it has a rumble track and it is always there. How do I execute on that huge library of interconnected and unrelated and sloppy information in order to create a thing that delivers an experience that some part of me will look at and say, "Ah, yes. That is the experience of that thing as extracted from the brain… That is the experience we meant to come across." That is where… What's the expression… That's why they pay me the big bucks.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't actually pay me the big bucks, but having a career as a creative lies not in having good ideas, but being able to do what Meg has called alchemy, [garbled] execution.

[Sandra] Yeah, that's… This is one of those places where you have to learn your own creative process. I really love that we have already two competing processes that are… Not competing but different to compare. Because I can't… My process is going to have to look different than Kaela's process is, because we're starting from different places and our brains just work differently. If I spend a lot of my craft learning time trying to see a movie in my head so that I can then follow Kaela's process, that is wasted effort. If I… I don't need to see a movie in my head, I can move with feelings and emotions.

[Megan] So, for work, I generally have to translate other people's words to visuals. I'm a storyboard artist for animation, which means that every six weeks somebody hands me a script and says, "Turn this into a movie." So I actually have a couple extra steps than most of my coworkers, because I read the script, watch a movie in my head, and I'll take out a pen or a pencil and a mark on the script itself where I'm imagining the camera is cutting. Then I have to write up detailed list of my shots. Like, okay, medium camera up close, foreground is this, background is this. Wide camera, these characters doing this. I'll pinpoint like emotional moments, and I'll star them, all this stuff. I have some friends who can read a script and instantly just board it finalize. They can just go immediately from one to the other. But it's, like, personally, I have to translate it into two or three different creative languages before I can get to my final set up, because it is a, for me, a process of turning a script into storyboards.

[Sandra] Yeah. On Twitter, just recently, I was reading a thread from Ursula Vernon talking about how she writes and how her writing process can't actually speed up anymore because she can't sleep often enough. Because she will, like, as she's falling asleep, the characters talk in her head and the story progresses. Then when she gets up in the morning, she just writes down the thing that her brain did while she was falling asleep. So there's no way for her to write any faster, because she can only sleep so much. That's fascinating to me because Howard does the same thing. He will fall asleep with character dialogue and things going in his head. I can't do that. I have to shut my brain off and turn off the stories in order to be able to fall asleep. Because if I let the stories run in my head, they will keep me awake. For… Hours! And hours, and hours. Then I will have anxiety and I will have to get up and write down the thing because I'm afraid I will lose it while I sleep.

[Howard] See, my method is more, look, characters, if you guys aren't going to tell me a nice story at bedtime, I'm just going to have anxiety instead because I'm going to spin on real stuff, and that's boring. So… Have some fun.

[Yeah. See, this is…]

[Howard] My brain is your playground. Go! Don't break anything.

[Sandra] This is actually a skill I would like to learn. You know what I was talking about… I don't need to see a mov… I don't need to learn how to see a movie in my head. But that one I would actually like to learn, because it sounds like a nicer way to fall asleep than me with my wrestling thoughts every night. So… Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Emptying the head is hard.

[Emptying is hard]

[Megan] So you've thought up a great moment for your story and you can feel the emotions all right, and you're so excited to do it. How do you transform ideas into thing while keeping what made you excited about it in the first place?

[Sandra] This is where rough draft is my friend. Just… Or… Oh, I know. Howard has this outlining method he calls 10-year-old boy watches the movie. Like, he literally writes down the idea as if a 10-year-old has seen this movie and is telling you about it. Okay, so then they were in a car chase, and then the train comes sideways out of nowhere. And then there's a helicopter… Oh, by the way, there was a helicopter way back in… Like, literally back and fill as we're telling the story. Just dump it. Then you can go clean it up. So there's this let the excitement just blah onto the page, and then you can engage your more critical brain at a later stage. Seems like one of the ways that people do that.

[Howard] We need to take a break for a thing of the week.

[Yes]

[Megan] Right. Thing of the week, this week, is a YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting. It is a series of video essays dissecting how different creatives bring their own vision to the big screen. Two of the videos I'd especially love to recommend is how Jackie Chan does comedy and how Edgar Wright edits for jokes. I don't think those are the actual titles of the episodes. Ah. Edgar Wright: How to Do Visual Comedy and Jackie Chan: How to Do Action Comedy. There you go. These are my two favs.

[Awesome]

[Howard] Cool. I haven't seen either of those, but they have comedy in them, so…

[Megan] You need to.

[Howard] It's possible they will be right up my alley.

[Kaela] I love Jackie Chan, so I know what I'm doing…

[Sandra] Yes. [Garbled I've got] plans for after we're done recording.

[Howard] So. But let's come back to those tools. You've got something you're excited about. What do you do to capture that excitement, that energy, that elemental spark in the medium in which you execute?

[Kaela] One thing I do is I just let myself go write that one. Like, I know I used to try and pull myself back because I was like, "Oh, I have this perfect scene idea in my head. I can feel it. I can see it. I live it." Then I was like, "Oh, but I'm not there in the story yet, I can't write it yet."

[Howard] Write the homework first.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I just let myself have dessert first. That's probably the best way of putting it. Dessert first writing. Where when I love it and I'm excited and I can feel it, I just dive in and I just full on draft it. Drafting is my favorite part of the writing process, anyway. So I'll just let myself go ham. I don't worry if I'm like, yes, I used three paragraphs to write something that should probably be one. Because I'll do that later. That's what revisions are for. I'll do that throughout the book. I jump around, and I go back and forth and up and down in order to get to all of those dessert places. Whenever I feel the excitement for it. It's all about the excitement, it's like… So I've captured that lightning in a bottle feeling.

[Howard] Meanwhile, the guy who's putting green vegetables on the buffet is like, "What?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "What! You gotta eat your greens."

[Kaela] I'm sitting down with seven different cakes. Hello!

[Howard] You've plowed through 11 bowls of pudding.

[Laughter]

[As many as four kids. That's terrible.]

[Laughter]

[Sandra] This is another interesting place where Kaela and I apparently are different, where… Because most of my aha moments, most of my lightning in a bottle moments, are actually in revisions. Drafting is kind of a slog for me. It is in the revisions that I catch the lightning and put it back. Like, I drafted, and all of the beauty leaked out in my drafting. Now it is just flat on the page. So in my revision, I go catch the lightning and put it back in. Howard and I used to, early on in the comic, I remember so many conversations with Howard where he would bring me comics and say, "Okay. I think this was funny when I wrote it, but now it is all drawn and I think the funny has leaked out." It's this thing that happens when we become overly familiar with the scene, we lose touch with the thing that is actually still there. We just have said the words so often it makes no sense to us anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] That is me and revisions.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Yeah. So I'm happy that for me, putting the lightning back in is a thing that happens for me in revisions, because it makes the revision process exciting and interesting. But… Again, different people, different approaches.

[Whoa!]

[Megan] And they all work.

[Sandra] They do. That's…

[Howard] Any other tools? Any other concrete bits? Crunchy stuff?

[Sandra] I'm trying to think… We were talking about influences in a prior episode and talking about going back to the well, going back to remember the thing when you feel like you have lost the track or lost the thread, stepping back and describing your thing to somebody new. Saying what is the thing, what was it that excited me about this story. And seeing that…

[Howard] Yeah, that was part of the process for my story An Honest Death in Shadows Beneath. Shadows Beneath is a compilation from Brandon and Mary Robinette and Dan and I of things that we workshop on the podcast several years ago. My story, there was this bit that really excited me and every time I sat down to write the story, that bit kept leaking out and I realized that the bit was only working if I told it in a different tense. If I changed the way, just the POV, and the narrative unfolded. I wanted to shoehorn it into the third person limited POV and it just didn't work until I pulled it forward into a more immediate tense. It's which is weird, but that was the way I'd originally, I guess, heard the idea in my head, and it wasn't until I came back to that that the story flowed cleanly.

[Kaela] That's a really good point about finding the right framework as well. It's not always just about executing something, but sometimes it's finding the right framework so that the execute… So that you can execute it at all. Like, there… Like Cece. I wrote two different books with Cece. Cece's idea of souls being on the outside of your body and how that would change your world. I wrote two different books about that, and it just didn't work for some reason. I was like, "Why? Why isn't it working?" But then I said it in a completely different place, I gave the main character really specific motivation of trying to save her sister. Then I decided, yeah, I'm going to do a Shonen anime tournament. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make this like a battle to the death Pokémon style, like somewhere between Pokémon and the Shonen battle. That actually created so many more… And first person instead of third person. Like, all of those things amalgamizing together into one thing ended up being the framework where that kind of a story could shine. Because it put into question… The stuff that we joke about with Pokémon is that like legal? You're making animals fight against each other? But in this world, it's criaturas and their people, which is what I wanted to explore about, like, how would it affect other people's souls, like, on an emotional theme level. That was the thing I was most interested in exploring. I didn't have a world previously or an emotionally intimate enough voice because it was third person. First person really brought that out, to give that the justice that I wanted to. The thing that made me want to write it.

[Sandra] Yep. If you want to catch lightning in a bottle, the bottle needs to be shaped right to catch the lightning.

[Kaela] Yay.

[Sandra] So if you can go back and remember what your lightning was, what the spark was that drew you to this story or this character or this location, and figure out, okay, what else do I need to change around the thing so that it can live here without being squelched.

[Howard] I'm now picturing 20,000 Writing Excuses listeners all out on assorted hilltops in thunderstorms…

[Laughter]

[Howard] With huge arrays of bottles holding them up saying, "This one's round, please?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "No? Here's a square one. Please?"

[Sandra] All we need is Robert De Niro as the pirate captain on an airship to go catch the lightning.

[Howard] Oh, my.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Sorry, guys.

[Howard] All right. That might be a good mental picture to wrap up on. Because his portrayal of that lightning pirate in Stardust brought me such joy.

[Sandra] Oh, so much joy.

[Howard] Such joy. Lightning in a bottle indeed.

[Howard] Okay. Do we have homework this week?

[Megan] We do have homework and it's practicing turning an idea from one form into another. This week, you're going to choose a theme from a movie you love and write it up in a novelization style.

[Howard] That is much better advice than standing on a hilltop during a thunderstorm with a collection of glassware around you.

[Safer]

[Howard] So… Fair listeners, thank you so much for joining us. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.24: Worldbuilding for Games

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/13/16-24-worldbuilding-for-games/

Key points: Your number one goal is to inspire curiosity, to create a place that people want to come back to, to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. You're giving them a springboard to tell their own stories. Use the power of allusion, drop interesting details in without fully explaining them. Ask more questions than you answer. Think about adventure hooks, details or questions that people can use to tell their own stories. Work on narrative resonance, build motifs and themes into every component of the game. Ask questions, drop in allusions, adventure hooks, and random details. Then explain and expand later, justifying and exploring those details. Fill the well, then grab one of those old ideas and queue it up. Start by inverting things or pairing things that do not go together, then follow the logical causal chains. Why, how, and with what effect. Focus on the worldbuilding that your players will interact with. Watch out for your personal biases and norms. Make sure all kinds of people can say, "They're like me."

[Season 16, Episode 24]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Worldbuilding for Games.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are so excited to be talking about worldbuilding. This is something that we all do in our normal kind of fiction novel short story writing. But how is it different for games? Cass? What do we need to know?

[Cassandra] It's actually very similar, I think, in that your number one goal with worldbuilding and games, like in novels and prose, is to inspire curiosity. You want to create a place that people want to keep coming back to. Not necessarily to stay, because some of these places can be absolutely terrible. But to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. I think this is especially true for tabletop role-playing games, isn't it, James?

[James] Yeah. Because in tabletop, you're often giving people the tools to tell stories, rather than telling them the stories. So the setting that you give them in something like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or whatever is really a springboard for people to tell their own stories. One of the things I love, as a writer for games like that, is I'll have somebody come up to me at a convention and be like, "Oh, that lost city you wrote about. We've been playing a game there for a year. Let me tell you all about it." They'll get to the end of their story, and I'm thinking, "I wrote two sentences about that city."

[Laughter]

[James] They put all that detail in, it was them imagining it, and they think I'm a genius because they created all this stuff. So you're really getting the audience to do your work for you. Which is why one of my favorite things when doing game design is what I think of as the power of allusion with an a. Where I will, just like drop interesting sounding details in there and not fully explain them. Let them, let the audience sort of wonder about it or decide for themselves what that could be. That's fodder for them to tell their own stories. The same way as in like a videogame maybe you show some cool art off the edge of the map in the background.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is actually very similar to the way puppetry works. Hey, we've gotten six episodes in without me bringing up puppetry until now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But what you want to do is you want to create certain specific aspects of the character and then trust that the audience is going to fill in the rest. Like, we've all seen Miss Piggy bat her eyes at Kermit the frog, and she does not have working eyelashes. You, the viewer, puts that into your head… In… You build that mechanic from the world.

[Cassandra] Fantastic.

[Howard] The humor classes that I teach, I use a theater principle called noises off. Which is that the pie fight you imagine is way more interesting than the pie fight I can draw. James, what you said here about allusion, dropping a reference for something and getting you, the player, you the reader, to imagine whatever that was, whatever it is, that's incredibly useful because I didn't have to draw it. I didn't have to build it. You did all the heavy lifting.

[Cassandra] I think that one really good example of that, if you want something to research, is the Bloodborne game from FromSoftware. One of the things that I remember most distinctly about it was there was this whole journey to a boss. You're kind of going up this completely red river, there are just mountains of corpses everywhere, there's no explanation, there's no one giving you exposition. At one point, you see a gate. This guy, who has been completely skinned, he's just red muscle and tissue, he's holding onto the bars of that gate and just very gently banging his head against the door. Again, there's no explanation and it never comes up again in the rest of the game. But I remember just standing there, like, "Oh, my God. What happened here?" My brain just went wild on that.

[Dan] I love that. I do want to give the counterpoint that as absolutely correct is all of this is, sometimes you do need to provide a lot of those details and fill in a lot of that allusion, which is kind of the big main job of worldbuilding.

[James] But, actually, I would… We're going to turn this into a debate show.

[Chuckles]

[James] I think that that's true, but you always need to ask more questions than you answer. You always want to make sure that if you give somebody the answer to a big mystery, you better make sure that you asked another one. Because the answers are rarely as satisfying as the questions, in terms of keeping somebody up at night thinking about stuff. Especially in tabletop. Which is why, when I'm writing for a tabletop book, I'm always thinking about adventure hooks. I'm trying to think, every paragraph, I want to be putting in a detail or a question that could lead a game master to go, "Oh. I can write a campaign about that." I'm trying to give people tools that they can use to tell their own stories. So, if you give somebody an inn, you can have whatever details you want, but make sure that there's something there they can work with. Because that's what they're paying you for. So even if all you need for your story is an ordinary basic tavern, make the tavern keeper have a criminal past so that at a moment, she's worried her old colleagues could find her and kick in the door. That's dropping something in that the game master doesn't have to use, but they could use to start a game.

[Dan] Yeah. Absolutely, and I'm… I didn't mean to imply that we shouldn't be doing that. Phrasing it the way you did, ask more questions than you answer, I think, is a really good way to put it. But, as a game master, when I come to a supplement, if it's putting all the work on me, well, then, I didn't need to buy that supplement, because I'm the one doing all the work anyway.

[James] Right.

[Dan] So, I really like it when a game offers me enough tools to work with, rather than being so free-form that there's nothing there.

[Cassandra] I think that's one thing that is possibly, like, definitely necessary on the topic of worldbuilding. You can go as light as you want, you can be detailed, depending on the property, but narrative resonance, I feel, is vital. You should build your motifs and your themes into everything you do, including the mechanics themselves, like, every component of the game should carry its weight, doing double duty where possible. I think the Persona series is a really good example of that. They have something called the Social Links mechanics, which makes use of the tarot arcana and builds on the idea that each of the cards has different meanings. Each of these cards are associated with an NPC. You can be friends or romance or whatever. They're fascinating, because mechanically, the Social Links are just a way of leveling up the personas that you get in the game. Even if you're not necessarily into the idea of doing the side quests, you're going to move towards them. Because you want to discover more, because you want to interrogate your understanding. There is this one character that I think of that is a really good example of this. Kanji Tatsumi in the Persona 4 game. His arcana is the Emperor. He begins as this really stereotypically rude, thuggish guy who yells at everything, who is very contrary. But he's also hiding the fact that he's an absolute sweetheart on the inside, and he is trying to compensate for the knowledge that he isn't a typical guy's guy by over exaggerating those traits. His journey becomes confronting his fears. That kind of ties to the Emperor, that sense of patriarchy and control. What happens when you have too much of it holding onto you? Even though vaguely wandering through this game, you know it's related to terror. You know it's related to the Emperor. So you sort of know what you should be doing. That is because of narrative resonance.

[James] We should pause there for the game of the week, which is Dan with the Dune RPG.

[Dan] Yeah. Dune is my favorite book of all time. It just got a brand-new RPG. By the time this heirs, it will be just a month old, maybe. It's from Modiphius, it uses their 2D20 system, which is the same basic game system that we use on Typecast for Star Trek: Horizon. But what they've done here that ties into the world building is Dune is a… Has a really wide range of power sets. You've got very weak, physically weak, characters set up against characters with incredible magic powers versus characters who have incredible technology, who can see the future and do all these things. How could you possibly balance all of that worldbuilding together so the game is still fun? What they've done is a really brilliant mechanic where your motivations and your drives as a person directly affect how good you are at doing something. So it's less about the powers that you have and more about why you're doing the things that you're doing. It's a really clever twist on the system and they do a really good job with it. So, the Dune RPG from Modiphius.

[James] All right. So with all these things we've been talking about, with dropping… Asking questions, dropping in allusions, and adventure hooks and stuff. This is something that gives game masters something to build on. But it also gives you job security. If you can get the audience excited about something, then you can come back later and continue to write more about it. This explanation and expansion way of working, forcing myself to justify and explore the random details that I dropped before, is something that I really enjoy. A lot of my best work has come out of… I drop a couple of lines… Early on in my career, I wrote about a city called Kaer Maga, and just like through in a line about, like, "Oh, yeah, and it's full of worm folk and bloat majors and sweet talkers who sew their own lips shut so that… Because they're not worthy of speaking the name of God." Like, I just sort of dropped these details in, and a bunch of fans went, "Wait! Whoa! What? Like, I want to know more about that." That led to setting books and adventures and novels. That's really my favorite way to work, is to just kind of throw out random ideas and test the waters. But I want to know, how do you all come up with interesting setting ideas? Setting details, specifically.

[Howard] At this point, I stopped coming up with them. I have… The well is too deep. I just reach in and grab something that I thought of 15 years ago and queue it up. I don't have time for new ideas. I'm going to die before 90% of these hit the page. Wasting time thinking of new ones is awful.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that helpful piece of advice…

[Explosive laughter]

[James] Kill Howard and take his ideas.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Some of the things that I'll do is inverting things or pairing things that are unexpected. So a lot of times this'll be… Like, I'll take a single starting point… Like milliner assassins was something that we used in an earlier season. I'm like, "These two words do not go together." Then chasing the logical causal chains out from that point. So I think about like, why do we have milliner assassins? How? So, for me, it's why, how, and with what effect, and chasing these in the logical. The how is kind of how it exists in that moment, and the with what effect are the effects to the future and kind of to the sides. So that's one of the ways that I will come up with interesting worldbuilding details. A lot of times, I mean, it really is that I will just fart words onto a page and be like, "Well, that looks interesting," and then carry on.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[James] I love that.

[Howard] I love the causal chain idea. For Planet Mercenary, one of the worlds has too many metals in it, and I conjured up genetically engineered pigs whose metabolisms push the metals out of the meat so they're actually safe to make bacon from. When we came up with an adventure in which someone is stealing the pigs, my daughter asked me, "Where do they push the metal?" I said, "Well, probably all the way out to the edges of their skin." She said, "So they glitter?" I realized, "Oh, my gosh. Not only do they glitter, they shed glitter." If you've stolen the pigs, you are now trying to steal animals that shed glitter everywhere.

[Laughter]

[Why would you steal that?]

[Howard] It is now a game mechanic, and it grows out of the idea of causality. You had a cool idea. Make that idea causal for something interesting.

[Cassandra] I feel like causality is definitely a very good way of developing worlds. All of this sounds very much like how I do it. I tend to start with the idea of a primary food source in a world, and build from there. Like, why is it this way, is it a migratory let's say protein? If so, do people… Are people largely nomadic? Do people settle down? What kind of world would have flying pigs wandering around? What kind of cities would come through? What kind of economies? How do you build a luxury item of it? What would pair with bacon on an alien landscape? Then I start building the flora and fauna and cultures just around that single idea to begin with. I also really like food. I don't know if that's obvious.

[Laughter]

[James] I also love approaching things from that evolutionary standpoint, of always asking yourself why things are the way they are. Also, what are the evolutionary pressures, and where are they pushing things? I think it's important when you're doing all of this stuff, like, it can be very big picture. But focus on the worldbuilding your players will actually interact with. Also, it's okay to do it patchwork. It's actually, in some ways, better. You don't have to just sit down and write the whole setting in a day. If you try to, you're probably going to end up spreading your ideas a little too thin. So by zooming in and saying, well, I'm going to develop the city today, then, next week, I'm going to develop this nation over here that's different, you'll have a different flavor just because you're different from day to day. You've taken in different stuff.

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say the same thing about focusing on the worldbuilding aspects that players will interact with. I had to recently, for a science-fiction RPG that I was writing a scenario for, they really, for some reason, wanted it to have a diner. It's kind of a noir style adventure, and there like, "Well, we need to meet the cop in a diner." So, if I was going to put a diner into this science-fiction world, I wanted to make sure that it had an appropriate science-fictional sense of wonder to it, despite just being a diner. This particular world had brain… Everyone has a computer in their brain, and you can download memories. So I thought, well, obviously what that means then is the chef can make absolutely anything. Because he's going to just be able to download your grandma's recipe and then reproduce it for you because he can do the memories that way. Which then spun out, well, he needs access to an incredible amount of ingredients if he can make anything that a customer asks for. That started creating all these things. Then we had to think, well, how are the players going to interact with this? Not just they can get their favorite food, but are they going to be able to mess with the little drones that can deliver these ingredients? Are they going to be able to request specific different things? Keeping the players at the forefront of the worldbuilding changed how that whole scene played out.

[Cassandra] I think we're slowly running… Well, we're very quickly running out of time.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] One thing I want to throw in there is when we're building worlds, it's important, I think, to consider our own personal biases. A very large budget game that I will not name because I do not want its fans to go after me is absolutely brilliant it is a wonderful thing. Great quests. It's also been rightly lambasted for only having white people, an entirely white cast. The developers pushed back, going, like, "Well, this is our country. The ethnic majority is X." Everyone else is like, "No. Historically speaking, this is not true." I understand everyone's arguments here, weirdly enough. If you do not think about things, you just expect your norm to be other people's norm, that can be incredibly alienating. So, when you're worldbuilding, think about your own privileges and biases, and how it will interact with your players' needs.

[Mary Robinette] This is true for prose as well. You've heard us talk about this.

[Howard] I've shared this before on Writing Excuses. My son, adult son, he's autistic. We were watching Elementary and Sherlock is interacting with an autistic woman. My son, who rarely is interested in what I'm watching, stood behind the couch and watched that and said, "They're both like me." I almost wept. Because that is the only time I've heard him say that. Everything that we build… Everything that we build can easily be built to have room for people to have that experience. Where they can look at a character, an NPC, or whatever, and say, "They're like me."

[James] I don't think were going to get a more powerful point to go out on. So we should probably wrap it there.

[James] Your homework for this week is to take a story or a game that you've written and drop in several casual allusions to names that you've just made up. So, places, people, objects. Don't try to figure out what they are. Just make the names as cool sounding as you can. So you throw in soultrees, and the Babbling Throne, Kobishar the Unmoored. Just write those in there. Then come back a week later and write a page of background on each of those names to sort of justify what it is and explain why it makes sense.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds great. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/19/15-29-barbie-pre-writing-with-janci-patterson-and-megan-walker/

Key points: Barbie Pre-Writing? Start with a rough outline, pick dolls for the characters, and role-play the story, beginning to end with dolls. Role-play, then take notes, then write. This really helps with characters, it gets you immersed in their heads. You'll get new scenes, characters will reveal things, and it's more natural and suits our characters. The dolls, or miniatures, act as a focal point for the characters. As for collaboration, we come up with ideas together, we text a lot, we use a notes file in OneNote, and we build a rough outline. Then we game it out, both the plotted scenes, and others that appear organically. Then we take notes, and decide what we really need to include, and who's going to write what. One big advantage to collaborative writing and role-play gaming is the synergy, the way it sparks the imagination.

[Transcriptionist Note: I have probably confused Janci and Megan at some points. My apologies for any mistakes.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 29.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have two special guest stars, Janci Patterson and Megan Walker.

[Megan] Hi.

[Janci] I am so excited we got to make Brandon say Barbie Pre-Writing.

[Megan] Yeah. This was a big moment in our lives.

[Brandon] Janci is a long-time friend of the podcast, and a long-time friend and colleague of ours. We are glad to have you back, and Megan, your first time.

[Megan] Yes, I am.

[Brandon] I want to start off by saying, "What the heck?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Dan told me the title of this, and said, "We're just going to call it this." What?

[Janci] So, we, for pre-writing… We are co-writers. We write romance and epic fantasy together. With our epic fantasy, we have a third co-writer, our friend Warren. Before we write the book, but after we have a rough idea of what the books are going to be about and who the characters are, we have entire rooms full of Barbie dioramas and we pick out dolls for the characters and then we role-play through the entire story, beginning to end, with the dolls. Sometimes, if it doesn't go the way we want, we do it again.

[Megan] And it's super fun.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do you film this?

[No]

[Janci] We don't want to watch or listen to ourselves. No.

[Brandon] Do you take notes? How do you…

[Janci] Afterwards, usually. Not after each individual scene, because we are so into the story, we just kind of keep going, keep going. But usually it… Like, either later that night, or like days later, we'll take notes of the main things we remember from the scene, how the flow of it went. That also keeps us from writing down each and every little individual thing that we said, because not all of that's going to be good in a book. You know…

[Megan] It's all improv, right.

[Janci] Sometimes a scene will go five hours, because we love it. That's going to be 10 pages in the book. So we don't need everything that we said. So, mostly, between the two of us, what we can remember…

[Megan] What we remember as being exceptionally good from that scene.

[Howard] I am remembering being a big brother, and what a horrible person I was, and how fortunate we all are that none of this was happening where I was nearby, because…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Brandon] I have so many questions. This is really cool.

[Janci] Awesome. That's what we're here for.

[Dan] This is super cool.

[Brandon] This is the best. So, what do you find this does for you? Like, what do you get? What is the… How is it different to pre-write this way?

[Janci] The thing that we get most is the characters. Because we… Essentially, we're sitting there, and… People who don't role-play, what it is is we sit there and one of us is one of the characters and one of us is the other. Megan takes all of the girls, I take all the guys, we write a lot of romance, so usually it's… Most of what we're doing. We sit there, and we set up the scenes, and then I will talk as if I am my character and she will talk as if she's her character, and we go and we just have a conversation. It gets you so deeply immersed in the character's head, because for a while, you are that person. We find all sorts of reactions that we wouldn't have necessarily thought of, like, intellectually, that are just a basic gut instinct.

[Megan] Yeah, like, leads to new scenes that, like, we'll do a scene, and then will realize, like, it went totally different than we anticipated it going, and, oh, no, now my character, she needs to go talk to her mom about this, where… Or she needs to go do this, and that wasn't something we anticipated. But when you're so firmly in the character's head, you know what they're wanting to do.

[Janci] It also gives us a lot of moments where it's like, "They just destroyed our entire plot, what are we going to do now?"

[Megan] That happens a lot.

[Janci] One of the things we hear a lot about our books is that we're so brave, that we let our characters just talk out things that would have been, in a normal romance novel, the whole conflict, and it's over in a couple of scenes. Then we have a different conflict. It's not because we're so brave, it's because our characters talked about…

[Megan] Our characters talked about, "What are we going to do now?"

[Janci] No, I want to tell him this thing that's supposed to be a secret.

[Howard] That's kind of what people are like when they're allowed to talk.

[Janci] Right. Right. Exactly. We find that's kind of what happens naturally, and yet, every time, we tend to have the tendency of plotting these things out, thinking that the characters will be able to hold this information back.

[Megan] Then they destroy our book.

[Janci] They destroy our book, almost every time.

[Megan] But we come up with a better one, because it's more natural and more like thorough…

[Janci] And suits our characters and…

[Howard] Okay. So I have to ask, could you do this without the dioramas? Could you do this without the dolls? Could you do this without either? I'm not asking because I think those are unnecessary. I want to know what those bring because that expands my business expense budget…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For Star Wars toys…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] By like a billion dollars.

[Janci] The dioramas and such add a lot to the budget. Yeah.

[Dan] One of the big things they bring is… I follow Janci on Facebook, because we've been friends forever. I love all the pictures. She's like, "We're plotting a new book. Here's some dude with a haircut and like…"

[Gasp]

[Dan] It's awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Janci] So, I've found that at least… I mean, the dioramas I feel like are the less necessary part of it. I mean, it's awesome to have it, and it adds a lot to a scene. But for me, I feel like… I personally have always felt like I needed the dolls to have almost this like focal point so it's slightly removed from me. I think it's potentially a self-consciousness thing, or potentially… I'm not sure exactly, but for some reason having the dolls… I use to actually do this with my friend Warren, the one who's working epic fantasy with us. We used to do this, when we were like teenagers, we would use miniatures from like D&D, that kind of thing. We didn't know how to play D&D, we didn't know anyone who play D&D, but we got the little miniatures and we essentially just played Barbies and created stories with them. But I've always just use something as like a focal point for this is my character.

[Brandon] This is so cool. It really is.

[Janci] It is so cool.

[Brandon] Let me ask you this. When you sit down to write, do you each write your… The character you are playing? Or do you not?

[Janci] Not necessarily.

[Megan] Not necessarily.

[Janci] We tend to divide it that way just because it's fun for us to write our own characters. But if it comes down to it and there's… We need to get the book done and there's stuff, one of us isn't going to be able to get to it, then we write each other's characters. That's no big deal.

[Megan] Yeah, we're able to do that.

[Brandon] Oh, okay.

[Megan] Because we also, one advantage too, you get to know the other person's characters as well...

[Janci] So well.

[Megan] When we talk about it so much in the scenes and everything.

[Janci] After the scenes, we'll sit down and be like, "This is what was going on in my character's head that they didn't say." So we both know all of the motivations that are happening, even if they didn't actually make it into the scene.

[Brandon] I've heard a lot of writers say that it's really handy to speak out loud your dialogue, or even get a table read, right, of a given scene, where everyone, you get several friends, you each take a character, you read them through. This goes even further than that.

[Janci] It does.

[Brandon] I can only imagine. I wish Mary Robinette were here, because…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Being a puppeteer, she would just love this idea, I'm sure.

[Howard] I actually have two questions. One of them is related to I wish Mary Robinette were here. That's that when you are holding the dolls and having them talk, are you moving the arms and posing them and…

[Janci] So, we mostly set them in the dioramas and let them be still. Then, if one of them is going to move, like, since we do a lot of romance, if one of them puts the arm around the other, we'll either say he does this, or we'll move the dolls and have them do that. But we don't, like, move them and articulate them.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Megan] Usually they just set there. Yeah.

[Howard] The second question com… Not completely unrelated. When you are writing, do you ever find yourself needing to go get the doll or look at the diorama as a mnemonic? Is there stuff that you don't remember until you went back and looked at…

[Dan] The visual aids.

[Janci] Not for me, usually. No, I think that… I think acting out the scenes actually, like, sticks them in my head better anyway, just as a visual thing, personally.

[Megan] When we say we take notes, sometimes it takes us an hour to take notes on a scene, because we're sitting there going, "Oh, and remember they said this. Oh, before that, she said that." Because it's so stuck in our heads.

[Janci] One thing that the dolls are really good for, though, is clothes. I'm personally terrible at describing clothes and books. But now I just describe what they were wearing.

[Laughter]

[Megan] You have all the outfits.

[Janci] It's amazing.

[Megan] So we have a vast wardrobe for them.

[Janci] Both in epic fantasy and contemporary. So…

[Brandon] Well, let's stop and talk about some of these books themselves for the books of the week. Tell us about some of the books you've done this with.

[Janci] Well, the first… I guess the one that… Contemporary romance series. The first one of that is called The Extra. This one is basically a girl, named Gabby, who lives in LA and her roommate is an actress on a soap opera set, and she ends up becoming, Gabby ends up becoming an extra on that soap opera set. Then, basically, the book is just… It's a fun rom com, basically. All the hijinks that take… That happened behind the scenes are just as crazy as the stuff that's on the soap opera itself. So that's a lot of fun. And a lot of fun to game out.

[Megan] You can get the first book for free on e-book retailers and the second book for free by joining our reader's list. So.

[Brandon] My wife has been consuming these voraciously.

[Yay!]

[Brandon] So she loves them.

[Oh, that makes me happy.]

[Howard] And those are by Janci Patterson, Megan Walker, and…

[Brandon] [garbled]

[No, just the two of us. Yeah.]

[Janci] So, the other series will be coming out next summer, so by the time this airs, they'll be coming out. They are under the pseudonym Cara Witter, since there's three of us. We're not putting three names on the book. But the first book is called Godfire. It's in epic fantasy about a girl whose father is a dictator, and she doesn't realize that he has used dark blood magic to make her. So she's not actually a person, she is his weapon. Those will also be available, the first book for free and then the second one for free with our reader's list everywhere.

[Brandon] Awesome. For those of our listeners who are interested in this, the business side of it, these two are very shrewd in the way they've been approaching this with, you hear, they are doing what, one book a month?

[Janci] In the first year.

[Brandon] For an entire year. You get the first one for free and the second one for the mailing list. It's just a really shrewd way to do the marketing, so… If you ever want to talk about marketing your books…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We don't have time on this podcast, but grab one of these two and chat with them.

[Brandon] I want to ask you right now about collaboration. Like, Janci, you used to write all your books by yourself. Then, I remember when you came to me and said, "I've discovered collaboration and I will never go back."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What… Tell me about your process, both of you, and why you like it so much?

[Megan] Oh, boy. Keep the faith.

[Janci] We start with the Barbies, so our process… I collaborate actually with several different people. All of those collaborations are awesome. The great thing about collaborations is you don't have to do all the sucky parts yourself. There's somebody else to bounce things off of and somebody else who's just as invested as you are, which is awesome. Our partnership, we pretty much all have our hands… Both have our hands in everything. We come up with the ideas together, we text… Our text chain is a million miles long, and we text like 100 times a day back and forth. I had an idea about this. I had an idea about that. Oh, that works with this. When we're smart, we move it into our notes file on OneNote that we can both see. When we're not, a year later we're like, "We had ideas." They're buried in our text chain. Then we get together and we talk through it, a rough outline.

[Megan] Then, usually after that point, we end up with… Once we have sort of the rough outline, again. Knowing that most likely our game is going to destroy it, and we're going to have to reconfigure things. We do end up like gaming out the scenes we have plotted, and then whatever scenes kind of come from, organically from, that. Then we take the notes and basically… Usually we go through the notes and kind of decide, like… We kind of turn off our gameplaying brains and turn on our writers brains and be like, "Okay, what aspects of this don't need to be in the book." Like, what…

[Janci] There are always great things that our gaming brain thought needed to be in the book, and sometimes we even put in a note, "This needs to go in the book." Then our outlining brains are like, "That needs to go in the book?"

[Megan] That was not good.

[Janci] No. So, yes. Then we do that. Then, we usually like split up the chapters that we're going to write, again, usually, by the characters that we are, but not always, depending on what other things we're working on.

[Brandon] So, the romances are mostly two viewpoint romances?

[Janci] Yeah. The first one isn't. But the ones thereafter have been. Yeah.

[Megan] It's not always split evenly, even in the book. So, sometimes one character has fewer chapters than the other.

[Brandon] Are these… I believe, where each book is a different character, set of characters, that are related tangentially to the first book?

[Janci] Right. We're actually doing both. Kind of a sequel for romance. We have… The first book is one character, the second book is her roommate. Then the third book is the main character's brother. But then we get to book 6… Somewhere around book 6, we go back to our main character. She has kind of a love story. She hasn't broken up with her boyfriend, they're together, but it's kind of a story about their relationship.

[Megan] Like… Yeah, what they're like now, a few years later, and what issues have come up in their relationship and stuff like that. So we go back and revisit some of the original characters and…

[Howard] But, by expanding the core POV cast, you've increased the range of business expense for Barbies.

[Laughter]

[Janci] That's always my goal. Get more Barbies.

[Howard] I'm sorry to keep coming back to that [garbled toys]

[Janci] Barbies, if you don't know, aren't cheap when they're collector Barbies.

[Dan] Yeah. But on this note, it's probably worth pointing out that there's a lot of ways to do this...

[Oh, yeah]

[Dan] Without the visual aids, or with different visual aids. A lot of authors use role-playing campaigns or games. There's actually a role-playing game called Microscope that is… It's not narrative, it's worldbuilding. You, as a role-playing group, come up with a world as part of playing the game. I talked to a handful of other authors that use that when they're starting a new series, and that helps do their worldbuilding for them. So, this kind of collaborative gaming process of outlining is pretty common. There's a lot of different flavors of it.

[Brandon] I actually know some people who are doing a triple-A videogame at one of the big studios that they have, part of their workday is a role-playing session in the world before they go to actually building it, because that's really expensive in video games, getting all the architecture done. They're role-playing it to find all of the problems with the worldbuilding…

[Mmmm]

[Brandon] That they think the players will eventually spot, and try to fix those before they sit down. They're doing it through a role-playing session.

[Howard] Because it's cheaper to play D&D than to work.

[Brandon] Yeah, it is.

[Laughter]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like…

[Dan] Unless you're the guy paying the checks.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like is a huge advantage to this, at least for me, because I've written books by myself before as well and had that experience, but there's just this synergy of not only writing collaboratively, I feel, but also in the gaming itself, that it just sparks the imagination. There someone else who I kind of like play off of, and it just, for me, it really helps.

[Janci] Especially with the comedy.

[Megan] Oh, the comedy. Yeah.

[Janci] With our… Even in our epic fantasy that is darker, we have some comedic elements, and when we… We know when we really have something when we do a scene and we're both in stitches and we can't finish the scene because we're laughing so hard, and then when we go to take the notes, we're remembering and we're laughing so hard…

[Megan] We start laughing.

[Janci] Again, and we stop taking the notes, and then when we outline it. We just find this so hilarious. Then we know that we've hit on something that's going to be really good.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Well, you now own what is probably the most distinctive title of a Writing Excuses episode ever.

[Yes!]

[Brandon] We are out of time. Do you guys have a writing prompt, maybe, you could give our audience?

[Janci] So, not that this counts as so much of a writing prompt, but this…

[Howard] Homework.

[Janci] Okay. It counts. But the suggestion is, if you're a writer, take a scene from your book or a scene you're wanting to write or something and get some toys and a friend and get like, Barbies or miniatures from a D&D or like your kid's old action figures. Your old He-Man action figures…

[Dan] My kid's? Can I just use my own?

[Janci] Whatever. You can use your own.

[Dan] Okay.

[Janci] Basically, find a friend who's willing to do this with you, and act out the scene.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] That is great.

[Dan] This is a great time to point out that Brandon and I are working on our second collaboration. We need to borrow Janci's Barbie collection at some point.

[Janci] You can come play in the Barbie room.

[Megan] Yeah, you're invited.

[Brandon] Thank you, audience, at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] Thank you, Janci and Megan, for being on the podcast. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go play with your Barbies.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/08/15-10-evaluating-ideas/

Key Points: How do you decide which ideas to keep and which to drop? One story cooking, others simmering with ingredients added as they come up. Know how the story ends! Interact with your ideas, explore, write them, and you develop the skill to evaluate them. Passion and excitement! What are you most excited about? It's a different skill, but you need to learn how to force yourself to write. Take the core of the idea and find something you are passionate about. Add your exciting ideas to the pot. Don't throw everything into one book. Find flavors that work together. Keep track of your ideas, write them down. When you're struggling with a story, when do you push through and when do you abandon it? Understand why you are struggling. Have the ending, or at least points that you are excited about writing, in mind. Try to make this chapter or this scene someone's favorite in the whole book. Force yourself to finish books. Make a checklist, what kind of problem is this? Avoid shiny new idea syndrome. Think about your goals. Finishing teaches you how to write.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Evaluating Ideas.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm out of ideas. Help?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Help?

[Brandon] So, we often talk on this podcast about how ideas are kind of cheap. But, let's shelve that. Like, we've covered that idea. That a lot of great… Writers generally can use any number of different ideas. Bad ideas make good books sometimes. So let's just shelve that. Let's actually talk about ideas, because I have had, once in a while, an idea that I was really attached to. I'm like, "You know what, I know ideas are cheap, but I want to write this one just because I want to write it." We have a lot of questions here, because we're doing questions from listeners this entire year, about how we evaluate our ideas and how do you figure out which ones to keep and which ones to drop?

[Victoria] So I am… I look human shaped to those of you sitting here, but I am actually a six burner stove. This is how my entire mind functions.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Six burners on the stove, only one of those at any given time on high heat with the project that I'm actually cooking with. The other five are all simmering on very low heat as I add ingredients to my ideas. So I actually have a very long cook time before I decide if an idea has legs. By the time it's time to assess what next goes on high heat, I know enough about the story to be able to tell whether it's worth pursuing. Now, for different people, these things are different, but for me, I don't pursue a story unless I know how it ends. I do this because one, I'm very prone to quitting and if I have an ending with my story, instead of looking out at the desert, I'm looking across a field and I know it's a finite amount of space. I also am convinced, to go back to the food metaphor, that the end of the story is the taste left in your mouth, and that we will retroactively reassess an entire book based on how strong or weak the ending is. I need my endings to be strong so that I don't lose hope and I want to work with them. So, that is one of the main ingredients that I have to have. When you add that to the fact that a lot of my ideas steep for anywhere from six months to three or four years, then I've never actually trunked a story once I've started it. Because once I've started it, I've known enough about it to know that it has the potential to be a book.

[Howard] As someone who, as of this recording, needs to lose at least 30 pounds…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The taste left in my mouth was the only thing that remained at the end of the meal… That would be heaven. With regard to evaluating ideas, I… You know that character in the police procedural whose skill set is they're really good at judging other people? You, dear listener, and me, we sometimes like to think that we're good judges of people. Or maybe that's a skill that we want. I have come to grips with the fact that I'm still not very good at it. There are people who I have made the right call on, but there are people who I haven't. Evaluating ideas is the same way. It's not going to happen overnight. You have to meet a lot of people and interact with them. You have to meet a lot of your ideas and interact with them. You have to explore them. You have to try to write them. Then, you develop this sense for, "Oh, this idea is a three book idea. This idea is a plot twist." Where… But both ideas could be expressed in seven words and look the same until you've worked at it a lot.

[Brandon] I work very similarly to Victoria with this whole burner thing. Whatever I'm writing on, I often can't say what the next thing is going to be, with the caveat that when deadlines are tight, it's going to be the one that I have a contract coming due on. But when I hit that point, and I try to build my schedule… A here is a free slot. You have six months you're going to be able to do anything. I can't often say which of the other five projects on the other burners it's going to be. I get there, and then I decide. While I'm working on my book, sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to do this thing next." Then it'll change to another one. If I had finished that book right then, we would have gotten a different novel next. Which can be, I know, frustrating for fans, because I'll tell them sometimes, here are the many things I'm planning to do next. I'm going to do one of these. Some of the ones that they really are waiting for just never come up because I'm not, when I'm trying to turn all the burners up, I look at them all and decide which one I'm most passionate about.

[Victoria] Well, there's a commonality coming into play here as well, which is the gut feeling. Which is, of course, very frustrating, because it is of course unquantifiable. It is the fact that we consume enough narrative to begin to feel in our own work when something is ready and when something is not. I just finished a book that I sat on for six years because, even though I had the pieces of it, I knew I wasn't ready, I wasn't a strong enough writer. That's a really hard conversation to have with yourself, because we get excited about ideas. So, I think having this six burner stove or a four burner stove or a two burner stove, giving yourself options, really helps you because you don't know where you're going to be at when you're ready to write that next book.

[Dan] The fact that, for all of us, what it eventually comes down to is passion and excitement, what are you most excited about? You will notice, nobody in talking about how they choose projects says, "Oh, this is what sells." Right? We always talk about don't chase the market. Don't chase the market! Like, there is not a market for any particular genre or style. What there's a market for is stuff that's awesome. You will be able to write better the idea that you just can't wait to start writing. You'll be able to write that better than anything else.

[Brandon] I will add the caveat there that when a contract is coming due, in a lot of ways, you also have to learn how to force yourself to write… Be passionate about something that you've committed to writing. That's a different skill.

[Howard] That's a different… Skill set.

[Dan] But you presumably committed to that because you were excited about it.

[Victoria] I was going to say, this is the thing. This is why it comes back to things we've talked about already, but it's why it's so important that you let passion and what you actually want to write and not what you think people want to read be a guiding force for your entire career, because that's the only way that you guarantee that when those deadlines come up, you want to write this thing. You're not writing something that you had no interest in writing because you thought it would sell. Like, you have to make sure that in some way, you have that emotional connection with everything on your burner stove, so that even if you have to move something into that forward spot, you're not dreading it. Maybe it's… Maybe you're really excited about something else, but it's really important that you have that core fire for everything that you're writing.

[Howard] Last night, my daughters made me sit down and watch several episodes of a YouTube, Teen Fortress 2 commentary gamer. At one point in the episode, he was doing something funny and they were playing a song… I think it was a love song or something. It was a song I was familiar with, but because of copyright, they couldn't actually play the song or the YouTube video would get pulled. So he had a cheesy karaoke version of the music playing in the background, and the Teen Fortress 2 computer voice reading the lyrics. This is the difference between execution on a brilliant idea which is going to sell millions of copies and execution on a brilliant idea which never would have gotten out of the recording studio. The song, as read by the computer voice… It worked in the episode, obviously, because we had context. But if you set these two things side-by-side, that is the difference between an author who doesn't yet know how to really execute on an idea, and an author who does. When people look at the things that I've done and say, "Oh, man. That idea was so brilliant." I shrug and I'm like, "You know what, guys, the idea was not brilliant." What was brilliant, and I say this patting myself on the back, is that I managed to stretch it out across an entire book, and I drew some really fun pictures, and I made some cool reveals. It wasn't the idea, at the end of it.

[Dan] Yeah. I, a few months ago, published a novella with Magic: The Gathering. Which, to our earlier point, I was not necessarily in love with that setting, right? Because I didn't know what it was when I signed the contract. Then I got into their offices, and they're like, "Well, this character and this setting. Go." So what I had to do was take that core of an idea and find something that I was passionate about in it. What am I going to be able to do? So, first thing, I made it into a heist story. It was not intended to be one, but they were cool with it, they rolled with it, because that's what I was excited about. Being able to take those kind of… Victoria talked about adding ingredients to the pots. I had this big pile of ingredients that hadn't gone in any pots yet, and I was able to throw those exciting ideas into the other job, and then get really excited about it.

[Victoria] Also, talking about one of the most difficult and important things to cultivate in yourself, is the understanding of the kitchen sink, right? That you do not need to take every idea that excites you and put it into one book. It's about… And I know I come back to the cooking metaphor a lot, but it's about finding, like, flavors that work together. You don't need to don't every seasoning and every spice and every ingredient in. It's about learning to withhold and say, "This would actually be better on its own as a starlight… The star thing of a different meal."

[Howard] On the second night we were in our house, we ran the dishwasher. You said kitchen sink. The dishwasher drains into the sink. There was this gargling which woke me up because it sounded like a voice. This idea came to me that, "Oh, my gosh, you have a family who's in a house and they think that the house is possessed because the sink is talking to them, and the exorcist can't do anything and the priest can't do anything, and the plumber fixes it." That was the end of the idea. That was as far as it went. This was 1999. Before Schlock Mercenary. Two years into Schlock Mercenary, I realized, you know what, I bet I can tell a ghost story in Schlock Mercenary where it gets fixed by the plumber and everybody is quite upset at that. So, yeah, these ideas, they come from weird places and some of them may seem completely stupid, but… I mean, to the kitchen sink point, I keep track of them. I write them down. You don't write it down, it's lost forever and you don't get to use it.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our awesome thing of the week, because it's not a book.

[Howard] Whoo hoo! It's awesome.

[Dan] It is awesome. So, Howard and I and some other local fantasy authors do a Twitch show. We play D&D online every week so that you guys can watch us. It is called TypeCast RPG. We're using… Right now, we're doing a campaign called The Gods of Vaeron in Fifth Edition D&D rules. That is me as the GM, Howard Tayler, Charlie Holmberg, Brian McClellan, Mari Murdock, and Ethan Sproat, all science fiction/fantasy professionals. All authors except Ethan, who's a professor of science fiction. It's super cool.

[Howard] There's a thing that happens in TypeCast which speaks well to the topic. I will sometimes illustrate moments from the game. There are moments which are beyond my skill, and I'm just not going to try. But, every so often, I will have an idea, and I need to execute on it in literally a minute and a half. Because if I wait too long, if I draw too slowly, it's gone. The practice that this has given me in evaluating ideas has been frighteningly effective. Because I have to make the decision quickly. I have to execute to the best of my admittedly limited cartooning ability. Yes, I've been doing this for 20 years. But I know what my skill set is and what my skill set isn't. That's the sort of thing that I think authors can learn from, in that you have an idea, you don't need to spend a novel fleshing it out. See how quickly you can flesh it out to determine what it leads to.

[Brandon] So, we have further questions along this line. One person asks, "How can you tell the story that you're struggling with has potential and that you should push through or if you should leave it and start working on something you like more?"

[Howard] Someone please answer this.

[Dan] Yes.

[Victoria] Ha ha ha. I mean, that's a difficult thing. I always say it's the same kind of thing along the lines of writer's block. You need to understand why you're struggling. There's a difference between struggling because you're afraid of not doing it justice, struggling because you're bored which you're guaranteed readers are going to be bored then, and kind of like, you need to assess where your mentally at in the process. I will say that some days one of the only things that keeps me going on a story is the fact that I do have an ending in mind. So, coming back to my definitely not prescriptive wisdom, but if you are somebody who struggles to finish things or finds yourself getting lost on the way, I do find that having an ending or at least having mile markers, having things and scenes and moments that you're excited about in the story, having them not all be in the first act, these are things that help me get from A to B to C to D and so on.

[Brandon] That's great advice. Having things you're writing toward, you're excited about. Another thing, kind of on the flipside, you can do is I try to set down… If I'm feeling bored, I try to step back and say, "How can I make this chapter someone's favorite chapter in the whole book?" I find that almost always I can find a way to change up what's going on just a little bit to make that specific chapter a real showpiece for the book. If you can do that for every chapter, suddenly you don't… You're not worried about the idea anymore, you're excited about how this is going. I often say that for newer writers, my experience has been that most of the time, you should use one of those options rather than abandoning the story. There are times to abandon stories, but I think it should be the exception, not the rule. It should happen very rarely. Particularly if you're new, you just need to learn to finish things. So, learn to make every chapter the most exciting or the most interesting chapter in the book.

[Dan] Definitely, if this is your first book or even your second, just finish it. Because forcing yourself to finish a book that you are maybe not in love with anymore is going to teach you how to stay in love with books. It's going to teach you so much more about evaluating their validity than we can just tell you over the computer here.

[Howard] I did an unblocking session, a small group session, at the Writing Excuses Retreat in 2019. It was a delightful session. One of the things that I talked about is that… I've been doing this for long enough that I have a checklist. The checklist is there to determine is this an overarching story problem? Is this a scene problem? Is this a chapter problem? Then, is this a me problem? Am I sick? Have I eaten yet today? Do I need to hydrate? Do I need to go get some exercise? Do I need to go back to the well? Have I forgotten to take my medication today? There's all kinds of things. Until I have… Until I actually acknowledged that there was a checklist and that there were criteria, I was really bad at figuring this out. I've gotten much better at it because I get stuck all the time. I think we all, to some level, get stuck all the time. If the only question you know how to ask is, "Does this mean it's time to abandon the story?" it means, boy, you need a checklist, because there's a whole bunch of other things that come first.

[Victoria] You need more questions before that last resort.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Brandon] I… Even in my professional career, I've rarely abandoned stories. The one thing that I've abandoned most recently was done after revisions determined that revising the book to be as good as I wanted it to be would be as much work as writing a new book. That revision wasn't guaranteed to succeed. So I shelved that book.

[Howard] And the new book would be better.

[Brandon] And the new book would be better. I shelved that book, but I still finished the book. Right? Finishing things… We have another question here, "How do you find energy to keep a story going after that first spark of inspiration fades?"

[Victoria] I feel so strongly about this. This is shiny new idea syndrome. It is a medical syndrome. I think we have all felt it. There's a thing that happens either 50 pages, 100, 150 pages in, where suddenly you are like, "Um. This is familiar. I have…" That's exactly when you get a new idea. Something pops into your head. It's shiny, you don't understand it, it's mysterious and alluring, and you think I should follow that instead. So many writers, especially aspiring writers and authors, dropped the thing that they're working on to go follow the shiny new idea. It is a trick that your brain is pulling because in order to finish a story, in order to write a story, not only its beginning, but its middle and end, you have to become familiar with the material. As you become familiar with the material, that inherent shine of mystery and elusiveness wears off, potential energy becomes kinetic energy in which something is always lost. So we think, surely if I follow the shiny new idea, that one won't disappoint me.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] It is a way toward madness. It is a way to never finish anything. I think that comes back to finish it. Even if it's not fabulous, even if you don't want to revise it, you will learn so much in the process of hitting that finish line.

[Howard] I was a music composition major, and I did not learn this lesson as a musician. I think it may be the reason why I'm a cartoonist and not a musician. Because by the time I started cartooning, I had figured it out. As a musician, I came up with wonderful themes and textures and arrangements and everything was a couple of minutes long. My instructors kept saying, "Give us some theme and variation. Explore this, dig into this. Expand it." But it's perfect the way it is! It wasn't perfect the way it was. I had another shiny idea I wanted to chase instead. Yeah, you listen to an orchestral suite, you listen to the symphonic greats from whenever, there's a core theme in there that they explored and explored and explored and explored and explored before they moved on to the shiny.

[Dan] I think when you're in this situation and you're kind of bored with a story and you want to pursue a new one, you're trying to decide if you should drop it or not, take a look at what your goals are for that. What are you hoping to accomplish with this short story or with this book that you are writing? Because, first of all, as we've discussed, if you're early career, the purpose of that book is not to sell, right? If you think, "Oh, this is impossible. I'm not going to be able to sell this." Well, you're not going to be able to sell it anyway, it's your first book. Its goal is to teach you how to write your second book.

[Howard] We're saying that very kindly.

[Dan] Very kindly and lovingly. I had five garbage truck novels before I finally wrote my first published novel. So, think about it. So really what you're doing, if you're early career, is you're learning how to write books. You don't have to think, "Oh, this book won't sell." Or "This book isn't perfect." It doesn't matter, because your goal is to learn how to write. Finishing it is going to teach you how to write.

[Brandon] We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] I have some truly terrifying homework for you. I want you to get a writing implement and something to write on. Pencil, maybe a notebook. Set it next to your bed. Or whatever the thing is you sleep on. When you wake up in the morning, write down everything you can remember about your dreams from the night before. If you can't remember anything, write the words, "I didn't remember my dreams this morning." Okay? Do this for a week. At the end of the week, review the journal, and see if there is an idea there that perhaps you want to explore in your fiction.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/05/15-01-evolution-of-a-career/

Key Points: This season is going to be organized around topics taken from questions from the audience. So this is what you wanted to know! Starting off with the evolution of a career, goal setting for a career as a writer. How do you choose a book for early in your career versus saving it for later? Work on what you're most excited about. Start with something simple, tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight. Sometimes you want to push yourself, set a challenge for yourself. When you look back on first projects, you are sure to think you could do it better now. But that opportunity cost comes with everything you write. Pick an area to improve, but focus on the things that give you joy. If you have an idea, you're excited about it, it's ambitious… Go for it! Even if it doesn't work, you will learn. Don't worry about using your best idea too early, you will have more and better ideas later. The path you expect, the path you plan, is probably not the path you will follow. Grieve for the untaken path, but rejoice in where you are walking now. You always learn from experience. How do you plan for the next stage? Have a plan, but be ready to toss it. Look for options. Avoid closing doors. Don't brand yourself by your first project. Do a couple of books to prove you can do it, then do something else. Leave breadcrumbs for your readers to follow. Pay attention to what your readers like. Think about who is this book for. Brands evolve. As you plan your career, make sure you have a plan, and make sure it's something you love.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode One.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Evolution of a Career.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. We are very excited to have Dongwon with us for this, the very first episode of 2020. We are doing something a little different than we've done in the past with this new season of our show. Mary Robinette, this was your idea. Can you tell us what we're doing?

[Mary Robinette] Well, we realized that the podcast is 15 minutes long, this is 15 years long at this point, and we're not that smart, but you all are. So we decided that rather than trying to come up with a topic, what we would do is go to you and see what things you wanted to know about. So we've collected a bunch of questions, and we're using them to guide the season this year. So you will not, in most cases, hear a specific question from an audience, but the topics and the questions that we're trying to answer for you have all been generated by you.

[Dan] One of the things that we saw a lot of, and this shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did… Maybe a third of the questions we got in were all based around career. What does a career look like as a writer, and how does it change over time, and how do you decide what you're going to do? So, since we've got Dongwon with us, we wanted to talk about the evolution of a career. How do you set goals for your career? So let's… Let me actually start with this question that I think is really interesting, and I'll throw it to Dongwon first. When you're starting to look at your writing as a career rather than just a thing that you do, how do you choose a book that is very good for early career versus one that you might want to save for later on when you're better or more established?

[Dongwon] It's kind of a tricky question. Because… The thing that I always, always, always tell people is when it comes to you picking the project that you want to work on, work on the one you're most excited about. That said, I do talk to a lot of writers who at some point will say, "I tried to do this thing and it was too big for me at this stage. I didn't know how to do this, I didn't know how to do that." So sometimes, when it comes to that first novel, and a lot of debuts… Often times, you can read a book and know that this was a first novel, that this was a debut, that this was the first thing you did. Because it has sort of a clear, sort of straightforward through line. It tends to be A to B to C. It tends to be much more straightforward, in terms of how we naturally as people tell a story. Right? So sometimes what you want to think about for that first book is keep it a little simpler, right? Don't try to do the 15 POV's with complicated tense things, complicated structure. Focus on telling the story that you already know how to tell. Tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes talk about this with my students as setting things on the easy setting. There's nothing wrong with an easy setting. Like, you can do beautiful, beautiful work if you are dealing with things that you are confident in. So sometimes I think about that, like, waiting until you have the writing chops, or picking one aspect of the novel that you're going to put on the difficult setting and everything else is well within your comfort zone. I also want to say that having a practice novel as your first novel is… There's nothing like wrong with saying I'm going to write this without the intention of publishing it. If you finish it, and you're like, "This is publishable." Potentially. Sure. But we don't say, "I have picked up the violin. I'm going to go to Carnegie Hall…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "With the first thing that I've learned to play."

[Dan] Yeah. Well, I do want to emphasize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting yourself a challenge that is kind of beyond your level. That's how we push ourselves. That's how we learn. But I do agree that when you're sitting down and saying, "Okay, I've got a few books under my belt. I think it's time to do one that I'm going to really try to get published." Maybe back off on that difficulty level, like Mary Robinette was saying, and do something that you know you can really hit out of the park.

[Howard] Sorry. At risk of overthinking things, there is nothing in the first five years of Schlock Mercenary that I couldn't go back now and do an infinitely better job at. There are no first projects that later you is going to look at and say, "Boy, that… I really only could have written that as an early career thing. I'm not ready to write that anymore." No. You're always going to be leveling up, you're always going to be improving. There's a story in the second year of Schlock Mercenary where I start telling the story from the point of view of the bad guys, and Schlock is the monster. I decided to use marker art for it. It was all hand-lettered. I… This is me… This is in 2001, 2002, I think, that I'm telling this story. I remember thinking at the time, "Yeah. There's no way I could have told this story or illustrated this story when I was first starting out." I looked back at that now and I think I was not ready to tell that story then.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I could do such a good job with it now. But now it's done. Now I've told it. Now I can't tell that story again. There is an opportunity cost associated with that for me. But that opportunity cost is associated with everything you write. You don't get a do over. You know what? Life is grief.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Just own that. Own the fact that your first project is always forever… It's going to be your first thing. We all had to do that.

[Mary Robinette] My… So, the first novel I published, Shades of Milk and Honey, is the fourth novel that I wrote. When the UK edition came out and they asked me if I wanted to do anything different, I'm like, "Well, yes, in fact." So that novel, the UK edition is two chapters longer than the US edition because I had a better idea of how to do endings. But every novel I do is an iteration of like, learning where my weakness was. So I think that's the thing… Like, when I say do the easy setting, I don't mean for the entire novel and don't… But what I mean is pick something… Pick one area. Just one area to improve, when you're thinking. Like one area to stretch in, and focus on the things that make you… That give you joy. Chase that. Rather than doing the thing that I see a lot of writers do in their early career, they put so much effort… Focus on "I gotta have an original idea. It's gotta be original, it's gotta be new and exciting." So, as a result, the emotion that they're trying to evoke in the reader is that writer is clever. Which is… That's like wanting someone to say, "That person is funny." Instead of trying to…

[Dan] Instead of trying to make them laugh.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[Dongwon] One last point I want to make on this, and to contradict myself a little bit. I do really want to encourage people, though, that when it comes to writing that first book, if you have an idea and you're excited about it, and it's an ambitious project, swing for those fences, right? Like, go for the big thing. Don't go half measures. Kind of talking about Howard's point a little bit, resolve to not have a regret about it. Just do the thing! If it doesn't work out, you still learn so much in that process. Then it's on to the next book. Right?

[Dan] Yeah. Given that we've raised the specter of the opportunity cost, I do want to point out, the more you practice this, the more you do it, you're going to have better and better ideas every time. So don't worry that you're burning your best idea too early. Because 10, 20 years from now, you're going to have such better ideas than that one, and so many other cool things to do.

[Dan] Anyway, we are going to stop now for our book of the week. Which is actually a musical theater production of the week. We were… Mary Robinette and I were absolutely just geeking out about what turns out to be one of our shared favorite musicals of all time. Mary Robinette, what is it?

[Mary Robinette] Follies, by Stephen Sondheim. I love this musical so much. The idea is it's an old vaudeville house… Like a Ziegfeld follies kind of thing. It's shutting down, and all of the old performers are coming back for a reunion. So the whole thing is told in present day and flashbacks. You get to… They have cast present day elderly actors and their younger selves. It's a fascinat… It's like beautiful and heartbreaking. Some of the singers can't hit the high notes that they used to be able to hit anymore. But the depth of their performance is so much more. So it's… When we're talking about the evolution of a career, this thing that we had just been geeking about is a beautiful portrait of that.

[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite songs in the show is called The Story of Lucy and Jessie. Where it is a woman singing about how now she is older and more experienced and much more interesting, but she doesn't have her youth and energy, whereas the youth and energy person was such a bland, boring person that nobody wanted to talk to, and how she can never be happy because she can never combine those two parts of herself. The way that it looks at age and youth and early career and late career is stunningly cool.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Follies by Stephen Sondheim. You can find it on many different forms of media. I am a big fan of the original cast. Dan is a fan of the new cast.

[Dan] I do prefer the original cast, although the new cast does have Bernadette Peters on it. She really hits it out of the park. So. Awesome.

[Howard] I arranged music for an a cappella group, when I was [hhhhh] 25 years younger than I am now. They did a song called Don't It Make You Wanna Go Home. Nine guys. At the end of the song… One of the guys was a contra tenor, who just killed it. Squeaking up there in the stratosphere. Another guy who was a… one of the sons of the university's music faculty. Amazing voice. End of that song, they are scatting and noodling around. The two of them duel very briefly with notes that most of us can only admire from a great distance. It was an amazing and beautiful thing. I caught up with the other singer a few years ago, and found out that… Boy, not five years after singing that, he developed vocal nodes and could no longer perform at all. But now works as music faculty. I have the recording that I was present for, where he was… I almost have guilt, because I wonder if the things that he was doing to his voice to hit those notes that the other guy was just born to hit might have been part of the problem. But that thing that he was able to do in that portion of his career will always be with me, will always be with him. It always exists. But he had to take a different path. When we talk about the evolution of careers, we have to recognize that the path that we think that we are on, the path that we have laid out for ourselves, is not the path that we will be on 20 years from now. It is going to change. We can't hit it regret free. There will always be… I said, life is grief.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You get to grieve for the path untaken. You get to grieve the expenditure of what you thought was the best idea when you couldn't write it as well as you could now. But you also get to rejoice in where your feet are right now. You've got to be agile and keep them moving.

[Dongwon] The thing I want to say about that, though, is also there's no wasted time. You always learn from that experience. You can take so many lessons from a moment that… I'm a big believer that the only way, literally the only way we learn new things is through failure, right? You hit that wall and you learn lessons from how you hit that wall. You pick yourself back up, and then you keep moving forward. Right? So. Even if it doesn't work out, take the lessons from it, right? Examine it to see what other things you could have done, how you could have pivoted from there, and do that next time.

[Dan] We… I don't want to spend too much time on this specific topic, because we're going to dedicate an entire episode to it later in the year, called Rebooting Your Career. But for now, we've talked about the early stage of your career, let's talk a little then about career planning. So another question I'm going to pitch right at Dongwon. Once you've got that first book, maybe you've made your first sale you've done some self-publishing and found some success. How do you plan for the next stage?

[Dongwon] This really is one of my very favorite topics. It's one of the things I love most about my job is working with writers to help them strategize about how do we want their career to look. What are we planning for this first book, for the book after that, for the contract after that, for the contract after that? Right? So, roughly, generally with most of my clients, not necessarily everybody, with most of them, we have a sense of here's what we're doing now, here's what we're doing in five years, here's what we're doing in 10 years. Right? Now, the thing is, publishing is a system that is designed to be extremely random. Right? What makes a book work is highly unpredictable. What makes a book tank, also highly unpredictable, right? So when you're thinking about this… There's two things you need to keep in mind, is, always have a plan. Always know where you're trying to get to. But also be ready to throw that plan out the window at the drop of a hat. Often, what we're doing is, when we're planning for those decision points, right? You're looking at… We have contract one, contract two, contract three. Then, what you're doing is, at each of those junctures of when we're deciding what are we going to write next, the thing we're solving for is having options. Right? We're not solving for we will do A to B to C. What we're doing is solving for, okay, once we do this, what are the three moves we can make at that point? How do we make sure that the first move we make doesn't close doors for the next move we want to make? Right? If we get that movie deal, then we can do this. If the book sells five copies, then we can also do that. Right? So you're keeping all those things in your mind, and trying to build out a little bit of a decision tree. But you will go completely mad if you try to map the whole thing. So you pick your path, but then you're ready to know, we can pivot wherever we need to. Right?

[Mary Robinette] This is a really important point that you… Having those options open. One of the things that I see writers do at the beginning of their career is that they pin their identity and their… They brand themselves around their first project. That is, let me just say, a mistake. Because the first project is unlikely to be the first one that takes off. If George RR Martin had done that, we would all be looking… His entire brand would be vampires on a steamboat.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because that was… Fever dream.

[Dongwon] It's a very good book.

[Mary Robinette] It's a very good book. It's not what he became known for. I did a lot of Regency stuff, but one of the things that I did, very consciously, when I was… This is, speaking of closing doors. We sat down and talked about book 2. It was a sequel. But the classic sequel in a romance is that the sister of… Or the best friend of the main character now becomes the POV character in the next book and does… It's another romance structure. We made the conscious decision not to do that, because had I done that, I would have… That would have put me on the romance path very, very firmly. I like romance, but I didn't want that to be the only thing I did. So we made the conscious decision to not do that. That's the kind of thing that you're looking for.

[Dongwon] My general rule of thumb, strategy, is you have book 1. You do book 2 in a way that's similar to book 1, either same category, similar voice, similar topic, to prove you can do it, you can do it again, and then in book 3, prove you can do something else. Right? That's generally how I think about it. It's not always that pattern, but it's why… If we're going to do a series, I like duologies, I like linked standalones, I don't like a seven book series. Right? Because if you have a seven book series, then you're trapped in that for seven years of your career at a minimum. Right? So if you're doing track… So, what you want to keep is maneuverability. You want to keep the ability to jump to something else if things go wrong. Or even if they go right, sometimes the right move is to jump to something else.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to… Excuse me. I want to jump in on this because I very specifically went maybe much farther over the line then I should have with my second project. My first thing was first person, modern day, contemporary horror. Then the second project was third person, post-apocalyptic science fiction. Multiple viewpoints instead of one, female protagonist instead of male. Like, I made it as different as I conceivably could because I wanted to not be pigeonholed. I wanted to present myself as the person who can do anything. Which has had both pros and cons. It is very difficult for a giant audience to follow me book to book. Because not everyone's interested in the same things that I am. On the other hand, I've got a historical fiction that came out last year. Everyone was like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense. Of course he's going to jump out of the other four genres he does into a brand-new one, because that's the brand he's established for himself."

[Mary Robinette] I looked… So, when I was… When we were first talking, it was like, "Do I want to do a Tad Williams career, where every single book is different, or do I want to do a series, genre, where you are doing a series?" I write all over the map in my short fiction. So the thing that I have been doing is I've been doing the same, but different, path. So like book 1, straight up Re… Austen pastiche, book 2 is a courtroom thriller… Or is a wartime novel, spy novel, disguised as a Regency romance. Like, the same is the set dressing and the characters. That is my same. My plot structure shifts. When I got to Ghost Talkers, I kept a plot structure that was similar to one that I had already done, and I stayed in historical, but I jumped forward by 100 years. I also knew by that point that what people liked in my books was that I had happily committed couples. So I stuck with that. With the Lady Astronaut books, it's science fiction, but it's still historical. That, again, it's like that is a very conscious choice. The book that I have coming out this year is another Lady Astronaut book, but the one that I am working on for next year is… It's straight up science fiction, but I am deliberately giving it a 1920s noir feel, in terms of the aesthetic, to retain that sense of familiarity, to make it easier. So, I think of it as leaving breadcrumbs for my readers to follow me. Which has…

[Dongwon] I mean, really what this is is having a brand.

[Dan] One of the things we talk about a lot, and that new writers hear all the time, is don't chase market trends. Don't try to write what you think people want. This advice sounds like it's the opposite of that. Because you're saying, I know what my readers like. But it's because they're your readers. You're not trying to chase an entire market. You have found your people and you are giving them what they want. Which is a very different thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I am looking at expanding out of that, because I'm like, I don't want to stay just with the historical Regency. Which, obviously, I love my Regencies. But I… Like, how do I bring science fiction in? How do I bring mainstream people in? Like, I'm trying to add each time without losing my core.

[Dongwon] I talk a lot about how all of publishing is reducible to one question. That question is, who is this book for? Right? So what you're doing isn't writing to the market. It is being very intentional about who this book is for. You know this is my current audience. I want to grow my audience. I want to push my audience to also follow me to these other places. So, sometimes when you make the big jumps, as Dan was talking about earlier, it can be hard to hang onto that audience even though you know who the audience of the new stuff is, right? So in terms of transitioning and growing, I think there are two very different strategies that can work really, really well.

[Mary Robinette] I did lose people when I didn't do the traditional romance structure for the second book.

[Dongwon] I mean, you always will, right? Because you take risks when you write a new book, otherwise, why are you writing a new book? So, there are chances you will lose people, but you will also gain people, hopefully.

[Howard] When this episode airs, I'm six months away from ending the 20 year Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. In terms of career decisions, that is a conscious decision built around… Big surprise, making money. The two words…

[Dan] That's a good career goal.

[Howard] Schlock and mercenary…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Either of those words should suggest that I'm all about the art. When you reach the… When you get to the bookshelves and you are holding something and you see that it is the first book of three, or the third book of 10, and book 4 isn't out yet… There is a group of people who won't spend money yet. Well, I'm right now, in print is book 15 out of 20. I need to be able to say, "The end." And have everything in print, because there is a group of people whose money I don't have yet.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That is…

[Dongwon] There's 10 of them. You're going to get them.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm coming after all of them at once.

[Mary Robinette] I've never bought one of your books.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you keep giving them to me, so…

[Howard] But this… So, this decision, I need to be able to say the end. There are people who are asking me, "So, what comes next?" No matter what the answer is, there's a group of people who won't be satisfied with that. The most important person for me to satisfy right now, and Sandra and I have had this conversation several times, is me. What do I want to do next? Part of what I want to do, and this is the sort of thing that's dangerous to put on the Internet in a recorded permanent sort of format. One of the things that I would love to do is no longer be putting out a daily comic strip. Because there are things that I can't do while I have that deadline pushing down on me. But the thing that has set me apart from almost every other comic strip out there is that it has been daily and has updated without fail. So, am I sacrificing my brand in order to do the thing that I want? Or am I making the right career decision? As of this recording, I don't have a good answer to that.

[Dongwon] I mean, but this brings up a really important point, that the thing about strategy is that brands evolve. Right? They have to evolve. If you remain static over time, you don't have a strategy, you have a pattern. Right?

[Mary Robinette] My brand when I began was the puppeteer who was also Regency. Right now, it is the writer who can talk about tea in space.

[Dan] Yeah. Which, there's a huge market for that. Who knew? We… Excuse me. We have let this episode run a little long because it is the very first one and we wanted to introduce the whole year. I do want to end on the point that Howard hit on. Which is, first of all, as you're planning your career, a) make sure you have a plan, but b) make sure it's something that you love. Because otherwise, why are you doing this? Goodness knows, there's not enough money in it to make it worthwhile. But if it's something that you genuinely love to do, that is what is going to see you through everything else that happens to you.

[Dan] So, we want to leave you with some homework. Let's get that from Dongwon.

[Dongwon] I think the homework is, a lot of times when I talked to a writer I'm considering working with, I'll ask them this question of whose career do you wish you could have if you look out in the market today. When I asked that question, I'm not asking who do you want your books to read like. It's not about the style of the books, it's not about the voice of the books, or even the subject matter. It's look at their career. Look at how fast they publish, what kinds of book they publish, kind of who they're publishing for, are they doing YA and adult, are they doing like all different genres, categories, and things like that? So, take a look around at the market and really pick one or two authors. Really examine how have they published. What years… What was the pace of that, when did they start taking off, and those kinds of things. Consider, is that the life that I want, or do I want something else? Then that will help start helping you inform a decision about the career choices you're looking over the next year, five years, 10 years.

[Dan] I would add to that, look at the other ways they spend their time. Are they the kind of person that does a lot of news stuff, a lot of convention appearances, do they make most of their money speaking rather than on their sales? Kind of look at all of that peripheral stuff as well.

[Dongwon] Are they doing a lot of school visits? Yeah, exactly. What's their lifestyle like, too? Do you want to live that life? Right? Do they have a day job? Or, all they are, are chained to a desk, putting out books every six months?

[Dan] Awesome. Well, great. This is been a cool episode and we're excited for the rest of the year. Please join us next week when we're going to have Brandon Sanderson and our 2020 special guest, Victoria Schwab. We're going to talk about theme and subtext. It's going to be awesome. So, for now, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.31: Learning to Listen As a Writer

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/05/13-31-learning-to-listen-as-a-writer/

Key points: Write what you know? Extrapolate from what you know? Learn lots of things? Make sure you know before you write? Hemingway: if I write a story every day based on one thing I know, I will never run out of ideas. But how do you incorporate people and things you see around you? Often unconsciously, without knowing where I picked it up? Sometimes very consciously, write it down! Warnings? Sometimes. Often the attitude more than the exact words. Concepts! Pay attention or listen? Spend less time talking than listening, especially when it's something you don't understand. Watch for commonality or overlap. Let the other person tell you what they want to talk about. Release forms? No. A contract for expert knowledge. Be careful when you put people you know in your work. Try to make them not recognizably similar to specific people. Beware of using someone's personal experience as is. Nonfiction research? Watch for common experiences. Borrow an incident, but make the context and characters different. Do pause, and check. Cribbing reactions, probably not good. Borrowing incidents or events, probably okay. Do look for and celebrate differences, which are what make characters pop out and be unique.

( What did you say? )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Learning to Listen As a Writer.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] What?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm disappointed…

[Laughter]

[Howard] In Howard.

[Brandon] So. Old adage in writing, write what you know. Which I've always found a strange adage, because if I only wrote exactly what I know, and I think every new writer thinks this, you're going to end up with exactly the same book every time. But that's not what that adage means.

[Mary] No. I've always thought that that adage actually means extrapolate from what you know.

[Brandon] And learn lots of things. It kind of… I always… Often heard it referenced in this sort of make sure you know before you write. What we're going to be talking about today is if you want to write really spectacular characters, you probably want to learn to be an observer of human behavior and learn how to incorporate that into your writing. Which is full of all sorts of pitfalls at the same time. So, let's dig into it. How often do you incorporate things you see around you, specifically people? How do you do it? What are the issues you need to be aware of?

[Mary] A lot of times, I'm doing it unconsciously, because it's just something that I've overheard or seen and it's a mannerism… I don't actually remember where I saw it or picked it up. Other times, I do it quite consciously, where I will… Someone will say something. I'm like, "That's really smart and clever." I will… I have been known to just write it down.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do you warn them, when you do?

[Mary] Ah… If it's someone I know, I warn them. If it's someone… Where it's on the subway or something, I'm like, "They're not even going to remember that they said that thing." It's not that I'm… The chances of it actually… First of all, the chances of my writing it down being exactly what they said? Pretty slim. But… Frequently, I don't wind up using it, but just the attitude of the character will stick.

[Brandon] For me, it will often be like the… If it's a clever quip like that, it's the concept. Why did I find this funny? A plus B was amusing to me. Can I come up with other A plus B's that are funny in the same way? But sometimes it's the same things you just mentioned. I say that character… The way this person is talking, that snapshot of a personality, is something I want to start playing with in my head until the character will work out.

[Howard] In terms of behavior as a writer, I would categorize that more under pay attention than listen. Listen, for me, usually means when I'm talking to another person, when we're having a conversation, I want to spend less time talking than I spend listening. I don't want to tune out the things that I don't understand. A while back, I just posited a question in response to some silliness that was happening. If somebody in a conversation with you describes an experience they've had that is completely alien to you, what is your reaction? Do you explain it away by telling them they're wrong? Or do you believe them, because there must be some reason that they're telling you this, and continue to listen and maybe learn about something that is completely alien to you? After adopting that second mindset, after realizing, you know what, my experiences, no matter how old I get, how well-traveled I get, how smart I think I am, my experiences are always going to not include 99% of what happens out there. If I want to be able to put those things in a story, if I want to be able to be a good person, I have to listen, and I have to believe. Because most people… I mean, when people are telling you about a thing that happened to them, or a way that they feel, most people aren't lying about that. They're being honest.

[Mary] The… One of the things that you were saying about the fact that your experience is only going to be like 1% at best of commonality or overlap, it just reminded me, the… Do you know where write what you know comes from?

[Brandon] No, I don't.

[Mary] It's actually Hemingway. I'm going to paraphrase it badly, but he basically said something like, "If I write… If I pick one thing that I know each day and write a story based on that, I will never run out of ideas." Which is a very different interpretation of write what you know! I think that one of the things for me about learning to listen as a writer is also learning to listen to the… To your own experience, and the places where your experience overlaps with someone else's. That drawing those lines and those parallels are one of the things that can help you unpack stuff.

[Brandon] Right. You may not, in other words, know what it's exactly like to be a welder in the 1940s, but you might know what it's like to be a father, and build on that commonality and explore the parts that are different while reinforcing the parts that are the same as you build a character.

[Mary] Yeah, this is something that my mom talks about. So my mom spent several decades as an arts administrator, and would have to… She would have to schmooze. She was a fundraiser. So her job was to be an active listener, because that is the best way to make someone feel… Feel like they are in an interesting conversation, is to let them talk about themselves or the things that they're interested in. But to keep from lying about it, mom would steer the conversations to those overlaps, those places where the other person had something that she was also interested in. I think that that's one of the things as a writer that when we talk about learning to listen, it's really learning to be curious and engaged with other people and to not center yourself in the conversation.

[Dan] Yeah. When I am talking to someone, this is particularly when I'm trying to learn someone… Learn something, I always learn the best stuff when I let them tell me what they want to tell me, rather than trying to get one piece of information. When I was talking to lawyers, I did a bunch of lawyer research for one of my books, there were two or three key things that I needed to know in order for my plot to work. But I learned so much more by just saying, "Well, you know, you… You're the expert here. Tell me more about your job and about what it's like and about your experiences." And just letting them take the conversation where they wanted.

[Brandon] This is part of why we're trying to do this, this year on Writing Excuses, is give you once a month or so a glimpse into someone's life that you may not have a chance to interview for things like this that you can use as a resource. My question then, to you… To the podcasters, is twofold. How do you record these things when you are interviewing someone? What physical means do you use? And number two, at what point do you need a release form to use this sort of thing? Do you ever need a release form, or what's the possible…

[Dan] I have never actually used a release form. Typically, I will mention them in my acknowledgments of the book, and put in the little line of if there's mistakes, they're my fault, not theirs.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] I've used a contract when I have been using someone… Using expert knowledge. With both… In the Glamorous Histories… Actually Glamorous Histories and Calculating Stars, I wound up hiring… In Glamorous Histories, I hired a historical law expert, and I also hired in Antiguan writer/editor to handle some dialects that I knew I was going to screw up. For the Calculating Stars, I hired an actual rocket scientist. Then, I also worked with some astronauts and some other NASA people who were not allowed to do this for money. Because it was exploiting their government position. But with all of them, I'm very upfront about this is the information that I need to get, and I do my research before I talk to them, so that I'm not asking them the 101 questions. Like, "How does a rocket fly?" I don't think…

[Chuckles]

[Mary] I… What I do is, I usually go in with very specific things that I need to know that I can't find. Then… Sometimes I will also do madlibs where I will write a line that just says, "He fiddled the jargon…"

[Laughter]

[Mary] "And turned to her and said jargon."

[Brandon] Jargon the jargon.

[Dan] That was the version of Calculating Stars that I read. It was awesome.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Now I…

[Mary] It was a lot of jargon.

[Brandon] I want to throw something out to you, listeners. We are planning right now to go to NASA and get you some…

[Mary] Some actual as…

[Brandon] Some actual astronauts on the podcast. I tell you this, we'd keep it a surprise but I have…

[Mary] We cannot…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, at this point in the…

[Brandon] No faith in our ability to not tweet about it.

[Howard] At this point, they may have already heard one of those episodes.

[Brandon] They may have. That's right. It's possible.

[Dan] Maybe.

[Howard] This was either really surprising, or now you know how excited we were about…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That thing that you heard us be very enthusiastic about when we recorded it.

[Brandon] Were we going to put that one… Yeah. But…

[Dan] So I wanted to jump in quick and say that what Mary's talking about are very kind of specific and professional relationships. If what you're doing is just putting in… Putting people that you know into your work, you often have to be much more careful. When I wrote Extreme Makeover, which is about a beauty company, and I have worked in several beauty companies, I went out of my way to make sure that none of the executive staff in that book were recognizably similar to the executives that I had worked with in those companies.

[Brandon] That's smart.

[Dan] To avoid this kind of what did you do?

[Brandon] It might be urban lore, because I've never had it explained to me firsthand. So this is not legal advice and I'm not a lawyer. But I've heard told to me that the dividing line is use somebody's personal experience. Like, they tell you a story of when they were in World War II, and what exactly happened to them, that's… Then you use that exact story, that is where you're crossing the line into danger territory, that you're going to want to have a release. Because potentially, if that person were to decide to write a book about their life in World War II, and you have used their story, they could materially prove that your story has wounded their chances of their story selling. But when you say this person is a big interesting blowhard at a company, I'm going to create a big interesting blowhard like them and write a story, you don't need a release for that. So, watch that line.

[Howard] You're not going to [garbled]

[Dan] There's that blowhard.

[Mary] Just… Listeners. You're right, we did go to NASA last week for you guys.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It was literally last week.

[Brandon] Literally last week.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Mary] But you can tell that we have not been to NASA yet, so we're engaging in time travel.

[Dan] We went to NASA last week. They had a time machine.

[Brandon] We will have another NASA episode coming up.

[Mary] I think it's when we will go to NASA last week.

[Brandon] We will have gone to NASA.

[Brandon] All right, let's stop for the book of the week. Howard?

[Howard] Okay. In the interest of learning to listen, there's a nonfiction book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Leavitt called Think like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. It is… It's a fairly short read, I think it's about a five hour audiobook, and it's got a couple of hours of the Freakonomics podcast tacked onto the end of it. But they talk about how their data gathering tools, as economists, as researchers, forced them to rethink things that were conventional wisdom, common knowledge, whatever, completely turning some of our ideas on their heads. Honestly, if you've… If you're unfamiliar with Freakonomics and all that, that five-hour listen may very well retrain parts of your brain so that you can listen in ways that you weren't able to before.

[Brandon] If you have somehow come to our podcast and not listened to one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Then you should be familiar with it, because it's actually a very fun listen. They're great books. I really enjoy them.

[Howard] Well, Dubner, the journalist of the two, Dubner narrates. He's so conversational. It's just a… It was a delight to listen to this book.

[Brandon] So, building off of that, how specifically do you guys take a nonfiction book and use it as research for a book you're working on?

[Mary] Heavily. Says the person who writes historical fantasy and science fiction. I use it really heavily. But what I do is I look for common experiences that I see multiple types of characters have. I… But I'm also not above like going, "Well, that's a really harrowing story that I am giving as backstory to one of my characters." I typically don't… I can't even say that. Usually, you can take a single incident and when you put it into your story, the context is so different and the characters that are happening are so different, that it's not the same thing. Like in… There's a character in Calculating Stars who has a medical issue that was a medical issue that I read about in an astronaut biography. But it's also a medical issue that my father-in-law experienced. My father-in-law is a Vietnam-era fighter pilot. In both cases, it was probably caused by being a fighter pilot. So that was the kind of thing, and I was like, well, this experience is something that I feel totally free lifting because it's not a unique experience. Even though I'm taking the inspiration from a specific astronaut's biography.

[Brandon] Right. You want to take this and have it inform a larger picture of the character you're developing, rather than lifting one person wholesale and having every beat be the same.

[Mary] Well, the other thing is that you can take the same incident, but the character is going to react to it differently than the real person did. That's the stuff that's interesting.

[Howard] Procedurally, for me, I've found that… I've consumed… Over the last couple of years, I've probably consumed 250 hours worth of documentaries on World War II and space travel and a whole host of other things. All of that, I can't point at any one thing specifically that has informed my writing. But my writing is better as a result. Things have a more real shape because I am learning more real things. One of the most important skills I've picked up was the ability to question myself before I commit something in print. Where I would take something that I'm writing that… You know what, that's right, I remember reading this in a whatever or hearing it in a documentary. Writing something down, often something scientific or mathemalogical or whatever. Then I'll stop and say, "You know what? Let's take a moment and Google and make sure I'm using those words correctly."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Often, I will find out that I remembered that incorrectly, and I'm going to fix that now. It's… The more I know, the more I pause to check what I know before I commit something to print.

[Brandon] Now, did you say mathemalogical?

[Howard] I said mathemalogical and I said it on purpose, because it's funny.

[Brandon] That is so awesome.

[Laughter]

[Dan] But now, we've called attention to it. I've been trying to remember the name of this woman and I can't and I feel very bad. I will look it up and make sure it gets in the liner notes. But I listened to a memoir by a woman who was a chaplain for the Forest Service.

[Ooo]

[Dan] It was fascinating. There was one particular incident with a murderer that she had to deal with that I just thought was incredible. I spent a year or so trying to figure out how I could incorporate some aspect of that into the book I was writing, and realized that what I loved about it was her reaction and her choices that she had made in that event. That is what kept feeling wrong, and I ended up not using that. So that, for me, has become the line. That if I'm going to talk about an event or a technology or a thing or an illness or whatever it is, that's fair game. But if I am cribbing somebody else's very specific reaction to it, then I've stepped over the line.

[Mary] As we are wrapping up, the thing that I'm going to say that we have not said is we've been talking about the commonalities, but the other thing that's really hugely important is to look at and celebrate the differences. Because those are the things that are going to make your characters really pop out and be unique. So the commonalities are the things you can kind of coast on those, and it's important to know where they are, but the places where your character reacts that are different, those are the things that are, I think, really important. My mother-in-law says that you know that you love someone because… when you love them because of their flaws. I think that's kind of one of the things with… When we're trying to create characters and to listen as a writer, to listen to the things that are different from us and to celebrate those.

[Brandon] Awesome. Dan, you're going to give us some homework.

[Dan] Yes. We talked earlier in the episode about interviewing people. So we want you to do that. It might be a good idea to use a clipboard, just so you have something that makes you look a little more like an official interviewer, and a little less like a weirdo in a grocery store. But find somebody that you don't know, out in the world, and just ask them if you can take a few moments and just interview them quickly. Ask about their lives, ask about what they do, their job, learn something you didn't know before about a person that you've never met.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/13/12-33-how-to-be-brief-yet-powerful/

Key Points: Brevity, it's not just for short stories! How to get an idea across in a brief number of words. Start by honing in on what you want to tell, during the conception phase. Start with your character, what do they want, what are they doing to try to get it, and what obstacles do they have to overcome? Instead of punch-by-punch action scenes, try an emotional buildup, one headbutt, and the effects of that. Make sure that readers know what is at stake. Specifically. The consequences of failure. Look for powerful moments. Use the cold open! Short story titles frame the story, and often are longer. Look for resonant phrases, or borrow from quotes. To evoke a whole world, be specific about one thing. Food is often good for this. Knowing that a reader will probably read a short fiction piece in one sitting, and only read it once, may affect pacing, paragraphing, and emphasis. Many stories are competent, but forgettable. Make your characters specific, give the reader an emotional connection to the story, make it particular. "The more specific you are, the more universal it becomes."

( Emotional buildup, punch, and consequences? )

[Brandon] This has been a really good discussion. I'm actually going to have to call it here. But Mary has some homework for us.
[Mary] Yes. What I want you to do is we're going to start from a concept. This is a thing that I wind up doing… Weirdly, I have typewriters and I will set up at a convention and I will sit down and I will write a short fiction… Piece of short fiction on demand. So what I want you to do is basically this. You're going to pick a character. An object. And a genre. Then you're going to write 250 words. That 250…
[Brandon] Only 250?
[Mary] Only 250 words. One page. That needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which means, just in case you're thinking about this already, that means that it is one try-fail cycle. So one character, one object, one location. Now if you want to bring in another character, that's fine. But be aware that every time you add another character, those are more words that you need to handle that person.
[Brandon] Awesome. That sounds really hard.
[Laughter]
[Mary Anne] Sounds like a good homework exercise for Brandon.
[Brandon] Yes. This has been Writing Excuses. I'm out of excuses, now I'll go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/06/12-32-structuring-a-short-piece/

Key Points: Flash fiction and short stories. Short fiction is usually just two MACE elements. Flash fiction is usually a single MACE element, often one problem to solve. Introduce the problem, a couple try-fail cycles, and solution. Often MACE elements get nested, or form frames. Also, changing POV often changes MACE elements, because they are all about affecting the primary character. MACE is often useful for pruning -- focus on what you really want to tell, and remove extra threads. Sometimes flash fiction, short fiction, implies questions or endings for the reader, instead of explicitly describing them. This is good for issue stories (elemental genre).

MACE: Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character, Event.
Milieu: starts when a character enters a place and ends when they exit (often returning home); main conflict is getting out, returning, stopping the main character from getting out of the milieu; journey, quest, man against nature.
Ask/Answer: the character asks a question, ends when they find an answer; main conflict is stopping the character from getting the answer: mystery, puzzle, trying to solve or find an answer. Sometimes getting the answer introduces a bigger question.
Character: internal conflict, starting with dissatisfaction with self, end with new self-definition or acceptance of self; conflicts block the character from finding satisfying self-definition; love, romance, coming-of-age.
Event: external conflict, status quo has been disrupted, ends with new status quo or resolution of some kind; conflicts block character from achieving new status quo.; action, adventures. Often event story introduces character story, as the disrupted status quo causes the character to question their self-definition.
(For more details, see the liner notes!)

( Swing that MACE, hit them in the gut... )

[Brandon] We're out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework to help us practice the MACE quotient?
[Mary] Yes. Now, ironically, this is probably the longest description…
[Laughter]
[Mary] For a homework assignment. What I want you to do is, I want you to take either a new idea or something that you're working on that you'd like to be a short story. I want you to write… Pick one of the MACE elements. Whichever one you want to pick. Whichever one you feel like is your major driver. I want you to describe that in three sentences. So the first sentence is where the story opens. The second sentences what your major conflicts are. What your major conflict is, or the type of conflict. Your third sentence is where that winds up. All three of those things should match. Then, I want you to pick a second MACE element and do the same thing. So you've got two things. Say you've got one that's character and one that is ask/answer. So that's part one and part two of your homework. Part three of your homework is to nest them. So that you start with the ask, then you introduce the character, then you close out your character tag, and then you close out your ask tag, so it's nested. Part four of your homework is to flip it, so that the character is on the outside… It doesn't have to be character, whichever of these you picked. Character is on the outside, ask/answer is on the inside. I have this written out in full detail, you'll be happy to know. It is in the liner notes. So that you don't have to remember all of the things that I've just told you. And all of the description of the MACE elements is also in this.
[Brandon] You get a worksheet this time!
[Mary] You get a worksheet.
[Whoohoo!]
[Mary] This is the benefit of the fact that I teach classes sometimes.
[Brandon] Excellent. That actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys should all totally do that. But for right now… This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses, now go write.

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.

Current Mood: tweet

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/07/writing-excuses-6-10-scott-cards-m-i-c-e-quotient/

Key points: MICE: milieu, idea, character, and event. Milieu: where the story takes place, starts when you enter the space, ends when you exit it. Stories about setting. Idea: start with a question, end when you answer the question. Character: start with a dissatisfied character, end with satisfaction or at least reconciliation. Event: something is wrong with the status quo, and ends with a solution. The MICE framework can be used at multiple levels, story, chapter, scene. Make promises and fulfill them. These can be nested, but close them in the order you open them. (Actually, reverse order -- MI ... IM).

( Mickey... Donald DUCK! )
[Brandon] All right, then. So, writing prompt. I should probably make myself do it, because I haven't done it in a while. So, writing prompt is do this with a different fairytale. Let's pick one.
[Dan] MICE quotient for Red Riding Hood?
[Mary] Red Riding Hood's a good one.
[Brandon] Red Riding Hood. That's a great one. MICE quotient for Red Riding Hood. Try and write a page of each story of the different things for MICE. Okay.
[Dan] Sweet.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: waiting

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July 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.08: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Working with an Editor
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.24: Worldbuilding for Games
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.31: Learning to Listen As a Writer
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 19.08: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Working with an Editor

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

Writing Excuses 17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment

Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity

Writing Excuses 16.24: Worldbuilding for Games

Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

Writing Excuses 13.31: Learning to Listen As a Writer

Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

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