Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction

Mar. 5th, 2025 05:16 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction 
 
 
Key Points: Reaction is everything. Reactions sell the impact. Slow down, let us see and feel the reaction. Give audiences reactions they are familiar with. When we write too quickly, we often leave out reactions. Watch out for reactions that don't match the character's goals, motivations, fears, or seem completely opposed to what they want. Sometimes reactions line up with something else, but tell us what that is. No plan survives. Make a list of possible reactions. Don't forget the other characters! Use your own experiences. At the end of a scene or chapter, what do you want the characters, and your readers, to be feeling? Tell us how they're going to feel, tell us how they are feeling, and tell us how they felt. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 09]
 
[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 09]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] The reaction of who. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Howard] I'm sure many of you writers out there are saying, Howard, it's supposed to be the reaction of whom. But if you've been following along with us, you know that right now we're in our fourth episode where we're talking about the lens of who, the lens of the character. How we are approaching our writing through a specific lens. In this episode, we're finishing that up by talking about the fact that really, reaction is everything.
[Mary Robinette] There's a saying in theater, acting is reacting. Where there is something that happens on stage, and then you react to it. The actions that you take during that reaction let the audience know what your character is thinking and feeling. Because on stage, you don't get to go inside their heads. As writers, we do get to let the reader inside their head, but often there's a mismatch between what's going on inside their head and the actions that they are taking.
[DongWon] Or, if you're not showing enough reaction, things will feel really, really flat. Right? There's a video essay I really love by Tony Zhou who does Every Frame a Painting about martial arts movies. One of the things that he shows is that in a lot of great martial arts movies, what you'll see is… You see the actual blow land three different times. You see the first strike, you see a… Usually, like, a slow-mo zoom in of the strike, and then you see the reaction of the person who got hit. It's that reaction that sells the impact. Right? Because these are [stunt] performers. They're not actually hitting each other, their hitting each other very lightly. So when I see an emotional beat not land, when I see an action scene not land, it's because we don't see and feel the reaction. So I'm always telling people, it's okay to slow down. People think that to get through an action scene, it's got to stay fast to keep things moving really, really well, and we're missing the reaction and that's why things start to fall flat or not have the impact you want.
[Dan] Yeah. In… Since we're on the subject of martial arts, one of the things that I love about martial arts fight scenes, and I saw this as well in a YouTube video, but I can't remember which one it was. I can't give my sources as well as DongWon can. Someone was talking about the importance of familiarity and resonance in a fight scene. The idea that I, as a person, have never been through a pane of glass. I've never broken through one. Whereas I have bumped my head on something. I have knocked against a wall. That sort of thing. So you watch Jackie Chan, for example, and you'll see him crashed through a bunch of panes of glass, like in the beg… The one I'm thinking of is the big fight scene in the Lego store. He goes through several panes of glass, and then crashes off of a wall. What that does is it gives us a reaction, it gives the audience a reaction they're familiar with. So that right at the end, that last bit of it, we go oooh, because we know what that feels like. That lets the audience react with the character. [Silence] That was so weird that now nobody has any follow-up.
[Mary Robinette] No, no.
[Howard] No, this is the reaction of…
[Ha, ha]
[Howard] The reaction of me looking to Mary Robinette and thinking, oh, you have a response, and Mary Robinette looking to me and saying, oh, that look on your face suggests that you're about to say something.
[DongWon] Reaction and reaction.
[Howard] Both of us were wrong.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I was just trying not to make this whole episode about martial arts movies, because Dan and I could talk for an hour on this topic.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I'm there with that. So, here's the thing that I was thinking earlier about the… Showing the reaction multiple times. That when you're dealing with that reaction on the page, you're dealing with where does the character feel it in their body? What are the thoughts that go through their head? And then, what is the action that they take as a result of those things. And how does it link to the things we've already been talking about, which is, like, motivation and their goals? How do these things tied together? I will see characters who receive terrible shocking news, and all you get is a line of dialogue from them. Like, how does that sit with them, where is that… Where do they feel that? That's part of that, that's slowing down and letting us feel it. It's not that your character needs to have a reaction every single time. But it is a way of disambiguating what their response is. Sometimes it's very clear what's going on, you don't need to put all of those things in. But sometimes you really need to slow it down so that we can… That we can link to it. Like, when you let us know how we feel it in our bodies, a lot of readers will also map that to their own body. They tighten their shoulders, unconsciously, you can tighten your own shoulders.
 
[Dan] Reaction is such an important one to focus on, because, like you're saying, it is one of the first things that we leave out when we start to write too quickly. When we think to ourselves, well, I know how this person feels about what just happened, the audience is going to pick it up as well. I don't have to make… State it explicitly. It's one of the first things that disappears.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will go through, when I'm doing my revision, and I will look for places where I need to layer that back in. Where I've gone too fast, and I've left it out. So, if you're thinking, oh, my goodness, there's so many things to think about when I'm writing, remember that you can layer that in later. But it's absolutely true. It's the other thing that I see people do is that they… The character will have a very cinematic reaction that is completely at odds with their goals, with their motivation, with the things that they're afraid of. The classic one is two people… Like, someone wants to get back together with someone else, and they go into a room, and they yell at them. I'm like, how does… How do you think that's actually going to work? Like, that's not how that… Or all of the stalkers, like, out there. Like, yeah, I want to convince this person that I'm loving and safe. I'm going to stand under their window with a… In the rain with a radio. I'm like, that's not… Like, that's not going to get the reaction you think it's going to get.
 
[Howard] One of my very favorite examples of reaction to things not going as planned… It's cinematic… Is in the, as of this recording, most recent Mission Impossible movie. There's a car chase in the middle, where Ethan Hunt… No, wait, I mean Tom Cruise… No, wait, I mean Ethan Hunt, is handcuffed to… I forgotten the actress's name and I forgotten the character's name.
[Dan] Hayley Atwell.
[Howard] Hayley Atwell. They're handcuffed together and they're handcuffed so that Tom Cruise would not be in the driver's seat. They switch vehicles, I think three times, and the reactions of, wait, I'm not driving. Wait, you don't actually know how to do this thing with the car. Wait, you don't have a free hand to use your weapon. Over and over again. Things don't go as planned. Sandra and I and my youngest son watched this… I say youngest son. 21. Watched this in a hotel room at Gen Con. This was his first time seeing it, and he, about three quarters of the way through, said, this is the most interesting car chase I've ever watched.
[DongWon] That's a great one.
[Howard] It is so… It's because it's all about reactions. It's all about watching how the characters who have their motivations, who have their skills, are continuously dealing with something going wrong.
[DongWon] Exactly. The reaction sells the emotion in that moment, and, Mary Robinette, you bring up a great point, the reaction and the action don't match when a character… That's when they feel really wrong. However, I will also point out that sometimes you could use that to paper over other flaws in your story. Right?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] So I watched Twisters last night. Which is one of the most fun blockbusters I've seen in a while. Truly, Hollywood remembered how…
 
[DongWon] I always recommend writers have their own websites. It's important to have a place on the web where you can make sure people can find your press kit, upcoming releases, and bibliography. Even if you've not published yet, being out there and establishing a digital identity is incredibly important. So, when Kinsta reached out, we thought they'd be a good fit for our audience's needs. They take care of the technical stuff so you can focus on your writing. Kinsta provides managed hosting for WordPress, offering lightning fast load times, top-tier security, and unmatched human-only customer support. They offer you complete peace of mind by ensuring that your WordPress sites are always online, secure, and performing at their best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security, and it's one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC 2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200% faster sites by simply moving there WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called my-Kinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. My-Kinsta is packed with a range of features that simplify site management, including tools for cache control, debugging, redirects, [garbled] location, and even CDN set up. And thanks to their unlimited, free, expert led migrations, Kinsta ensures a smooth transition from other hosting providers so you won't experience any downtimes. Plus, their 24/7, 365, human-only support is available in multiple languages, ready to assist with any inquiries regardless of site complexity. Ready to experience Kinsta hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's the perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new members on select plans. Don't miss out, get started for free today.
 
[DongWon] How to make movies again. There's a whole thing where the first half of the movie, there's a rivalry between these two groups, and I stopped at one point and was like, it makes no sense. It doesn't matter if they're both at the tornado at the same time. It's a tornado. They can both be there. It's big enough. Right? But there papering over that by the characters reacting to each other constantly as they're creating this rivalry. It was so fun watching them make faces at each other, make fun of each other, and outrace each other that I didn't care whether it made sense or not. Right? Because they were selling me the reaction, they were selling me the emotional stakes and reality of these characters that it stopped me from doing the step back and think about it for a long time, and 90 percent of the readers would never have done that… Or viewers would never have done that. I just think about story too much.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Another thing to think about when we talk about reactions that don't line up with your goals is that they might line up with something else. When you mentioned stalkers, that's now the thing that I'm talking about. I apologize. Because that's a real thing that happens. People really do take actions that are not plausibly ever going to get them what they want. But it's because they are not reacting in that moment to their goals. They are reacting to something else. If you are able to present that properly in your story, that may be they are reacting to a previous experience, maybe they are reacting to a past trauma, maybe they are reacting to a desire rather than a goal which can be different things. If you don't put it into your story, the reaction will seem wrong. If you do put it into your story, then that dissonance creates a really nice moment.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of contrasts, I think this is probably a good time for us to take a little bit of a break.
 
[Howard] It's been said, and I wish I could quote who said it first, that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. This is not only an excellent foundation for military doctrine, it's also a very solid principle for writing. Your characters have a plan. If their plan survives from formulation all the way to the end of the book, assuming it's something they formulated in the first act, there probably wasn't enough reaction going on. We want to know what happens when the plan suffers and you have to come up with a new plan.
[DongWon] So much of it is listening to your characters. Right? I mean, and this goes back to the mismatch, when you have that mismatch, it often feels like it's because you needed something to happen for the plot. Not because the characters were organically responding to the thing. The thing I've learned from gaming as a GM, when I introduce a villain, when I introduce a scenario or an NPC, I cannot predict how my players are going to react. I might accidentally describe the bartender as being like two percent too hot, and now our session is derailed and now we're just…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] In this tavern for the rest… For the next two hours.
[Howard] Installing air-conditioning?
[DongWon] Installing air-conditioning. Of course.
[Howard] Okay.
[DongWon] Yes. Because anyways…
[Mary Robinette] It's compelling.
[DongWon] Sometimes your villain just isn't going to have the impact that you want and you need to find another angle. Right? You can't predict sometimes how your character will react and you need to listen to what their response is in the moment rather than what you need their response to be to move the plot forward. Sometimes that means either you need to change the dial on what the inciting incident is or you need to let your plot shift to follow the character's response.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I will make a list of possible responses that my character will have. I think about what is the goal, what are they trying to achieve, what do I need them to achieve, and I list out things that could possibly get us there. The other piece to that, to both of your points, is that often when we're thinking about our main character, we are forgetting how the people around them are reacting to the actions that they are taking.
[DongWon] This is the solution to the passive character. So many times, there's a passive protagonist. Right? The reluctant hero. You need people reacting to the situation that aren't that character, because if they're not reacting and taking action, it's absolutely maddening for the audience and your story's not going to move forward. So you need to surround them with people who are having the big reaction to move things forward in that way.
 
[Howard] When we began with this lens on character, I talked about… Or I invited us to use our own experiences as tools. I want to lean into that again, now, because I find in my own life, there are lots of times when something painful or unexpected or surprising happens, and I act quote out of character unquote. I discover something about myself that usually I don't like. Boy, I'm not the sort of person who says unkind things to someone else just because I've lost my temper. But what's wrong, what happened here? So the tool is, look at your own reactions. Are there times when you've reacted to something and you've learned something about yourself, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant? I'm putting that forward to our panelists as perhaps… Our hosts, perhaps as a question.
[Mary Robinette] So, I think that that's… This is a… A great example, and it ties back into things that Dan and DongWon were talking about before is the… Is that thing where your character does do something that is out of character, and you… But when they do that, they still have to have a reaction to it. So if they snap at someone, and then… That's the external reaction that they've done, but the internal reaction is, ooh, I just said that. Is there a way I can fix it? That's a… That is a thing that can allow you to have both. There's this great… One of my favorite celebrity interviews, Nathan Fillion is talking about being on soaps, and how they're… He was a young actor on soaps, and one of the veterans said, at the end of the scene, they're going to push the camera in on your face. And you've got no script, you can't go anywhere. You can't… So you have three…
[Howard] For heaven sake, don't move.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So you have three possible reactions. Did I leave the gas on?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, I did leave the gas on. I turned the gas off.
[Howard] I can now see…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] Nathan Fillion making each of those three faces.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Once you start seeing that, it's… Like, you see a lot of actors who have those reactions. But the thing about it is, what he's talking about is letting the reader know how they are supposed to react…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] To what has happened. So I find that sometimes at the end of the scene, at the end of a chapter, that I will look at it and go okay, did they leave the gas on or did they turn it off? And think about how my character is feeling, but specifically, how I want my reader to be feeling. What reaction I want them to be having as well.
[DongWon] A lot of times what you want to do is… kind of going back to my initial example of the martial arts punch landing, is show it… Tell us how they're going to feel, show us how they're feeling, tell us how they felt. You know what I mean? Sometimes you need that structure to a scene. That can be as… That can happen all in one sentence sometimes. Right? You can do it real quick, you can do it real slow. All those things are really useful, but letting us understand the reaction, and giving us time to process what the reaction is, is hugely important.
[Howard] Yeah. As we've talked about throughout this season, we talk about tools, we describe them as lenses. We describe them as lenses because the things that you are putting on the page are the things that are informing the reader about what they are supposed to be thinking, what they're supposed to be experiencing, what they're supposed to be feeling. Reaction is a critical, critical lens. Are we ready for homework?
[Mary Robinette] I think we are.
[Howard] I feel like we're ready for homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, what I want you to do is, I want you to look at one of your character's reactions, and flip it. So if they take an action that escalates a situation, how would that scene play if they de-escalate it? Can you still get to the endpoint that you want? So take a look at those reactions and play around with them.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. Surprise! You're out of excuses. Now do something completely unexpected. Go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.34: Grants and Fellowships

Aug. 30th, 2024 05:04 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.34: Grants and Fellowships
 
 
Key points: Grants, fellowships, residencies. 3 types. Fellowship, Money to support your work. Project fellowship, money for a specific project. Residencies, go somewhere and write. Alone or in a community. Who's paying? Governments, foundations, individuals. 4th type, prizes! What do you have to apply? It depends, but the core is usually a writing sample (25 pages). Also a personal artistic statement. How do you research these opportunities? Check Creative Capitol and Philanthropy News Digest. It's a long timeline! Impact. Who are you as an artist?
 
[Season 19, Episode 34]
 
[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.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 34]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Grants and Fellowships.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.
 
[DongWon] So we wanted to do an episode talking about how to get grants and how to get fellowships. We've been getting a lot of questions on our Patreon about this over time. Erin has mentioned this on the podcast a couple times. And it's a thing that I think about a lot. Unfortunately, not as informed about it as I would like to be. So this is a little bit of us grilling Erin about how to do this. But because of what I do and the friendships I have, I know a lot of people in the literary world as well. Right? Who do more literary fiction. I've noticed that many of them seem to sustain themselves going from residency to residency, going from fellowship to fellowship. They're being able to fund their creative work through a lot of money that's coming through arts organizations, from the government, from a variety of sources. So... I've never seen science fiction writers applying for these fellowships, even though clearly they would be able to get them. Until I met Erin, who's very good at this. Every time I talk to Erin, she's off in Alaska or some other beautiful location writing in a cabin, because somebody is sponsoring her to be there and to do that work. So, I was hoping you'd tell us a little bit more about the grants and fellowships ecosystem and how to do your research and how to start applying for some of these.
[Erin] Sure.  Well, let me start by sort of d… Grants and fellowships is like a kind of broad term for this whole ecosystem of get money from people for being art…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Doing art. Whatever. I think… I tend to think of them as having sort of three… There's three main types. One is where people give you money, a fellowship, that's just about supporting the work you've done so far. So, this is the type of thing where they're like, "Send us your writing. You're a great writer. We just want to give you money to continue to produce art." There is no… You don't have to give it to us. You don't have to, like, turn it over. You could, literally, like sit and stare at the wall. We just want to make sure that you don't have to spend time working or doing other things. We will just give you that money generally. That is honestly, the best kind…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] There are people who do that. Then, you've got your project fellowship, project grant. That's where you go to somebody and say, "I'm going to write this book," or "I'm going to do this short story collection. Please give me money for this specific purpose." They usually then expect you to then deliver that thing. They want you to have the book or the short story collection or some explanation of what you did with the time, if you don't give it back to them. Then, the third is residencies, which is when you go stay somewhere. Sometimes, usually, ideally on somebody else's dime or for free. There are residencies that you can pay for, and it's like you get a discounted rate. So, it's like you can go stay in the south of France for like 300 dollars a week which is much less than you would normally spend to stay there. Basically, residencies are a wide variety. Sometimes, it's like you alone in the Mojave Desert. I literally just saw an application for that yesterday. Just in a hut. I hope you like yourself. You just…
[DongWon] I'm gonna get that one. That sounds like my dream, to sit in the desert by myself. No one bothers me.
[Erin] Exactly. Then there are the ones that you do where you're in a community. Like, I was in Alaska for a few months ago for Storyknife, which is one where you go up to Homer, Alaska. It's for women and women identified writers. Each person is in a cabin, and there's six of you at a time. You get fed, which is lovely. So that you just focus on the writing. Often, residencies don't ask you to produce something specific. Occasionally, they want to see your work. But a lot of times, they just want to put you in a location where you're away from your life and your normal responsibilities and you can just go and write. So those are the kinds of things that you can get.
 
[DongWon] Who is giving you money to do these things? Who's paying for this?
[Erin] It really depends. So's sometimes it's the government. As we like to say. The government has money for creativity because a country, city, state, province without art is not as cool, and people want their jurisdiction to be cool. So they put some money into arts funding. So what they will do is they will say you have to have lived in this state. So, like, there is usually a residency requirement. You can't get in a van and just drive from state to state taking their arts money. I mean, that would be great, but you can't. Instead, usually, you have to live there for anywhere from a year to five years, depending on the place. Then, you say, "I have been doing so much to enrich the artistic life of insert your location here. Please give me money so that I may continue to do so." So, sometimes it's the government of wherever you are. Then, sometimes, it's foundations of people who just love the arts. People who have made it in the arts and want to like pay it forward to the next generation. And they will want to give you all the money.
[Mary Robinette] My mom was an arts administrator. That was one of the big things that she did was fundraising. Mostly for grants, but also in order to be able to give fellowships to people. So they were getting money from the government, from things like the National Endowment for the Arts. But also from a lot of individual donors as well. Individual donors will sometimes then also set up their own little programs. Because either they are genuinely philanthropic or they need a tax break. Giving to the arts is one of the ways you can do that.
[DongWon] If you watch a lot of PBS programming, you'll see a lot of names that will come up in these spheres over and over again. Certain foundations, certain arts organizations, and certain private donors give a lot to support the arts in this country. If it sounds crazy that the government will give you money to make art, please know that this is a recent change in that that has become less common now than it used to be. The NEA used to be a really amazing sponsor of a lot of artists, both visual arts and written arts in the country for decades and decades. Right? It was an important part of how our government operated and how we made great art in the country. Many, many countries overseas… I know if you're in the UK, if you're in other parts of Western Europe, there's just an enormous amount of funding available for creatives who are trying to make art, and that the government will sponsor you to do that. So, that still exists in this country. It is not as robust as it once was, but that doesn't mean it's gone away. Getting any money has become a little bit more difficult over the past few administrations, but it's still out there.
[Mary Robinette] Well, these organizations, the ones that give you the fellowships or the grants, kind of exist to serve as a bridge between people who are creating the arts and the fancy people who have the money. Because, like, I can't go to a fancy person and say, "Hello. You need to do this." But I can go to an organization, and that organization has a fundraiser whose job is to go to places to get money from fancy people.
[Erin] Also, whose job it is to, like, evaluate. Because maybe you're like, "I want to give money to great writers," but you're like, "I don't really have time."
[DongWon] Yup.
[Erin] "To determine which… Who those great writers are, and I don't want to just give to the three people I know. So, I'm going to give money to an organization that has, like, a panel of people who will judge the writing," and that actually is probably a good segue into, like, what do you even have to do?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What are these people asking for?
[DongWon] Well, before we make that [jump] though, I wanted to point out there's a fourth category, which is prizes. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[DongWon] These organizations also run awards, usually annually, of who are the best writers? Who's making the best work in this area, in this category, in this identity group? Whatever it is. There's plenty of organizations, and those often have money attached to those prizes as well. So, that's another thing you can look out for to submit your name for certain prizes, either locally or nationally, whatever it is.
[Erin] That is very true. It's funny, because I've gotten prizes, but in my mind I still think of them as [garbled chips] so I always forget that it's an actual thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Poetry is also a field that has a lot of prizes, so including speculative poetry, so, for my spec poetry people out there, there are a lot of poetry prizes where they actually publish your poetry, and then they also often give you money.
[DongWon] It is, unfortunately, the primary way to get a collection published these days is to win a prize. It is very hard to publish a collection of poetry through a press directly. Most poetry presses are funded in some way, and are picking what their publishing through these prizes.
[Erin] The funny thing is, I know that a little bit because of going to residencies. Which is… This could run plug for sort of group residencies which are lovely, is that a lot of times they go across genres. So there's not really like many like speculative fiction only residencies. But I was in residency with poets and then with literary fiction and with people who write essays and do academic writing. So you learn a lot about other kinds of writing. Then you can use it to kind of inform your own creative life. Which is one reason that I absolutely love it. And… Is it time for the book?
[DongWon] It's a little early, but we could do it
.
[Erin] No. We will not break. Instead, we will talk… Just take a second to talk a little bit about what do people actually ask you for when you're going for a fellowship? It really depends. I actually keep shockingly no one a whole table that has all of, like, what each person needs. But… A lot of times, a writing sample is going to be the core of what you have to give. So you're going to have to give your best 20 pages, 25 pages is usually the limit of what you're going to have to do. Which, luckily, is about the length maybe of a short story. Or, if you used to submitting your novel, you're used to sending… It's like, here, this is my great work, that's the same type of thing that you can actually send on to a grant or to a fellowship to let them know this is who I am, this is what I like.
[DongWon] So, when you're submitting a query, we always say first 10 pages. Right? When you're doing a grant application, does it have to be the first 10 pages, or should it be a selection somewhere else that you think is particularly… Like, what are they looking for in that case? Do you know?
[Erin] They're looking for something that's going to make them go, "Wow, this is great writing." So I think that it can be a section from anywhere in your novel. You can even, like, give a little bit of an explanation of where it comes from. But if it's really contextual, if you have, like, a piece where it's like you really have to have read the first 50 pages to truly understand the genius of this moment, I would not send that…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because they're not going to do it.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] So you really want something that's going to grab people, almost the same way that when you pick something for a reading, you really want to pick something that kind of starts strong, brings people in, and ends at a really great point where people are thinking, "Oh, I'm really wondering what happens next," or "I feel like I've had a really satisfying experience." So that they're like, "Oh, I got this great bite-size sample of this person's work, and I just want them to produce a thousand more bites, and I will pay them for that."
[Mary Robinette] All right. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the more nuts and bolts of this process.
[Erin] Let's do it.
 
[Shawn] Hey, it's Shawn Nelson, founder and CEO of Love Sack and host of the Let Me Save You 25 Years podcast. Curious how successful people really made it? Tune in to hear from guests like Travis Mills, a true American hero, and Nate Chexits, cofounder of Rone. We dive deep into their stories and lessons that shape them, so you can skip the trial and error and get straight to the good stuff. You can find me wherever you get your podcasts. That's Let Me Save You 25 Years with Shawn Nelson. Listen now.
 
[Mary Robinette] This week, I want to tell you about a nonfiction book called Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. This book looks at what happens to economies at the margins of the modern world due to circumstances ranging from tsunamis to incarceration to the world's first digital state. Davies challenges conventional economic thinking, offering a glimpse into how extreme circumstances molds societies. For writers seeking inspiration, but who are scared of economics, this is an easy and engaging read. I highly recommend extreme Income Economies by Richard Davies.
 
[DongWon] Okay. Now that we're coming back from the break, I have a question for you, Erin, which is how do you begin to research these organizations? How do you know what's out there and what's your process look like to build your incredible spreadsheet that I know you have?
[Erin] I will tell you that, but before I do, I just wanted to note that the… Sadly, the writing sample alone is not the only thing that you may have to do if you are applying. The other thing is a personal statement. Now this is… Can be terrifying for people. This is where you try to sum up you are as a writer, as an artist, in a page that will really go along with your writing sample, ideally two things that complement each other. Like, in your personal statement, you don't want to be, like, "I use comedy to really like_the hilarity of life." Then it's like a story about eight ducks dying.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] That's… In a not funny way. So there's like… You want the two things to sort of complement each other.
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Erin] And create like a really nice picture of who you are. We can talk a little bit about techniques about that later. But, how I research them is I believe in really cheating off of other people's work. Not when I write, but when I apply for things. There are some great organizations. We're going to make a resource heavy liner notes for this, so that you can have all the links and apply to all the things. But, Creative Capitol is a place that gives money to experimental artists. But something they also do is they actually publish every two months here are opportunities coming up for artists and writers to get money from people who are not us. So they do that. Philanthropy News Digest sends out RFP lists, like, these are places you can send proposals to, and under arts, they have a lot of the big residencies and arts places that you can get money from.
[DongWon] An RFP is a request for proposal.
[Erin] Yes. Sorry, I used to work in funding…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So, this is how I found out about a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, Philanthropy News Digest has stuff. There is a person, a lovely person named Felicia, I can't remember her last name, who sends out every other week opportunities for people, both jobs and fellowships, for something which I cannot remember the name of. But she's a lovely person, and we'll put her newsletter in the notes as well. There's a lot of people who are out there compiling these lists for you and just sending them out to you. The main thing is just keeping track of what you want to do, what can you do, and when are the deadlines. I will say that a lot of… For some reason, especially on the residency side of things, there's a big deadline usually in March and October. These tend to be the seasons, like, September October, and like February March, when a lot of people want stuff at the same time, so it's good to sort of think about that and try to be as ready for it as you can be.
[DongWon] That's pegged to the reporting schedules that they have to give back to the NEA because they're… If they're getting money from the federal government, they need to tell the government, "Hey, we fulfilled our grants." Right? So, generally, they're taking those applications so that they can report back, "Yes, we've given out X dollars." Right? So when you're looking at applying for these things, keep in mind that they want you to apply. They need you to apply. Otherwise, they have to give that money back to the government, and they don't want to do that. Right? Because that's also a part of their operating expenses. So they are very eager for you to apply. They want you to do that. So, I'm really encouraging you to take this very seriously and throw your hat in the ring.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things to also recognize about this is that there's an extremely long… There's a long timeline.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So this is also one of the things when I was applying for grants when we were doing theater… Puppet theater, that you're applying for a grant now for a show that you're going to do in two years often, there was this really long cycle. Frequently people… I will see people in science fiction and fantasy who are just trying to get a grant for, like a convention. They're like, "We're going to do something next week." I'm like, "No. There's no window there."
[Erin] Even with project proposals, for the ones that will say, like, "I want to get money to, like, write my short story collection," I wouldn't say, "and I've got 10 of the 12 stories done today." Because by the time they give you the grant, they figure you're done. A lot of times, what you're pitching them is the project after the one you're currently working on. But you can pitch it like a dream, like they're not actually going to hold you to it, and be like, "You didn't put this specific element in." It's really about painting a picture of what it is that you do think that you would like to write. What could you do if you had unlimited resources, what could you do if you had time to do it? Then, just put that dream on paper. Because a lot of what you're trying to do… Like, I know, guys… I know you all like grants and fellowships can sound really dry. But what you're doing is you are building a dream of what you wish your creative life could be and then giving that dream to somebody else, selling it to someone else, and saying invested in my dream. Dream this with me. So what you want to be doing when you're writing up these things is saying, like, "It's not just I want to write a story about a robot. It's that I want to explore the way that robots really make us understand our humanity in a different way." That's something that moves me and it's something that should move you. So that even if I wrote a different story, you know that it's coming out of this place that's really exciting and really makes you think differently about the world.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that grant givers will often be looking for is what I call impact. Which is, what are the ripple effects from giving this grant to someone? So, if it's like we can give this grant to this person and it's going to make their life better. That's great. But if there's someone who's writing caliber is the same and you can see, oh, this is going to have these ripple effects where it's going to affect these different communities, that person is going to weight higher, because they have more impact. That… Because they do have a limited amount of money, so they want the most impact for the dollar.
[Erin] It can be a little scary. Because I think we're used to thinking about the next story and the next book and not thinking about you as like a product and you as an artist. I actually think whether or not you apply to a grant or fellowship, it's really nice to think about what are you doing? Like, look at the stories that you've written, the things that interest you, the media you're looking at. What is it about storytelling, the way that you tell stories, that's different than everybody else? What is it that draws your eye?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Or that would draw other people to you? I think that's a beautiful thing that you get a chance to do in an artistic is to think about self that way.
[DongWon]. Totally. It's really interesting, because for publishing, we don't ask for an artist statement, we don't ask for that kind of personal statement. But it's what I'm looking for, it's what I'm trying to figure out when I'm reading your query, when I'm reading your work, is what your whole deal? Why are you doing this? Right? That's an important question for me is understanding what is your impact? Why are you trying to do this? Right? So, learning to articulate that in an explicit way will help you communicate that when you are approaching the publishing process. Because that's a big part of your story. So much of publishing well is being good at telling your story in addition to here's what the book is. Right? So, learning to pitch pitch yourself for the grants process is very similar to learning to pitch yourself for the publishing process.
[Erin] And for the convention process. I was thinking, like, the other time that your asked to write a paragraph of who you are and what you can talk about is a lot of times if you're trying to be part of a convention. They'll ask you for, like, what could you speak about, like, where should we put you on panels? Being able to do that in a compelling way can help you get selected for panels and for things. [DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Which is just a great part, if that's something that your into in your career.
 
[DongWon] So what are some red flags to look for when you're looking at considering applying for a grant, or especially applying for a residence what are things that make you go, "Oh. Maybe not this one." Right? Or maybe they've all gone well? Right? Maybe this isn't a big concern as much as it can be when you're trying to find an agent or a publisher. Right? But I have to imagine not all arts organizations are created equal. Right?
[Erin] See, I would say… First of all, just like know yourself a little bit. Like, I don't know that I want to spend three months in the Mojave Desert alone. And applying for things just because they're there is, like, not the best. You can always challenge yourself, but if you're like, "I don't know how I would do with solitude in a residency." Maybe apply for a one week alone residency and see how it goes. Or spend a week in your house alone without talking to anybody, and say, "Did that work for me?"
[Chuckles]
[Erin] There's one residency that I'm afraid of called Back to Basics in Finland where for two months, you just hang out and you're not allowed to use your phone or Wi-Fi at all. I know many people…
[DongWon] I'll see you guys in two months.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Who are like, "Yes." I'm like, "Nah. I think I'd want to check my email."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like… I can't even imagine you without constant access.
[Erin] Exactly. So part of it's like know the type of experiences that you want to have. I think one of the things that can happen, same thing with publishing, is you're so used to asking. You want to ask, that when somebody says yes, you think I've got to go. But sometimes it's like, no, you don't.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] So, I also Google it, I try to look at, like, other people who have gone. Do they seem depressed after? [Garbled]
[chuckles]
[Erin] Afterwards, other Instagram pictures, are through a sad filter? But what does it look like to be there? Is it something that seems reputable? Is it… Are you going to be alone or with other people? What are they asking you for? Is there money involved that you have to turn over? Then, also trying to find them through reputable places. I'll also list in the liner notes, there's like an alliance of residential programs that kind of is like an overshooting body of a lot of these organizations. So they sometimes know, like… Somebody writes you an email, like, "I've got a cabin, come stay for free." Check, maybe, if they're on that…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Ax murderer? Or philanthropist?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Hard to tell sometimes.
[Erin] [garbled] same coin. So, check to see if they're on the list, or if anybody else has ever done it that you know. That's also a way to tell, by the way… Sorry for the slight ramble… If you qualify. Because sometimes they use confusing language. For example, early career artist. There's a fellowship out of Princeton and one out of Radcliffe where they basically give you 90,000 dollars and a year to just be an artist. Sounds great. It's for early career. But, if you look at who's gotten it, it's like so and so, who's on their third book. Which is still early, but, like, maybe not as early as you might have thought.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] When you went to apply. So it's nice to see who's gotten it, what kind of writing they're doing to see are you falling into sort of the realm of what the other people are doing. You can throw as many applications as you'd like in, and a lot of them are now waiving their application fees if you don't have money for. But I think it's always good to like line up your application with the general idea of what they're looking for, which I think is really a good thing to do.
 
[Mary Robinette] I do actually want to mention application fees, because that can be another red flag. If you look at their funding model and they're not getting any funding from outside sources and it's all coming from application fees that's a scam and do not apply for it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] An application fee, in and of itself, is not a red flag. Because there is administrative expenses, and, honestly, sometimes people have application fees just to keep people from applying. It's a form of gatekeeping so that they are not inundated. It's like, oh, are you serious about this or are you just filling it out because it's a form on the Internet? So… But, if their funding model has no donors, if there's no… Like, they don't have any other income source, uh uh. Or if the amount of prize that they're going to award is like… Look at the ratio between how big the fee is… It's like you have to pay 100 dollars to apply for this prize, and we're going to give out a 500 dollar prize.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Scam.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] Yeah.
 
[DongWon] What is your best experience with this process? Right? Whether it was a grant or a prize or a residency. What was the thing that when you think about it, you're like, yeah, this was worth it, I loved doing this?
[Erin]It's hard, because… Honestly, in all truth, they're all great. I love money from everyone. Thank you.
[chuckles]
[Erin] Don't hate me, people who aren't mentioned. But I think that the residential experiences that I've had, one at Hedgebrook and one at Storyknife, have been amazing. Hedgebrook is just off Whidbey Island near Seattle. Storyknife is in Alaska. I think for me, there's something amazing about being in a community with other writers in a really… I mean, there's no expectations and they also feed you. Like, the food alone is a good reason to go.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But I think it's also a way to get away from your life and also say to yourself, "I a writer," in a very concrete way. I think you can get a grant, or fellowship, or a prize, and it's amazing. But there's something about living the I am a writer life with other people and saying, like, "Oh, we're all creatives living together," and talking about the things that you're interested in. I mean, it's the same reason I love Writing Excuses, getting a chance to talk about writing with other people who are knowledgeable and smart and amazing, and also for food.
[Laughter]
[Erin] So that is… I mean, those have been standouts for me. I will say, like, I'm going to just acknowledge right now that there's a lot of privilege in being able to take that time away from your life and participate in a residency. Some of them are a week or two weeks, a month. There are some that are whole years long, if you really want to get away from your life. So it's not for everyone and everyone can't do it. But, for me, it's been really beneficial and I would say that if you get money from someone and you might be able to create your own residency, like, for yourself, maybe you could get a grant or a fellowship, and then say, what I'm going to do is rent a cheap AirB&B…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] In my town or… And then get away and, like, use that to get a babysitter so that I can write at this period of time. So I do think there's something nice about taking those types of opportunities and using them to, say, "I am a writer and I write."
[DongWon] Thank you so much for explaining all this to us, walking us through the process. That has been really helpful for me, just understanding a little bit more. But… Before we go, I believe you have a little bit of homework for our listeners?
 
[Erin] I do have some homework. It's not going to be a shock. I want you to write a personal artistic statement. Just a paragraph of who you are as an artist. Actually, I'm just going to throw this out there without getting permission from anyone like our producer. But, I would love to see some of these. Like, if you all want to share with us on social media or through our Patreon, like, share who you are as an artist and let us celebrate you and celebrate the artist that you are and the artist that you will continue to be.
[DongWon] I would love to see those. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Me, too. I'm like, "Oh, let's put some of those in the newsletter."
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] All right. Thank you so much.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length

Feb. 15th, 2024 02:37 pm
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Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length
 
 
Key Points: There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel. First, look at unfulfilled promises, or runaway atmosphere, and adjust those. What tells the story most effectively? Is the pacing off? Consider the master effect, what is the intended impact of the story, and do the separate elements support that? Often authors write their way into or out of a scene, and leave that extra text there. Cut it! NaNoWriMo, high-paced writing, may focus on whatever you're excited about, and leave out the parts that are harder for you to write. Take a look at filling those in! When layering, look for natural pause points. Watch for shorthand or compressed spots, which you can unpack to add emphasis or remove ambiguity. To add length, try sending them to new locations. To cut length, cut a character or a side quest. READ, review, do the easy fixes, audition (outline, then try changes on the outline), and do it! Adjust signposts and bridging material. Use narrative summary (aka summarize your darlings). Let things happen offstage, and have someone refer to it. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 06]
 
[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.
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Length.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
 
[DongWon] With us this week, we have a special guest, which is executive editor at Tor Publishing group, Ali Fisher. Ali acquires and edits speculative fiction and non-fiction across young adult, middle grade, and adult categories, and is, as a bonus, a cast member of the podcast Rude Tales of Magic, which is a D&D flavored comedy podcast. But really Ali's here in her capacity as an editor, and has worked on a very wide range of incredibly successful titles in speculative fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Yeah, so welcome, Ali.
[Ali] Thank you. Hello, world. I am so excited to be on this podcast. Longtime listener, first time being on the podcast here. I've been listening to Writing Excuses since, I think, 2010.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Ali] Is that true? You've been doing this that long, correct?
[DongWon] I mean, next season will be year 20 soon, so, I don't remember what year we started, but… It's been a minute.
[Ali] Yeah. I… I've been listening to Writing Excuses longer than I've been in publishing. So, it's a real pleasure.
[Mary Robinette] This somehow delights me. And also makes me feel impossibly old.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] revision, which is also something that makes me feel impossibly old when I get into it.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] We know that… We've timed this because we know that a lot of people have just finished NaNoWriMo, and you have written a novel and now you have to figure out what to do with it. So, that was why we invited Ali in, because as an editor, she has a certain understanding of what happens with novels. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is length. Because most of the projects coming out of NaNoWriMo are going to be too short. Having said that, every time I talk to someone about a novel, I always hear them say either, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too long." Or, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too short." I never hear anybody say, "But it's just right." There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel.
[DongWon] Exactly, exactly. Even when novels come to me as an agent or when it goes to the editor or the publishing house, I feel like that is one of the first things we're talking about, that's, like, where does this fit in terms of length. So, Ali, when a project comes across your desk, when I send you an email with the most brilliant thing…
[Ali] Uhuh.
[DongWon] Attached to it…
[Ali] Of course.
[DongWon] What is your immediate reaction when you start thinking, oh, I wish this was a little bit on the shorter side, I wish this was a little bit on the longer side. What are the questions that start coming to your mind to help you figure out how to answer that?
[Ali] Yeah. Absolutely. So, working in speculative fiction, often we're sort of… We see the higher range of word count on like different novels, novellas, or whatever, because there's a lot of additional writing that sometimes takes place in those books, especially at Tor, known for door stoppers.
[Chuckles]
[Ali] A wide range, though, really. So, depending on the age group it's for, there tend to be different sort of hopes and requests coming in from retailers for their shelves and what are their assumptions of those readers' reading lengthwise. Right? Middle grade being slightly shorter. YA has really run the gamut at this point, but… With adults attending to have potentially the longest word count that I've seen. Those are very broad generalizations, but it tends to be something that is absolutely always on the table in the conversation when books come in. But that word count conversation also tends to happen after an initial read and just sort of taking stock of… There were promises that were never… That I was excited to read about, we never saw them, or there was a lot of atmosphere here, but it felt a little exploratory to your process, and I actually think that it could feel bigger if there's less in there. So, stuff like that is a little bit more… A little less like let's chop this to a really specific length, and more of a what else… What's helpful in telling this story most effectively?
[Mary Robinette] I'm really glad you said that, because one of the things that I see a lot with early career writers is that they will have internalized these rigid ideas of how long a book needs to be. Sometimes they think that they have to cut 10% when they finish a book. I think they've picked that up from Steven King. But it's not just cutting. Like, shorter is not better, longer is not better, it's the why of it, for me. Like, why are you trying to cut or expand? That helps inform the places that you're doing it. For me, length, like description, that sort of thing, has a lot to do… Has a strong relationship to pacing.
 
[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. I think sometimes when a book can feel too long, that is because the pacing is… It's too drawn out. It's not moving fast, I'm not getting pulled enough… Pulled through this as forcefully as I want to, to have like a really great reading experience. So, I think sometimes the idea is, okay, there's some fat, we can cut here. There's some extra elements that aren't quite landing with the reader for whatever reason, and if we remove those scenes, then maybe things will move on a little bit quicker. Then, sometimes, we make sure on the other side too of everything is always up to 11, it could be exhausting as a reading experience. We kind of need those breaks and those breathing points to kind of absorb character information or background information or worldbuilding, and kind of like really settle into the story in some ways. So, I think length and pacing often feel very connected.
[Ali] Definitely. It is very hard to know before you get to the stage where you have confirmed beta readers or an agent or an editor who will read your book and tell you about things like pacing and tell you their [garbled] responses to stuff like that. I'm going to bring in something from a book that I read once…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Excellent.
[Ali] Right off the bat here. There's a book called The Fiction Editor, The Novel, And the Novelist. It's very short, I think it's like 170 pages, by Thomas McCormack. I don't know much about Thomas, but he was an editor once upon a time, and he has a concept called the master effect. The concept was the master effect is the cerebral and emotional impact the author wants the book as a whole to have. It goes on to say it can be… It's sort of like it's propped up by observation and insight and emotion and experience. So, like what does this all lead to? I think, when you're looking at length, it can be helpful to look at the separate elements, as they like relate to what that big overall feeling is that you want. It can be sort of like interesting to see what inspires that feeling most, and what doesn't really add to it. Right? Especially if you're looking at like tension or something, you might find with an eye really clearly set on, "Oh, I want this to feel really tense," then you realize like, "Oh, this traveling isn't quite getting me there," or something.
 
[DongWon] It's sort of like… We were talking about word count expectations by category and genre, that the publisher wants. If it's an epic fantasy, you want it to be this length, whether that's like 100,000 or 120,000 words. If you wanted to hit with middle grade office, you want it on the shorter side. Whatever that specific range is. But those aren't… They are arbitrary and they can be very frustrating when you run into them in a rigid way. But the logic of it does come from somewhere, which is, when you're reading an epic fantasy, so much of what you want to be hearing… Experiencing is that expansiveness, is the breadth of scope and perspective, and to get a sense of the politics and the magic and those kinds of things. So you're expecting a slightly slower pace when you're coming into an epic fantasy than you would if you were coming into an adventure fantasy, which you want it to be moving a little bit at a brisker pace, getting from action scene to action scene, from tension to tension, a little bit quicker than you would when you're not having big feast scenes or big courtroom political scenes. Right? So I think a little bit of those length expectations really are driven by genre and category, because those connect to certain types of pacing and certain types of reading experiences. So if you're thinking about that, you call it the master effect? Is that what the term was?
[Ali] Yes. Yeah. Thomas called it.
[DongWon] When you're thinking about the effect that you want to have on your reader for your particular category, that's where length can really be part of the conversation coming into it.
[Mary Robinette] That's something that we're going to talk about in our next episode, where we're talking about intention. Edgar Allan Poe has a similar concept, which he calls the unity of effect, where you kind of think about what is the overall emotional goal that you're aiming for, and then everything that you put into the novel goes into that, and I think that length is one of those things that you're also manipulating as you're moving through. One of the other things that you said, Ali, at the beginning was talking about… Or maybe it was you, DongWon, talking about… Oh, I can see you've left some of your homework here. But there's another thing that I see authors do, and I've done myself a lot, which is that we don't really know where the scene is going so we write our way into it to discover it. But then all of that text is still there. So I frequently find that often the beginnings of scenes and sometimes the ends of scenes are places where the author is trying to figure out how do I get into this scene or how do I get back out of it. That you've done the thing that the scene required, and then you're kind of floundering, going like, eh, I don't… It needs a… I don't know, let's… Eh… Then there's just a lot of text where you were trying to figure out the perfect line, and then you don't cut any of it, because you don't know which pieces are actually supporting it.
[DongWon] Exactly. I think… I would love to dive into more about how you identify those and some techniques for cutting or adding, depending on where you need to do that. But let's take a quick break first, and we'll talk about the specific techniques when we come back.
 
[Ali] For my thing of the week, I wish I could pitch every book I've ever been able to work on. But, since it's 15 minutes long, and we're not that smart, I'm going to constrain myself to just the most recent publication that I had the genuine pleasure to acquire and edit. This is Infinity Alchemist by World Fantasy and National Book award winning author, Kacen Callender. Kacen is the author of Hurricane Child, King of the Dragonflies, Felix Ever after, Queen of the Conquered, and many more. Infinity Alchemist is their YA fantasy debut. It rules. It's basically dark academia burn the magic school down. In it, 3 young alchemists come together to find and then protect the rumored Book of Source before others use it for alchemist supremacy. Of course, these 3 heroes end up in a legendary love triangle, and please remember real love triangles connect on all 3 sides.
[Chuckles]
[Ali] [garbled] is clear, mostly trans, mostly POC, and polyamorous. The magic system is inspired by quantum physics, so it's very original, very cool, and available just now as of last week from Tor Teen.
 
[DongWon] As we come back from break, I would love to start digging into some of the techniques. So, say you… Coming out of NaNoWriMo, the expectation is you've written 50,000 words, and now you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, how do I make this a little bit longer?" How do I make this feel like a full novel that is ready for a fantasy reader, or ready for a YA reader, whoever it is you're trying to reach? So, how do you know where to add length? What are the points at which… How do you add to the volume of the text without slowing down your pacing too much, or disrupt or throwing off your plot structure or your character arcs or whatever it is?
[Ali] First of all, congratulations. Well done. I don't… Every time I hear about NaNoWriMo that sounds absolutely bonkers to me. That is extremely impressive. My understanding is writing at that sort of sprint pace, for a lot of people… Some people that is a very standard piece of writing, for a lot of people it is, like, pedal to the metal, tough situation. My guess is you gravitated towards like writing things you're most excited about, or, like writing towards characters if that was what you're most excited about or writing towards just the world if that was what you were most excited about, so it could well be that, like, there are full category elements that are somewhat missing, that just don't feel as instinctive or easy or smooth for you as a writer, to, like, write when you're in that zone, when you're in that kind of sprint zone. So there may be whole categories that have opportunities for lengthening.
[DongWon] That makes sense. So you're really looking at it overall and saying what are the things that I was drawn to when I was putting this together, but maybe not feeling the sort of holistic sense of I want to have this effect on my reader, here's the things I didn't put in there. I'm writing an epic fantasy and all I did was right cool battle scenes. Now I gotta go put back the court intrigue, now I have to put a romance in here, now I have to put in those character arcs that maybe aren't as fleshed out as they were when I was thinking about how to get enough words down on the page. Right? So I think that's a great place to start, I'm just feeling like where are the elements of this story that I want to be putting in that I wasn't thinking about in that moment.
[Ali] Yeah. Unless you're pitching [garbled] battle scenes, and then…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] It's just a collection of battle scenes, which sounds…
[Laughter]
[Ali] [garbled] and you should do that, but then you need 20 more battle scenes.
[DongWon] I would recommend Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes, which is basically just one battle over 3 days for the entire book. So…
[Ali] Awesome.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Ali] Very cool.
 
[Mary Robinette] So I… What I look for when I'm doing this… The kind of thing that you're talking about, the layering of… Layering in the romance element or sometimes you've written a scene and it's only dialogue and there could actually be some description… Maybe we'd like these people to be some place. So what I look for when I'm going to like layering description, for instance, is I look for natural pause points. Because when you… When you're spending words on a description, the reader has to slow down to read them. So every word you've got on the page is basically creating a pause in the readers head between one line of dialogue in the next. Which is why… Sometimes you've had the experience where you see a character answer a question and you don't remember the question that was asked. Because there's been a ton of description in between those 2 things. So I'll look for those natural pause points to put in descriptions, but also to unpack emotion. One of the other things that I find when I got a finished novel is that at the… Especially the last 3rd of the novel, I just want to be done with the novel. So I, like, shorthand every emotional experience my character is having. This is a place where you can add length by going back and unpacking the things. You don't want to unpack every emotion that the character has. You want to unpack the ones that are… Again, going with that unity of effect. So I think about it as places where I want to add emphasis or remove ambiguity, as some of the places that I'm looking at for unpacking the emotion. Is this an emotion that I want to add emphasis to, because it helps you understand the character better? Or, is this moment ambiguous? Can I give a little bit more here? Like, did I completely forget to give any physical sensation to my character experiencing an emotion?
[Ali] Totally. So, like what you're saying, it could be that at the beginning, you have a… When notable emotional experiences happen, you have the full range of… The emotion beforehand and the observation, and the tension, and then the emotion itself, and then the internal judgment on the emotion, and, like, go through the entire sort of the cycle of that. And watching then the reaction, or the dialogue that comes after it. By the end, it's like, "Uh, she was sad."
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Moving forward.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] You've read my manuscript.
[Ali] Yeah, but it works at the time. So, like, just… That's also about balancing and finding that style… Style similarities across maybe when like different… Different days felt different levels of oh, no, I have to make up for 2 days now, or whatever, that you were getting through.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the other hacks that I have for adding length is reverse engineering something that I do for short fiction where I need to compress. So, with short fiction, I try to have everything in a single location. With novels, sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I need to make this longer. Where can I send them that I haven't sent them before?" Because it will make the world feel richer. It's like, oh, reuse locations, but sometimes sending them someplace else gives me additional words that I have to write because I have to describe the new place. Again, it can make the world seem broader and richer and more interesting if I just change location of a scene.
 
[DongWon] Exactly. So, on the flipside of that, though, you've got something, it's a 200,000 word manuscript, you need it to be 110. Right? You need to cut a lot of it because it's simply too big for whatever reason. Either for the readership or even sometimes bumping up against physical limitations of publishing.
[Chuckles] [Yes]
[DongWon] It's hard to remember that we are making physical objects that we're shipping around.
[Yes]
[DongWon] And when you print more pages, it gets more expensive, and when it's heavier, it's more expensive. That can really affect things. So when, for whatever reason, your publisher is saying, "Hey. We would love this to be shorter." Or if your friends are saying that, or just your own instincts, where do you start to make those cuts? What are the things that are either easy things that you can start to look at? I mean, like, okay, across the board, I could start pulling out these scenes, or, what are the more difficult interwoven elements that you're starting to look at?
[Mary Robinette] As, apparently the only writer in the room…
[Laughter]
[Ali] But we have a lot to say.
[Mary Robinette] You have a lot to say. But I will…
[DongWon] We have a lot of opinions about how writers should do things.
[Ali] Yeah. Since you asked what's the hard part.
[Mary Robinette] You have opinions about what I should do, but I can tell you what's mechanically difficult and what's easier. The easiest way to reduce a bunch of length very fast is to cut a character or a side quest. That'll pull out a ton of length really fast. It can feel daunting when you are thinking about doing that because usually it's a… It's woven into the book all the way through. So I… What I will do is I will… I have an acronym that I use which is READ. I will review, do the easy fixes, audition, and then do it. So by audition, what I mean is that I will… If I have to do a really big at it like that, I'll reverse engineer my outline. Then I will experiment with pulling out those scenes just in outline form to see whether or not the basic flow is still there. Then, when I get into it and start the do it part of it, I put all of those into a scrap been, because I will almost certainly need pieces of them later. Then, largely what I'm doing is I'm having to adjust my signposts, which is the way I exit and enter scenes, and the material… The bridging material from getting from one thing to another. When I'm cutting things. Then, when I'm cutting characters, often it's, like, you just go in and you change the character names and then you have to tweak the dialogue to make it make sense for that character. But it's one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of length.
 
[Ali] I also think there's a… Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like, generally, out there, there's a bit of like a demonizing of narrative summary. It can really go a long way to… There are scenes that are fully dialogue, beat by beat, like this is happening, that can probably be brought down to a couple of sentences. That's like reducing your darlings, I guess. Or like…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Summarizing your darlings.
[Ali] Summarizing your darlings. Exactly.
[DongWon] I think this is where show, don't tell can lead you astray. Right? It takes so many more words to show something than to tell sometimes. So, sometimes if you have this sense of I can summarize this, I don't need to walk through every part of this group figuring out what their plan is, or having this interaction or this conversation, you can condense that into a few sentences. You can condense that into a paragraph. Provided you're making that narration interesting and still connecting it to the character. I think there are ways that you can give us very large amounts of information very quickly. And then keep moving. That can really accelerate the read in the pace of the book in a lot of good ways.
[Garbled] [go ahead]
[Ali] I was just going to say I just love what you said about auditioning. Because I think it can be very daunting and emotionally taxing to cut things that you wrote and loved. I will say as an editor, I have recommended things and been very sad about them and felt like I genuinely know I'm going to miss this. But the audition process was such a smart move. Because then you can like be really honest about whether that's going to take something away that's genuinely precious to the book, or if it's like something that was very cool, but isn't needed.
[DongWon] Because sometimes you audition and find that, oh, that was loadbearing.
[Yeah]
[DongWon] This whole thing doesn't stand up without that element. So it's like, okay, we can't touch that one. What else can we do? Unlike renovating a house, you can actually pull those out and see what happens to the whole structure.
[Ali] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to pull out a loadbearing wall under any circumstances. Unless you're like, okay, I'm going to have to pull this out, but then a beam of steel…
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] So… But when you're pulling things out, I like what you said about the show, don't tell, and the narrative summary. But the other piece that I think a lot of people underestimate when they're thinking about length is how much can happen offstage. In the gap between scenes, in the gap between chapters. You can… I found that I can cut an entire scene and just have someone refer to it having happened. That the implication is sometimes enough, if the scene was not doing anything loadbearing, aside from like one thing, that often I can just say, "Oh, yes, I see that you got the diamonds," instead of actually showing them going into the store and buying the diamonds.
[Ali] Yes.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Obviously. A thing that all of my characters do.
[Ali] So fancy.
[DongWon] I did not assume that they were buying the diamonds, when you set up that scene, but… Yeah. I mean, you can just tell us that anything happened.
[Mary Robinette] That's why you need the narrative summary.
[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. Exactly. 
 
[DongWon] Well, apropos, I suppose, for an episode about length, we're running a little bit on the long side here. So, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us.
[Mary Robinette] I do. I want you to… This is a way to play with length. You're going to find 2 scenes that… Scenes that are right next to each other. What I want you to do is I want you to remove the scene break, and then write bridging text to connect the 2 of them. So that narrative summary about how they got from point A to point B. Then I want you to find a different scene that has that bridging text, and cut it into 2 different scenes. So that you are removing it and creating new signposts, new entry and exit points to get from those 2 scenes. I want you to try that. See what it does to length, see what it does to your perception of the pacing
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go edit.
 
[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler

Feb. 9th, 2023 04:10 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler
 
 
Key points: Changing as a creator over the 20 year span of Schlock Mercenary? Three parts. First part: Better as a storyteller in terms of craft, better artist in terms of composition, and better humorist. Second part: I learned I was writing social satire. Third part: What I am doing matters. People have changed as a result of my work. Transition from joke-a-day to long form? I had an idea that I needed to lay down parts for that took longer. By working several weeks ahead, I had time to mull new ideas and mash them together. What's next? I'm working on it. Are you looking for a new tool or challenge? Yes, but chronic fatigue means I can't afford a long learning curve. I have so many stories I want to tell that I'm prioritizing using a medium and techniques that I already know so I can tell as many as possible. Low bar, but I cleared it.  
 
[Season 18, Episode 6]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview With Howard Tayler.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm the guy with his feet in the fire.
[Dan] Haha!
[Whoohoo!]
 
[Dan] Howard, I've been looking forward to this one, I'm going to ask you the hardest questions. So... I actually am not. I'm going to ask you some things about stuff that I assume you've been thinking about a lot, because I've been thinking about it a lot. You, as you've said several times, you've just finished your magnum opus. 20 years of daily web cartoons and all of these wonderful books and stories that have come from them. I would love, if you could condense into just a little nugget for us. How do you feel like you changed as a creator from the beginning of that to the end of that long process?
[Howard]  Ooo. Three-part answer. Part one, I very quickly got better at all of the pieces that were involved. I became a better storyteller… Just the craft. Better storyteller in terms of craft, better artist in terms of composition, better humorist… I treat that is a different skill than the other two because it's such a specific mechanic. I got better at all of that. So that's part one. Part two is I realized, and it was when we first started recording Writing Excuses… I say first started. 2009 we had an episode, or maybe it was late 2008, where the question was, "What have you learned from Writing Excuses this year?" My answer was I have learned that I'm writing social satire. Which I had been doing for eight years now but didn't know it. Once I knew it, I got a lot better at it, because I recognized which jokes didn't fit, which jokes did fit, which scenarios did fit, which scenarios didn't fit. That was actually a huge change for me. Similar types of changes have happened since then where I have realized, "Oh, this is what I doing. This is the name for the thing that I'm doing." So that's answer number two. Answer number three is the squishy one. It is I have learned that what I'm doing matters. There have been people who have emailed me and said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I would wake up every morning and just not think I could go on and was ready to end it and then realized but then I will miss tomorrow's Schlock Mercenary update." I realized, "Okay. That's way too much for me to carry. Please don't put that on me." But… I'm carrying it, and I will. Thank you for staying with us. On less life-threatening sorts of notes, people have described things that I've written that have woken them up in some way or another, that have changed the way they think about things. Even though I write silly stuff, it matters. Yeah, I mean, it's social satire, so at some level, you step back and say, "Well, of course, social satire matters. That's how we understand where society is broken. Blah blah blah." I don't go around thinking that that's my job, but… At some level, it is.
 
[Dan] That's great. So I think that there is a phenomenon that I see in web comics a lot, but I think it's more fair to say that every creator, every writer goes through this, where they decide that they have a really big idea, and they want to get it out there into the world. The reason this stands out to me in web comics is because in that particular medium and art form, you're kind of tap dancing live in front of everybody. Right? So, comics that started as joke a day kind of stuff or very small stories eventually hit this point, and I've seen this dozens and dozens of times, where they decide they want to tell a very long, very epic, very involved story. I have never seen any of them pull it off as successfully as you can. I wonder if you can point to any particular decisions or tools that helped you make that transition from joke a day into what was by the end of it an incredibly powerful and epic science fiction story time?
[Howard] Um. Pfoo, Pfah. I remember picking up my sister-in-law, Nancy Fulda, from the airport, and being in the airport, and just thinking about sci-fi and travel, and had this whole idea of what if the worm gate network, the reason they want that as a monopoly, is not because of money, but it's because of information, because they are able to gate clone people and quietly interrogate them and find out all of the stuff, and then just quietly murder the gate clones and nobody knows anything else. So that idea came to me, waiting in an airport. In order to tell that story, I knew that I needed to lay down some pieces that were going to take longer. Up until that point, I'd had this idea that I was going to do it a little bit more like Bloom County did it in the newspapers back in the 80s. 80s, early 90s, which was Berke Breathed would run a story… He was also doing social satire… He would run a story that ran for a week. Or maybe two weeks. With Opus as interludes on Sundays. So I had this idea that in terms of framework, yeah, I can keep people's attention with a story for a week or two. But, the fact is that on the Internet, people could page back. Start from comic one and could just read it straight through. I thought, "Hey, you know what, I can go for more than a week or two. I can go for maybe a month. But a month really needs to be the limit."
[Ha ha]
[Howard] Then I had this idea about the Teraport breaking the monopoly and the worm gate and the cloning and all that. By that time, I had five or 10,000 regular readers who had stuck with me, and I decided, "All right, I'll try making it a little longer." As I'm sure most of you have experienced, when you're writing something that takes several months to write, during the course of writing it… Maybe I should ask it as a question. Do you ever have ideas for other things to write?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because that is exactly how it went, is that I would ask, "But then what happens? But then what happens? Oh, wait, there's this thing out in pop culture that I want to talk about because it's so much fun…" And, "Ooo, and then what happens if I mash these things together?" Because I worked ahead… Because I typically worked three weeks, minimum of three weeks, sometimes as much is 6 to 8 weeks ahead, I had time to mull these ideas over before I started throwing them down on the page. I was never drawing comics the day before they aired. That way lies madness.
 
[Dan] We… I have a lot of questions to ask about what is next. But first, we're going to pause for our thing of the week.
[Howard] Schlock Mercenary ends with a trilogy of books, called Mandatory Failure, A Function of Firepower, and A Sergeant In Motion. The thing of the week is these three books. Because coming up with the ending for the twenty-year mega arc of Schlock Mercenary was super fun for me, but those three books online will really only take you about a day to read. If you read them, we'll do… Or even if you don't read them, we'll do a deep dive on that sometime later this year. So, three books. Mandatory Failure, A Function of Firepower, and A Sergeant In Motion, found at schlockmercenary.com, and the URL at the end of schlockmercenary.com is 2017-09-18. Because it started on September 18 of 2017.
 
[Dan] So, Howard, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about what comes next. You've finished a lifetime worth of web comic, science fiction, but you're still creating an you're still working and you're still doing new things. What comes next?
[Howard] I was going to ask you guys that.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because I… Oh, boy. Yeah, sometimes… Honestly, sometimes, I just don't know. In the tag cloud, the career and lifestyle episodes… I could talk about this for a whole 15 minutes, which is waking up in the morning and just not being sure what comes next. Because for a solid 18 years, 18 of the 20, I would lie down in bed and as I drifted off to sleep, the voices in my head were talking about what happens next. The story was unfolding for me all the time. They're quiet now. I know that sounds kind of sad. They've stopped talking. But… I left them in a good place. I hope. I've done some prose writing. It's gone well. But it got interrupted… It got interrupted by stuff. There's lots of interruptions. For the next year, we are spending most of our time getting the final Schlock Mercenary books, 18, 19, and 20, getting them into print. That's what's going to pay the bills for 2023 and most of 2024. By the end of 2023, Dan, I need to have an answer to your question and it needs to be a good answer that's already generating revenue. So, um, yeah.
[Dan] Sounds to me like you might need that answer a lot sooner than the end of 23.
[Chuckles]
[Yeah, yeah.]
[Howard] Perhaps.
 
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I remember you talking about in a previous episode, Howard, is that when you started Schlock that you kind of didn't actually know how to draw. That you had this idea, you wanted to do it, and that you taught yourself the tools that you needed to, in order to move forward with the story. I guess when you're thinking about what is next, you're playing with prose, but that's a tool you already know. Is there a tool that you're looking at and going, "Hum, that's a really interesting tool. I would like to know more about that, please."
[Howard] Um… Short answer, yes. Longer answer, long Covid and chronic fatigue have constricted my energy envelope to the point that if the learning curve is steep enough, I can't afford to do it. I don't have… I can't put in a 12 hour workday anymore. I can barely put in a four hour workday, a six hour workday, of just sitting and getting this stuff done. It's difficult. I mean, one of the things that I've loved is when we were doing the role-playing games streams for Typecast RPG. I loved creating Twitch overlays and the idea of streaming and having video conversations that mixed… I've got all the gear, I've got all the tools to do the pushing of buttons and having pictures change. I had this great idea for a Twitch stream that's Howard and his artist friends. Dual cameras, switching between various… I'm waving my hands around, and the audio is just not going to pick that up.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Swapping the camera pictures. The whole show would be titled Everybody Draws Better Than Howard Does. I would have other artists on and we would talk about what we were each working on and I would shower them with praise and we'd plug their work and it would be silly fun. I don't have the energy for that. That's… I just don't have the energy for that. But I have had the energy for sitting down and writing. I've got so many stories I want to tell that it is fair for me, I think, to prioritize and say I would rather pick the medium, pick the techniques that I already know so that I can tell as many stories as I can. I can say as much of what I've got to say before my timeline eventually runs out, then for me to try and learn something new and slow all that down. I know that sounds kind of morbid and whatever, but… Um… Hey, maybe the CFS will get better and I'll be putting in 12 hour days when I'm 70. I'd love that.
[Mary Robinette] I really like that, though, the idea of picking… We do, I think, tend to go for a hard setting all the time. The number of writers, and I know… Hello, listener, I'm speaking directly to you, the one that listens to the homework assignment and says , "Humpf, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to make it harder." Or, "They told me that you can't possibly do a story about zombie unicorns? I'm going to do a story about zombie unicorns, and submit it to the editor who told me they don't like it."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I know that that is a temptation, that happens to a lot of people. But I think there is something really beautiful about saying I'm going to use this tool that I love, that is familiar and comfortable, and I'm going to tell the best stories I can with tools I already know how to use, and I'm just going to refine them.
[Howard] Yeah. That's… Um… I think it was 2008, 2009, about the same time the podcast started, I really got on this kick of the focused practice, the whole concept of focused practice. The idea that you practice the things that you're bad at so that you stop taking shortcuts and going around them. For me, it was I didn't know how to draw hands. So I practiced drawing hands. Ended up drawing Curtis Hickman's hands doing magic tricks in the first Xtreme Dungeon Mastery book. Curtis came back to me and said, "Howard, these are the best illustrations of these tricks that exist anywhere. Because all of the others are grainy photographs in black and white of an old man's hands and you can't tell what's going on." So, low bar, but I cleared it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] So I was on this kick. Now I look at things and I say, "Yeah. There are things that I am not good at. But there are a lot of things where I've spent years refining my skills, and, yes, I could develop the skills further. Obviously. But I'm good enough at it that maybe I can just focus on that, and now that path is the easy path, but it's not the shortcut. It's falling back on the craft that I've spent 20 years learning.
[Dan] I… This is going to sound like a joke, but I mean it sincerely. I'm going to make "low bar, but I cleared it" my mantra for goal setting for the year.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Like, simple things that I can finish and feel good about myself. That's fantastic.
[DongWon] Under promise and over deliver.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
 
[Dan] Howard? What's our homework today?
[Howard] Okay. I want you, fair listener, who you are probably heavily focused on prose. I want you to take a moment and explore some of the tools in my toolbox. Take an index card. For each key beat, each key moment, in a scene that you've written, and illustrate that beat. Just using stick figures and smiley frowny angry faces, just whatever skills you've got, so that you have a camera aimed at a very scribbley blurry version of that scene. Do that for the whole scene and see how that changes the way you eventually edit it or rewrite it or write what comes next.
[Mary Robinette] All right. You have your homework assignment. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.13: Beautiful Prose, Purple Prose

Mar. 29th, 2017 05:16 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.13: Beautiful Prose, Purple Prose

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/03/26/12-13-beautiful-prose-purple-prose/

Key points: "We're all purple on occasion, it's a guilty pleasure for a lot of us." What's the problem? Patches of purple prose in an otherwise normal story that breaks the flow. Good writing in the wrong place. Overuse of bad metaphors, fancy long words, and thesaurizing! Avoiding it? Take a fresh look, or let someone else read it. Watch beginnings of books or chapters, where we often overdo things and try too hard. Instead of two paragraphs on 20 foot stilts, try elevating all your prose a couple of inches. Metaphors are better than similes. Watch the adverbs and adjectives -- use the right ones, don't overdo. Adverbs often mean compressed storytelling -- expand it! Replace verb and adverb with a better verb. Think about the story purpose behind your description. Be judicious, use expressive prose where you need an impact. Use purple prose, especially in dialogue, to set a character apart.

( Across the purple sage, the golden sunset gleamed... )

[Brandon] We're going to go ahead, and we're going to pitch at Howard some homework to us.
[Howard] I'm pitching the homework at them.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] All right. One of the writing rules that is so often read to us is "Put away the thesaurus. Just write using your words." Here's your homework. Take a paragraph that you've written. Get out the thesaurus. Replace as many of the words in that paragraph as you can. Break it. Painted so purple that the color purple feels ashamed to have its name associated with it. Just go overboard. Then take a step back and look at it. Ask yourself why it broke. Sometimes, the way to figure out how something is broken is to deliberately go too far. This is your excuse to take it too far.
[Brandon] Excellent. That sounds like a lot of fun, actually.
[Dan] I look forward to reading all of those, on the website.
[Brandon] Yeah. Post those for us. We want to read those.
[Piper] Yes.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses.… Oh. You know what? What if they took paragraphs from our writing?
[Dan] Oh, yes! Oh that's brilliant.
[Piper] Do that!
[Dan] You can do your own, but if you want to take something from one of our books…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Please.
[Piper] Anything by Piper J. Drake. I would love to see you take a paragraph of one of my things. Preferably one of the PG-rated scenes.
[Laughter]
[Dan] If you can take something, say that you've broken it, and it's actually just verbatim, and you can trick people, that would be fantastic.
[Piper] Yes. I want to see this. Please do.
[Brandon] Okay. Oh, this is going to be awesome.
[Howard] Okay. This is supposed to be homework, not a social media game.
[Brandon] Okay, okay. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses Episode 19: Plot Twists

Jan. 30th, 2011 10:09 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Episode 19: Plot Twists

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/06/15/writing-excuses-episode-19-plot-twists/

Guest Star: Michael Stackpole

15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry and Mike Stackpole is that smart.
( Plot Twists and other barbed plots )
Some Key Ideas I pulled out:
  • Plot twists - surprising, yet inevitable.
  • Don't dilute the impact -- make it strong, quick, and hurt a lot.
  • Effective plot twists are well foreshadowed -- but you probably do that in revision.
  • You also need misdirection and red herrings.
  • Plot twists fulfill your promises, but not the way that the reader expects.
  • Keep the reader guessing!
  • Current Mood: groggy
  • Current Music: Beer For My Horses, Willie Nelson
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