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Writing Excuses 17.22: Establishing the Ensemble
 
 
Key points: How can you make all of your character matter? Start by giving everybody an introduction tied to the big change at the core of your book, show us their reaction to it. Play up those changes as they meet each other for the first time. Show us why we should like these people. Use a task list, character name, introduce them, describe them, make us like them, aim them at the story. Help the readers know the characters, and then you can use them. You get more combinations and fusions then. Pair them up and explore the sandpaper interactions. Use another character to help readers know what to feel.
 
[Season 17, Episode 22]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Establishing the Ensemble.
[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.
[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.
[Kaela] I'm Kaela.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We… Last week, we talked about making sure that all your characters are different. What we want to talk about this time is making sure all of your characters matter. Giving them equal space, equal weight, equal time, whatever it is. So, Zoraida, we're going to throw this to you, like we always do. Why is this important, and how do we start?
[Zoraida] This is important because every character in your ensemble needs an equal amount of importance. Right? Like, they need to share in this goal that they're going to go forth and conquer. When I start, in my books, I give everybody an introduction that has to do with the big change. Right? So, I feel like in a book there's something that has changed in the world, and now these people are all reacting to it. This could be in contemporary, it could be in fantasy, sci-fi, whatever. But the inciting incident, the change, is now transforming every single person. But before that, we get to see a glimpse of who they are before they meet each other. Because sometimes you have ensemble casts where it's strangers coming together, or, like, The Fast and Furious movies, right? Huge ensemble. They already know each other, and then you have an outsider coming in, right? So, playing up with those changes is my starting point.
[Howard] There's a couple of cinematic examples that are super useful. One of these is the… Serenity, the movie. Where, in the first few minutes, we are introduced to everybody aboard the ship. It goes very, very quickly. Wash says, "Things are about to get interesting." Mal says, "What do you mean by interesting? Oh, God, oh, God, we're all going to die?" That's… In two lines, we've established a little bit of relationship between those two. This is an ensemble that's already come together, but they needed that opening romp there on that planet to introduce us to them as individuals and how they function as a team. The other good example itself, and I've mentioned this before as a master class sort of thing to study, is the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Where, as we are introduced to each of these characters, James Gunn is using every cinemagraphical tool in his toolbox to let us know that we're supposed to like these people. The example I always come back to is… Now I've forgotten her name. The green skinned one.
[Garbled. Gamora.]
[Howard] Gamora.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I know. How could I… It begins with a Z? No, it doesn't begin with a Z. No, that's not right. Gamora. When we are introduced to her, she is the only green thing in a room full of blue and black. So even though what she is saying is very aggressive and threatening, we have been told this is the person that we like. Anyway, between those two visual examples, I have a whole toolbox of things that I use when I am introducing characters via prose. I recognize… If I'm introducing you to someone not in their own POV, but I want you to like them and they're going to be part of my ensemble, what am I doing to set them apart from the people around them? What am I doing to make you like them? What am I doing to make you interested in them, so that when we come back to them, we're like, "Oh, yes. I'm so happy this person joined the team."
[Dan] Absolutely. You get a… The book that keeps coming to mind, and this is not an ensemble book, so it is not necessarily a good example. But, in Pride and Prejudice, early on, you get to meet all of the sisters. Actually, maybe Little Women is a better example, because that one is much closer to an ensemble cast. It still is primarily about Jo, but you get to know who all of the sisters are and how they interact with each other. You get introduced to them fairly quickly. Now, not all of them have equal space by any means. But they all, in their own way, are important to the story. You've got the sick one, and we have to really get to like her, because, spoiler warning for this 200-year-old book…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Things are not going to go well for her. That affects everybody else. One of the reasons…
[Howard] She doesn't die, does she?
[Dan] That I absolutely…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Howard!
[Garbled]
[Dan] One of the reasons that I love, love, love the Saoirse Ronan movie of Little Women is because it gives much more weight and a little more space to… And now I can't remember her name, but the sister who's in the book kind of the snotty one who gets all the stuff that Jo wants and can't have. Giving her that little bit of extra attention, so we get to see things from her perspective, absolutely rounds out her character. Suddenly, she's no longer kind of the villain of Jo's story, she's just part of this ensemble who helps make everyone who they are. So being able to give the right amount of weight and space to the characters really helps everyone come together as a unit.
 
[Howard] I think it's useful when you're outlining, and even if you're not outlining, even if you're discovery writing your way into this, have a task list that's like character name, and introduce them, describe them, make us like them, aim them. Just four little things where you just have this in front of you so that you know I'm not meandering through their dialogue and their scene. I have four goals here. Especially, early in a book, when I'm trying to establish an ensemble. I have to name the character, I have to make them distinctive, I have to give them a… I have to give them personality. And I have to aim them at the story, so that as the story unfolds through other points of view or other scenes, when that character shows up again, they show up on the vector that we expected. Or, if they're not on the vector that we expected, that's interesting. We thought they were going to show up wearing the top hat. But, no, they've turned the top hat into a gun, or something.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I'm making dumb stuff up, because I didn't think this out well enough before hand.
[I want to see that character]
[Howard] Do better than I'm doing, please.
[Zoraida] No, but I understand what you're saying, because we're tasked with making… Yes, okay, we have protagonist and supporting protagonists, and they're all working together for a common goal. They all have their own voice. We've done all of that work. So, now, how do we introduce them in a way that becomes memorable, in a way that says, like, I want to see more of this person. I want to see their point of view, or I want to see them in a scene. The really rich part to me when I have multiple groups of people is getting them alone together, like, so, breaking them into smaller groups and seeing how those dynamics play around. I just finished binging The Expanse TV show. The way that they introduce every single character, they… I immediately wanted them all to be friends. As the seasons progressed, I wanted them… Like, if they were not in a… There was, like, one season where they weren't together all the time. I was like, "Where are they? Why aren't they together?"
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] "Please get them back on [the route to Dante?] as soon as possible." That's the feeling that I want readers to have when they walk into a story. Like, get my people back here.
[Howard] Yeah, I think… The second season of Stranger Things, I think, had the same sort of problem. Where our ensemble had been broken up and they were in different places. Yeah, sure, they come back together at the end… Maybe it was season… I don't know what season it was. But the point is, it was… I was enjoying the season, but I was angry that I didn't have my ensemble for so much of it.
 
[Dan] So, our book of the week this week is actually mine. It is Ghost Station. This is my Cold War spy novel. It's about cryptographers in Berlin in 1961. Very paranoid and… Anyway.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] But… When I submitted this, the editor who bought it, their very first comment was we need to fill out this ensemble better. A lot of it is workplace. He works in a listening station in West Berlin. There are several other spies there, whether they're cryptographers or surveillance people or whatever they are. His main note for me was we need to get to know all of these people better. He was absolutely right. It made the book much, much better to spend more time with that group and get to know them, because it gave more chances for friendly banter. It gave more chances for suspicious things to be dropped. It gave more chances for the main character to feel nervous and self-conscious, because of the things he didn't want people to discover. All of that came together so well because we got to know all of those characters. So it… I didn't plan it as an ensemble book, but the editor helped make it into one, and that made it much better. So, Ghost Station by Dan Wells. We just got a printed edition of this out, you can get it on Amazon. So, hooray.
[Yay!]
[Dan] Hurry and go buy that.
[Excellent. Buy the book.]
 
[Dan] So. How does that work for the rest of you? Knowing who the characters are, and helping the reader to know who the characters are, really improves everything about the ensemble. How do we do that? How does that… First of all, let's ask the question why. Why does getting to know the characters really, really well affect the story and affect the interactions?
[Zoraida] I think it's because once everybody has established personalities, you have sort of… You have an endless opportunity for different character dynamics and interactions. You have somebody who can make a mistake, you have somebody who can keep everybody on task, you have somebody who, like, they might have nefarious things, they might be playing both sides… It's very vague, because I'm not picking a genre to go with it, but the more you know about a character, the more you can utilize them. Like Howard said, right, it's like aiming a gun, aiming something, and entering them to do the thing that they are there for on the page.
[Kaela] Yeah, like…
[Howard] The very… Oh, go ahead, Kaela.
[Kaela] I was going to say that the more familiar you are with anything, the more you… It's like being a chef. When you know how everything works, you're able to start combining things and seeing them and seeing all the different possibilities for new combinations, for fusions, etc. I actually think that's something that the MCU does super well, like, Guardians of the Galaxy Two, I was really curious how they were going to set that up and how they were going to explore new character dynamics. Like, I never expected Yondu and Rocket Raccoon to have, like, one of the most emotionally moving story lines in film to me. I was like I did not expect a blue man and a raccoon to make me cry, but they did.
[Chuckles]
[Kaela] But that's because they knew those characters so well that they knew that they were really similar, and they wanted to explore that. There was an opportunity there. I loved how they did that. It's one of the things that, like, I'm most interested in in ensembles is how, like… I call it sandpaper. Is how you know them well, you can pair them together and you know exactly how to get the right angle on it so that they're scraping in a way that's interesting, that's sanding them both down into something new, but is also getting a lot of interesting friction, a lot of interesting conflict for the reader. That's something I love to do in my books even.
[Howard] The very… I was just reading this last night. The very first Superman comic book, and in fact, I think it's the very first line of dialogue we get from Superman, he is a jerk. He's carrying this woman who is tied up, and he leaps to safety, and sets her down and says, "I don't have time to untie you. Attend to it yourself." Then he jumps away to go do other stuff. Okay?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That's our first introduction to Superman. Now, this was, depending on how you feel about the creators of Superman, and they were young guys who learned a lot about writing, whatever. None of it matters. This was sloppy because she's actually the bad guy. But Superman doesn't know it yet. So him dissing, sort of… Discomforting the person who the writers knew was actually a bad guy is fine, but we don't know it. My point here is that when somebody says something, if it's something that's going to rub the reader the wrong way, if is they're insulting someone or being mean or whatever, if you give us another character who has an opinion about that, you can tell us how to feel. If she'd had a thought bubble… This would be dumb, but if she'd had a thought bubble, like, "He's being so mean to me. Does he know that I'm really the murderer?"
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay. Don't do that. But that would totally make the line okay from Superman, because maybe Superman does know. So that's one of the things that I think about, is that any time I'm introducing these characters, any time I'm trying to define them, I make sure that they say a thing and that somebody else has an opinion about it that helps inform how I want the reader to feel about it.
[Yeah]
 
[Dan] We are going to end with that, and have some homework. What we want you to do this week is to pick an ensemble work that you like. This could be a book, this could be a movie, this could be a TV show. Maybe you want to do Community or Star Trek or Little Women or whatever it is. Identify each member of the ensemble, and why they are important, and why the story could not be told without them. Not just it's fun to have Drax in this movie because of X, Y, and Z. But specifically, why would this movie not work without Drax? Do that for every character of the ensemble. See what you can learn about it. Anyway, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Brandon, Howard, Dan, me, Mary Robinette, and a few special guests are going to go write this September on the big group Writing Excuses cruise. We'd love for you to join us. See writingexcusesretreat.com for details and for information on other upcoming in person events.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.42: Alternate History
 
 
Key points: Worldbuilding alternate history stories? First, an alternate history is extrapolation of what would have happened if something different had happened at some cusp point. Often set some years after the breaking point. There are also stories where the world is basically the same plus X (e.g., magic). Extrapolation? Use the patterns! Worldbuilding, and research, for both types involves much the same approach, a broad view, an inciting incident, and thinking about what are the ripples and ramifications from that. There is also historical fantasy, which is grounded in the real world, plus an addition. It's somewhat like the question of time travel stories, of how resilient the time line is. Does crushing one butterfly change everything, or do even major changes (such as the addition of magic) have ripples, but leave things mostly the same? When some of your readers may know more about something than you do -- be willing to let it go and be wrong. Focus on telling the story, not being right. Talk to the experts! If you don't know the answer to something, don't put it in the story. Use a character who is not an expert, so even if they get it wrong, the reader can say, "Of course." Have your character show they are competent with something you do know, then handwave past the other things. Be aware, common knowledge may insist that you have made up things in your alternate history, even if they are actual real things. Also, just because this wardrobe or furnishing is this year's best, does not mean everyone has it! Most people have older items in their house!
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 42.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We have a really fun topic today. We are going to talk about how to worldbuild your alternate history stories. Mary, what is an alternate history?
[Mary Robinette] Well, an alternate history is where you take a cusp point in real… Like, you go back and you look at actual history and then you pick a cusp point and then you extrapolate what things would have looked like if a different thing had happened.
[Brandon] Okay. So usually the alternate history is taking place some years after this breaking point, this cusp point as you called it. How do you do that? Like, how do you guess what would happen?
[Mary Robinette] Well, as the person who writes alternate history… The thing is that history goes through patterns all the time. We… There are certain things that are fairly predictable, like the way people respond to certain stimulus, the way we respond to certain events. So what you do is just kind of look at the way those patterns shape when the different thing happens. For instance, we know that there's a kind of 20 year cycle in fashion. So if something happens where there's a cusp point, then fashion is going to go through a predictable change between veneration of the artifice and one of the natural. So you can kind of look at those things. We know that people react to Empire in predictable ways. We know that people react to oppression in predictable ways. That there are patterns there. So you can apply those. Like, a cusp point that I never got to exploit, but was really fascinated by, was the Prince Regent's daughter died in childbirth bearing a male son. A male son. Well done, Mary. A male heir. Queen Victoria was born in response to that. There was a race to produce another child, because Princess Charlotte was the only option at that point. Had she survived, and the pregnancy was survivable… The doctor, her obstetrician, refused to use forceps. If he had used forceps, chances are she actually would have survived that childbirth and the sun would have, too. The British Empire would have looked totally different. Completely, completely different. So that's an interesting cusp point, where you can sit there and go, "Well, we know how we reacted when Queen Victoria took the throne. What happens if we map that on to something that happens earlier?"
 
[Brandon] Now, I've heard people who talk about alternate history, kind of, maybe this is an artificial distinction, but make a distinction between books that are trying to explore what would have happened, like you say, on these cusp points, and books where one thing about our world is different, and instead of trying to go all the way back and extrapolate, you're writing a story where our world is basically the same plus X.
[Mary Robinette] Like Naomi Novik's…
[Brandon] Yeah. His Majesty's Dragon.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Like the Glamorous Histories.
[Brandon] Exactly. So do you see these as a real distinction? Are they approach… Worldbuilding approached in different ways?
[Mary Robinette] I think the worldbuilding is actually approached in exactly the same way.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] You're looking at the ramifications and ripples. The inciting incident is different.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] In both case… In one case, it's an action, a cusp point. In the other, it's the… And now we have magic.
[Brandon] Right. Do you make kind of… I remember you talking about Glamorous Histories where… Something along the lines, I'm going to put words in your mouth, you can change it. But it was something along the lines of you were not interested in the butterfly flaps its wings and so America is suddenly communist. You're not looking at "Oh. If humans had magic way back when, I'm not looking at now 2000 years later that we have completely different nations." But some people might be writing history that way. I don't know.
[Howard] I think of these… I do draw a dichotomy. There is the event-based, the trigger-based, the cusp-based alternate histories, and then there are alternate histories which I think of more as parallel alternates.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] Where the events that we know all kind of happened, but they happened and magic was running along parallel to it. What we are exploring in some cases is… I think of the Glamorous Histories in this regard… How would the Napoleonic wars have fallen out had there been magic? Yet we still win the… I say we. The French don't win the Napoleonic wars.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] In the Glamorous Histories.
[Mary Robinette] I think this is one of the reasons that we have the useful other term, historical fantasy.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] So what I write are… With the Glamorous Histories, are historical fantasy, which is very similar to an alternate history in that it's as much grounded in real world as possible, with this… But it has this addition. Calculating Stars, on the other hand, is a straight up alternate history. Things happen differently, but I'm not violating real-world in any way, shape, or form.
 
[Brandon] Okay. So, how have you specifically done research for say the Glamorous Histories or the Calculating Stars or Ghost Talkers?
[Mary Robinette] It's… It's, honestly, not any different from the way I do research for anything else. I start with a broad overview to kind of get a sense of the world. Then I start thinking about how things shift. With the Glamorous Histories, in particular, with my addition of magic, I didn't want to shift the world very far, so I was very careful when I was constructing the world that I… That's choices I made did not shift the world too far when I was constructing the magic. So, for me, the distinction is less about the kind of research I do and more about the ways in which I'm applying it. It specifically the way I'm dealing with the worldbuilding based on that research.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Margaret] It feels almost like you're dealing with the effects of what… How do you see the timeline, and the resiliency of the timeline, if you were telling a time travel story. Whereas, do you believe, that… Is it a time travel where you crush a butterfly and everything changes, or is it a belief that the timeline is basically resilient, but if you go back in the past and make changes, you'll see some ripple effects, but it's not going to send us careening off into left field.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with the Glamorous Histories, with the insertion of magic into the world, everybody has magic. Every nation, every people on the planet, have magic. So that's… That doesn't shift power dynamics at all. The fact that every… Because I gave it to everybody. If I had just given it to one nation, that would have shifted power dynamics. That would have been a very different story.
 
[Brandon] So, kind of a more general question. How do you approach writing about something, like, for instance, World War I, where you know a certain percentage of your audience is going to know way more about the topic than you will?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Howard, you run into this, I think, with Schlock Mercenary with the… You are very good at the sciencey parts, but I'm sure many of your audience are better at the sciencey parts.
[Howard] [sigh] At some point, I just have to be willing to let go. Because I'm more interested in telling a story than in being right. That's… I found that that's a healthy attitude in a lot of cases. It's not that I don't need to be right. It's that I can say, "Oh, yeah, got that wrong." But I'm going to continue to tell the story that I'm telling, because I'm enjoying telling it, and people are enjoying reading it. If I find a way to work better science into it, I will. The trickier bits to recover from if I've gotten it wrong are when I've misrepresented an existing culture in ways that future extrapolation don't account for. Specifically, in my case, the interactions between officers and grunts. The whole military culture. I've been fortunate in that I've stuck the landing several times just by having talked to the right people and gotten a sense for… Through being an old guy… A sense for how people react to other people. Because a lot of those things translated straight across.
[Mary Robinette] I think the talking to the right people is really key for a lot of this. Like, I basically went out and said, "I need World War I people to read this thing." With Calculating Stars, I'm like, "I need astronauts." I mean, I just want to hang out with astronauts, too, but I need rocket scientists, I need fighter pilots, I need… Asking the right people to talk to you. But the other thing is if you don't know the answer to something, don't bring it up in the story. Like, this is one of the things that makes me look like I really know what I'm talking about. In Calculating Stars, I very carefully never talk… Never tell you how much that meteor weighs.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] I never tell you how big that thing is. We did research… There's a range that I am comfortable with it being within that range. But I am not going to get specific about it, because the moment I'm specific about it, that opens the possibility that I am wrong.
[Brandon] Yeah, we talk about this a lot, particularly in fantasy, that sometimes it is better to leave these things unsaid, because sometimes when you start down that path and start explaining, you work yourself into making it harder for the reader to suspend disbelief. One tool I also have found in this area, and I think I mentioned before on the podcast, is if it's an area about which I know I'm not an expert and I know some of my readers are, I will generally take the perspective or viewpoint for that given chapter of a character who is not an expert. Who can be cabbage head. When they describe things wrong, the reader, who are my experts, can believably let themselves suspend disbelief and say, "Well, Kaladin just doesn't know a lot about horses. Yeah, he got that wrong. He obvious… He talks about not knowing a lot about horses."
[Margaret] One of the things that I've hit before when I'm working on a television show. One of the shows where I worked as a writer's assistant was called The Unusuals. It was a cop show that took place in New York City. So, there are a lot of cop shows that take place in New York City. So the audience is familiar with them. We had police consultants that we talked to about things. One of the first things, one of the first cops we talked to said, "You guys know that there's no such thing as an APB?" The All Points Bulletin is not a thing that the New York police use. If you put out what we think of when we think of an APB, it is called a Finest Bulletin.
[Mary Robinette] Huh!
[Margaret] Because like TV…
[Howard] You're contacting all of New York's finest.
[Margaret] New York's finest. That's what it's called. We're there, and we're like, "Okay, this is accurate." If somebody mentions a Finest Bulletin in dialogue, we're going to have to stop and explain to everyone in the audience what we mean. Whereas, if we say, "We're going to put out an APB on the suspect," everyone watching knows what it is and we're going to roll ahead with it.
[Howard] Elementary handled it a little differently the first couple of times they introduced that. It was… You need to put the word out. I'll put out a Finest Bulletin. Then they just called it that. I see the decision going either way.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is The Yiddish Policeman's Union.
[Margaret] Yes. The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. Which is… It's funny, when it came up, I don't think of it as an alternate history book, but it absolutely is. It takes place in an alternate version of our world where Jewish refugees during World War II, instead of settling eventually in what was then Palestine, are in Sitka, Alaska. This was based on actual historical research in… There's this worldwide refugee crisis. Everyone's trying to figure out where. One of the proposals somebody floated in the day was, well, we could send them to Alaska. Who's up there? A lot of native Alaskans, but… Leaving that aside, as I'm sure they did at the time. So it takes place in a world where Sitka is this bustling Yiddish-language city, and you are following this intricate mystery which ends up tying into the politics of how everyone wound up in Alaska in the first place. One of the things that was so delightful to me reading this is, especially as an American Jew, seeing the ways it was both the same and different, the relationship that American Jews had with Sitka that you see American Jews having with Israel. That was really kind of cool and often funny.
[Brandon] I believe it won that Hugo, didn't it?
[Mary Robinette] Yes. It won basically everything.
[Brandon] Everything that it could win.
 
[Brandon] Mary, before we jumped to [garbled] I saw you scribbling notes furiously.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is slightly off-topic of alternate history, but… Which is how to handle it when your character is actually an expert about something that you are not, and you're trying to deal with that in the alternate history. I'll very quickly brush past this, which is that you have your character demonstrate competence on something that you do understand. Then, the reader believes that the character understands it.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] So they will grant you when you handwave past other things that you have thought it through.
[Brandon] That's awesome.
[Mary Robinette] I use that trick all the time, because Elma is a mathematician and my math skills do not exist. The other thing that I was going to say is that one of the biggest problems with writing alternate history, like the all finest, is fighting common knowledge. There are things that people think they know because of the media that they have already absorbed. So when you go into the alternate history, sometimes you put something in there that is not actually a deviation and people will totally think it is. Like, so, Andy Weir read Calculating Stars, and was on a podcast talking about how he loved my alternate history touch of NACA, which is the NACA, the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, which was a real organization that predated NASA. This is someone who knows aerospace. But because common knowledge is so hard-core about NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, it's a thing that he just missed. Similarly, when I was writing the book, I was… I had… My beta readers were going, "Wow. I love this alternate history where there are women of color in the computer room." I'm like, "These are based on actual real women." But Hidden Figures wasn't out yet. As soon Hidden Figures came out, those… That commentary totally went away. This is the thing that you have to fight when you're doing an alternate history is… Is that line between how much do I want to shift the reader's awareness and how much do I just want to tell this story and… It is an alternate history, so maybe the common knowledge thing is the way things happened.
[Howard] I was on a panel talking about how right do you need to get things. Somebody brought up the use of Chinese as swearing in the Firefly series. They loved how this was used to represent a melding of Western culture and Eastern culture. The linguist on the panel said, "But they got it all wrong. There's no way that these people would be speaking in Western intonations and then would correctly inflect the Chinese profanity. There's no way they'd get the pitches right."
[Margaret] They should have crappier Chinese accents?
[Howard] They should have crappier Chinese accents. He's absolutely right. Except if they had done crappy Chinese accents, the rest of us would have seen it as a slur on Chinese. So…
[Margaret] Or laziness on the part of…
[Howard] Laziness on the part of the actors. So, I'm happy that they decided to be wrong in their extrapolation of…
[Brandon] There's a pretty good YouTube series called History Buffs which takes a look at historical movies and kind of goes down what they got wrong. But one of the reasons I like it is because about on half of those, they'd say, "I agree with this change. By doing this, you are actually emphasizing this part of history which is a real part that didn't happen during this time or didn't happen this way, but when you presented for audiences, you make this tweak and get the right effect so that they actually learn the history even though it's technically wrong." Once in a while, I think that's what you do.
[Mary Robinette] When you were talking about going back and looking at movies and things that got things wrong or right… One of the things that I want to talk about when we're talking about alternate histories is actually fashion. This is a thing that I see people get wrong all the time. It's not, "Oh, your fashion is wrong, how dare you?" The problem is that when people do the research, they look at it and say, "Okay. This book is set in 1893. What were people wearing in 1893?" But if you look at your own wardrobe, you have clothes in your wardrobe that are at least 20 years old. Sometimes more. We are all nodding. If someone is wearing everything that is from that year, if there home is decorated in only things from that year, then either that is an enormous wealth display, or something has gone terribly wrong in their life, because they've had to replace everything that they own. Either way, you are making a character statement, and you are making it by accident, because of your research patterns.
[Brandon] That's really cool. There is a very good tip. 
 
[Brandon] I'm going to have to cut us here and give you guys some homework. The homework I want you to write is I want you to do an alternate history of an event in your life. We've been talking about macroscopic scale, changes to historical events and nations. I want you to just look back at something that's happened in your life and write that event as if it could have happened differently. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
mbarker: (MantisYes)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.48: Character Death and Plot Armor
 
 
Key points: When and why do you kill off characters? First, ask yourself what is the worst thing that could happen to your character. It may not be death. Character death should be the best move for the story, not just an easy way to make the reader feel loss. What are the consequences of the death? Do writers look at character death differently than readers and fans? Everybody hates it when you can predict a character's death. Make them care, but don't telegraph a death. "Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact." A death, like any event in a story, should be surprising yet inevitable. Set up a longer arc for the character, follow through on consequences, and make it pay off. Beware of fridging! Killing a character as inciting incident, as backstory… Make sure the dead character has a purpose beyond simply acting as motivation for the protagonist. When do you decide to give a character plot armor, because they are too important to the story to die? Consider ablative plot armor!
 
[Mary] Season 13, Episode 48.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Plot Armor and Character Death.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] [squeal]
[Dan] I'm okay. Don't worry.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] Well. That line… I'm okay. To kill off this season of Writing Excuses, we're going to be talking about character death. So. First question. When do you kill off characters and why?
[Mary] Chapter 6. No.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I've come back to…
[Oh, he's serious…]
[Howard] Any time I'm thinking about killing a character or threatening the reader with that as an option, I always come back to what I think Pat Rothfuss said on one of our casts years ago, which was there are so many things that are worse than death that can happen to your characters. I ask myself that question first, because I want to know that I am choosing character death because it is the best failure mode or the best success mode that this particular story can have. I can't just default to it, because I think that's the only way to move the story forward or to make the reader feel loss.
[Mary] I look at the consequences of the death, for exactly the same reason. Because the death itself, sad that that character's dead and all, but people who survive, those are the ones that I'm going to be traveling with. The consequences of that death on the plot, that… If it's just, "Oh, and then everybody's going to be really sad…" That's not a consequence. I mean, yes, that is a consequence, but that's not a unique consequence that's going to drive things, usually.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask you a follow-up on that, because it prompts something in my thoughts. Do you think we look at this differently because we're writers than readers and fans do?
[Mary] I started doing this because deaths in books as a reader annoyed me so much. It wasn't a structural thing. Because I didn't know why they annoyed me. I just… I hate reading things where I'm like, "Oh, that character's going to die." Or where they die…
[Howard] I hate reading things right can do that…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Where I can say, "Oh, they're dead."
[Dan] Where you can tell.
[Mary] I hated it when characters would die and I didn't feel anything. Because I just didn't care.
[Brandon] I would say that annoys me a lot in cinema. They do that sometimes.
[Dan] My brother and I came up with the phrase, "That character wants to live in Wyoming." Which comes straight from Hunt for Red October, where there is the one Russian officer who's like, "I would like to live in Wyoming." He's gone. You know he's dead as soon as he says that.
[Howard] Was that Sam Neill? Was that Sam Neill's character?
[Dan] Yeah. So as soon as somebody starts talking about how they're going to retire soon or they're going to go to this place, all their plans for the future… They want to live in Wyoming. It's hard, because the space that you're aiming for is in between those. You don't want to telegraph it, but you also want to make them care. Those were the two problems that you had. Finding that middle ground… This is a character I love and don't see their death coming. That's what I shoot for, basically, with most of my characters.
[Howard] But I don't want that death to feel like a cheap shot. This is one of the places where the argument for narrative-driven fiction versus fiction that feels real is often centered around that. Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact. That's probably not how I'm going to go. That's probably not how any of us are going to go. But when you look at deaths in stories, we always have… Always is the wrong word. But we very often have the narrative is shaped around that death. When it isn't, often I'm annoyed. When it is, sometimes I feel like it was too convenient. There's no pleasing me. Just stop killing your characters.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] See, I asked this question as a writer just because the thing that it prompted in my mind is how I will have people come through my line, and just really be torn up by a character death. Which, for me, this is kind of maybe seeing in my brain, I'm like, "But that was a really good death." Right? I'm like, "Why are you torn up about that?" It was… They fulfill their character arc, it came to a good conclusion, it… They sacrificed for something they believed in. This was a really good death."
[Howard] I respond… in that exact situation, my response has nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the person at the table in front of me. The person at the table in front of me is grieving, and what they need me to do is grieve with them. My response is, "I loved that character too. In fact, I may even have loved them more than you did."
[Mary] Now, see, I'm evil because my response to that is, "I am so delighted I made you cry. Thank you for telling me. I worked really hard on that."
[Dan] My usual response is, "That's why I killed the character, is because I knew you would react that way. If you wouldn't react that strongly, what's the point?"
 
[Brandon] Though, I will say… This is something that's maybe just a little pet peeve of mine. I remember… This is going to date me, it's a long time ago, but there was this TV show called 24. This had a really big cultural impact on myself and my friends when the first season came out. We watched it, riveted. In that scene… Spoilers for a 20-year-old show or whatever… The main character's wife dies. The whole plot is set up for we need to save her. He's going to save her. He's the action star. He gets there a little too late, and she's dead. I was… totally thought it was great, until I listened to the commentary, which was the wrong thing. Where they said, "Yeah, we weren't sure if we were going to kill her or not. Then we decided, well, what would the reader… Or the viewer, not expect." For me, hearing that, that is not what I wanted to hear. I did not want to hear you just said, "Well, what's going to… What's the most unexpected?" This may just be a thing for me, because that's good storytelling in some ways. But I don't want it to just be what's unexpected. I wanted to be what the story's pushing for.
[Howard] I don't want it to be unexpected. I want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. It's startling, but when you look at it in retrospect, you're like, "Nope, that's…"
[Mary] I'm really sympathetic to the, "Well, what would the readers not expect?" Especially when you are trying to decide in the moment. Because sometimes… Like, I mean, I have done things where I have plotted, planning for the character to live, and thought, "Well, maybe I will kill them. I'm not sure." It's not until I get there that I really… The story itself kind of… The shape of everything that's come up to that point makes it clear to me which choice I'm going to need to make. I have a… This is going to involve spoilers.
[Brandon] Okay. For?
[Mary] For one of my own stories.
[Brandon] Which one?
[Mary] The Worshipful Society of Glove Makers. Which is on Uncanny. I kill a character in that. I can avoid… I'll just tell you which one. I did not plan to kill that character. At all. I had planned for them to have the… We're going to try to work this out. There's… Trying to deal with the situation. The simplest solution for this problem character was to just… If they were just dead. So another character just kills them. I wrote it, and I was like [gasp]. Because sometimes you just… Sometimes you do just right things and discover it. I looked at it and I was like, "Oh. That… Huh."
[Howard] Surprising, yet inevitable.
[Mary] Because it's the simplest choice. But, because I had set up this longer arc for the character, people consistently tell me that they actually gasp out loud when they get to that death. So… That's why I'm like… I'm a little sympathetic to that.
[Dan] Well, I think the way to make that work is to follow that up. You kill a character on a whim like that, which I've totally done. But then, like you were saying in the beginning, you need to follow…
[Mary] Consequences.
[Dan] The people who survive, and follow through on the consequences, and you can totally make that pay off, even if it isn't inevitable.
[Brandon] I think it is good storytelling. It just didn't work for me, because I wanted to believe they were doing what was best for the story, not what would surprise me.
[Mary] But it worked for you until you knew their motivation.
[Brandon] It did. That's what I'm saying.
[Mary] Never asked the author why they did something!
 
[Brandon] Let's go to our book of the week.
[Howard] Ah, yes. Schlock Mercenary book 13, Random Access Memorabilia. I did two things in this book that I totally loved, and I'm totally going to spoil for you, because there's so much more going on in the book that's fun. One of them is that I killed Sgt. Schlock and brought him back from a completely… Like, from a backup. From a clone. He'd lost five days. At one point, he's watching the video of his death, and somebody says, "Are you… How do you feel about this?" He looks at her and says, "It's kind of cool." It was significant to me because one, it pulled plot armor off of everybody. I demonstrated that anybody can be killed, and can lose something. Yes, I may bring them back. Second was if this is the only consequence for death, if the reader doesn't have to mourn, how can I possibly threaten characters with death in the future? The second thing that I did was part one, part two, and part three were called Read, Write, and Execute. When part three aired, all of the computer nerds in the audience were like [choke] surprising, yet inevitable. Just by the naming of the chapters.
 
[Brandon] All right. So. Question for you. Can you kill off a character, as… Like a side character and have it provide motivation for other characters, but not simply fridge the character? Do you know what I mean by fridging?
[Dan] Yes.
[Mary] But why don't you define it? Or shall I define it?
[Brandon] I'll define fridging. Fridging comes from an old Green Lantern comic book, where Green Lantern arrives home to his house and finds his girlfriend stuffed in a fridge. Famously, without any kind of warning that this would happen. Simply to add more character to Green Lantern himself, to give him something to mourn over, to provide motivation. It's become a cliché of the comic book, and just at large, media industry, that if you want to provide motivation, for often a guy, you will then kill off a female love interest or friend, to give them something to mourn over. Yet, at the same time, we've just been talking about killing a character when it's completely unexpected, and the effect it has on the people around them. What is the difference between these two things?
[Mary] So, for me, this was the thing that I had to reverse engineer, because I was planning to kill off a character. For me, it's making sure that the character has a longer plot arc that is clear and obvious, and they're going to be fulfilling this all the way through the story. It usually involves something with the main character. Like not, "Oh, we're going to go be happy together," but "I am disagreeing with you about this thing." That there's a conflict they have with the main character. So that when you kill them off, that is left unresolved. Which is the way things happen in real life. That there's a lot of unfinished business that you have with the people who are gone. There's a whole that they leave. I think that that's one of the things that happens when a lot of these characters are fridged, is that they don't leave a hole in the plot.
[Howard] It's very, very difficult… Very difficult for… If you kill a character as your inciting incident, and that character has a close relationship with your protagonist, you're going to have to have done some miraculous writing to not be accused of having fridged that character. Because that piece as a motivation to start the story is very, very hackneyed.
[Brandon] Well, let's… 
[Howard] It's super hard to do right. I wouldn't try it. That's just the way I feel about it. At this point. And I work in comics. So.
[Brandon] You're extra sensitive to it.
[Howard] I just gotta steer away from it.
 
[Brandon] I mean, I'm going to push us on this one, just because… I do think this is totally a thing. I'm not trying to discount fridging as a cultural thing we should avoid, but at the same time, some of the best stories are told about people who wear loss as a motivation. If we look at… Just even Batman. Batman is a guy who lost his parents, and it changed him into this thing. That's like this archetypal story that has been retold and retold and we are fascinated by it. What's the difference between that and fridging? Is there a difference?
[Mary] Well, Batman, it's backstory. Which is, I think, a little different.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] The… I mean, honestly, you can fridge someone mid book. I think when… I mean… I keep feeling like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.
[Howard] That character needs to feel like they had a purpose beyond simply dying as a motivation point, as an arm bar for the protagonist, for the plot.
 
[Brandon] Okay. So, spoiler for the first Avengers film. When Agent Coulson dies and it brings the whole team together and that's like the pivotal moment of the whole thing. Agent Coulson? Not a fridge? Because he had had all these interactions with them before, or is he a fridge because he…
[Dan] Well, Coulson specifically sacrifices himself. So it's a very different situation. It's not an inert character being acted upon. It is someone making a choice.
[Brandon] So you think… That one you would say… That was a [big point]
[Howard] Well, Nick Fury even… Nick Fury knows that he needed something to pull these characters together, and so… To pull the heroes together. So he dials up the emotional impact by throwing the bloody trading cards at Capt. America. Coulson never did get you to sign these, did he? He staged that. He went and got them out of Coulson's locker, and made them bloody. So, yes, you can argue that this is fridging, but you could also argue that it wasn't because Fury… Fury didn't want this to happen. He used it. He used whatever he had to turn the team into a team.
[Mary] But Coulson is also an example of how you can give a character a sense of a life outside. I've pointed to this in previous podcasts. The scene when he's getting off the elevator with Pepper and he's… And she's like, "Are you still dating that cellist?" That's just… It's like, "Oh. There is this whole other life to this character." Whereas most of the time, you're like, "What can I tell… What can you tell me about the character who's been fridged? They really, really loved the main character so much. They just loved them."
[Howard] One of the reasons that Coulson works so well is that Stark really just does see him as… "Why are you calling him Phil? His first name is Agent." Then we come around to Ironman facing off against Loki and saying, "And there's one more person you upset. His name was Phil." We realize that yes, he liked… He had come to recognize that Agent Coulson, Phil Coulson, had a life that Tony Stark was now wishing had continued.
[Mary] This is an example… Thank you for bringing that up. This is an example of that thing I was talking about, about making sure that the… There is a conflict point that the dying character has with the main character. Because it looks like the arc that they're setting up is Ironman learning to recognize the puny ordinary people. Which is actually an arc that Ironman goes on. It's just Phil is not there at the end of it.
 
[Brandon] I appreciate you guys letting me push you on this one. It is something that I'm really interested in. So thanks for putting up with me on it. I do want to ask just a different question. We have very little time left. I want to ask when do you decide to do the opposite and give plot armor? This is the phrase where we say a character is too important to die in the story right now. They haven't fulfilled their plot arc. I'm going to prevent them from dying. I'm going to rescue them in some narrative way from the consequences of their choices. When do you do this? Why do you do this? Mary's wincing, so maybe she does…
[Mary] I haven't done that. I haven't done that yet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Well, I did that in book 15. Lieut. Sorlie, who I had kind of planned for her to sacrifice herself heroically. I got to the end of the story and realized nothing she can do at this point will seem more heroic than what she has already done. The death would be a downer, and it doesn't need to be a downer. That's… I don't need that sacrifice in this story. So… She lived.
[Brandon] I've done it before. I have a character that their story isn't done and I feel it will be less sat… More satisfying to rescue them and continue their story than it would be to let them die there with unresolved major plot things. But I don't always make that choice. It's always a really hard one.
[Dan] Well, Howard touched on this earlier, but there is so many things that are worse than death. So if I find myself in this situation, I'm not going to kill that character, but I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to make them live through something, or experience something, or maybe even they get off scot free and all their friends are dead because they are the only one that lived through whatever it was. So that there are still consequences for the scene. They don't get off scot free.
[Howard] That's ablative plot armor.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Something hits them, it explodes outward…
 
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt instead of some homework this time. A good old classic Writing Excuses writing prompt. I've been thinking a lot about the story Mary talked about last month, where she had the people… The alien race where they went through a kind of butterfly-like transformation at the end of their lives and lost all of their memories and had to be reminded of them. I thought this is an interesting take on death. That a story where the characters die, but don't die. So your writing prompt is that. Do something where, perhaps fantastical, perhaps not, one of your main characters is going to go through a major transformation that is going to feel like death to those around them, but they're not actually dying. Write that story. See how it goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/09/10/12-37-subplots/

Key points: Subplots usually carry less emotional weight. The subplot's inciting incident starts after the main plot inciting incident. Subplots often are related to the main plot in some way. Sometimes the real emotional resonance is in the subplots. But beware of subplots that lead the reader too far from the main plot. The main plot needs to move forward. Subplots should be in service to the larger story. Sometimes you can spin a subplot that isn't needed off into a separate short story. Subplots don't necessarily have to be related to the main plot, but they should intersect. So look for the intersections that are interesting, that complicate or change the story. How can a subplot change the character's plans? How can the subplot support the main plot? Using MACE, try to look for a subplot that is in a different category from your main plot, to get interesting intersections. If you can remove the entire subplot and it doesn't affect the story, then the subplot doesn't belong there. Although it may illuminate the character or world... Subplots let you pull solutions for problems from them. Beware of having it be too convenient! Do side characters need a subplot fo their own? Not necessarily, although it is one way to flesh out a character. But sometimes, you just let them achieve goals offstage.

A plot, B plot... Save the cat! )

[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and get some homework.
[Wesley] Okay. So, your homework for the week is, let's say that four major things will drive a story. They are environment, characters, disruption of the status quo, and questions. Take a piece, look at your main plot, and decide which of these main four things it is. Then ask which of the remaining three things can go wrong. Make one of them your subplot.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go right.

[Brandon] So, listeners. I used the word gypped in this podcast. It's a word I've been trying to eliminate from my vocabulary. We thought rather than just cutting it out, I would put this little thing on here. This is one of those words that wiggles its way into your dialogue which you don't realize it is deeply offensive to people. So I want to apologize to the Roma people who might be listening. I'm trying to get rid of it. If those who don't know, it actually means Gypsy ripping off, because Gypsies were seen as people who would rip you off. It is an offensive racial stereotype. So, I apologize for using that. I thank you guys for continuing to listen even through the mistakes that we occasionally make.

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.15: Editing Mary's Outline

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/08/writing-excuses-7-15-editing-marys-outline/

Key Points: Inciting incident and tone need to be clear from the start. Make sure to include emotional cues. Don't forget the characterization! What defines the character? Make sure the reader knows the starting state (establishing shot!). Decision Point! What is the problem for the book, and decide to overcome it. Readers should be able to pronounce names and tell them apart. Visual cues can help. If characters change their minds, make sure something leads them to it. Escalate! Don't let the Monkey King take over. Make sure characters have conflicts, problems, skills, and flaws that show us who they are. Make sure your outline highlights the plot elements, the progression, the problems being worked through, and the conflicts -- not eating fruit. Consider giving the readers the map (ala Dora the Explorer). 
A silhouette by any other name? )
[Mary] All right. I have a writing prompt for you. This started off as a retelling of a Chinese folktale. So, what I want you to do is I want you to take a folktale and retell it in the Dora the Explorer formula. So make it a quest story, and just go ahead and outline it for right now.
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.4: Brevity

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/22/writing-excuses-7-4-brevity/

Key Points: In late, out early. Start where things are happening, close to the change point, at the inciting incident. Minimize backstory. Remove extra characters and locations. Cut filler language, combine wording and ideas. Remove repetition. Use the right nouns and the right details. Use analogies for richness. Combine scenes -- have characters do something while they're talking. Don't proliferate viewpoints. Brevity doesn't just mean shorter, it also means packing more interesting material into what you keep. Trim the fat.
20% lean meat? )
[Brandon] Let's do a writing prompt. Howard?
[Howard] Okay. You have a group of characters in a spaceship...
[Brandon] 10 seconds.
[Howard] On a very, very long trip. Tell us why it's important. Tell us what the problem is, and solve the problem. In 150 words.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excus...

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