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Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue
 
Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.
[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] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]
[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.
 
[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.
[This potted plant…]
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"
[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.
[Laughter]
[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.
[Brandon] I can…
[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.
[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…
[Howard] Info heist.
[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.
[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.
[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.
[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.
 
[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.
[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.
[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.
[Brandon] Right. Whereas…
[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.
[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?
[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.
[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.
[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.
[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…
[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…
[Howard] Are two completely different things.
[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes…
[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…
[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.
[Margaret] Oooo!
[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.
[Mary Robinette] That's true.
[Margaret] Oh, yeah.
[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.
[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.
 
[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"
[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.
[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?
[Howard] Go.
[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.
[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.
[Margaret] Exactly.
[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.
[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.
[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.
 
[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.
[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.
[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.
[Margaret] Da.
[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/13/13-19-backstories/

Key points: Backstory affects everything a character does, so it is one of the most important aspects of a character, but you also don't need to map out everything and try to fit it all in. A broad overview, similar to what you have of your friend's backstory, is probably enough. Then, when you are writing  a character, you may find yourself inventing back story in the moment to explain their reaction. When you find you need more backstory, stop, make notes, and then later go back and weave it in. Sometimes you may want to build lots of backstory, but be very conscious of what the reader needs to know versus what you may need to know. Where can you fit in backstory? At the end of every action scene, as a pause or rest. Or when a character is interacting with something that triggers it. In conversation! Flashbacks are not just to give information. They should be presented at the right time to shape the interaction the reader is having with the story, to propel a story forward. Flashbacks that break the forward momentum of the story fail, while flashbacks that add to the momentum work well. You can use flashbacks to build a mystery and answer it, or to deepen it. Put your flashbacks in when the reader wants it. Avoid tangential zoom flashbacks. Think about what your character inherited, where they are now, where they want to be, and where they think they are. Those four parts are your character's cultural backbone. Then discover the rest as you write.
 
When they were young... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Backstories.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We are talking character backstory.
[Hooray! Yay!]
[Brandon] This has been really hard to not talk about…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Before this point.
[Mary] That is, in fact, my backstory for this episode, is that I've been wanting to talk about this for months.
[Brandon] So, go! Backstories.
[Mary] All right. So the thing is, like, backstories are simultaneously one of the most important aspects of your character, and also the thing that you need to worry about least. Because a backstory is going to affect the way your character moves through the world, they're going to affect how they interact with other people, but at the same time, you do not actually need to map out their entire backstory, their entire life, and then try to fit it all in.
[Brandon] Yeah, because you will… If you work too much on it, you will try to fit it all in, and… Boy, the infodumps are really…
[Mary] So, generally speaking, what I try to do with my character is have a kind of broad overview of what their backstory is, in much the way that I have a broad overview of what someone else's backstory is. Like, I don't actually need to know more of my character's backstory than I do of Amal's or Maurice's. I don't need to know their entire life history, unless it is specific to the moment that I am encountering in that particular story. It's absolutely affecting the way they move through their life, and it's affecting the way I interact with them, but I don't need to know all of it to be able to have an effective, moving interaction, and satisfying one, with them.
 
[Amal] Do you ever find yourself inventing backstory in the moment, because as you're writing a character, you realize that they're having a very strange reaction to something, maybe more than you'd planned for, because you're caught up and then you retroactively invent backstory to…
[Mary] I'm, in fact, doing that right now with a novel that I'm working on. Where I knew that my character had previously been on this planet as a military surgeon. She's 78 now, she had been there when she was in her 30s during occupation. And she's back. I knew that about her. As the… As I've been working on it, I've realized that actually something went wrong when she was here previously. It wasn't just that she was a military surgeon. I mean, obviously, war is a lot of things going wrong for an extended period of time, but that there was a backstory that I actually needed to unpack. So what I've done is I've gone ahead and stopped and made some notes to myself, and then am continuing going forward as if I had already written that stuff. But this is the mistake that I see people make, that I have to go correct, is that I will see a lot of writers who make that discovery and never go back to weave it in previously. Which either results in the reader feeling as if they've been coy all the way through, and not… Or feeling as if the writer lied to them.
[Amal] Interesting. I had a moment like that reading a book that came out recently called Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. Where you're basically introduced to this character, who, in my case anyways, I just despised. Like, hated, hated this character. Then, you're kind of given a flashback very late in the book that does actually explain a number of the behaviors that made me detest him. But it felt like too little too late. It felt like no, actually I didn't… I feel like without having had… And that can actually absolutely be a decision. Like, maybe she just never wanted me to like this character. So it doesn't actually matter that I have this information, and so on. But timing those reveals needs to be a deliberate choice as well, I think.
 
[Maurice] So, I'm horrible at following any of this advice.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] [garbled to save myself]. I literally did 3000 words worth of world building for a story that was 6000 words long, so, I mean, that's the kind of guy I am.
[Mary] I mean, I've been there and I've done that.
[Maurice] I'm the same way when I'm building my characters and doing their backstories. I try to be conscious of the fact that yes, I've done all this work, the reader doesn't need to know all this, but I need to know this. Now, the one time when it did come in handy was with the first book of the urban fantasy trilogy. Because when I turned it in, it was a 60,000 word novel, because I was… I don't know, I was doing a thing. But when they accepted it, they were like, "Okay. But this is an adult urban fantasy novel. You need to add 30,000 words to it." I was like, "How I'm I going to add… The story is there, it's done." But what I ended up doing was, I have all this backstory material. All of a sudden, it's like, "Wait. 30,000 words? I now have room to flesh out and to show some more of that backstory for some of these characters." So you get an even deeper feeling of why they're doing the things they do. Because sometimes they're arb… And I realized that, when I was doing the draft, sometimes they are behaving in this nonsensical way. To me, it made sense, because I knew there backstory. It was like, "Oh, wait, I have gone to the other extreme of so not showing enough of this." It was like, now, forced to add that 30,000 words back, I was like, "Oh, why don't I bring the readers up along for the ride, so they can see this too?"
 
[Brandon] So, Maurice, let me push you on that. How did you get that in there without it feeling like an infodump? Because I think that you're absolutely right, you need this stuff. But it also needs to be natural.
[Maurice] Right. So, it became a matter of how am I going to dramatize this information? So, then it was like… So, basically, I would go through the narrative and see where the brakes were in the story, to go okay, now… There were like… For example, there was a… Wherever there was a big action scene, I needed to sort of reset anyway. So I've learned that during those reset moments, that's where I can slip in some backstory, because it gives the reader a pause, come down from that action scene and sort of reset the stage. During those moments, it's like, "All right. Here's a little bit more about this character."
[Mary] I also find… So I'll do things like that where I use it as a rest point. But I also will often handle the character's backstory in the same way I'll handle other pieces of infodumpy stuff, which is I will save it for moments when the character is interacting with something. So like if I want you to know how a mason jar works, I'm not going to go, well, a mason jar is a glass object that is used… What I'm going to do is I'm going to have the character pick up the glass, and I'm going to have them put water in it. I'm going to have them put a lid on it. I'm going to have them boil it. So that… I will have them interact with it. It's like, "Oh, that's how a mason jar works."
[Right.]
[Mary] So a lot of times, when I'm trying to slip backstory in, then I will have it arise naturally through conversation, or through something… Some environmental trigger, some concrete trigger that… Like with the mason jar example, my grandma use these all the time, these mason jars, and her dill pickles were amazing. That's the kind of… It's like, well, now you know that I had a grandma who canned things.
[Amal] Right. Exactly. The… It's funny. I'm thinking back to a short story I wrote called Madeleine which I've mentioned in another episode. Where, just talking about triggering things, literally the whole plot is that she has no control over the fact that she's encountering things and they are triggering these memories and hallucinations, which are also flashbacks… But are also weird, because there are new intrusive elements that are happening in them. But for… In order to choose what those would be, because they were… Like the fact that they were happening was the plot, I didn't want them to actually be moving in a way that advanced… Like… I don't know if that makes sense. Basically, I wanted them to feel as random and intrusive as memory kind of is on its own. And as unpredictable. So even though it didn't necessarily make plot sense… Like, it wasn't necessary to the plot that she be sipping a cup of warm milk, or that she needed to remember that when she was a small child, she sipped a cup of warm milk in the same way and blah blah blah. The… Like, I tried to just through moving through my own environment, kind of pick things, things that are sensory, things that are weird and interesting and stuff to try and trigger those things. Because ultimately, the point of those flashbacks was something beyond giving information about the character.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Which is Racing the Dark.
[Mary] Yes. So this is… Alaya Dawn Johnson is a wonderful writer. This was actually her first novel, which I had read years later. She wrote it, I think, 2008. It's YA and it is phenomenal. Especially when you're talking about character backstories. It's set in a series of island nations in which people have learned to bind the spirit. So they have bound the spirit of fire and death and water. They have been bound for about a thousand years at this point. Wind got away about 500 years previously and wreaked havoc. It's this young girl who is… She supposed to be a diver. That's what she does. Much like the pearl divers, but for this specific type of fish. The environment is changing in ways that make people think that a spirit might be breaking loose. It just… Things just keep getting worse for her, in ways that always seem… It's like and what other choice did she have? It's forcing her down this very specific path. It's just phenomenal. But her backstory, this… This… The fact that she was a diver is so important. Sometimes in things that she is able to do within the story, but also in the choices that she makes and the regrets that she lives. It's a wonderful story. I'm actually reading the second book in the trilogy right now. But Racing the Dark is the first one, by Alaya Dawn Johnson. I highly recommend picking it up.
 
[Brandon] Let's dive back into flashbacks. Because I love me a good flashback.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I just do. It's interesting, because when I first got into writing, I remember one of my professors saying, "Don't use flashbacks. Flashbacks are a crutch." That is kind of some writing advice, and yet I have series that use extensive flashbacks. In my current book, I would guess that there are 50 or 60,000 words of flashbacks.
[Mary] But you know how to use them. This is the thing, is that a lot of times when people are using a flashback, they're using it just to get information in. You understand that what a flashback is actually doing for the reader is allowing you to present information to them at a time when they need it. So, if we hearken back to a previous season, where I talk about the MICE quotient a lot, the MICE quotient is not about the linear timeline that a story… That a character goes through. It is about the order in which you present information to a reader. When you're using backstories, you are presenting it in order to shape the way the reader is interacting with the story, not just to hand them a piece of information.
[Brandon] Right. I mean, handing them a piece of information is really important…
[Sure]
[Brandon] But the issue is you don't want to frontload that into the story, you wanted when it will be relevant, and also when you're dramatically… You'll be like, "Oh, I can get the context of this scene now," and things like that.
[Mary] Which then you can use as momentum to propel the story forward. A lot of times, and this is when flashbacks fail, it is because they break the forward momentum of the story. When flashbacks work well, they are adding to the forward momentum of the story by giving the reader information that they need to understand the emotional context of what's at stake.
[Brandon] It also lets you build a mystery, and then answer it, or build a mystery and then continue it in an interesting way.
[Amal] I love that idea about momentum. I'd never heard it that way before. Because I found myself just now thinking of when I have found flashbacks successful. Interestingly, I'm more often thinking of film, because it feels as if it's a filmic device, literally showing you in a visual way things that happened before. I was thinking of like Ratatouille… Everyone's seen it, right? You said mice and I thought of…
[Chuckles garbled]
[Amal] Yeah, so in fact, it opened a flashback to Ratatouille. Where basically the climax of that film is absolutely about pushing that forward momentum. It's about… I think… I don't know if there's more than… No, there are a couple of them. But this flashback involves… To spoil the film…
[Mary] It's been out long enough.
[Amal] It's been out. So, basically, there's this restaurant critic and he is impossible to impress, he's made this restaurant lose its Michelin stars because he's so asorbic, and our hero, the rat, has to cook a meal that's going to impress him. So instead of trying to build up these airy things, he cooks a very, very simple country meal, ratatouille. He cooks like a vegetable dish. Then, to show how delicious this dish is, as the critic is tasting it, literally, the camera kind of like sucks you backwards into a flashback and you see him being a small child tasting ratatouille for the first time and loving it. It's all warm sepia tones. Like, everything about the texture and the light and the timing of the flashback is such that you realize yes, he's eating the best thing he's ever had in his life, partly because it's reminding him of being a child. It builds so much character stuff into that one moment. Which then resolves the film. It's... So it's not, you don't need to know any of that stuff about the critic beforehand, you need to know everything opposite that. You need to know the critic is a jerk, who... It's so great. Anyway.
[Maurice] I was just thinking about that… I tend to write a couple projects at a time, so like, I have a short story and a novel project I'm working on right now, and they both kind of hinge on this use of flashbacks, which I hadn't really thought about until this conversation, how much they're hinging on the flashbacks. So in the short story, you have this woman, she has a shattered psyche, and so as she's trying to… I love the idea, again, I love this idea of the forward momentum… As she's progressing through the story, there's stuff that she's dealing with in the present, as she's remembering the past at the same time. So there's kind of this going back and forth, going back and forth, but it is about building that forward momentum of what I'm trying to reveal about her and her trauma and her overcoming it. Within the novel project, and partly, don't get me wrong, I love a good flashback. I just love a good flashback. So I was just thinking about how I'm using the flashback now in the current scene I'm writing, which is almost, in a lot of ways, just to set the mood for the rest of the chapter. So it opens with a flashback in order to just… Part of it is to just you're going to get some insight into the character, which sets the mood for what's going to happen in the rest of the chapter. So I love the idea of flashback and how it just… We all have these secrets that lay buried deep within us, sometimes we're not even always aware of. So just that slow revelation of what that might be reveals a character to us.
[Brandon] Put it in when the reader is going to want it. I think of when my students do it poorly, or when I did it poorly when I was a new writer, is you're writing along and you'll be reading this story, and then… Tangential flashback, just zoom, and the author thinks that they're giving lots of character, but really what happens is your reader, you're in a scene, and then suddenly you're off reading about grandma's pickles…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] And this extended thing, where really all you needed at that point was, "Oh, my mom… Or my grandma used to put pickles in jars like this. Hmm. Every time I take a sip, it tastes like pickle juice to me."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Or you need a… Don't do it this way, but a "Oh, no, not one of those!"
[Laughter]
[Brandon] You need that hook that later on you're going to get the explanation to.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] That is my reaction to pickles most of the time.
[Brandon] Obviously.
[So good]
[Brandon] Depends on if they're kosher or if they're not. Anyway.
[Mary] Pickled okra, y'all. I'm just sayin'. Pickled okra is just... Ah'm just goin' ta go full out Southe'n on y'a. It is just... 
 
[Brandon] We are almost out of time, so...
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Last comments on this?
[Mary] Yeah. I'm going to say that when... That you can spend as much or as little time building your character backstory as you want, but I do think that there are some things that you should know about your character going in. That you need to know where they are… That their cultural backbone, I would say. Which is how… And when I say cultural backbone, it's four things. The inherited one, what is the culture that they have inherited? What is the culture that they are currently living? What do they aspire to? And then, what is their perceived culture? That if you know those four pieces of your character's backstory, that most of the rest of it you can probably discover as you are writing. If you want to dig deeper into any of that, then I think you can. But don't feel like you need to create a 3,000 word biopsy for each of your… Not a biopsy.
[Laughter oh, my God.]
[Mary] Well, you know, their backstory was…
[Amal] An exquisite corpse.
 
[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and go to our homework.
[Mary] All right. So your homework is I want you to explore what these different tools do. So I want you to write a scene where a character has a flashback that exposes some aspects of their backstory. Then I want you to reset that scene again. And this time, in that same scene, they are going to talk to another character about their backstory, so that they're having to deal with the ramifications of it in real time.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.26: Mystery Plotting

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/11/27/writing-excuses-6-26-mystery-plotting/

Key Points: Mystery plots are when you don't know what's going to happen, and you're waiting for the revelation. How do you write a plot that is about finding out information? One trick is to bury the important information: for example, in the middle of a list. Add extra people and details to make it harder to see the important part for the trees. Start with the solution to the mystery, then work backwards, adding red herrings and other distractions. How could someone misperceive this? Break your information and clues into small chunks and reveal them slowly. Plan how to dole out the information, how to bury it, how to obscure it with other bits of information. Make your red herrings lead to something else, something extra. Separate learning a bit of information, realizing it is a clue, and realizing who it implicates into different scenes -- spread out the revelation.
Whodunit? The answer is in the box! )
[Howard] Whichever. No, that's good. That's good. It's a puzzle box, and the answer to the puzzle is someone's soul is in this box. Now start building your way back to the beginning of the mystery so that the people who are trying to find out the actual contents of the box are deceived into thinking that it's anything but a soul right up until the very end.
[Brandon] That's very nice. Way to roll with our stupid comments, Howard. Well done.
[Howard] You called me Mister Brilliant, I had to execute.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.25; When Characters Do Dumb Things

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/11/20/writing-excuses-6-25-when-characters-do-dumb-things/

Key points: Don't just make character do dumb things because the plot requires it, because then readers disengage from the character. Let the audience have information that the character doesn't, but don't let the reader get it too far ahead of the character! Dumb choices should make sense as far as the character knows -- even if the reader wants to let them know that there is something else they need to know. Dumb choices may be personality based, a character flaw, or driven by emotion. Pay attention to the consequences -- really dumb choices should have strong consequences. Avoid plotting that requires a character be stupid. Dumb choices often are dumb because you didn't lay the groundwork. Give your characters good reasons for their choices.
Try the yellow pages? )
[Brandon] I'm going to go ahead and do our writing prompt because I've been gone for so long from the podcast. I'm going to suggest that you actually create a really solid romance where the characters can't be together for good, character-driven reasons. Not because of a misunderstanding. Not because they have an argument in act one and then hold a grudge. But because of legitimate, either cultural biases or character biases. Write a story about that romance where in the end they don't get together.
[Howard] And not because one of them is dead?
[Brandon] And not because one of them is dead, and not because either ot them are stupid. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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