wetranscripts | Entries tagged with juxtaposition

Writing Excuses 21.16: Tension and Release as Call and Response

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-16-tension-and-release-as-call-and-response

Key Points: Tension and release? Conflict, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, anticipation, micro-tension. Conflict resolution, end of the fight (physical or emotional), escape for a moment. Safety versus danger, known and unknown. Movement! Release is pacing. Risotto! Genres of the body. Flow. Leapfrog! Season to taste. Frogs in a bag storytelling. Modulation.

[Season 21, Episode 16]

[Howard] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Tension and release as call and response.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about tension and release as a way to kind of guide your reader through your fiction. A lot of times we talk about conflict as being a thing that a story must have, but I've been thinking more and more that it's tension. We did a whole thing about tension season before last, last season... Previously...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] On writing excuses. So, we're just going to do a quick kind of reminder about what tension is, and then talk about specifically how you can use tension, but also the release of tension, as a way to control how your reader experiences the story. So, I'm going to start with some of the idea... Some of the pieces of tension that we talked about previously. There's conflict, of course, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, anticipation, and then micro tension, which is small pieces of tension. So those are types of tension. What are... When we're talking about, like, release of tension, what are some ways we can think about sort of the opposites of these?

[DongWon] I think, I mean, conflict resolution being sort of the most obvious one. Right? And the end of the fight scene, whether that's a physical fight or an emotional fight. Right? Like, coming to some kind of conclusion where you have that mini-resolution. Right? And this doesn't have to be resolution of the core tension of your thing. Right? The monster can still be hunting them. But you make it to a safe room, you bar the door. You escape for a moment. Right? Or you have a beat where you think you defeated it. Right? And I think all of these can be small releases of tension that give your story... It adds to the pacing. Right? It pulls you through it. Because, to me, tension and release is controlling pacing, is controlling flow.

[Howard] And part of what you said right there, if you resolve the fight, but maybe not the emotional conflict, well, those are two different sources of tension. It's entirely possible to relieve... To release some of the tension. Oh, okay, good, they're not shooting at each other, but they still need to have the big talk...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And they haven't yet.

[Erin] A lot of times, I think about tension, especially in horror, but I think it works in other places, about safety versus danger, and the known versus the unknown. So if you move... And a lot of that is about tension as movement. So you move from one known state, a lot of times, to another known state. So you go from dangerous and known, I know I have to give a speech and I'm super par... Like, I just... It's just going to be so horrible, I know it. But it's dangerous. To dangerous and unknown. In the middle of my speech, the zombie apocalypse occurs.

[laughter]

[Erin] Which is great, I don't have to do the speech anymore.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] However, new problem. But it does resolve the emotional tension of the speech.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then you move on to a new place.

[DongWon] And the reason why release is pacing, in my mind, is because... Okay, so, my worst food opinion is I don't like risotto, and part of why I don't like risotto is that every bite is the same as the one you just had. Right? It just continues to be the same flavor going forward, and the same texture going forward. And so, if you have a book that has, or you have a story that has no release of tension, it can feel very same throughout. Right? Differentiation allows us to observe the passage of time. Right? And so, when you let people have those moments of release, it makes them feel like your story's moving forward, even if the main overarching thing is still not resolved.

[Howard] I was just thinking of... I don't know if it was in Alien Earth or not, but there's a moment where the xenomorph has gotten away...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Now we're all tense, because we can have a jump scare at any point, where the xenomorph leaps out. And then, someone says, oh, we know where it is, it just killed so and so. That's actually a release of tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because now I know it's not going to jump out...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Right here. And then they go after it. And now I'm tense again, because they are approaching the place where we could again be jumped by the alien. And so it is a very nice rolling forward of tension and release as we make me tense, and make me relax.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and I think it's not just that it's boring, I think it's also fatiguing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] For the reader if things are at the same level of tension. Like, if you think about a set of stairs, there are landings on stairs in order to give your muscles time to recuperate before you do the next set of stairs.

[DongWon] Exactly. That's why the StairMaster at the gym is the worst thing ever invented.

[laughter]

[Erin] Is it worse or better than the risotto?

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[DongWon] It's better than risotto.

[Mary Robinette] I'm so tense about wondering why.

[DongWon] I know. I know. My dislike of risotto knows no bounds. But the reason we keep going to horror, I think, is it's one of what is sometimes called a genre of the body. Right? It's a genre you feel in your body as you have the tension. Romance, erotica, there's a few... Humor, all of these are sort of categorized as sort of rom... Or genres of the body. And so they're great examples of looking at how tension builds. Right? Humor is also tension, as you tell a joke, Howard, what you called the comedic drop, is you're building tension until you have the reversal, you have the drop that lets the humor sort of be resolved. That's why you can use humor in a horror story to get that little release valve of tension before you ratchet it up again.

[Howard] It's why horror is one of my favorite things to write...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the whole humor tool box applies.

[DongWon] It's the same skill set, it's just a different resolution.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's why Jordan Peele is one of the greatest horror auteurs of all time, because he's also one of the funniest people of all time.

[Mary Robinette] But you can also use it in things that are not particularly funny...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Or overtly horror. The Spell Shop by Sarah Beth Durst is this cozy, and it's just delightful and charming. But one of the things that she does in it that I think is so fascinating is, like, I could not stop turning the pages, she's so good at the tension and release. And one of the things she does is uses juxtaposition and questions to pull you through. So the opening of the story, our main character's a librarian, there's a coup that is going on in the city. We do not actually see the coup, we see smoke rising in the distance. But all she has to do is get out of the library with her sentient house plant. And just the juxtaposition of librarian, sentient house plant, smoke from coup in the distance, and you know that at any moment, those things could intersect...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And even though they don't directly intersect at the beginning of the book, that is still looming over you for much of the book. And it allows you to be like, any moment now, this anticipation, this juxtaposition of this extremely cozy thing with some real horrors happening in the background...

[DongWon] Well, what's useful also about your list of different types of tension is that you can alternate between them to keep flow moving through the story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So the game Blue Prince is a great example of this, because you have the tension and release of receiving a puzzle, and then solving the puzzle. Right? And that is one kind of resolution. What made me think of it is in the background, there's also this revolutionary narrative happening, and the succession narrative happening in the background. So as you're getting story elements, that is pulling you through, as you want to know what's happening in the world, who are these characters, why is this house the way it is? At the same time that you're getting the tension and release of the puzzle solving. Right? The game Hades uses a similar structure, in terms of the tension and release of doing a very difficult combat and then dying and then getting more story. Right? So if you alternate them too, as you let pressure off one valve, you have the other one still pulling you, and then you release that one, and the other one's... You can alternate them.

[Howard] I think of it as leapfrog.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] The frog jumps, we're tense, the frog lands, and we've relaxed, and now another frog is going to jump over it. And that pattern... I mean, obviously, if that's the whole pattern all the way through the book, it will get a little stale.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But as a structure for helping you understand tension and release in your own work, that's a fine starting point.

[DongWon] Well, this is...

[Mary Robinette][garbled] more frogs.

[Howard] You just need more frogs, literally.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] Because I think, like, again like we talk a lot about how humans are pattern recognition creatures, and if you have the exact same type of tension resolution, tension resolution, the reader already sees the resolution when the next tension occurs, and therefore they don't feel tense. They're like, it's when you have like the hero who's played by a really big name actor in danger in the first 3 minutes of a movie and the person's like, I'm not really buying that, like, I doubt that you got Val Kilmer in order to kill him in minute one. And so when it does happen, it's very shocking.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think playing with different types of tension says, okay, we're going to do this a little bit differently. We got a question recently at a live event about how to make try-fail cycles feel different. And some of it's having a different fail to the same try, or a different try, but the same fail. Changing one thing changes the pattern enough that then humans are like, this is new, and yet again, I'm feeling my emotions.

[DongWon] Well, all this kind of plays into a thing that we're talking about with the difference between shorter fiction and longer fiction. And as you go from a short story to a novel, you need to layer in more plots. You need to go from an A plot to an A plot, B plot, C plot, D plot. And that, having those different layers, lets you alternate when you're building and when you're releasing tension to sort of create this movement and flow that we're talking about. Speaking of tension and release, we've got to take a break for a second. But when we come back, I want to hear from you guys about how you decide where to put those releases.

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[Mary Robinette] Writers know something a lot of people don't. The darkest, strangest spots can be some of the most personal ones on the page. We make space for them in our work all the time. But what happens when a dark or disturbing thought shows up and won't leave? Not as a story idea, but as something that just takes over. Something that feels completely out of character for you, but your brain keeps circling back to, no matter what you do to try to feel better. That experience is actually one of the hallmarks of OCD, and it's more common in creative communities than most people realize. OCD involves persistent, unwanted intrusive thoughts about anything that matters to you. Your identity, your relationships, your fears about who you are. Along with mental or physical behaviors you feel driven to do to get relief. The harder you try to push them away, the stronger they get. These thoughts can feel very real. Which is what makes them so upsetting. And because OCD is so widely misunderstood, many people live with it for years without knowing what it is. But it doesn't have to be that way. Because OCD is highly treatable with the right kind of specialized therapy. OCD needs ERP, or Exposure and Response Prevention, which has proven to be the most effective treatment. And that's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's leading provider of OCD treatments, and it's covered by insurance for over 138 million Americans. All of their licensed therapists specialize in ERP therapy and will help you learn to take the power away from intrusive thoughts in live, face-to-face virtual sessions. They also provide support between sessions when you need it most. So you're never facing OCD alone. If this sounds familiar, visit nocd.com to book a free call with their team. That's nocd.com.

[DongWon] Okay. So when we went to break, I kind of wanted to hear more about your decision making process. Right? So, when you're putting together a story, what is the thing that's telling you, okay, I need a release here, I need to build tension here? What are those things that are, like, mechanically going into your process there?

[Howard] I'm a big baby.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I do not like being tense. I am not as tense when I'm writing as when I'm reading it. And so generally speaking, I... I like my food much saltier than Sandra does, and so I know that if it's the right amount of salt, I've screwed up. It's reverse for tension. If I feel like this is too tense, then I need to turn it up a couple of notches, and that will be accurate. And that's where my barometer is now. I don't know if that's where my barometer will be in 6 months or 6 years or whatever. But it's... I'm... Life is a moving Target. I just scale things in that way because I've discovered that my tastes are such that I like a little less tension. And so when I'm writing for a wider audience, I'm going to put in more tension than I want.

[DongWon] I like that you're almost, like, checking yourself somatically as you write, of like where am I feeling tension? Is this too much? Then it's like, oh, then that's the right level. Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about it... I mean, the challenge in leaning on Howard's metaphor is that it is a season to taste. For me, when I'm using tension, I'm often using it to control pacing, and also to control the effect on the reader. So if I have... If I have a slow scene, it's a quiet scene, it's people in a room and they're having a conversation or, I don't know, making tea. I'm very likely to then try to insert some other kind of tension in order to make that moment kind of tick along, even while giving people the illusion that they're resting.

[Howard] I love this contrast. Because I'm speaking to how am I feeling while I'm reading, and Mary Robinette is speaking to how is the structure of the book working in terms of pacing. And to be honest, I use both tools.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I think a lot of us end up using both tools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's why it's so important to call out all of them.

[DongWon] Yeah... I...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, this makes so much sense to me with both how each of you individually talk about process, talk about fiction. Erin, I'm kind of curious, like, you write incredibly tense fiction. Like, an Erin Roberts short story has me sweating from line one to the end. Like, how do you think about maintaining that level or increasing it? Do you ever, like, choose to intentionally decrease it? Or do you just make me suffer the whole time?

[Erin] I often go in writing, thinking, how can I make DongWon suffer?

[DongWon] That's... It's successful.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I think that part of it is that I have trained myself... I was thinking, to love tension. Some of this is a lifetime of watching soap operas, which have to create tension all the time in situations that are very familiar. Like... It's a lot of it like who's in love with who and who lied to who about this.

[Howard] So many frogs.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But there's so many frogs [garbled] Like, it's basically putting a whole bunch of frogs in a bag and shaking it...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Is a soap opera. And so...

[Howard] And then you nickname each frog.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well...

[DongWon] The frogs in a bag method of storytelling is what we're saying? Okay.

[Erin] And so I think because I, like, sort of grew up with that as a level of storytelling, I always want more tension. I'm like, they're spending too much time feeling safe. I don't like it. Throw something at them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think also I've learned a lot about tension from singing and seeing other people sing.

[DongWon] Ooh, I love that.

[Erin] When you talked about risotto earlier, I was like, this is how I feel... If you ever go to karaoke or even professional singers who don't modulate...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like they haven't...

[DongWon] Who just belt. Yeah.

[Erin] They have a beautiful belting voice...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But they just belt for 5 minutes straight. After a while, you just tune it out.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And when I'm singing, I like to belt, like, I will watch the audience for, like, when I feel that they're kind of done with it, and immediately modulate what I'm doing in real time to try to, like, do something different, like, oh, that's a perfect time to get quiet. That's a perfect time... Now you know what I can do, like, I'll do something else. And so a lot of it, for me, is very like gut feeling. But in order to do that as someone who's writing a story, I will read my stories to myself, or have the voice of, like, Microsoft Word, read it to me, and feel like, if I'm not feeling tense in this moment, I need to add something else here.

[Howard] Man, if Clippy can make you tense...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You're doing it well.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Clippy makes everyone tense.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me think about a thing about why we modulate in a song, and we do it for emphasis. There are times when we go quieter because we want someone to lean in, and that's also I think places where you have their quieter scenes, where it looks like the tension is dropping, but there's this undercurrent underneath it, that you're like, I have this creeping sense of dread, versus other times when you do belt full out because you're trying to emphasize a different kind of thing. I think thinking about the emotion of the scene is really, like, why you are choosing one type of tension over another, and whether you're doing it as a release or a tightening.

[Erin] Just a yes-and to that. Like, from the singing part of things. When do you... When people sing quietly, they're able to enunciate more, you're more likely to hear the lyrics of what they're saying to actually...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Get a sense of what the words are when someone sings. The louder you sing, the broader your voice becomes, and a lot of times, people don't listen to the words as much, they just listen to the sound of it and the feel of it. And so in writing, I think, in those small scenes, if there's a small detail of tension, like the tension is actually, like, whether or not this person wore the thing on their left wrist versus their right, the small detail that works better in a quiet scene. In the middle of a large fight scene, it's going to be hard to pay attention to, like, what side somebody had something on, because the bigness of it is actually drowning out some of those small details. So having both of them allows you to give both types of tension their demesne.

[Howard] And in the spirit of yes-and, I've got an oh, wait.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] When I was studying audio engineering, I had things exactly backwards, and the instructor in the studio had to come over and tell me, no, you're pushing the faders at the wrong time. I was mixing something where the singers would be really loud and then really whisper, and then really loud and really whisper, as sort of a call and response. And I was turning them up during the loud, and down during the whisper. And he said that no no no no no no no. What you're trying to mimic is the lean in. When people lean in in order to hear something, they concentrate on it, and their brain makes it louder. And so when the soft singing happens, turn it up. Let us lean in. When it's loud, bring down the fader and let us sit back and it washes over us. I do not know how this applies to writing, but it's fascinating to me.

[DongWon] Well, as pattern recognition machines, what we do is recognize edges. Right? An edge will always stand out to us more than the middle of something. Right? So when you have that micro tension response, it gets us to lock in and focus, like, when we're like, oh, wait, what was that punch line? You know what I mean? Even though if the scene isn't overall a funny one, having that little bit of just like friction there lets us refocus and pay attention and lean in, as you were saying, to hear the thing better, and then we can go back to sort of what the baseline of the scene is.

[Erin] Yeah. Thinking of that and the call and response you were talking about, since we put that in the title, is the like... It creates a pattern that you then break. It's like lean in for a hug, this is great, lean in for a hug, this time I stabbed you.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so it's like...

[DongWon] Surprising, yet inevitable.

[laughter]

[Erin] If you know me, yes. So, like, I think that is a thing that allows you to almost lull the reader into thinking that there isn't tension, that we're in a low tension moment, and then allows you to ratchet it up really quickly, which makes that edge that much sharper...

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] To not cut your reader with, but to cut through their attention with.

[DongWon] Cut me, apparently.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And it is that... The thing that we'll see often at the end of a story, that we get this big cathartic snap because of a big tension release.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that's also why you'll see in a lot of places where you get, like in the horror thing where they're about to get out and everything looks great. It's that contrast can provide you with more of a reaction to this new tension.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of new tension, it is time for homework, and I want you, listeners, to consider adding some new tension to your story. I want you to look at an existing thing that you've already written, and I want you to look at it and see if you can spot what in that scene causes the tension. And if there's not anything, that's a good sign that you should add something. Try listening to one of the earlier episodes where we do a whole module on tension that's several episodes long. See if you can add a bit of juxtaposition, see if you can add a question. If there is tension already, what happens to that scene if you change it?

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.15: Using Contrast for Maximum Effect

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-15-using-contrast-for-maximum-effect

Key Points: Contrast! Light emotional beat, then dark. Or vice-versa. Dark night before the dawn? All is lost, then success. Or escape, then eldritch horrors. Foils! Bad, worse. Gradations! Clink-boom! Contrast makes the audience pay attention. Songs in a minor key. Juxtaposition. Ironic distance. Whiplash! Compress/expand.

[Season 21, Episode 15]

[Howard] Locus magazine is one of the finest and most respected resources for readers, writers, editors, illustrators, and assorted aficionados of speculative fiction. Locus tells the stories of, and about, storytellers through author interviews, book reviews, curated reading lists, industry news, and more. The annual Locus Awards recognize and celebrate excellence across science fiction, fantasy, and horror, showcasing new and diverse voices in the speculative genres. Right now, Locus is holding their annual fundraising drive. I'm proud to support Locus, and I'd love for you to join me. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to explore the awards available to this year's supporters. If you're looking for a long enough lever to move the world of speculative fiction, look no further. Locus is that lever. It's the rising tide that lifts all ships. It's the shining city on the hill. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to help Locus keep the lights on and the future bright. locus mag.com/igg26.

[Season 21, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Using contrast for maximum effect.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] And this week, we're continuing our conversation about moving through the middle of your book. And, one of the things we wanted to focus on, having talked about soggy middles, try-fail cycles, is ways in which you can use contrast to heighten the impact of certain scenes in your book. Right? And when we say that, we sort of mean contrast in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes that is putting a big light emotional beat next to or in advance of a dark beat, just to sort of give you a sense of loss when you get to the darker moment. Or even the other way around. Right? Having the dark night of the soul before your triumph and success. Right? The night is darkest before the dawn kind of thing. Right? And I think some of the examples that we're going to use will have a feeling of being a little cliched, but I think we're reaching for the ones that are very obvious in that way. And, in the back half of this, we want to talk a little bit about ways in which you can sort of make it feel a little bit more subtle, and a little more integrated, and not just the, like, yeah, the dark cave before the hero's success. So, when you're thinking about moments of contrast, what are some examples that you'd reach for, either in your own fiction or stuff that you see out in the world?

[Mary Robinette] So, this... For me, this came about because I was on a panel and one of the people on the panel said that there... That you always had to have a all is lost moment. And I always bristle a little bit about the... Anytime it's like you always have to.

[DongWon] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] Tools, not rules. Exactly. And so what I started thinking about was, like, yeah, the thing you have is the moment where it does look like they have lost everything, and I think it provides this big cathartic beat when you come out of it. There's a bigger contrast between the moment where, oh, no, I've lost everything, and, look, we succeeded. But, when you look at horror, you also get this beat of contrast where it's... It looks like, oh, they're going to get out, and then they get sucked back in and devoured by eldritch horrors. So I think that the contrast does this thing for you, and that you see it in a bunch of different ways, in this really big macro scale, but also a lot of other places. So, I also think about contrast like with foils, like a contrast for the main character.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, those are things I think about with contrast.

[Erin] Oh, let's say you have, like, contrast is like a foil, like a thing to show what the character is like. I was trying to think about how contrast is handled in long running formats, like wrestling and soaps. Where, like, there is no dark night of the soul, because, like, the show is on 300 days a week...

[laughter]

[Erin] And so, like, there might be one person's dark night of the soul, but, like, it will...

[DongWon] That's a really long week, by the way.

[Erin] [garbled] Eldritch horror has consumed my sense of time. But I think, like, that is a... Something like, I was like, well, how does that work? I was trying to think about it. But what they really do use is, like, the idea of, like, this not that. So...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In wrestling, you have your heels, people who are just evil, and your faces, who are like the good people, and people do, like, a heel face turn or a face heel turn. But one of the ways that they do that, when they want to shift what a character is or how they're perceived is by, if you're a bad person, and then somebody worse shows up, then all of a sudden, ooh, you're not as bad as we thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And it makes it easier for you to turn face. And so, like, thinking about using contrast as a way to also reset audience expectations of what's happening on the canvas.

[DongWon] I love the idea of having... Contrast not just being opposites, but also, like, gradations. Right? You can have this guy that you thought was the worst villain, and then the real villain shows up, and you're like, oh, no, the bad guy was just a henchman. The bad guy is actually the nice one. What is truly evil is whatever is happening over there. Right?

[Mary Robinette] It's one of the things that makes us love people who are doing heists. They're criminals.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But they're not bad.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like the way the person is whoever that they're heisting against.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly. Like, Danny Ocean is not a good guy, but Andy Garcia's character, like, that dude's evil.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And so I think having that differentiation really matters.

[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about was... As a contrast moment was in Memory of... A Memory Called Empire...

[DongWon] A Memory Called Empire.

[Mary Robinette] Which we've talked about in a... At length a couple of seasons ago, but more recently, there's the scene at a restaurant. And it's... They're having a nice meal, and then there's an explosion. And this is a classic kind of setup where there's everything's really lovely, and then things go terribly wrong. And it's often so predictable. But one of the things I love about the way Arkady Martine handles that is that she makes it about something else. But, specifically, she makes it about something else that is also a contrast.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It is the difference between the way food is prepared in one place versus another place, and so you focus on that contrast in the scene, and you're enjoying the nice meal, and then there's this other... This other bigger contrast. So there's a lot of fun things you can play with.

[Erin] I also think contrast can be in a single moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Erin] All my examples are a little... Very me.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There's a famous... And I'm going to get it wrong now, so, gee, [garbled Tran don't at me?] but there's a famous General Hospital moment called clink BOOM in which one pair of characters clink glasses after getting married, while another one dies in a car bomb explosion. But what's interesting is that you see both of the things coming. Like, neither one is a surprise. The wedding is being prepared, someone's creeping around, they do that camera angle where you can show that somebody's being followed, but what you don't expect, despite the fact that both these things are coming, is for them to come at the exact same time. So it makes something that you would have thought was, like, super not surprising all of a sudden surprising, because you have to deal with it in a contrast that you weren't used to.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that that's a really good example of why it works, because both of those feel earned, like, even though you see it coming. In Downton Abbey, when they get rid of Matthew, the... It's this big contrast moment. Lady May is having a baby, and then he is driving, and then there's just this random car crash, and he dies. And it's unearned. It doesn't... It comes completely out of nowhere. Which, like, is a thing that happens. But it exists only because there is a contrast... Contract dispute. And it just... It felt cliched, it felt like this is a thing I've seen, this is... There's no surprise, there's no interest, and also they're telegraphing it so much leading up to it, that... Like, if he'd been racing home and desperate to get there, then actually I would have been a little bit shocked if he had died in a car crash, because I was expecting the happy ending to be him arriving at home. And instead, he's tooling along, and he just doesn't know that she's in labor, and it's... Like, birds are singing, and he's enjoying a nice car ride, and I'm like, oh, this dude's dead.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and sometimes you can just use contrast to heighten moments that wouldn't be heightened without them. So... Just by defying the audience expectation.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And this is a thing that's been used so much, it's becoming cliched. We can think of all the moments in action movies where everything, like, slows down, and they're getting, like, a moody pop song...

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] Over a scene of a bunch of people dying. Right? I think, like, this is a gamer reference, but, like the Gears of War commercial that used Mad World, like, played in this moody slowed down way while a guy is, like, chainsawing aliens in half. And you're like, all right, what are we doing? At the same time, it was like, this is cool as hell. I want to play this game. Because that felt novel and interesting at the time. But the contrast between the two actions gets your audience to pay attention in a way that they might not have otherwise. And can give the feeling of more weight and impact then it necessarily would have been if you just shown the thing in a more quote unquote normal way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was the way it was used in the much older film, Good Morning Vietnam.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the first times they see that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Contrast between the music and the horrors of war. And that one is very generated by the story. It's like, this is music he's playing at the radio station...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] While these things are also happening.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] The thing, and this will not help you right at all, sorry... But the thing that I love about those is that they're often the song in a minor key. And what's interesting about that is that is a contrast right there. Like, I will say, if you want to creep yourself out, listen to Don't Worry, Be Happy...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In a minor key. Because it's so... The lyrics are so bright and the music just sounds so creepy on some primal level. And you start creating story... What I think is really interesting about listening to it is I'm like, I don't trust you that you're telling me to be happy, because the music is not matching. And so I'm actually going to create, in some ways, like, what could be going on here? What's happening with this character? And I think that sometimes contrast can also leave space in us for the reader, in between the two poles, like, something is... There's some, like, gap that needs to be bridged, and the reader can kind of step in to bridge that gap.

[Mary Robinette] I think you've hit on something that there is a distinction in kind of the ways we're using contrast. But what you're talking about right there is creating something that is unsettling because of the juxtaposition of two contrasting elements.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Whereas the other type, where it's like these are very happy moments followed by a terrible moment...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a contrast there where you're trying to create more emotional distance for the character... For the reader to travel, so that you get a bigger cathartic snap. And they're both forms of contrast, but just for different effects.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think this hits on a really important point, and one I want to get into more after the break, but how is distance important for juxtaposition and contrast?

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[DongWon] Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed contemplating distance...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] In that little bit of a break that we had. And one thing that really strikes me, as we're talking about both these examples, as you were discussing right before the break, Mary Robinette, is in one way, we have ironic distance instead of, like, expectation setting. Right? when you have, like, the moody music over, or, like, a happy song in a minor key. That creates an ironic distance. That's something internal to the reader, and the reader's expectations, that's creating an emotional distance from the work in a lot of ways. To then have the emotional impact of them coming back into it. Versus the contrasting sort of things within the story of, like, a happy scene followed by a dark scene, or sometimes vice versa, that creates impact from shortening the distance between two different types of emotions. Right? So how do... How are you thinking about distance in these ways, and are they connected in terms of these two different modes?

[Mary Robinette] The way I think about it is using the... Using the... The first moment, say, to kind of set expectations, to place the reader in a specific spot, and then the second moment is kind of like a whiplash or a catapult situation. Where, in order to move from one state to another, you have to move through it fairly rapidly. And, like, the faster you go across a bigger distance, kind of the bigger impact snap it can have.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes that will backfire, because it didn't actually load it enough to get that snap. Like, everything that's surrounding it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But that's kind of the thing that I'm thinking about. I will say sometimes do this by not necessarily having a happy moment before having a big tragic moment, but sometimes making you think, oh, we're dealing with this story problem, and, oh, no, it's actually this one. But there's a contrast between the kinds of things that the character is trying to solve. And the... I don't know. I don't know another way to describe it, other than whiplash. Which can be a negative. But in this case, I think it's a little bit more like a slingshot effect around a planet...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] As if we've done that, all of us.

[laughter]

[Erin] I have. No. So, here's a question. Do you think it matters whether it happens... To the characters but not the reader? So what I'm thinking, we talked about a few episodes ago, the thing that happens where the, like, spaceship is exploding, and then the story rewinds and says, like, 12 hours earlier...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So at that point, you know that, like, every happy moment that's happening in the 12 hours leading up to this, is just the prelude to disaster. The characters don't. They're moving forward in real time. And I'm wondering, like, does that create... Is that the same effect, is that a different effect?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it is the same effect. Like, there's a story that Justin C. Key wrote, a short story, in which you know that you are reading about someone who is dead by the end of the story. And it is... It's an examination of their life together and it's a form of mourning. And so you're seeing these memories, and there's this bittersweetness because you are existing in both states. And so... And I do think it is... It... I know that it wouldn't work without that contrast, without that awareness. Otherwise, it's like, oh, look, they're at a soccer game. That's cute. And so having that... Preloading that knowledge for the reader does provide that contrast for them as they're experiencing things.

[DongWon] The deep dive project we did last year, Charlie Jane Anders All The Birds In The Sky is all about contrasts. Right? A lot of times, what she's doing is either doing the Greek tragedy thing, of, like, this is going to end in disaster and we know that that's creating contrast in the overall narrative tension way, or directly contrasting two extremely different people by showing us their relationships and the conflicts they have around that. And that lets us see all the unreliability in each of their narrations. Right? We can see the ways in which... I believe her name is Patricia is being unreliable in reporting about her own relationships be... Through the contrast of how other people see that, how other people experience those relationships.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As we were talking, I suddenly had a... Small revelation, which I always enjoy. It's why I like doing this podcast with you guys.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Um, there's a thing in puppetry we call compress/expand, in animation they call it towards and away. And the idea is that if I'm going to jump, I have to bend my knees first, so that's the compress, and then I expand. And so, one of the ways you can think about these contrasting moments is loading energy. And that is also, I think, why some of them don't work. Because it's so obviously not loading energy of any sort. This is the thing where you're at the beginning of the movie, and it's like, look at how happy this couple is... I'm so sad, she's going to die. Because there's nothing else happening in that scene. It's not doing anything. That scene itself is just existing. So it's not loading energy...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In any sort of way. In terms of your expectations, in terms of tensions that you can have. And then when it releases, it's like, but I didn't... I'm set for that.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, that loading comes from stakes. Right? And that emotional investment in how the character sees themselves, how the character feels about other characters. And if you're loading that up with the tension, then when you have that contrast, either through success or failure, that's where you get that big release of energy that makes for an exciting story moment.

[Erin] But how do you not make it feel like, oh, I'm about to have this moment of horrible thing, like, now I've just like lo... How do you earn that, like, the happy moment before the sad... Or the sad moment before the happy?

[DongWon] That is a bit like...

[Erin] In order to...

[DongWon] This is my last job...

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly.

[DongWon] And then I'm going to retire.

[Erin] But, like... I just got my place fixed out in the country. Yay.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I think by doing exactly what Arkady Martine did in A Memory Called Empire, which is that you make that scene about something else. So, you're faking the reader out. It's like the scene appears to be doing something. It is doing something, it is carrying energy for this story. It's doing all of this load-bearing thing, stuff about the differences in their world, about her feelings, about being in this space, about exploring this, her, like, horror that people just eat an entire piece of an animal, coming from a space station, that's just weird, and so it's doing all of these other things. And so, in a way, it's a form of misdirection. You make the reader think that's what this scene is about. And then they don't notice that you're setting them up for this other thing.

[DongWon] But it feels inevitable when that other thing happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? Because you've been lingering in this response and the tension is coming from all the micro contrasts of the scene that are leading into the bigger contrast.

[Mary Robinette] How do you do it?

[Erin] I don't.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You do.

[Erin] I don't... I don't know. To be honest, off the top of my head. I think... I don't think I use contrast as much, because I think I tend to... A lot of times, I like to center my stories in a mood. And so the mood will predominate, so even though there's differences in what is being experienced, it doesn't... The highs and lows are not quite as high or low.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean... I do... I shouldn't have sprung that on you like that, because I do think that you use contrast, but in short form, it shows up differently, I think.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In short form, what we're often looking at is a contrast between the beginning state and the ending state, or the contrast in the middle between the way a character handles things at one point and the way they handle it in a second point. I'm thinking about the contrast... Some of the contrasts that are in Sour Milk Girls. Like, there's the difference in the way we are talking and interfacing with memory at the beginning versus where we moved to at the end. And the reader's understanding of what we are talking about shifts. For listeners who are just coming into this episode, you can go listen to our deep dive on Sour Milk Girls a couple of seasons ago. It will be correct in the show notes, but I don't remember.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think that that in short fiction, because we aren't having to... We don't have as much room to work, that it is often a contrast between beginning and end. Sometimes we use contrast in terms of, like, what I sometimes call an avatar of success. Like, at the beginning, your socks are cold and wet, and at the end, look at how dry and warm they are.

[Erin] Thinking actually about the story that we actually just did recently, which is yours I believe...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which...

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we definitely...

[Erin] Possibly.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, time travel, yes, we have done that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The story, and, like, the contrast... Where I actually think... In thinking about the difference between the beginning state and the end state, and the difference in the way that, like, the character holds power at the beginning and at the end, what is interesting, because I think in some ways, I don't know that contrast is within the character so much as it is within our understanding of what the character's capable of.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to point out that and say at the end of the story, I am using contrast very consciously because I had forgotten that I did this. So, but it's an example of how you can do it in a very tight space. There's a... The very last scene, she is having... She's prepared welcome snacks for her asshole cousin, and it looks like the tension is just, oh, he's here, I have to be hospitable to him because he's my asshole cousin. But really, it's setting you up for, look at how I've been exercising my power this entire time.

[DongWon] Exactly. And I'm going to introduce a little contrast into this episode by transitioning from us talking about the concept to you doing some homework. So what I'd like you to do is to look at a pivotal moment in your book, and add a beat, either before or after, that inverts some element of the original beat. You can switch the tone, the mood, introduce a character or a character that's a foil to your protagonist, or switch up the location in a way that allows you to highlight some interesting aspect of your first scene.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-23-tying-it-all-together-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding

Key Points: Recapping! Scale. Juxtaposition and recontextualization. Compression and expansion. Familiar details. Multiple scales, size, wealth, experience. Use multiple ways to convey it. Language! Constructed languages, names, how it ties to culture. Don't forget the everyday things! Look at the original meanings of names of people you know. Consider multiple languages, also slang, class, etc. Technology and identity. Make it relatable, tie it to familiar experiences. Big questions, and looking at them from several angles. What's normal and what's technology? Self and tools? Double down, ask the question and dig deeper. Mix it up! Weave several tools together.

[Season 19, Episode 23]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding. Tying It All Together.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I have no idea how we can talk about A Memory Called Empire in 15 minutes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] There are so many things that I learned just from reading this book, let alone putting together these episodes. Just from reading this book. So many things that I learned.

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what this episode is. This episode is us going back and recapping the tools that we learned, so that you'll have like this one spot that you can return to to refresh your memory. We're going to start by kind of recapping the idea of scale. Like, how to use scale and what some of the concrete tools that we can use to indicate scale to a reader. We gave you a lot of really good examples during that episode, but some of the actual tools that we are using are things like juxtaposition between two elements. We saw that in A Memory Called Empire with the discussion of the vastness of the Empire compared to the smallness of Lsel. So juxtaposition is a really useful tool for indicating scale.

[Howard] I like juxtaposition and recontextualization. One of the first times I ever saw 3D used well in a movie was the animated Monsters Versus Aliens. There is a scene in which we look at the little monster, and we zoom in on each person, and then open the camera and look back and there's this giant robot marching across the back. It communicated scale so brilliantly.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because as the camera moves, the context changes. And changes again, and changes again, and everything gets bigger.

[DongWon] That's the thing I talked about earlier about compression and expansion. Right? It's this architectural concept of going in through a big space, if you compress people into a small space, and let them come back out into the big space. Right? We see that over and over again. We start broad, we condense down to Lsel Station, we condense down to Mahit,, and then we expand back out into space, and then we go back into the spaceport. Right? So, when you have somebody coming from this galactic scale and then disembarking into the gray featureless airport lobby, right, that she ends up in, that, I think, is a thing that communicates the scale of this Empire so effectively, because we're going from that huge, broad thing to something very, very familiar. Right? So when you're trying to communicate also very wild new concepts, giving us the familiar detail is going to help a lot, too.

[Mary Robinette] Scale is a tool that you can use, not only to indicate, like, the vastness of an empire. When you're talking about worldbuilding, there's a bunch of different places that you wind up using scale. Some of those are scale of wealth, and having a juxtaposition of those two things, someone who is very wealthy against someone… The poorest member of society. Those are ways to indicate kind of who some of the outer edges of the world that you've created are. Those are things that I think can be a lot of fun. You can also demonstrate that with the magic. You got a brand-new magic user versus the scale of someone who's very experienced.

[Howard] The old joke about Europeans in America saying, "Oh, that's a long drive," and Americans in Europe saying, "Oh, wow, that's an old castle."

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Yep. Exactly. One other thing about that is even when you're staying within one topic within one region, talking about wealth or scale of an empire, whatever it is, is think about multiple ways to get that across. Right? Not just physical description, but the way… We talked about the opening line of the book, the way she uses disembarkation there to remind us that there is a massive amount of bureaucracy here too. Right? So when you layer in these other details, and other vectors of scale, I think that can give us a lot of extra context. So, like, in something like wealth, it's not just contrasting the two people, but also what are the things that the wealthy person takes for granted that will indicate that in different ways.

[Erin] Exactly. You sort of took the words right out of my mouth, because I was just thinking, a lot of times, when you think about wealth, people think that it's all about money and stuff. Which part of it is. But some of it's about the… What you believe you can do. What you think can happen in a day? The scope of the world that it opens up for you, if you have unlimited resources, versus if you have little tiny ones. What are the ones that… What is the thing that your character is worrying about? Both people worry. Rich people worry, poor people worry, but their worries are different.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that we saw in A Memory Called Empire, the scale of power, the difference between Mahit and her one assistant, and the Emperor and all of the people that are surrounding him, and the number… The layers of people that you had to go through, just to get an aud… To talk to him. That, again, is like scale of power can be demonstrated by multiple different means.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's also then talk about the use of language. I suspect that will wind up talking about this a lot, because we, strangely, like language.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Strange, that. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a tool that you can use, and we talked about a number of different aspects of that tool. We talked about some of the specific language choices that she was picking.

[Howard] Some of the con lang stuff.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The long words that force us… The long unfamiliarly polysyllabic words that force us to slow down and absorb the paragraph at a different pace.

[DongWon] Taking the opportunity for something like the naming scheme, to introduce ways of developing the character. Right? The thing that is so interesting to me about how the language works is it builds the world in terms of, yes, they have these weird names in this culture, the numbers and the noun, but also some opportunity to show here's how Mahit, an outsider, relates to the naming scheme in this world, because we have this example of the, I believe it's 36 All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. I always… I never quite remember the number. I hope that's correct. But that way in assimilation works and the way cultures collide is written very clearly in how that works out.

[Erin] I also think that language, one of the great things about using names is, they're everywhere and we use them all the time. I think something that… A trap that I've fallen into in the past is that you name the unusual, you name the thing in your world that is like the big weird thing, but you forget that, like, people eat every day.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And sit every day. These are the words that actually make up most of our lives. Making changes there actually can make a greater impact on your reader then what the big thing in the sky is called.

[DongWon] Well, that's done so effectively when she learned the word for bomb. Right? Because suddenly, this thing that wasn't in her imagination, wasn't in her possibility space, is a thing that she has to directly confront, and she's laying on the ground, listening to people scream for help and then scream this other word, which she learns is bomb. Right? So, the way language also communicates what is and isn't possible within the Empire and within Mahit's experience of the Empire. It's just this masterful way of gesturing at the entire scope of the world and what the stakes are in this world.

[Howard] One of the most useful tools I've found for opening my head to naming conventions and possibilities is looking at interpretations for original meanings of names of people I know. Then, writing them down and trying to narrate a scene with them called that. My name, Guardian Clothesmaker…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, that's a much more heroic name than Howard Tayler.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But, still, it's… It makes me rethink it. As you start doing this with names you're familiar with, you'll twig to all kinds of new possibilities for whatever it is you're working on.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about that that I just want to point out is that you are, basically taking your name as we know it, the sounds… Then putting it back to original meaning. What that implies is, of course, there are two languages. One of the things that I will often see people do when they're creating worlds is that they have only one language system. Or that there is, even in that language system, that there's only one way of speaking it. There's no slang, there's no class variation in it. That's something that she hinted at, we didn't talk much about it in the episode. But that's something that… A tool that you can use to make your world feel more expansive is to think about the different languages that are in use, and also the power structure related to those languages.

[DongWon] Explicitly, Mahit is a foreigner to this language. This is a second language for her. Right? She's had to learn this, and we are learning it alongside of her. One technique to really think about is when you want to do this big expansive world, this unique culture, having that audience surrogate perspective is so, so useful. Right? This is a way that she's found to add a lot of depth to what can sometimes feel a little boring, because the audience surrogate sometimes doesn't have enough texture to themselves. But she gives this relationship that Mahit has to the language and learning the language and the culture of this world that we can feel her presence as a full person, while still getting all of the benefits of having that outsider perspective. So that she can just sometimes stop and explain, "Hey, here's what's going on with the names. Hey, here's how the language works. Hey, here's how the culture works."

[Howard] On the subject of outsider perspectives, I've got a question that I'm going to ask after our break.

[Dan] Hello. This week, are thing of the week is a role-playing game called Pasion de las Pasiones, which is based on Mexican tele-novelles. This is such a great example of how the mechanics of a role-playing game can tell a certain style of story that couldn't be told in any other way. I… This one has such a tight focus on that soap opera style of storytelling. So, instead of having attacks you can make poor spells that you can cast, this thing has special moves like express your feelings out loud, demand what you are owed, things like that that just helps sell that idea. It's a really great game. It's a lot of fun. So. Once again, that is called Pasion de las Pasiones.

[Howard] So, Mahit is giving us… She's our every person. She's grounding us, so that we can ask questions about Teixcalaanli culture. But Mahit herself has imago technology embedded in her head. That's weird.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's weird stuff. It… On the surface, to me, it feels like, "Oh, no, you're breaking that rule. You're taking the audience surrogate and you're making the audience surrogate weird." Why, how did Arkady get away with this?

[Mary Robinette] I think by making it relatable. Because one of the things that she does, right at the beginning, is tie it to experiences that are common. The feelings of being an outsider and being grateful that she had this guide with her. So, tying that to a relatable experience, it's like the times when I have been in another country and I have been solo versus when I have had someone with me. How much easier it is to navigate when I have someone with me. If… The idea that I could have someone with me who was supplementing my knowledge so that I didn't look like a bumbling barbarian. Like, that would have been… Like, I would have liked that. I would still like that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's like every other spy movie, where there's a person making their way through a cocktail party, and then there's the voice in the earpiece telling them, "Oh, that's so and so, and this is so and so. And uh… Oh, adjust your glasses, the camera's off." Except the imago doesn't need to do that part.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But this does bring us around to talking about what we talked about in our third episode, which was technology and identity, and the different ways that you can use those to make your world building feel expansive and to ground the reader in different things. So, some of it is what we're talking about is tying it to the familiar experience. But then there's also this id… This idea of identity and where a character sits within the world that they are in.

[Howard] The asking of a big question.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of the things that I love about genre fiction is that it asks questions that are difficult to ask outside of the genre. You still can. But, for me, one of the things that A Memory Called Empire asks is what is the line between human and nonhuman, if we're not talking about genetics, we are talking about what's in your head. Where is that line?

[DongWon] What is too much technology? Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] And what is the role of… This is a very relevant question for us these days, of what is the role of AI in our lives? Right? We all are using assistive devices in terms of our phones, in terms of our computers, to learn more, experience more, and enhance our natural knowledge of the world. How is that different from an imago, and how is that different from a cloud hook, and what's the difference between those two things? Right? So one of the things that I love is that she's using repetition to deepen the idea. Right? Every time she hits on this same subject, she's coming at it from a different angle with different nuances. I kind of think of it as, Mary Robinette, your yes-but/no-and, but at a meta level. Right? She's using that thing where she's returning to this concept of where's the line between what is technology and what is self. Then, every time she hits it, she's asking a slightly different version of it, and pushing past where she took us last time. That is so cool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even if you don't have something in your world that fits into this category, I think that line between what is technology and what is not technology is so interesting. Like, we're all wearing clothes. Clothing is technology, but nobody thinks about it as technology. I have glasses. My glasses are in assistive device. Nobody thinks about them as assistive devices anymore.

[DongWon] Put a camera on it. Suddenly you're wearing technology.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, like, what does your character think of as technology versus what does your character think of as just normal. Like, you don't think about your faucet as technology. Your faucet is just part of your life.

[Erin] Yeah. What is the distinction… I would say, between, like, self and tool? Where does your identity and where do the things that you use to express your identity, to move through the world, begin? That can work for both technology and for magic. So, either way, they're something that you're using in order to make your way through the world. What I like is that, sort of as we've been saying, there's a slightly different relationship each time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it's because it's a different person, so it's a different identity using the same tool. Sometimes it's because it is a different tool being used by the same person. By looking at those differences, each one gives you a different facet of understanding both the tool and the person using it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, that person's… Because of that person's lens looking at that tool, like, you learn so much about them. Like, one of the scenes that I remember in Arkady's book is when they go to the neurosurgeon and there's a drawing of a prosthetic hand. There's this moment where Mahit thinks, "Why is that contraband?" Because in her world, it's not. So I think that part of the thing that you can also play with is what are the things that your character finds abhorrent about a potential technology and what are the things that they're like, "Why is anyone surprised that we have this?"

[Howard] When you ask these questions, there's a technique that I talk about in humor all the time that shares a name with something that you should never do on social media. Doubling down. Take the question, and keep asking it deeper and deeper and deeper. Keep digging that hole. Because… A Memory Called Empire is not the first science fiction book to talk about world cities, it's not the first science fiction book to question humanity or our role with technology. And yet, when Arkady breaches subjects with us… Broaches those subjects with us… I don't know which word is correct there, and I'm going to let it slide, because the salient point is, it feels fresh. She asks the questions well, and you don't have to be conversant with all of the science fiction out there in order to do this. It helps. But you have to double down and keep asking.

[DongWon] Well, I think the magic is in the connections. Right? We've talked about these techniques in isolation, but she's not just doing one of these at a time. She's doing all of them at once. Right? That sense of compression and expansion, she's doing as we're also learning about the imago technology, as were also learning the language and the culture. Then we start to see how the technology intersects with our understanding of the culture through the epigraphs, through the poems, through people's reactions to things. Right? So, language, identity, culture, physical spaces, bureaucratic spaces, all of these things, she's interweaving in such a beautiful way. Right? So, Howard makes a great point, which is all of the things are pulled from other sources. It's easy for me to go through and say, "Oh, this is like Anne Lackey. Oh, this is like Star Wars. Oh, this is like this or that." You can do that with any work of fiction. The beauty of fiction is how you we've those things together to be their own distinct portrait. As were talking about here, being able to tie these different techniques together and switch it out from beat to beat to beat is going to be the thing that makes your fiction feel rich and exciting and fresh.

[Mary Robinette] It's also not something that's limited to science fiction…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Or fantasy. These kinds of things are things that you can do with a modern day thing. Someone and their relationship to their cell phone versus someone else who's like, "Why are you attached to that device at all times?" So looking at those ways that they reveal the character, and reveal the character's relationship to society, is something that you can do, I think, and should be doing, kind of as a tool to make things feel more expansive and grounded. I'm going to question a real quick thing that occurred to me as you were talking. Again, when you think about technology, it doesn't have to be complicated. I was recently talking to a medievalist who talked about the introduction of the fork.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Up to that point, everybody was like knife and spoon. When the fork got introduced, people were like, "What is this?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "You're being so hoity-toity, and this is…" There's a woman who had her forks and she was very proud of them and she died of plague, and everybody was like, "Well, it's because she had forks."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Well, also, the difference between one culture having forks and one culture having chopsticks.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? The difference in how you eat, what you eat, how polite society operates, all of that is rooted in this technological device in this difference.

[Erin] I also think it's so funny how technology, like, comes around again.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] We talked about… I mean, I think we're not going to get rid of forks, although you never know. But, thinking about…

[DongWon] The day of the fork is coming.

[Laughter]

[Erin] All rise. But I think it would be… I'm thinking about letters. Like, I'm thinking about the way that, like, letters to emails, that there was a period of time in which people would be like, "Why would you write, when you could call?" Now people say, "Why are you calling me? This could have been an email."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The fact that the technology has changed, but the question between whether or not I want to read your words or hear them continues to go… Maybe it will take another iteration in another generation [garbled]

[Harward] Why are you replying to my post when all you really needed to do was click on the 100 and the thumbs up emoji.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because that's all you said.

[DongWon] Well, this circles back to A Memory Called Empire, because she's imagined a world where emails are physical objects that are sealed with wax and sent around. Right? There's such a deliberateness to that choice of… And that tells me so much about this culture, that they have email. They just think it's crass to use. So they send each other physical memory sticks instead.

[Mary Robinette] Physical memory sticks that are encoded with poetry.

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness. So, speaking of encoding. We're going to encode a little bit of homework for you. The homework is, find a piece of worldbuilding that you love, and come up with a different way to use it in another part of your work in progress.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-11-turning-up-the-contrast-with-juxtaposition/

Key points: Juxtaposition adds tension from the contrast between two things. Good news, bad news framing. Hallelujah moments in movies, with something horrible happening and beautiful music playing. Juxtaposition works with mood and emotion, instead of conflict. Horror often juxtaposes monsters and pastoral settings. Juxtaposition can add depth and context. It can add tension to a character. You can use it to show the reader how the character doesn't fit, or that this person has hidden depths. Cozies juxtapose cozy elements with murder.

[Season 18, Episode 11]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be talking about juxtaposition this week, and how to use it. I'm actually going to tell a personal story to kick us off, because the first time I taught this as a topic, I was at a conference and my phone rings and it is my husband. I'm like, "What's going on?" He's like, "Well, there's been a family medical thing at home." I'm like, "Oh. Okay." He's just updating me. Everything does turn out fine. It does have a happy ending. But I then had to go back into the room and teach. The thing is that this added a certain amount of tension to this thing. Because there was nothing that I could solve. I was in a different country. There was nothing that anyone in the room could solve, because they didn't even know about it. But there was this juxtaposition between hello, I have to teach this class, and there's this thing that's going on at home. They're two unrelated things. The tension comes from the contrast between those two things.

[Howard] A common example of this is the good news, bad news framing of things. Again, a real-life story. Sandra and I were at Gen Con, and we get a call from one of the kids who's holding down the house. He says, "So, good news and bad news. Good news is I learned how to defrost the freezer."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "The bad news is I didn't do it on purpose."

[Laughter]

[Howard] That juxtaposition right there has told us an entire story that we're going to have fun unraveling. So I often think of juxtaposition first in terms of the good news, bad news. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the juxtaposition of the Steward of Gondor eating while the soldiers are going to war is completely different. That's just bad news, bad news.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I often think of the hallelujah moment, which is where something horrible is happening and a cover of Hallelujah plays in a movie.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Erin] If you ever hear Hallelujah playing, run. You know what I mean? Something bad is happening. But it's something about the beauty of that song, or any sort of piece of music that is very beautiful, with something horrible happening underneath that's [garbled]

[Howard] Ave Maria in Hitman.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The first time I saw that was in Good Morning Vietnam with It's a Wonderful World… Or It's a Beautiful World… Trees of green and like bombings are happening in the background. It can be overplayed. Because in… They tried to do that in Downtown Abbey, where it's like, "Oh, look, the new baby…" This beautiful music is playing, and someone is having a car crash in the background. It fundamentally didn't work because it was so clear that that was what they were trying to do.

[Dan] Yeah. Music is such a great way to do this. One of my very favorites is actually the finale of the first act of the Steven Sondheim musical Gypsy in which everything has gone wrong. The little sister has run away, and now the family isn't going to travel around anymore. The older sister, she's the main character, she thinks, "Oh, great. This is perfect. This is exactly what I want. Now I get to have a normal life with a normal mom and a normal dad." Then the mom sings Everything's Coming up Roses which is this huge triumphant don't worry, we're going to make this work, I'm going to make you a star. Which is 100% not what the main character wants out of her life. It is a triumphant and wonderful song juxtaposed against the absolute world crushing tragedy of what it means for this girl. It's horrible and delicious and I love it when a story is able to do that.

[Mary Robinette] I think… You just reminded me of something that Erin had talked about previously, which is that the tension is coming from the emotion. I think that one of the things about juxtaposition is that it is so much about mood and emotion. Very specifically those things, rather than the conflict. An example that Howard gave previously was the eating of the food during the… Juxtaposed with the battle. That those two things spoke to each other, but that they were a contrast as well.

[Howard] When I teach my humor class, I talk about juxtaposition, but the sort… The kind that I use is what I call forced congruence. Which is when you juxtapose two things in such a way as to force them into congruence one with another. The example I use is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "the Vogon ships hovered in the air in much the same way that bricks don't." Which is hilarious and it forces bricks hovering to be the same as the Vogon ships. Paints a very clear picture, and, for me, manages to be hilarious.

[DongWon] You also see this used to extremely great effect in horror. Again, I think horror and comedy are sort of two sides of the same coin. I'm really thinking about Bong Joon-ho's movie The Host, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. The first time we see the monster is running along the banks of the Han River through this park area where people are picnicking, having a lovely time, it's a lovely day. The grass is green. Then this monster comes bursting out of the Han River, causing chaos and mayhem. It's a very visceral terrifying scene with this intruding thing into this very pastoral imaging. Throughout the entire thing, the visual thing that drives all of that is the juxtaposition of horror and this family pastoral thing, which ties into the theme of the whole movie as it is very much a family drama of a family trying to figure out how to come together in the face of tragedy in the middle of this apocalyptic thing happening in this major metropolitan area. He uses just… Bong Joon-ho, in particular, is so masterful at using juxtaposition to drive narrative throughout all of his movies.

[Erin] I think one of the things… Because sort of a lot of our examples are movies and our visual media because they have… There's so many great tools of juxtaposition in terms of showing two images together or using music. I was thinking about what is a good textual… Another textual example. I recently reread The Ones Who Walked Away from Omalas. It starts with like the equivalent of a beautiful musical piece in describing this utopia in such lyrical… In such a lyrical way that it almost feels like you're listening to music, which makes the juxtaposition with the reality of Omalas hit so hard. So it's something you can do, like with text, as well as in a visual and sort of a medium that has sound besides.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I used it in Spare Man in what I will call the singing toilet scene. In which I have a conflict, straight up conflict, but it is happening in a bathroom that has singing toilets. It is one of my favorite things that I've ever written.

[DongWon] Well, I would argue that one of the driving impulses of the… Or one of the driving things about the book in general is that juxtaposition of the humorous surreality that is a cruise ship or a space liner in this one against this serious drama and murder and interpersonal drama. It… That tension between those two things, the discordance between the ridiculousness that is a cruise ship that all of us know very well versus a very serious thing happening, which… That is so much this like generative engine in the book. It's like… It almost feels like a gear slipping, but you're doing it on purpose. So we keep like running into it, and having to be like, "Wait. How does this work? Why is this like this? Oh, that is so weird that this murder is happening here, but also it's so weird that this service person is talking to them in this way right now."

[Howard] It calls back to anticipation, because if you are juxtaposing, especially if you are juxtaposing where there is a forced congruence happening. If one of the elements is one with which we're familiar and we know how it unfolds, the juxtaposition forces us to anticipate what is going to happen with the second element. I don't have a good example off the top of my head, but if you think of Beethoven's… Is it the ninth that ends with the da da da da da da dat dah dah? And then the cannons?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] I think that's… Is it the ninth or is that the third?

[Dan] The beginning, the 1812 overture.

[Howard] 1812 overture! It's the overture. Okay. Thank you. Gah. Music major. They can have their degree back. Find.

[Mary Robinette] Juxtaposition is…

[Howard] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Happening in your brain right now.

[Howard] When you hear that ba ba ba... The next thing that's going to happen is an explosion. If you're watching a movie, something's about to blow up. Because the forced congruence and the anticipation has told us what's coming next.

[Mary Robinette] Well, what's coming next right now is our thing of the week. Our thing of the week is When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins. I loved this book a lot. It is set immediately or shortly after the end of World War II. It's in the 1950s. Franny is a young Jewish woman and she wants to do stand up comedy. If you think that's Marvelous Mrs. Mazel, this is not Marvelous Mrs. Mazel with magic. That's not what this is. The only thing it has in common are the words that I have said thus far. It is a story about intergenerational trauma. It is a story about the search for comedy. It is also with… Has this wonderful magical element. It's at the juxtaposition between stand up comedy and the very real PTSD that Franny's brother is dealing with, that she herself is dealing with. Those two things play off each other so beautifully. It's funny and it's moving. I highly recommend When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins.

[Dan] So can I talk about another example of juxtaposition? We have in our notes beautiful music playing over a fight scene. One of the ones that I love is in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The opening stunt, the opening fight scene, they have the music Ain't That a Kick in the Head, which I believe is a Dean Martin song. It's very funny, ha ha, fight scene with this, but you realize very quickly that that music is diegetic, that music is happening inside of the story and all of the characters can hear it. It's being broadcast over the PA during a prison break. So there is the juxtaposition of tone, but also we realize that the characters are using it as a countdown. So it becomes this form of creating tension in the story. What's going to happen when we get to the end of that song? So it's kind of adding two or three things at once, and doing them very effectively.

[Howard] The fourth thing that it's doing is finally doing right what Hudson Hawk tried to do for the entire movie where the two of them are singing the same song in order to try and time their heist. But it was never as cool as it was in Mission Impossible 4.

[DongWon] One more thing I want to bring up in terms of juxtaposition is it is incredibly useful as a technique to add depth and context to a scene. I often talk about fiction and particularly novels as a layer cake. You want to add as many layers as you can to make sure that the reader's getting the most amount of information as possible in a given moment. Right? So, going back to examples Erin used last time in terms of making sure there is tension rather than conflict, a way to add tension into opening with a fight scene, opening with an action scene, is you're giving us flashbacks, you're giving us different POVs, to tell us about the character and what they care about. If you start with a gun fight, and halfway through, you do a flashback to realizing that the main… The protagonist's sister has been kidnapped and that's what they're trying to do, then that adds tension in a way that wouldn't be there initially. So, using juxtaposition can add so much more meaning or depth. Also, like the Aldhani… Climactic Aldhani scenes in Andor is a great example because they're cutting between this religious ceremony that's happening by these colonized people and this heist for the revolution that is going to eventually free them. The tension between those two images is adding all this thematic and narrative depth that elevates what's happening on the screen to a different level versus what we would have seen if it was just a heist happening in a vault.

[Dan] Well, if I add to that… I know, Erin, you want to say something. But, just before we leave Andor, one of the things I loved about the tension created in that juxtaposition at the end is that we know that all of the fallout and all of the consequences of this heist are going to fall on those indigenous people and not on our main characters. They're the ones that the Empire is going to crack down on, they're the ones that are going to have horrible consequences. So it adds this extra layer of really bitter tension to what's going on. It drains all of the joy that we normally expect from a heist, and all of the triumph is completely gone, because we know that those people are going to suffer for it.

[Mary Robinette] Erin, what were you going to say?

[DongWon] But we also know that… Oh, sorry.

[Erin] No, no. Keep going. That's fine.

[DongWon] But we also know though that this is the thing that is going to lead to their eventual liberation. This single act leads directly in a chain of events to the destruction of the Death Star and the fall of the Empire. Which is anticipation coming… Juxtaposition, anticipation, all these things are layered in there in this beautiful example. Anyways, we'll stop talking about Andor now because we would do that for six hours.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I was just going to say that in addition to adding tension to a scene, that juxtaposition can also add tension to a character. It's a great way of signaling an unreliable narrator or a character that makes you feel weird in a bad way.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Which is that, if someone, for example… If something really horrible is happening, but a character… Their interior thoughts about it are way off from what we think… They're like, "Kicking puppies? Eh, fine." That juxtaposition of our… What we believe would be the normal, or, like, within a set of reactions to a situation and what the character is experiencing, it can show things that are bad, things that are good, but I think it really adds some tension, because the next time you see this character, you're not sure how they're going to react to something, because they didn't react in the way that you were anticipating that they might.

[DongWon] This is Javier Bardon calling people friendo in No Country for Old Men. Terrifying.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The episode that kind of kicked all this off, we were talking about building a mystery, and then we're talking about the tools of tension. Using juxtaposition late in a mystery where a small thing has the same shape as the solution to the puzzle. You juxtapose those things and the detective looks at the small thing and suddenly realizes, "[gasp] Aha! That's the last piece that I need." Even if those pieces aren't related. That is a very common use of juxtaposition in mysteries.

[Dan] So, one way that I have used this, for example, in the John Cleaver books. In the first one, I Am Not a Serial Killer, I used this as a way of showing you how messed up John Cleaver is. This is a lot of what Erin was talking about, is, if we're seeing somebody's reactions are off. I went out of my way to include a lot of slice of life kind of moments. We get to see this kid on the first day of school. We get to see him at Halloween. We get to see him at Christmas. Every time, he is not reacting the way that we expect, and the kind of excitement that we would want to feel at those different moments. The cool high school dance that he gets to go to is this kind of nightmare for him. The Christmas party is just absolutely, kind of unbearably sad, because of the way that no one in the family gets along with each other. So providing those moments of resonance where we recognize what the character is going through, and it should feel one way, but it feels a different way, adds a lot of tension to a character.

[Mary Robinette] You can have that also in the positive, as well. If there's a character who is slightly terrifying, but you actually want the reader to feel sympathy for them or to enjoy… To ultimately think of them as a good guy. Giving them something that they care about, like a Yorky or a teacup poodle, is a way to humanize them by providing that juxtaposition. It remind you that people are not mono-dimensional. The other thing that has occurred to me as we been talking is that this tool of juxtaposition is a key tool in cozy mysteries. That that's one of the reasons that cozies work is because they are juxtaposing a British beautiful little country house with murder. Or baking with murder. That juxtaposition is, in fact, a key element of the cozies.

[Mary Robinette] Now, I'm afraid, we're going to juxtapose your homework.

[Erin] Homework.

[Howard] They've been anticipating it.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] All right. For the homework this week, look at your work in progress and find a scene where you may want to add more tension, and add an element of juxtaposition to do that. Any sort of… Any of the ones that we've been talking about, but add some juxtaposition into your work in progress and ramp up that tension.

[Mary Robinette] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[Behind you!]

[Murder!]

[Laughter]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.09: Unpacking the Tension

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-09-unpacking-the-tension/

Key Points: What drives a story? Tension! So what kinds of tension are there? Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Tension is emotional, it requires engagement. Narrative tension is what the characters feel, contextual tension is what the readers feel, and they don't have to be the same. Anticipation, expectations about how we think things are going to go. Juxtaposition, contrasting expectations and actually how things go. Unanswered questions, mystery, but also other levels. Cold start horrible situation, then back off to earlier, making us wonder what happened. Mystery box storytelling, what's in the box, what's the solution to the puzzle. Do a question and answer quickly to build trust with the audience. Anticipation is expecting an outcome, while unanswered questions, where you, the reader, don't know the answer. Micro-tension is smaller tensions, often lower stakes.

[Season 18, Episode 9]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Unpacking the Tension.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be spending the next several weeks talking about tension. I'm going to go ahead and frame this a little bit, because as we were trying to set the season, we each brought something that we have been struggling with a little bit or a new toolbox that we've been noodling with. Erin and I happen to have simultaneously just taught a class on tension. So she's going to be chiming in here in a moment. But I want to start explaining what's going through my head with this. So, we are often taught that a story must have conflict. I think that actually what drives a story is tension, but that conflict is the easiest form of tension to teach. I started thinking about this while I was reading Japanese literature, which often does not have any visible conflict, but there's a ton of tension. It really solidified for me while I was watching Ted Lasso. Slight spoilers here, but when you look at… Watch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso, there's no villain. Everyone is being kind. There's no conflict. All of the conflict comes from this anticipation of something that you think is going to go wrong. For instance, at the beginning of the Christmas episode, he's watching It's a Wonderful Life and he's drinking, so, obviously, the next thing that's going to happen is he's going to go on a bender, and he's going to have a dream sequence. None of that is what happens. But they so clearly signpost it that it builds this tension, and then you get this release… So, what I want to talk about is looking at some different types of tension. So we're going to kind of give you an overview, and then for the rest of the episodes, we'll be digging into each type of tension. So. I'm going to break them down, and then let other people talk. The types of tension that I am identifying as I am attempting to build this toolbox are anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and then micro-tension. Erin, on the other hand, is building… Is constructing a tension toolbox in a different way.

[Erin] Yeah. I will say that one of the things I love about tension, just to start, is that tension is emotional. Just the word tension feels more emotional than conflict. I think it's an amazing reminder that you need some sort of engagement with the thing in order to be tense. If you don't care, you won't be tense. I think sometimes because we think a lot about conflict, people will open a story or a novel or a movie with a conflict that we haven't bought into. So we're not feeling the tension. We just see the conflict. Like when you have a little… Your two dinosaurs, as a kid, and you have them fight. The two dinosaurs are fighting with each other, but why? Does anyone care? So, to me, tension is a lot about building in and thinking about the emotion. The other thing that I really love about just tension versus conflict is that conflict is something that is felt on the page. Your characters are in conflict with each other. Perhaps. Or with nature, or what have you. But your reader is not in conflict. They are observing the conflict. The tension is the thing that both the readers and the characters can share.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dan] I love this description of tension as requiring an emotional investment. For me, the way I have always thought about it, tension is a combination of anticipation and hope. You anticipate something bad is going to happen, you hope it doesn't. But without that hope, without that one outcome I like and one outcome I don't like, there isn't really any tension. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

[Mary Robinette] I think the outcome of tension and hope is where a lot of romance comes from. It's like, oh, you know that they're going to get together. So that's the thing that you're hoping for the entire time, but you keep seeing all of the reasons that they aren't going to get together, which is what builds that tension. That's a… I really like that framing, Dan.

[Howard] Yeah. I've… Without going into detail, one of the things that for me makes a good action scene is if I care about what's happening. If the action scene… Fight scenes are often inherently conflict, because they're fighting, but if I'm not feeling tension, if I'm not emotionally invested, all the great fight choreography is just eye candy. I don't care. So tension is key. It's critical.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think that brings up a really interesting point, because for me, tension is almost always about relationships, because stakes aren't necessarily about survival, stakes are about consequence and how you see yourself or how you see other people in connection to other characters. Because that's how we think about it, and that's how we feel it, so just for a quick example going to what you're saying, Howard, like the lobby scene out of the Matrix is them fighting a bunch of goons. The tension in that scene doesn't come from are they going to shoot these security guards. It comes from is Neo starting to realize who he is? Is he in tension with himself? What matters to him? So we're excited by that scene because we see, as Morpheus says, "He's starting to believe." We see that relationship starting to change. So the tension comes from an internal journey that the character is on, not the conflict of there are 10 random goons that need to get out of their way at this point.

[Erin] I think you can also, like, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm just starting my story. Nobody yet cares about my characters. How am I going to create this tension?"

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] One way to do that, also, is to tap into kind of primal tensions I think that we feel. So if you're on a spaceship and the spaceship is breaking, that's bad. But it's also this person's first day on the job, like, there's a certain primal, "oh, crap, I just got this job, and now everything is breaking." Or I have to give a speech. The things that people freak out about in their dreams. Like, that kind of thing, if you put it on the page, it's a way to tap into tensions that people might be feeling in their own lives. Then use that to kind of move the action forward while you build up the character engagement.

[DongWon] Yeah. The thing that you said about conflict being something the character sees, but tension is something the audience sees. Conflict for the character is am I going to survive this. I, as a reader, at the beginning of a book, I don't really care yet. I don't know you. Sure, if you fall out into space and die, that's not particularly interesting to me. But what is interesting to me is are you going to feel bad about it being your fault that you fall out into space and die. Right? I think that's the difference between tension and that conflict in that way of stakes matter… Survival matters to the character, but you have to give me a reason to care. That's where tension comes in.

[Howard] Circling back to Mary Robinette's five things here, can I talk about juxtaposition for just a moment?

[Mary Robinette] I think you can, after the break. That is going to create tension for our readers, our listeners…

[Gasp]

[Mary Robinette] As they wait to find out what Howard is going to say about juxtaposition.

[Dan] All right. So our thing of the week this week is Dark One: Forgotten. The first official collaboration between Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson. This is the prequel to a story that has been out in graphic novel form for a while, called Dark One. It's a portal fantasy. This is presented… The prequel is presented as a… As if it were a six episode podcast. Someone is making an amateur true crime podcast about a mysterious murder that has remained unsolved for 30 years. Over the course of the series, discovers many more mysteries and a much larger thing going on. This is a lot of fun, because of that nature of a… As a faux podcast, it is only in audio. It's available pretty much everywhere audiobooks are available. Take special note of this thing of the week, because several episodes from now, we're going to do a deep dive on this one. When we finish our whole tension class that we're doing, we are going to do a deep dive into Dark One: Forgotten and talk about the process of writing it and producing it and everything at length. So, it's a little over six hours, and it's a lot of fun. They did an amazing job on the recording, the cast is wonderful. So, Dark One: Forgotten by Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson.

[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard. Tell me. Tell me about juxtaposition. [Garbled]

[Howard] Okay. Return of the King, the Peter Jackson, we have the scene where the Steward of Gondor has sent troops into Osgiliath to try and take it back. While those troops are in Osgiliath, the Steward is eating and making… I can't remember if it's Merry or Pippin… Making them sing…

[Dan] It's Pippin.

[Howard] It's Pippin. We are watching… Is it John Noble? Is that the name of the actor?

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] I think it's John Noble. We are watching him crush food in his mouth and dribble on his face and tear meat from bone as we watch these soldiers drive into Osgiliath. It is brilliant and beautiful as juxtaposition and also serves as a way to give us X-rated levels of gory horrible violence without actually doing that. Our… Your brain does all the work because of the juxtaposition. It makes you terribly tense because the soldiers on the horses have not yet been turned into grapes in John Noble's mouth yet and you don't know if they will be.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Something that it makes me think of that I've been thinking about a lot is how much of storytelling is a collaboration between the author and the reader. We talk about this in puppetry that the difference between playing with dolls and a puppet show is that one of them has an audience, and that the puppet exists in this liminal space between us. It is also true for writing, that I can write something, but the moment you start consuming it, you're going to bring your own lens to it, your own experience, and you're going to combined things in your own head in ways that I can't anticipate.

[Erin] That makes me think a lot of something that I find really fascinating about tension. It is that difference between what readers are doing and what the characters are doing is narrative tension versus what I call contextual tension. So, narrative tension is the tension that characters feel, and contextual tension is the tension that readers feel. They don't actually have to be the same. If the characters are blithely walking into an ambush, but you signal to the reader that there's an ambush coming, there's a difference there. Versus where both folks, both are feeling tense. So there's a lot of really, really fun things that you can do there, in separating those two, and playing with where your character's feeling tension, and where do you want your reader to be.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think of this really as genre expectations. Right? So if you're in romance, you're in horror, you're in mystery, in the ways that we've talked about it in the past, the audience has certain expectations. This is why, when I talk about storytelling, I always talk about pattern recognition. Right? We have read and absorbed thousands upon thousands of stories over the course of our life. So, we have ideas about how these things are supposed to go. You can use those expectations for a lot of these techniques which [we mention?] here, in particular, anticipation and juxtaposition. Anticipation being sort of like we think we know how it's going to go. Then, juxtaposition is the contrast of we thought it was going to go this way, but now it's going that way. I think you can use that tension between the audience expectation and what's happening in the text to kind of create a discordant note that automatically creates a sense of tension that the audience is so hungry for it to be resolved. Waiting for that resolution, waiting for that next cord to progress, so that we know where we're going, is one of the most effective ways to create tension between the book and the audience.

[Dan] So one of the elements on Mary Robinette's list that we haven't talked much about yet is unanswered questions. Which, at one level, that's just what a mystery is, right? Somebody is dead, we want to know who killed them and how. So we have that question. But there's a lot of other ways to use this type of tension. The example that comes to mind is the old TV show Alias, which kind of leaned a little too heavily on this particular trope, but many, many… I would go so far as to say, most of those episodes started with the main character in a horrible situation, and then we would cut away and say, "72 hours earlier…" Then, that leaves us with this unanswered question of "Oh, no. I know she's going to be in a horrible peril at some point. How does that happen? How is that situation created? What is going to go massively wrong?" That creates the tension that draws us through the episode to get the answer to that question.

[DongWon] This is also what's commonly referred to as mystery box storytelling. This is this J. J. Abrams idea of asking what's in the box, what's in the puzzle, can be a driving force for your entire narrative. So, Lost is probably the most famous example of this. Sometimes they can be unsatisfying if it's clear they never knew what's in the box in the first place, but you can really connect with an audience who also wants to know what is the core of this mystery, what is the core thing that's happening. A more recent example is Severance. It's a good example of like, "What the hell is he actually doing down there?" It's something that really drives the story forward.

[Erin] Speaking of boxes, literally, since we've done Glass Onion as thing of the week, maybe you've all seen this, but it starts with a box being opened. I think that why this is so important is because in order to have your audience trust that you will answer the unanswered questions, it helps to pose a question and answer it early on. So that you're like, "I am capable of answering questions." How will they open this box? They do. You saw it. So then you're actually willing to give them more space. Each time you answer a question for an audience member or for a reader, I think what happens is you lengthen the amount of time that you can put between question and answer as they trust you that much more.

[Howard] Dan's example, from Alias, 72 hours earlier, is the in media res, and we're familiar with that structure. One of my favorite reversals of that can be found in the first paintball episode of Community. I think it's episode 23 of season one, where Jeff leaves the room. We've been told, "Oh, there's going to be a game of Paintball Assassin," whatever. Jeff leaves the room and says, "I'll see you losers later. I'm going to go take a nap in my car." Then we see, kaching, one hour later. Jeff wakes up in his car, steps out of the car, and the campus is a wasteland, with sort of zombie wasteland music playing. For a couple of minutes there, you're wondering, "Okay. What happened?" I now have a lot of questions about what could have gone this wrong in an hour. Now, obviously, it's a community… It's a community? It's Community, so it's a comedy. So there is exaggeration. But the tool is still there for you. Running the clock forward a little bit and things have changed, and how did it get this bad this quickly?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to briefly cut into say that one of the reasons that we separated unanswered questions from anticipation is that… We went back and forth on whether or not they should be lumped together… Is that with anticipation is something that you know is going to happen. Like, you know that when they walked down the basement steps, that a bad thing is going to happen, and tension comes from that. It's anticipating an outcome. Versus unanswered questions, where you don't know the answer. So in one… You can be… With anticipation, you can be wrong about the answer. Like, often you build tension by having them go down the stairs, and then something jumps out at them. But it's just the cat. So you can build anticipation and tension and let the reader be wrong about what they're anticipating, but that is different than the reader does not know what is going to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, so, like in Severance, I'm actually expecting not to get answers to many of the questions I have. It's sort of a genre expectation, that I would almost be unsatisfied if they did answer all those questions, but finding out more so I can start piecing together the puzzle is one of the narrative things that's pulling me through this story that I'm loving.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The last piece of it that we need to define, and then we'll go to our homework, is micro-tension. I'll try to keep this short. Micro-tension are smaller tensions that happen within a larger scene. So if your character is attempting to deal with a murder, but then they also have to make spaghetti dinner and the water boils over. That's a micro-tension. They're small tensions that pop up often from mundane sources, but not always.

[Howard] They can be related to the plot. I need to get the autopsy report, and in order to get the autopsy report, I have to apologize to the coroner. Now, macro-tension would be I'm going to steal the report.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] Hey, should I do the homework?

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a great idea, Howard.

[Howard] I should do homework. Okay. In this episode, we covered five types of tension. Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Look at your current work in progress or something that you're reading… Last week, we invited you to read a mystery… And try to identify examples of each of these. That's it.

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

[Mary Robinette] Imagine working with horses as a way to explore and enhance your creative process, all while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of Bear Lake, Utah. Led by me and Dan, this four-day workshop is suitable for writers and riders of all levels and experience. Come make new connections, receive valuable feedback, and set your writing goals in motion. Visit writingexcuses.com for more information about Riding Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go ride.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/01/17-18-how-to-be-funny-with-jody-lynn-nye/

Key points: Take expectations and twist them. Be the anodyne for the evening news. Exaggeration. Tweak the standard tropes. Break the rule of three. Move the boundary between violation and the benign. Tragedy plus time or distance. Puns. Juxtaposing the modern with the ancient or the fantastic. Absurdities and anachronisms.

[Season 17, Episode 18]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye.

[Jody] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Jody] I'm Jody.

[and there was no Howard there!]

[Dan] We are so excited... Jody, we have known you for so long, and we're kind of shocked to realize we've never had you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Jody] Well, I write science fiction and fantasy, most of it with a humorous bent. I have been writing since I was a small child. But I started getting read by other people in the late 70s, early 80s. I played Dungeons & Dragons long enough ago that I'm playing now with the grandchildren of some of the people I used to play with.

[Chuckles]

[Jody] I… Let's see. I do calligraphy, I do baking of fancy cakes, I like to travel, I like photography, and of course many people know that I love my cats, and most things are all about the cats, and everything goes to feed them.

[Dan] Just so that the audience understands like the sheer level of genre godmother that you are, you helped edit some of the initial Dungeons & Dragons books. Correct?

[Jody] Not exactly. My first job in publishing was typing the players guide monster manual in DMG for Gary Gygax from his original notes. Correcting spelling and bits of grammar and things like that, that, my boyfriend at the time who was one of the founders of TSR said, "No, no. Don't change anything." I realized then that they weren't going to be able to tell.

[Laughter]

[Jody] So I made it a little easier on the final editor.

[Dan] Awesome. You also helped start Dragon Con, correct?

[Jody] I was there early.

[Dan] You were there early. Okay.

[Jody] I was… I think I have been to all of them.

[Dan] Nice.

[Jody] So, Dragon Con is a wonderful convention to attend. It is the largest fan run convention in the world. It is a… Let's… A small place, but still cozy in its own way. It has as many as 50 tracks of programming, something for everybody. There are skeptics tracks, science tracks, many kinds of writing tracks. There's even a puppetry track.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Jody] Anyone can find anything to participate in.

[Brandon] It's a giant fun party.

[Dan] Yeah, it is.

[Jody] It is Mardi Gras for nerds.

[Dan] Mardi Gras for nerds.

[Jody] That's its nickname.

[Brandon] The last convention I did before the pandemic was being Writing Guest of Honor at Dragon Con. So…

[Jody] You and I were on a panel together. That was fun.

[Dan] Now, we are here, live, at a much smaller convention. LTUE.

[Cheers]

[Dan] We're so excited to be here.

[Dan] Howard is not here with us, and yet, Jody, you have pitched to us how to be funny as an episode topic.

[Brandon] It's always more funny when Howard isn't here.

[Dan] I know.

[Brandon] See, Howard always gets on the panels whenever we're going to discuss funny and says, "Nothing is more boring than talking about humor." That just really sets the stage.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] For being funny. So, we're doing this without his knowledge, because we… We're the kids playing when the master of humor is away. We're going to be funny, darn it!

[Dan] I don't know if we're going to be funny, but we're going to talk about how to write funny stuff. Jody, you've written a lot of very funny books, a lot of humorous books. Let's start with the question of when and why do you decide, well, this book I'm going to make sure that it's not just a fantasy or not just a science fiction, but it's going to be a funny one.

[Jody] I like to take expectations and twist them. I like to go for something that people have probably seen a lot too much of, and go with it. I have written now, with Robert Asprin, many, many books with him and in a couple of his series since then. The MythAdventures of Aahz and Skeeve.

[Brandon] No relation.

[Jody] No relation whatsoever. They don't even look alike. In spite of the green stuff.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Jody] Right. I always wanted to be the anodyne for the evening news. I wanted to give something to cheer people up when they were devastated at having turned on the news, realize that 800,000 gallons of oil has just poured down Main Street, and you're going to be stuck in traffic for eight hours. When you get home, pick up one of my books. It'll make you feel better. So that was my sort of reckoning, my idea. I like humor. I was brought up on the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello, Saturday morning cartoons, comic books. All sorts of things alongside real books. There weren't enough funny ones. So…

[Brandon] Yeah, you say that.

[Jody] I am filling that gap.

[Brandon] Real books… I've… I'm on record…

[Jody] Yes.

[Brandon] Talking about Pratchett, saying that I think humor is a higher art form than other forms of literature. Because it adds another aspect that you have to do. Really good books, like Pratchett or the MythAdventures still have… They're going to have character arcs. They're going to have narrative, they're going to have plot, they're going to have literary styling. You have to do all that, and be funny. It just makes it harder. When it works, it is just that much better.

[Jody] Oh, yes. Pratchett is amazing. I thought that… I think that he was our Shakespeare, because he understood everything about human nature in the same way that Shakespeare did, and liked us anyway.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yup. Yup. You always feel like… That's a good thing to bring up. There's like… There's all kinds of humor. It's all valid. It doesn't… Whatever you find funny. But Pratchett, I always felt like his arm's around my shoulder, pointing at things that we all do. But he's not laughing at me, he's encouraging me to laugh with him at me. Which is different. We always say, "He's laughing with us, not at us." He is laughing at us. But he's got his arm around your shoulder, and you don't feel bad. When I read his books, and he's making fun of something that I do, I feel better about myself after having laughed. I just love that aspect of his humor.

[Jody] I have seen… I have known people that he poked fun at, that he's put into the stories, such as, I know two of the three witches, the originals. That when he talks about Magrat, for example, who became Queen, that she was shaped rather like two peas on a shovel, well, the lady upon whom Magrat is based is a plump lady who is by no means just two peas on a shovel. She's tremendous fun. Gisa North who is Gytha Ogg, Nanny Ogg, is in fact, personality wise, quite a bit like her literary counterpart, but a complete opposite bodily. Of course, when he decided to create Lady Sybil who was one Anne McCaffrey crossed with Barbara Woodhouse clone, Anne McCaffrey absolutely adored it. She loved being sent up in that way, because he got her. But it was also quite a bit of Barbara Woodhouse, who is famous for… She was a dog trainer. She would command dogs, "Sit!" in this huge stentorian voice. Not unlike Anne who was trained for opera and also had a huge voice and could make people sit down, too.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now, I do want to point out that not all humor has to be gentle or kind or loving. A nice counterpoint to this story, I had the chance on a book tour to go through Roald Dahl's hometown in England. The librarian there told me, just giggling through her hands the whole time, that when he wrote the witches, everybody in town knew exactly which ladies he was making fun of. They all hated it, and everyone else thought it was hilarious.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Let's pause here, and give you a chance to pitch one of your books to us. What do you have out that's recent or that you would really like people to go look up and read?

[Jody] I am…

[Dan] And buy, which is key.

[Jody] All right. I am very fond of my latest series, which is the Lord Thomas Kinago books, which are humorous space opera, which are essentially P. G. Wodehouse in space. They are the feckless young lordling and the sensible, self-effacing gentleman who more or less keeps him out of trouble. The names of each of the novels… Lord Thomas is far too wealthy to have hobbies. He has enthusiasms. So, his enthusiasm of the moment is connected to the title of the book. So, View from the Imperium is about photography and image capture. Fortunes of the Imperium is about superstitions. It's not that he actually believes in any of them, but he loves the trappings. He's got a fortuneteller's tent and a crystal ball and a phrenology chart. Rhythm of the Imperium, naturally, is about interpretive dance.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Of course. That's perfect. All right. So, let's talk about how to be funny. Making people laugh at dinner is very different than writing a book that is funny. So, when you set out to do it, how do you add humor to something? How do you be funny on command?

[Jody] There are so, so many facets to humor, but in Lord Thomas's case, exaggeration is one of the ones that I like to use the most. He is very, very wealthy, so he can do what he likes. He is very, very overprivileged, and so are all of his relatives who, pretty much, except for a couple of his cousins, are odious people. But they are exaggerated in the same way that P. G. Wodehouse pictured a lot of the aristocrats that Bertie Wooster palled around with. In fact, Lord Thomas has aunts in the same way that Bertie Wooster had aunts. Some of them he could stand, some of them he could hide behind when the others were raging at him, and some of them were just terrible people altogether. But that's half the fun of it, is the exaggeration. There's a lot about the standard space opera that, with just a tweak, could be extremely funny. I played with a lot of those tropes. But at the same time, they're… It's a fairly serious story because he has a lot of elements of him that he's very sensitive about, that a great deal of the bravado is to hide the sensitive person inside. So I had to tell a good story at the same time writing a science fiction story that also had humorous elements to it.

[Brandon] Something you said earlier that I would like to emphasize here is playing with expectations. Right? A lot of our humor comes from there's a thing you expect, and then it is broken in a way that makes us laugh. The most obvious of this is probably the rule of three, right? You'll see this all the time in humor. In normal narrative structure, you often want to use the rule of three to emphasize in some way. So you will list three things, instead of two, and the third one is the most powerful of them. Even if you're just listing reasons that someone wants to go to dinner and it's not supposed to be funny. But you can use that third one as a twist when they're expecting growth. That's one of the ways to be honey… Funny. It's like, oh, these first two are building on each other and getting increasingly more relevant, and then the third one is completely irrelevant, and it makes you laugh. But you can also use that to say something about the character, which is always a lot of fun.

[Jody] Sort of faith, hope, and nattily.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love that. So, Howard is not here, but he has a whole class on humor that he has taught on our Writing Excuses retreat before, that talks about how humor is like the intersection between something that is benign and something that is a violation. Often, the process of telling a joke or setting up a punchline is moving one of those circles in order to create overlap. That this would normally be far too violating or horrific to joke about, but I have nudged it just far enough that a corner of it has dipped into the benign circle on our Venn diagram. Then, all of a sudden, I can say it in a way that makes you laugh instead of makes you shocked or horrified.

[Jody] Such as… There's a saying that comedy equals tragedy plus time. You're in an awful situation, and quite a lot of situational humor… And I'm not talking about sitcoms which have become not very funny things that have laugh tracks…

[Laughter]

[Jody] That say you should be laughing here even though you don't want to. But it can also be comedy equals tragedy plus distance. Something that is happening far away could be a lot funnier, especially keeping the nasty bits out of the view of the audience, so that you can laugh at the circumstances around them.

[Dan] I do love Mel Brooks version of that, where he says tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in a sewer and die.

[Jody] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Jody] I was going to use that very same…

[Brandon] That's playing with expectations right there.

[Dan] Yeah, it's playing with your expectations, because we think we know what it's going to be. It's adding distance, because it's not funny when it happens to me, but it is funny when it happens to you. It's also… If I just said it would be really funny if this guy in the front row fell in a sewer and died. Like, that would not be funny.

[Brandon] Oh, I think that's hilarious.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Well. Telling jokes to sociopaths is an entirely different process.

[Laughter]

[Jody] They think everything's funny.

[Dan] When you set it up properly, and say it in that form, then it moves that violation far enough that the benign can take over and it can be funny.

[Brandon] I've got a question for you, Jody. When I'm working on humor in my books, and I don't generally write humorous books, I write books with humorous elements occasionally. One of the things I've found is that sometimes the things I think funny just do not land with certain members of the audience. The way I mitigate this is by trying to have different kinds of humor. So that nobody will find everything funny, but somebody will find something funny. Do you have any advice on different kinds of humor that work well in books?

[Jody] Well, puns, depending on the book, puns work well. Puns are a very intellectual form of humor. No matter what some people might say. Because you have to understand the context in which they appear. Juxtaposing the modern upon the ancient or the modern upon the fantastic can be a lot of fun. For example, take Shakespeare in Love, where you had Shakespeare going through all the rituals of writing that quite a lot of us have little rituals that get us in the mood to write, and also the fact that he was seeing an analyst, which was completely modern. Certainly there would have been nothing like Anthony Sher doctor in real life in Elizabethan times. But it worked so well. There was a beauty to it, that they were able to present that kind of absurdities and still make it seem as if it was a historical kind of story. So, that kind of anachronism is often funny.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, we talked about Pratchett. Like, a good third of the humor in those books is that exact joke, just done again and again in different and interesting ways.

[Jody] Yeah. He was tremendously good at that. It is very hard to do slapstick in a book. But we can also play with timing, so that we can, using punctuation, capital letters, italics, spacing, and making sure that you have to turn the page before you get to the punchline. Ellipses are your friend. So are m-dashes.

[Chuckles]

[Jody] You can place… You can make the audience breathe so that you can get your punchline in there. Then, the line that follows it should be benign enough, just sort of carrying things on, so that they laugh at the joke and they don't actually miss anything important. So it is setting up a joke as if you were telling it out loud.

[Dan] Well, that's great. Thank you so much for being on our show today, Jody. We love you, we think you're so smart and wonderful.

[Dan] What is our homework?

[Jody] Your homework, since we were talking about humor, is to take something that you have written before. Take one of the scenes and make it funny. Draw out what it is you can exaggerate, make absurd, minimize. Give these incredibly important stakes to something that would otherwise seem trivial, and have fun with it.

[Dan] Great. Well. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Episode Two of Writing Excuses: Blending the familiar and the original

From over at http://www.writingexcuses.com/

This was kind of hard to summarize - lots of great ideas and interplay. So this is rough notes, not a nice transcript or summary, but I think it gives an impression of the episode.

Key Points: First, some discussion about what is meant by combining an ordinary idea and an extraordinary idea to make something unique. Then some discussion of how this juxtaposition changes. Postponed discussion of writing the story you want to write for another time as a can of worms. Third was some talk about keeping up with trends and anticipating them.
( Lots of stuff . . . )
Parting thoughts that were excellent: Don't just stand on the shoulders of giants and look around at the view, look far out and take a leap! To improve a book explain the heck out of one unimportant thing, then don't explain some important thing at all. Make sure your original is really original -- if you have a strong familiar, you can probably take a few more steps with your originality.

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May 2026

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with juxtaposition

Writing Excuses 21.16: Tension and Release as Call and Response

Writing Excuses 21.15: Using Contrast for Maximum Effect

Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

Writing Excuses 18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition

Writing Excuses 18.09: Unpacking the Tension

Writing Excuses 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye

Writing Excuses, Episode 2

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May 2026

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