Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 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.

 

 

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.