Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-04-metaphor-1-puppetry

 

Key points: Puppetry as a metaphor for writing. Focus, breath, muscle, meaningful movement. Voice means different things. Puppetry has mechanical style, aesthetic style, and personal style. Genre! Meat actors and puppet actors. Lots of styles of puppets, lots of genres and subgenres and mashups. Space opera, horse opera, and horses can't sing! Building a puppet. What kind of puppet? Some key questions, what size is the audience, what's the budget? Then do a drawing, a rough sketch, a thumbnail sketch, what is the vibe? Work in layers. Pitches. Found object puppets. Focus for thoughts, what is your character looking at. Breath, emotion, pacing. Muscle, internal motivation. What is driving your character? Meaningful movement, actions and body language. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 04]

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 04]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Puppetry as a writing metaphor. 

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about my favorite subject, puppetry. So the idea that we've got for you with this, and we're going to be doing this all season, is that the lived experience that we all have affects the way we think about writing. You've heard me talk about puppetry for basically 17 seasons now, since I first appeared on season 3, episode 14. But I wanted to do kind of a deeper dive into actually thinking about it as a metaphor, as a way for you to also begin thinking about things in your own life you can use as writing metaphors. So. This is going to be a lot of me talking, but...

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Everybody else is going to chime in at some point.

[Dan] Eventually.

[Mary Robinette] Eventually. So, in season 13… Season three, episode 14, I talk about the four principles of puppetry. Focus, breath, muscle, and meaningful movement. I talked about those as a way to think about character. What I also want to talk about is the way to think about puppetry as thinking about… How it informs the way I think about genre, how it informs the way I think about the lens that the… The voice with which we write. So I actually want to start by talking about voice. Since we're talking about lenses. I think that there's this wonderful thing in puppetry that writers can use. So you've heard people say, oh, it's very important to develop your voice, and, don't worry about developing your voice, your voice will come naturally. I love the voice of this. So we use the word voice to mean three different things. When you're talking about puppetry, you talk about the style of puppetry and that means three different things. There's the mechanical style, there's the aesthetic style, and then there's the personal style. So, the mechanical style is literally are you using a marionette? Are you using a hand puppet? Is it a giant body puppet? With writing, that mechanical style would be the like first person third person, YA, which has a different mechanical style… Middle grade, in particular, has a different mechanical style than adult. Gaming has a different mechanical style than prose. So what style of writing are you doing? Then, aesthetic is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like something that's handcarved from Appalachia? Does it… What does it look like? For writing, that is… Does it sound like it's Jane Austen? Does it sound like it is from the Bronx? Does it sound like…

[DongWon] Elmo Leonard.

[Mary Robinette] Elmo Leonard. Then, the personal is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why when Steve… After Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over Kermit the frog, everybody kind of freaked out. Because there are just subtle differences, even though it's obviously hitting the same mechanical and aesthetic, because there's these subtle differences that affect the choices that the performer makes. That… That is the same thing that means you as a writer are the only person who can write the book that you're writing.

[DongWon] Which is such an important thing to remember. Because we all kind of tend to freak out with this horrible burden of influence that we feel from other authors and other versions of stories that we've read. But my Kermit is going to be different from your Kermit. My monomyth coming-of-age story is going to be very different from your monomyth coming-of-age story. Or whatever it is that we're writing. So, remembering that you are an important ingredient in your work I think is really vital.

[Howard] There's a flipside to this. The fear that people are going to read what you're writing and just hear you. If you've ever watched a puppeteer on stage sitting visibly right next to the puppet and performing the puppet. They vanish. They vanish completely. It's surprisingly easy for us, as writers, to vanish into our prose. It doesn't make our voice go away. But we can disappear.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about having your own personal voice. Right? The thing that is really intrinsic to how you write, how you think, how you speak, is… There's a term called anxiety of influence. Right? This is when you are so concerned of, like, oh, no, I've replicated a plot from Star Wars. I've replicated a beat from this, or a worldbuilding element from Tolkien or whatever it is. The reason why it's okay to do that, the reason why… Not just because it's impossible not to, because you absorbed the things you've read and there's only so many stories and so many things, but because it's all going to be filtered through your natural voice. It will be transformed into something that feels different. Right? So when we say that you want to lean into and enhance your voice, this is the [thing] we're talking about, this natural style that you have that will… Everything will be rendered through it and therefore feel different if you allow yourself that kind of distinctiveness of the way you think and write.

[Dan] So, bringing this back to puppetry, I just watched a documentary about Jim Henson called Idea Man, which was wonderful. One of the interesting things in there is when they were talking about how he and his wife were just barely getting started. The reason that Kermit as a character took off was in part because the hand was so visible inside the puppet. Not only did it make it more malleable and you could do a lot of facial expressions, but the… You watched those early things and you can see the fingers inside of Kermit's head. That was something that they liked about it. That it made the puppet so particularly expressive of the puppeteer, that that personal style came through really strongly.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that it… It's difficult to remember now, because all of us have grown up with Sesame Street and with the moving mouth, hand and rod style being the predominant style. But when they started doing that, the predominant style was marionettes. The huge puppeteer at that time was Bill Baird, who was a marionette-ist. You've seen his work if you've seen Sound of Music. He built those marionettes, although the children did actually do the performance. But the… That look was the look that everyone was influenced by and mimicking. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, those were also these rigid, rigid figures. Then Jim Henson comes along with these incredibly malleable figures, and almost all of puppetry you see now on television is moving mouth puppets. But you can see the difference between, even though they're all using the same mechanical style now, and they're all… Everybody has been influenced by Henson, you can see the difference in different designers as they're working. I think that that's really exciting, like, when we get so wrapped up in the idea of the original idea. It's not that, it's the execution of it.

[DongWon] Well, what's interesting there is you have an intersection of mechanical voice and sort of your natural voice. Right? Because the mechanical voice in this case is allowing for different emphases on natural voice.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] You can see the performer in a different way than you can in marionettes. I mean, in marionettes, you will still have that natural voice, I'm assuming. But, as you're saying, in terms of being able to see the hand in the puppet… Very unsettling way to put that, by the way… Letting the mechanical enhance the natural, I think is a really wonderful way to do it. So, when we talk about fiction being voice-y, it is because you have this intersection of these two elements.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, all of these things are one of the reasons that I love using puppetry as a metaphor. So, now we're going to talk about a different aspect of puppetry to use as a metaphor. That's talking about the genre. So, for puppetry… Puppetry and science fiction and fantasy I feel like have a lot in common, in that we are both sort of the redheaded stepchild of our parent genre. So, puppetry is a form of theater. Puppet actors are actors. We think about ourselves as actors. The disparaging thing we talk about people who are not using puppets is that they are meat actors.

[Dan] Nice.

[Mary Robinette] Because we're performing with puppets, they're performing with meat. But the thing is that underneath that, there's this umbrella. So, there's this umbrella of puppetry, like we have an umbrella of science fiction and fantasy. Then, within puppetry, we have hand puppets… And these are all the mechanical style that you used to move the puppet. So you have hand puppets, you have rod puppets, you have shadow puppets, you have body puppets, and you have string puppets. Hand puppets, Kermit the frog.

[Howard] The Muppets are hand… Mostly hand puppets.

[Mary Robinette] The Muppets are hand puppets. But so are the puppets on Mr. Rogers. Those are also hand puppets. So anything you put your hand inside. Rod puppets are any puppets that's worked with a stick. That goes from Sicily and rod marionettes to [way angolek?] You guys can look these things up.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] They're amazing and beautiful. But the one you've probably seen, Slimy the Worm on Sesame Street. And also Rizzo the rat. Those are both controlled with a literal stick up their ass.

[Dan] And you thought I was making…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Bad metaphors here.

[Howard] Oh, Rizzo, I'm so sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Anyone did not deserve it, it would be Rizzo. Then you've got shadow puppets. Or screen puppets, they're sometimes called. That's anything where the… You've got… You're looking at an image on the screen. If you…

[DongWon] [Parawalkers?] is one example.

[Mary Robinette] Perfect. If you've got… You've probably done a shadow puppet where you've done the dog with your hand. It's one of the oldest forms of puppetry, but you can also do it with overhead projectors. There's a… So, like, within each of these, you get to drill down again. Then we got string puppets, which are marionettes, but they can also be cable control, for instance, in the original Little Shop of Horrors, the giant puppet is a cable controlled puppet. Those are mechanical cables that people are actually moving. That's also a string puppet. Then, body puppet is any puppet you put your entire body inside.

[Howard] Jack not name, Jack job.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Big Bird, Snuffy. So, within all of those, again, you can drill down further. It's the same thing with science fiction and fantasy, where you have science fiction, but then you also have space opera, you have near future, you have far future. What's interesting is the mash ups. So, we just mentioned Kermit the frog. Kermit the frog is actually a mashup that had never happened before. It is a mashup… Well… Shouldn't say never happened before. But it's the mashup of two styles that are not commonly mixed. Which is hand puppet and rod puppet. Rod puppets did not exist in the European vocabulary of puppetry until the early 1900s. That… They were brought over from Asia, from specifically Javanese puppets. Without that, that mingling of, that conversation between these two different cultures, these two different styles of puppetry, we would not have Kermit the frog, we wouldn't have the type of puppetry that we experience today. I think it's the same thing when we're talking about science fiction and fantasy. Like, steampunk. Is steampunk fantasy or science fiction?

[DongWon] Um… Who cares?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly. It's a mashup.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is the Swedish chef a hand puppet or hands? Because he's got a pair of human hands.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] He's got a pair of human hands.

[Howard] And… Who cares?

[Chorus of yeah]

[Howard] I just want to watch him.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But it's also… What I love is you talk about the lineages of puppetry too, as you're talking about new genres. Right? If where the rod puppetry comes from and it goes back to… Space opera. The reason it's called space opera is it comes out of a genre called horse opera, which is a type of Western. Right? So, the dominance of westerns as pulp fiction in the early twentieth century then transitions into spaceships and ray guns as technology evolves, as we enter slowly the atomic era, and then the horse opera becomes space opera.

[Howard] My brain… Oh, my gosh. You said horse opera, and the first thing I thought was that's ridiculous, horses can't sing.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And space can?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Anne McCaffrey made it happen. Yeah, we've got The Spaceship Who Sang. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But, that goes farther back into opera tradition. Right? It literally was called horse opera because it was taking the high stakes and melodrama from opera, translating it into the American West, and all of this. So, all of this is… Genre is about legacy and tradition as well, and the ways you can combine them is so novel and exciting.

[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a good opportunity for us to pause. When we come back, we're going to talk more puppets.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Do we want to move on to more puppet things.

[Yes!]

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So we're going to…

[DongWon] I just want to pause and say this is so delightful and so fun to dig deep into this topic. I mean, it… You brought this up over and over again throughout the show, but, like, to get it all in one place, I'm finding very delicious to go through one of the host's minds and how they think about it and approach it and all these things.

[Howard] The thing that's missing from the whole legend, the whole mythos of Writing Excuses, is video of Brandon, Dan, and Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Slack-jawed as Mary Robinette who we'd never had as a guest before guests, and talks about puppetry, and all of our minds explode at once. It was delightful.

[Mary Robinette] It was, I have to say, pretty satisfying.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… Like, the reason that I brought up puppetry was… In that episode was that you all had asked me about… Something about the way I thought about writing. In my background in puppetry has affected everything about the way that I move through my writing career. So, the next thing were going to talk about is actually building a puppet. It affects the way that I think about writing. So, I see a lot of writers who get very hung up on, oh, I can't get my opening right. So, when I'm building a puppet, I sit down and I first have to think about what kind of puppet I'm going to build. I have to answer these questions about the style of puppet. I have to answer those questions first. And those questions are informed by a lot of different things. They're informed by what size is my theater. They're informed by who my audience is going to be. They're informed by my budget. And that affects… And this is before I actually get to the building part, which we will also talk about. But that affects my conception. For me, as a writer, when I sit down and think, oh, I'm going to write. Sometimes I do just free-form and right in the same way that sometimes you just doodle as an artist. Sometimes you just say here's some stuff, I'm going to slap it together and see what happens. But when I'm building something for a show, in the same way that I'm writing something for a themed anthology or for a contract, I think about what is the size of my theater? Am I writing a short story or am I writing a novel? Because that's going to affect all of my proportions. I think about the audience. Because that's going to affect the stylistic choices that I make. And, I think about my budget, because my budget for writing is my number of words. If I have a really small budget, which is, like, a 3000 word story, I cannot afford to have a lot of sets. Because every set costs words.

[DongWon] This is… So when I often talk about publishing advice and writing advice, one thing I say frequently is you have to hold to opposite ideas in your head at the same time and learn how to live in that contradiction. So, the reason I bring that up is in this case when it comes to writing your book, I firmly believe that you should not think about the market, you should not think about the world, you should just focus on the story you want to write, the book of your heart, all of that. Also, the contradictory advice of what you should do is think about the market, think about the industry, and think about what you want your book to look like in a certain way. Exactly, who's your audience, what's your target word count? If you're writing space opera and you write a 60,000 word novel, sorry, you didn't write a space opera, you wrote a short science fiction novel. Right? So to hit certain genre markers and to hit certain expectations of your audience, you do kind of have to frame things up in a certain way to set those expectations.

[Mary Robinette] So, what's interesting is that when I'm thinking about audience, I'm not thinking about markets. Because, specifically, because I come out of children's theater, my audience are not the people who are buying the tickets. So I'm thinking about will this be funny for a third grader? Will they get this reference? Will they be worried about this? Is this too scary for them? Then, later, I have to think about how do I get their parents to buy a ticket?

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But I don't think about how do I get their parents to buy a ticket when I am designing a book.

[DongWon] Right

[Mary Robinette] When I'm coming up with a show.

[DongWon] Maybe that's a useful distinction between thinking about audience when you're starting to craft versus thinking about audience when you're getting ready to pitch. Right? Because those are two very different stages of the project.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With two very different mindsets and approaches. When you start thinking too much about the marketing and the publishing framing, I think that can infect…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Your work in a way that can be limiting. But I do think it's important to think about who do you want to read this book. Who's this book for, on some level.

[Howard] I think one of the challenges that many writers… New writers, old writers, established, published, whatever… Many of us face is the discovery right about the time, and I'm going to lean into the puppetry metaphor in ways that may not work, right about the time that you're hot gluing the last bits of whatever to your hand puppet, and you realize, oh, wait, this hand puppet actually needs to be eight feet across and be driven by cables, and I need to now go rewrite my whole book, because I've discovered something about it that says this structure isn't right, and I didn't know how to build Audrey 2, but then I saw a book or read a thing or learned a thing, and now I know, oh, my goodness, there's this whole structure that I didn't know how to use that's the structure I really needed for my book, and I just finished hot gluing a thing…

 

[Mary Robinette] We are 100% going to talk about this. And I'm going to actually, unless someone else wants to talk about audience, I'm going to use that as my segue. So, I've been talking about the decisions I have to make before I start building. When I start building, the first thing that I do is I do a drawing of what I want it to look like. This drawing does not include what it looks like on the inside. But after I've got this kind of general, like, this is the vibe that I'm going for, then I have to sit down and I have to start thinking about the interior structure. And I work in layers. So I will draw the body parts that are going to be there. I will draw, like, where does this have to fit? I will draw those things, and then I will start putting layers on top of that to figure out what I need. Then, after I've got that sketch, that's not the puppet. I've got that sketch, and then I have to build. Most of the time, if I've got a puppet that's like a papier-mâché or something, often, I have to start with building an armature. Then I put clay on the armature, and I do additive and subtractive sculpture, where I'm putting clay on and then pulling it off, and I'm slowly refining it into the shape that I want. Then I do a mold. Then I papier-mâché into that. Then I have to send it. Then I get to do my painting. Then I get to glue all of the details on. If I just jumped straight to the sculpture, frequently it would collapse, frequently it wouldn't have a spot to put my hand. So, when I'm writing, what I often start with is that I start with… You'll hear me talk sometimes about a thumbnail sketch. Which is a term that comes out of my art background. Which is just a little drawing, just a little bit, like, this is the vibe. That, for me, with writing is sometimes it's a log line, Jane Austen with magic, this is the vibe. Sometimes it is a paragraph of asteroid slams into the earth in 1952. There's a lot of chaos. Then ladies go to space. It's just a very rough sketch. Then I will unpack that, then I start to move towards my armature, which is my outline or my synopsis. But the thing that… The thing, for me, is that at every stage of that, I am discovering something new, and I know that, I'm going to discover something new in every stage. So, having gone through that with puppetry, when I'm doing that with writing, it gives me this freedom, because I know that I don't have to be locked in. I know I'm still going to be making discoveries. And particularly as a writer with ADHD, it gives me a bunch of, oh, you did that, now you get to do this next thing. Knowing that there's still going to be discovery.

[Howard] I have never… Not even one time, while writing, given myself third-degree burns with a hot glue gun.

[Mary Robinette] I… Um…

[Dan] You're missing out.

[Mary Robinette] Missing out. Yeah. I have two different spots from puppets. Two different third degrees from puppets. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that I do like about writing is that it is significant… I am injured significantly less.

[DongWon] I mean, we could consider carpal tunnel to be a form…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of a hot glue burn. So…

[Dan] One of the… Sorry, go ahead.

[DongWon] Not at all. [Garbled] more joke.

 

[Dan] One of the great things about starting with that thumbnail sketch for me is that it helps me pitch the story later on. If I have a really succinct starting point, if I know what the core framework or skeleton of this story is, I know what the vibe is, then it's so much easier to tell it to people. And I know… I can pitch a John Cleaver book or I can pitch one of my cyberpunk books really easily, whereas my Partials series, I didn't start with that, I started from a completely different direction. And to this day, what, 15 years later, it's hard for me to summarize in one sentence or even one paragraph, what that book is.

[DongWon] Yeah, and when I work with a client, my… One of my favorite stages is this first stage, where were coming up with the pitch. Right? There pitching me on ideas, a couple sentences, a paragraph, whatever it is. And then we just start, like you were saying, like, accreting more and more layers on to that as it develops into something richer. But you gotta have that pitch out of the gate, for me, at least to feel really confident that this project is going to work at the end of the day.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I want to say that just because I tend to work that way, there are also times and joy in working the other direction. Where you're like, here's a bunch of ingredients that I have, is a bunch of materials, what can I make out of that? There's something in puppetry we call a found object puppet, where you make a puppet come to life with… Using the mechanical principles of how puppetry works. If anyone has ever seen me do the puppetry demonstration live in person, you've seen me do scarf dragon, where I take a… Just a scarf, and turn it in. But we do this with, like, newspaper, shoes, water bottles, whatever it is, we just like, well, put these objects together.

[DongWon] There's a photo on the Internet somewhere of Mary Robinette menacing me with a napkin puppet that is very delightful to me. But, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a… I also have fond memories of that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Any time he gets to be menacing. There's a wonderful puppeteer named Paul Zaloom and I think you'll be able to find some of his work on YouTube. But he does found object puppetry where he will glue different pieces together. So, sometimes that's fun. Sometimes you do the drawing and then you're like, okay, but what structure has to be under it to support that? So it's not that you have to always start from the inside, but it is the what is the vibe, what am I going for, and that I can work in layers.

[DongWon] Well, there's one last element of this and I know we're running long, but I kind of wanted to bring this up. As you're talking about building, there's a thing that, as I've been in the industry longer and longer, one of the things that has been most useful to me is to step back and remember that a book is a physical object.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes.

[DongWon] That we… A lot of the time. Not always. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But, like the core of what the publishing industry is is a physical goods business. We print books, we ship them to thousands of stores around the country, and then those are sold by hand to a customer.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Yes, there are e-books, there are audiobooks, there's a million other things that branch off from that. But the original business…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Is stuff. The commercial heart of the business is the physical business. Right? So, sometimes remembering that what you're making is a physical object in the way that you are thinking about building a puppet and what that means for the space that you're in, the shape that you're in, the materials you're using. I think there's a very, very useful metaphor to remember that a book is a thing that you want to hand to a person at the end of the day.

[Mary Robinette] When I did the translation for the Hildur Knutsdottir, the Night Guest, one of the things that she was very specific about is that there are some chapters that are only one sentence long, and she was very specific about which side of the page that sentence was on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] Um… When we're talking about physically building puppets, I'm remembering another thing from this Henson documentary about Rowlf the dog. He was, for a long time, the breakout Muppet. Before Kermit, before Sesame Street, he was the big one. That was pure experimentation. Their guy who was their main Muppet maker cut a basketball in half, more or less because he wanted to see what he could do with it. And he ended up… That's why Rowlf has this giant kind of spherical looking head with this enormous mouth, because he was built from a basketball cut in half. That kind of experimentation, where you don't have a plan in advance, you just have stuff, and you have ideas, and you want to see what you can put together… Some of my best writing I've ever done comes from that kind of let's see what happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm going to… Because I just need to hit the focus… Those things… Because in episode 3-14, I did not have a good way to talk about muscle and I do now.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, focus indicates thoughts. What your character is looking at is what your character is thinking about. It's whatever they notice. Sounds, scents, touch. That's what is important to the character, that's the thing that is in front of their brain. Breath indicates emotion. So, breath and rhythm are closely related. If you walk into a room and you are breathing rapidly, it reads differently than if you walk into a room and take a very big sigh. But those are both mechanically breaths. For on the page, that your sentence structure. How long your sentences are, along your paragraphs are. Those affect the way your reader… The pace in the way the reader feels about it. Muscle, which is the idea that the puppet moves itself… In writing, I've started calling this internal motivation. What is moving your character? What is making your character make choices? Because you want it to… You want all of those things to appear to originate from inside the character as opposed to having the puppeteer's hand reach on stage and move a prop. And then meaningful movement. When your character moves, when their doing body language, that body language is as important as the dialogue. So those are the things. Everything else you can… Most everything else we talk about in 3-14, if you want to go back and listen to that. Thank you all so much for joining me on my let me talk about puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I could actually keep talking about it. But those were… Those are the things that shape the way I approach writing. Because it was such a huge part of my life for so long. So we're going to be talking about this kind of thing all season. We've got other metaphors that other people are going to be bringing to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right now, I have a little bit of homework. And oddly, I just want you to watch a puppet show. If you can find a live puppet show, in person, that would be amazing. Go to puppeteers.org if you're in the United States. That's puppeteers of America. You can look for your regional guild. Most of the time, they will list shows that are happening. If you're not in the United States, you can look at unima.com. There's a… unima is the oldest continually operating arts organization in the world. It's Union de la internationale de la marionettes. I'm saying this very very badly. But you can again find a puppet show near you. And if you can't do that, check YouTube. There's so many fantastic amazing puppet shows. But look at… Watch a puppet show, and I specifically want you to watch something that's not the Muppets. Just so that you can see how many different amazing styles out there… Are out there.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-01-welcome-to-2025

 

Key Points: Tools, not rules. Lenses. Who, where, when, why. What and how, execution, later! Back cover copy: Who, conflict, setting, hook. Who am I as a writer? Not resolutions, but questions and intentions! Metaphors! Tools in writing as spices in cooking. I never metaphor I didn't like. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 01]

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 01]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Welcome to 2025!

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] It's a whole New Year. So we have an exciting season prepared for you. This season is going to be very focused on your toolbox. One of the things we've been saying for a couple of years is that it's about the tools, not the rules. So we want to make sure that you have a really nice set of tools to use this year. We're going to be looking at a couple of specific things. We're going to be thinking about these tools in terms of the lenses that we use to approach a story. So this season, you're going to be looking at questions of who, where when, and why.

[Howard] Where's what?

[Mary Robinette] What and how are going to be things we look at in a later season, because we're going to be looking at lenses this time, and what and how are more about the execution. So while the lens does affect the way you use things, this is what we're going to be focusing on.

[DongWon] The execution comes at the end.

[Mary Robinette] The execution… Yes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Dum dum dum. Then, I've got some other exciting stuff that I'm going to tell you about when we get to the end of this episode for things to look forward to for later in the season. But, right now, I wanted to say, since we're at the beginning of 2025, and this is our twentieth season, which is…

[Dan] Yay!

[Mary Robinette] Wild. We want to talk a little bit about the lenses that we're using in the way we are thinking about the next year coming up for us all individually.

[Erin] It's funny, I really… So, I love the… Just to get a little bit back to, like, the who, not what, where, when, why, and how. This is a framework that I love to think about when I think about writing. Because it's something that lets you make sure that you're not missing any aspect of writing. Like, who are the people in your story? What is the way… Like, what is happening? Where and when is that going on? Why are you even telling this story? And how are you going to get it across? But I also think that you can use that in your actual life. Like, who are the people that you want to, like, be a part of your year? What are the activities that we want to be doing? Like, where and when… Like, are there places that you want to go, are there perspectives from the past or the future that you want to bring into your life? Then, how are you going to get there? So, I don't know if I have an answer to it, but it just occurred to me that, like, maybe I should be thinking about the who, what, where, when, why, and how of my own life.

[DongWon] Yeah. I really love that. I mean, in the… In 2024, I relocated, I moved across the country, and so, I found myself in a new location. And thinking of the who is like a very important question for me right now as I'm looking to build a new community. Right? Find new friends and find a way to start developing roots in this new location as I look towards the future and try to figure out what's next for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I also had a big move in 2024, that was not entirely an expected move. We had to move to help with some family stuff. For me, one of the things that is really exciting is also thinking about the why of things. Sometimes the why is not a thing that is in your control. This is a thing that a lot of times, as writers, we let… The why can be both empowering and also a barrier. So, for me, it's like, okay, so I've… The why has happened. What or who can I find now? How can I embody the place that I'm in, in my writing career, and all of these other aspects?

 

[Howard] Three years, I've had this formula for writing back cover copy. Which is character, conflict, setting, and hook. And I just realized that those mapped very cleanly onto who, who's the character, conflict, character when a thing happens, where is it happening is the setting, and hook is why should you buy this book.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It maps perfectly. It's not that mapping it, and this I think reflects right into why we play with these tools instead of rules… Maps perfectly into helping me rethink my code for back cover copy. Because, especially with hook, it's not the why of the story, it's the why of the decision to get the reader to buy the book. Because that's what back cover copy is for. So, by applying another layer of words to a tool that I thought I already understood, I actually understand it better and am better prepared to apply it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm really actually extremely grateful to you for saying that, because I've been trying to figure out how to explain hooks to people forever. I mean, why do we care, why do we want to invest, is like, oh! That is way more actionable than…

[Howard] Yeah, the word hook…

[DongWon] I like that it's a why in terms of the story, too. It's why is this story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Like, the hook should be the thing that is motivating and pulling you into the story, both in terms of your relationship to the reader, but in the story itself, too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think. So…

 

[Erin] Something that I'm thinking about which takes it away from this conversation and back to me…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Is…

[Dan] [garbled]

[Erin] No, I've been thinking a lot, like, just to be, like, completely real, I… What I'm thinking about currently is who am I as a writer. I write a lot of different things, I write games, I write short fiction, I write in different genres, in different… I write scripts sometimes. And it's like, who am I? Because that's when, for me, the lens comes into play. When I am writing, what am I focusing on? Am I focusing on my own work, my focusing on another people's IP? Like, in my focusing on which… Why? Because they pay me? Love you all.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But, really, thinking about that and thinking maybe the beginning of the year is like who are you as a writer?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I think you can sometimes get into a kind of, like, a snowball rolling downhill where you're just dealing action after action…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's the action in front of you.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] But you're not actually thinking about, like, why am I taking this action as opposed to a different course?

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, beginning of the year is a time that everyone's talking about New Year's resolutions. Right? We're all thinking about, like, what do we want to change for this year? What are our goals for this year? But what I love about this approach of tools, not rules, is it's stepping away from resolutions, which I always struggle with because then it's like, oh, if I didn't go to the gym seven days a week by the end of January, then I've failed at life, and now I feel terrible. But, like, instead of thinking about what are the specific concrete goals, thinking about these questions in terms of who am I, reflecting on that, how do I want to be in the world, how do I want to engage in my creative practice? And then, when… What are my expectations for this year in a certain way? And so shifting away from, like, concrete resolutions that you have to stick to to practices and tools, I think, is a really lovely way to think about it.

[Mary Robinette] That gets back to that Dolly Parton quote that you love so much, figure out who you want… Who you…

[DongWon] Figure out what you're good at, and then do it on purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[DongWon] Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. That's what it is.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Last year, I set… I didn't set a resolution, I set an intention, which was… I picked a word. Stability. Which…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Very laughable very fast.

[DongWon] How's that worked out for you?

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] But what was interesting was that within the chaos that was happening, when I was offered a choice, which I… It was like, how can I find stability within this?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Thing that is happening? That allowed me to find stability even though last year was fairly chaotic. And I think this is also true, like, when you're thinking about your writing. I talk a lot with students about thinking about what is the intention behind this, what is the why, who are you telling the story for, and thinking about that as a… Is just a word. Sometimes I have people who will just write down what is the emotion you want people to leave the story with? They can have different emotions during the story, but what is that… Where do we linger when we get to the end?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think, approaching the year with intention, approaching your work with intention, all are incredibly important. And then, like, having that thing to focus on in terms of, like, where are you trying to get people to, where are you trying to get yourself to? Right? I think all that can be really, really important things to be bringing in as you're looking down the road at this year.

[Mary Robinette] So, why don't we take a little break. You all can listen to our lovely sponsors while you also think about what and who you want to be.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Take a little bit of thinking or intention, and we're going to talk to you more.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[DongWon] Heading into the new year, we're all thinking about what our intentions and goals are. It's hard not only to set your targets, but to live up to them. Especially as writers and creative's in a world that doesn't always seem eager to support you financially. That's why building your financial literacy and starting to work towards a stable financial base is an important aspect of developing your writing career. We talk a lot about the creative tools you need, but peace of mind about your bottom line will give you the space to pursue your goals and develop the career that you want. Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing, so your money has a chance to grow for you, your kids, and your retirement. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that fits you and your money goals. You don't need to be rich. Acorns let you invest with the spare money you've got right now. You can start with five dollars or even just your spare change. Head to acorns.com/WX or download the acorns app to start saving and investing for your future today. [Garbled inaudible]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I said that we were going to be talking to you about some other additional exciting things. We've been talking about setting intentions. We've been telling you a little bit about this idea of the toolbox. I want to talk to you also about another thing that we're going to be doing deeper in the season. That is, we're going to do another deep dive. So, last season, we picked five works and we broke them apart looking at different aspects of a toolbox. This season, we're going to be talking to you about toolbox all year, and then at the end of the year, we're going to apply all of the tools we've talked to you about to a single work. That work is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. I want us to talk a little bit about why we are picking… Not just… We don't have to talk about, like, why is it All the Birds in the Sky, but why are we picking a single work to bring the lenses to?

[DongWon] When I was an undergrad, I was an English major, and one of the most useful classes I took was a class on Literary Theory, on Critical Theory. Which was very dense and very difficult, but I enjoyed it very much. One of the things I took away from it was we were moving through all these different modes of analysis, about post structural or gender studies or critical theory and all these different ways, and what was so helpful to me was understanding that each one of these was a different lens through which I could examine this work and take away different things from my reading and understanding of the work. So why was… It wasn't necessarily that I felt a need to attach to one particular school of thought, of, oh, we need to think about this in terms of powers and economics, we need to think about this in terms of gender, or whatever it is, or language. All those things were useful, and in using, in picking and choosing different lines of approach, was giving me a more holistic understanding of the text. And figuring out what I was taking away from that text that made it meaningful to me. Right? So, obviously, we're not applying critical theory here, but as we're approaching using these lenses, being able to take a single text and kind of through parallax, show you all these different perspectives on it, hopefully, that'll give a really complete picture of, like, ways that you can think about your craft, ways that you can think about your intention, and how to manifest that on the page.

 

[Howard] We're going to be talking about the metaphors, as well, metaphors for our tools. And I just arrived at the perfect lens metaphor for this exact thing, because I recently went to the optometrist. And there's this part at the optometrist where you're looking at the picture or the words or whatever, and there flipping the little lenses in front of you, and they're saying, okay, which is better? Three or four? Three or four? Four or five? Four or five? Imagine them doing that where between three and four, they switched the picture. No! That's not how you develop your lens. That's how you get a headache and get confused. By focusing on one book… Sorry to use the word focus in conjunction with lens, but by focusing…

[Dan] No you're not.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… It over burdens the domain a little bit. But, by focusing on just one book, we will get a sense not only for how each individual tool works, but also for how the tools work differently. How the who is different from the where is different from the when.

[Mary Robinette] It also lets us see the places where there is a convergence. One of the things that I enjoy doing, because I am a nerd, is sometimes taking a piece of text and highlighting… Going through and saying, okay, let me take a look at all of the places where the author is using physicality. Now, let me go through and look at all of the places where the author is using emotion. Let me look at the places where the author is using focus. Often, the same line will get highlighted more than once. This is one of the things that we can do when… We kept talking about this in between episodes last season, that some of the books… Like, oh, we could have also used this book to talk about structure. We could have also use this book to talk about voice. So, taking one book that has a bunch of things going on in it, allows us to say, look, you can use all of these tools at the… I talk about layering a lot, and seeing all of these tools being used in a single work, I think it's going to give us some great opportunities for you.

[Erin] I also think it avoids… Or hopefully it avoids… One of my biggest fears as a teacher, which is that you give people a lot of tools and they feel very overwhelmed. I almost feel like it's like somebody was like I really want to make a great chicken soup, and asked a lot of people, like, how should I season it? And one person's like, aw, man you gotta add turmeric. It's great, and it does cool things. It makes your chicken soup yellow. Somebody else is like, make sure you get salt in their. Someone's like, but it's got to be spicy. What about pepper? All those people could be right, like. Eventually, you could end up with an entire spice cabinet full of cool spices that would make your chicken soup better. But if you put all of those spices in one chicken soup, it's a disaster. Because you don't know, like, okay, for this situation, or, like, this is the flavor profile I'm looking for at this moment, I should use these six spices. Oh, no, I'm in a different situation, let me use these for. So I think that, like, sometimes I always feel like just a person throwing spices at students…

[Laughter]

[Erin] And saying, like, hey, use this. And, like, not really telling them, okay, here's how we can actually combine them in interesting ways, and here's places where this one might work and this other one might not.

[DongWon] We can talk all we want about how turmeric is delicious and used in these cases. But until you taste a dish that has turmeric in it, you'll never understand exactly how to apply it. Right? So what we want to do is not just tell you here's the recipe, but also, let's take a look at the final dish. Let's all enjoy that together and then unpack a little bit why it works.

[Howard] I really love looking at food as a writing metaphor. We should do an episode…

[Laughter]

[Howard] We could do an episode that does that.

[DongWon] Oh, interesting. You like metaphors? Do we like metaphors here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. In fact, in our next episode, we're going to be talking about writing metaphors just a little bit.

[Erin] I never met a four I didn't like.

[Howard] Oh, my gosh.

[Mary Robinette] Erin. You are sitting next to the door. I will point that out.

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled and we have a door]

[DongWon] [garbled airlock 25]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, I do… Since I am of the cast, and I am one of us that has read all of All of the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, I just want to tell you why I suggested this book in particular. It uses more than one POV. The characters start out very young and they age through the course of the book. So you get to see the different lens of… That age brings to a characters interaction with things. It is both science fiction and fantasy. It's basically two kids, they both start as the kind of prototypical protagonists of ah, yes, the tiny genius who discovers this, and the other one is ah, yes, the tiny magical gifted girl. And then their stories meet and intersect in ways that are incredibly delicious. It also has a very strong voice, it's very voice-y. But that voice changes through the course of the story, because the characters change through the course of the story, and it's also a beautiful, harmonious whole. It goes places you do not expect it to go. I loved it to bits. So I pitched it to everyone as we should use this one, it does all the things. It is All the Birds in the Sky. So, get ready. We're going to be doing that deep into this year, but you can start reading it at any point. We'll give you warning, but it is going to be all spoiler all the time when we get to those. So, I just want to wrap us up before we get to homework by having each of the hosts tell us a tiny bit about an intention that you have for the coming year.

[Dan] Well, one that I am working on is I am trying to focus more on character as I write the who. I have been the story structure guy for such a long time that I worry that I'm falling into ruts. So I'm trying to change the way that I write, just to shake things up.

[Mary Robinette] I am, in 2025, as we are recording this, which for transparency, we're recording in 24. I'm going to be out from contract for the first time since I sold Shades of Milk and Honey. So my goal this year is to write a book that's just for me.

[DongWon] I love that. Kind of on a little bit of a parallel mode, for me, it's looking at 2024, like I said, I've relocated, I'm kind of in a new location and kind of stepping back and looking at my career, I'm very lucky that my career is, like, it feels like it's in a very solid place right now. I have a place where I have certain things that have worked really well, and kind of feels like I have a foundation that I can make a couple new moves. So, looking at, in 2025, what areas, in terms of my role as an agent, that I want to move into and try to take on some new projects and consider some new things. So it's been a real period of building and growing and then, like, trying to, like, stabilize the past few years, was me like really trying to like firm things up a little bit, so I have a little bit more of a foundation to build on, and feel like it's time for some new moves.

[Howard] You should talk to Mary Robinette about choosing stability as a word.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] We're moving, so we really need to grow. That's what it is.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Ooo.

[Howard] There was this discussion online a few days before we recorded this episode about what it takes to be a web cartoonist. I expressed a long, and I think, very profound opinion about that. Which is, basically, you create a comic and you put it on the Internet. Boom! Done. What does a writer do? They write. Boom, you're a writer. Painter? You paint. Web cartoonist? Make a cartoon and put it on the web. I've been a web cartoonist for 20 plus years except… I'm not doing that now. I'm… So this whole… The idea of a resolution being not what you're going to do, but who you're going to be? I am currently at a loss. So, rather than resolving on who I'm going to be, I'm going to resolve on what I'm going to look for. What I'm going to look for is an answer to that question, because I need to hurry up and find it.

[Erin] I think, for me, I work a lot, as we know, and so I think that I want to embrace play as an intention for 2025. And really… And I think part of answering that question about who I am as a writer is playing a little more, in all the different spaces that I enjoy, and trying to figure out what, like, brings me the most joy, and then go from there, and the work will follow.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] This is so good.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, the homework that I have for you, dear listeners. We're going to be talking about tools this year, and I want you to make a list of the tools that you already have in your toolbox. Then, as an intention, I want you to think about an area that you want a tool for. Then, over the course of this year, we're going to try to help you find that tool.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-41-deep-dive-erins-short-fiction-extravaganza 

 

Key points: I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story. Genre can be bookseller's version, where do we shelve it, the critic's version, what is the cultural lineage of this, and the reader/writer's version, what's useful, important, what does it feel like? Is it horror if the writer didn't intend to scare you, they just wanted the character to do a horrible thing? What drives speculative fiction in short form is the power of clear and simple metaphors. There are horror stories where the protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens. In these stories, our protagonist is the horror, doing things that we are horrified by. The antagonist is trying to prevent bad things from happening, and fails. Short fiction packs a lot in a small space. In a Myers-Briggs of writers, there are long and short writers. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 41]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] 'Cause 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'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I have managed to put off my deep dive until the very very very last, but the time is here.

[Dongwon] You were very very determined to go last.

[Erin] Right.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Very determined to go last. I have no idea why, but I'm really excited to talk about my work, I guess…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But also to just give a… To shine some light on short fiction as a whole.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I am merely a conduit for the love of short fiction. But I want to talk a little bit first about why I picked the 3 stories that I asked you all to read, and then see if you have any questions for me, otherwise I'll just ramble about them at length. So, the 3 that I picked are Wolfy Things, is the first story that I ever had published, so I felt it really represented the beginning of the extravaganza when I was really just kind of getting things off the ground. I was just saying before we started recording that I can tell it's my first published story because I just can. Something about the way that it's constructed, I'm like, "Oh, it's early on." But I still love it. I picked Sour Milk Girls because it is my buzzy-ist story, I would say. It's the story that ended up in year's best collections and like almost made the Hugo ballot. So it's the story that sort of people know me the most for and were most excited about. Then, I picked Snake Season because I think it is the closest to where I'm going as a writer. I think it's like sort of the truest to…

[Howard] Oh, no…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, "It's the truest to my voice of murder."

[Dongwon] Let's go.

[Erin] Weirdly, it's also the one that's been translated into the most languages. It's been translated into, I think, Spanish and Portuguese and… Anyway. So, people can be horrified, I guess, in many different languages.

[Mary Robinette] Ha. You said horrified. You… I was saying earlier, we were having this conversation about whether or not Erin writes horror. I was like, "I think you do." She does not think she does. But, ha ha…

[Erin] It's you all. You brainwashed me into thinking it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] I think so much when I write, I think about what I'm writing as, just like one individual person's like troubled story, that I don't see like… What they're doing may not be… I would not use my protagonist as like life lessons. I wouldn't follow in their footsteps.

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] If they told you to do something, I would say, "No." I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That I just decided not to write.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But I…

[Mary Robinette] Accurate.

[Erin] I just… Even though that's the case, for me, it's really, I think I get so much in their head and have to understand them in order to make them somewhat sympathetic on the page, that I can't think of what they're doing or what I'm doing as horror. Because I get why they did it, and I decided to make them do it, even though it may be something that is beyond the pale in the normal, like… In the normal life of things.

 

[Dongwon] I love this as a way of thinking about genre. I think one thing with conversation about genre get so muddy in a certain way, because there's almost 3 different ways in which we use the term. One is how I use it, which is very much the book selling side. Where do we put this in the store, what bisac code do we put on this, what gets… What comp titles do we use? Right? Like, how do we sell this? Then there's like the way critics use it, which is… I'm not even going to dive too deep into that, but it tends to be more about what's the cultural lineage of this. Then there's like how readers and writers use it, which is much more like what's useful to you, what's important to you, what does it feel like? So I love this idea that you separated out so much of your process from necessarily what the bookstore genre of it is because you need to access a space where you can look at it in a way that these are just people doing things. Yes, the things that they are doing are very upsetting, but they are doing things for relatable reasons. Right? So, I mean, even Sour Milk Girls where she does one of the worst things I've ever seen a character do in a story to another character. It's so upsetting the thing that she does to Princess, but it's so understandable and relatable, even if I wouldn't make that choice, I can understand why she does it in a way that I think, for you, I can see how internally, that's not horror, that's just a person. Right? That's a flawed person who lives in a deeply flawed world trying to survive in whatever ways that she can. Her experience and trauma and psychology all lead her to this place of doing this upsetting thing.

[Howard] The context in which… Ghost does things to Princess. Ghost is not doing anything to Princess that society has not already done to Ghost.

[Dongwon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] In reading that story, there is horrific revelation after horrific revelation. At first it just looks like they live in an orphanage. No, this is worse than an orphanage, this is… Something's being done to these kids. As we learn more about it, it gets… You experience horror. So in talking about genre, I always go back to our Season 11, Elemental Genres. I keep turning the page because I keep looking for the next horrific reveal. I experienced dread, but I'm sort of thrilling, reveling in it. It grows so nicely out of that symmetry between what society is doing and what the character is doing that when we get to the end, it is the perfect horrific inevitability. So, yeah, circling back around, yes, Erin, you're writing horror. Are they going to shelve it as horror? I don't care, I just want to read it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Something that I just want to circle back to, you said that your antagonist… Your protagonist is the antagonist in someone else's story.

[Dongwon] Great line.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… When I think about all of these stories, I'm like, "Oh, yes." One of reasons that these work, I think, structurally so well is that you have a character who has set out to achieve a goal. They come up with a plan, they have obstacles, they have all of the markers. It's just as a reader, I do not want them to achieve that goal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that is… I can see why actually you would make the argument that it's not horror, because in horror, generally speaking, bad things happen to the protagonist. In this case, you're like, "Oh, no, your protagonist is absolutely…" And I can see all of the stories that are written from the other character's point of view.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It is… I'm like, "Oh. Yes." Okay, I will grant your point about how these may not be horror.

 

[Erin]'s Thank you. I think it also comes back to, like, what… Intentionality…

[Mary Robinette, Dongwon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] So we were talking about, just before hand, in all the fascinating conversations we will reprise here, about that there's 3 different genres of the body. Humor, erotica, horror. They all try to make you feel something in a very visceral level. So, to me, to set out to write horror is to say I want to scare you. I want you to feel dread. I never intend… That's never a thought that goes through my head. I just want my characters to accomplish a horrible thing which might make you feel horror, but I'm not thinking. At the end, if you said, like, "I was totally fine with everything they did and I felt like I was like I'm cheering them on," I might have some questions about your moral compass…

[Laughter]

[Erin] But I wouldn't feel like I didn't accomplish my goal as a writer. Whereas, I feel like in a horror story, if you say like, "I wasn't scared at all," that you've missed something.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The same way that if you didn't laugh at humor…

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] Last night we joked during D&D, we joked about you being chaotic evil or what… This is more like chaotic IDGAF…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Chaotic WTF. I just… I am doing a thing and you're going to have experience, but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the thing.

 

[Dongwon] I will say… I will grant you what you're saying on Wolfy Thing and Sour Milk Girls. I will say I made the mistake of reading Snake Season…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Right before I went to bed.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yes. Bad choice.

[Dongwon] I was upset. The image of Sarah, the image of the donor, is just so upsetting to me. It's so emotional too, though. I mean, what drives speculative fiction in short form so well is the power of the metaphor. Right? One of the things I love in short fiction is it's so clear and simple about what the metaphor is. Right? In Sour Milk Girls, it's the state is robbing them of their identity and memories, because that's kind of what the foster system is invested in doing, is erasing who you were to be this person that can be entered into new situations. Right? So, just this mother's trauma over her dead daughter, over this monstrous thing that she's afraid of in herself and in… I don't know how to unpack all the things in that because it's so rich and textured and dense, like, that's the beauty of that image. But, yeah, I'm very scared of that little girl. She's definitely haunting me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that also happened for me as we got deeper into the story was wondering how much of Sarah's appearance was actually just Mary's view of her, like, was this just a normal little girl who just wasn't a baby anymore, and that that's something that she couldn't stand. Like, the fact that I don't know and there's just enough ambiguity in there? I mean, I feel like she's… It is… She is horrifying and also what if she's not?

[Dongwon] Yeah. Exactly. Because do you know something, maybe she's fine?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] On that disturbing note, we're going to take a slight break. When we come back, I have a question to ask you all.

 

[Dongwon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week and it's a way I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave you with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a whole meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty, time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.

 

[Dongwon] My thing of the week this week is Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap. In my personal opinion, I think Isabel Yap is one of the greatest science fiction short story writers we have in the game right now. She's an incredible talent and this is her debut collection of stories. It came out a couple of years ago in 2021 from Small Beer Press. The work that she does in here is so wide-ranging and delightful and engaging. She pulls from her Filipino ancestry in bringing in some traditional myths and monsters in the story, and the way she blends fabulism and horror and supernatural elements with grounded relatable concerns of contemporary characters is incredibly powerful and wonderful. I think this is a phenomenal collection and I would love for all of you to go check it out.

 

[Erin] We are back, and my question is ready, which is, who do you see as the antagonist of these stories? Because I've been thinking about it, and I actually think there's a slight shift in the antagonist… In who I see as the antagonist of all 3 stories that I think makes Snake Season feel the most horrific. But I'm curious…

[Howard] Wolfy, the antagonist is Erin. Sour Milk Girls, it's Erin.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Snake Season, it's Erin like 3 times.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm upset at you in particular…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah [garbled] statements.

[Dongwon] No, I mean I'm not sure who the antagonist in Wolfy Things is, actually. That's kind of an interesting one. It feels much more like portraiture than really like a strong… Like this intense metaphor about society in a certain way. Sour Milk Girls is definitely the state. Then, for Snake Season, it's almost just like the world. Like there's a… She just exists in a world that is stacked against everyone in the story in a certain way.

[Mary Robinette] Like, she's… She has decided that the conjureman is the antagonist. Like… I think from her point of view, from Marie's point of view…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The conjureman is the antagonist.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] But I don't think that he actually… He…

[Dongwon] I don't think he's a good dude, though.

[Mary Robinette] I don't think he's a good dude. But structurally speaking, like, he does serve the function of an antagonist.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] She has…

[Howard] There are horror stories in which our protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens.

[Dongwon] Yep.

[Howard] Just in general. In these stories, I think… In all 3 of them, our protagonist is the horror. The protagonist is the one who is ultimately doing the things that we are the most horrified with. So the antagonist is the one who's trying to prevent bad things from happening. I'm just… In broad structural strokes.

[Dongwon] Totally.

[Howard] There is… That is a flavor of horror in which we are sympathetic with, we are following a character who is on a path, their goals are going to lead them into the horrible place, and the antagonist is the one who is putting obstacles in front of them, and the antagonist is going to fail.

[Dongwon] There's no Freddie, there's no Candyman, there's no [garbled]

[Howard] You stop thinking of antagonist is villain, and start thinking of them as the person who's in between the protagonist and their ultimate goal.

[Dongwon] Well, this is why I think it's so useful in certain cases to really let go of genre expectations and not think of it as a genre piece in certain ways and just follow the story where it goes. Right? Tonally, and voice wise, I may look at this and say horror. I think Howard's right, and you're right, when I break it down to the core elements of the story, horrific things are happening. I think you're right, though, that is not a horror story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Aha!

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] You convinced me.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I also want to say that I don't think that every story has to have an antagonist. In, I think Wolfy Things… I've forgotten the main character's name. I remember Lee's name, but I don't remember the POV character's name.

[Erin] Nikki.

[Mary Robinette] Nikki. I think Nikki is the protagonist, and the antagonist. I think he is both.

 

[Erin] I think… What I would say is that for me, or what I think I was trying to do, and it's interesting to go back and see whether or not that work. For me, I think, society, culture, the world, as it is is the antagonist. I think that a lot… I think that all 3 of these stories, to a degree, are my kind of thinking about, ruminating on the idea that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's [garbled]

[Dongwon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] And that ultimately the reason the society is the antagonist is that the protagonist is monstrous, but they are only monstrous because they are in a world that creates monsters. Therefore, in them trying to figure out the world and where they fit into it, they start with good intentions, but they ultimately are kind of in like the classic tragedy sense, unable to escape who they are and how they've been made…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what has created them. I think that Snake Season is the place where that is the least clear.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I love that.

[Erin] Like, the culture is like much more, like, hopefully like the culture of the town and their hatred of wolves is pretty clear, and the state's direct like manipulation of these poor girls is pretty clear. But in Snake Season, it's a lot less like it's just kind of the world in less of a directly antagonistic way and more just like how do you fit into the world as it is.

[Mary Robinette] But it's also like in Snake Season, at least to me, it was about how she only felt like she was supported after her child had died.

[Dongwon] Yeah. The only time people came out in a sympathetic way for her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Instead, she had the conjureman who's like bossing her around, and her husband who's not there. And she's alone. She's alone with a child that she's trying to raise by herself while her husband goes off and works. The only way she gets people to come out is if a child dies. She's not conscious of that, I don't think. Not like… Or she's… That is the lie she is telling herself.

[Erin] She's not, like, waking up and journaling…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] No one has visited me for months…

[Dongwon] Time to kill a baby.

[Mary Robinette] Kill a baby.

[Erin] That would be horrible.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Erin] But you can't say that to yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So you create a world in which that is what's happening for you, so you can get the emotional joy… Or not… The emotional comfort that you want.

 

[Howard] As we explore these structural interpretations... I love doing this. I could do this all day. It's important to recognize that a large part of this comes from us, within, what we bring to the table, what are reading experience was. When I read Wolfy, I at first thought the wolf was the antagonist. After reading it, I feel like Lee is the antagonist. Because there's a moment when I was reading, when I felt like, "Oh. Nikki's objective has changed." Nikki wants to talk to the wolf, meet the wolf, learn who the wolf is, and Lee prevents that from happening, by falling on his own knife. Lee, you klutz. Nikki's goals change and he follows through with the original plan. But that is an interpretation which… Okay, in critical senses, maybe it's wildly invalid, but based on what I brought into the book, that's the experience that I had. That's one of the things that I love about short fiction in general is that it's so tight that we have all of these experiences so close together within 30 to 45 minutes of starting the story. It's easier to unpack, easier to talk about, and I talk about it for way longer than I would on a 300,000 page…

[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to touch on this actually. Each of these stories implies a massive world. Right? World building, technology, magic, societal stuff… The amount that you get into 6000 words in terms of gesturing at a bigger world is truly extraordinary and breathtaking. But also, I think, especially Sour Milk Girls could sustain a novel length work, right, with what you have there. I could see something bigger possible in that space if you want it, but that's not what you wanted. You love short fiction. You like writing short fiction. You believe in it, as do I. I adore it. But I'm curious to hear more about your thought process, about why short fiction, why is that how you wanted these stories to unfold. Why do you like working in that space?

 

[Erin] So this is a great question, specifically for Sour Milk Girls, because of its origin story. So I actually wanted to, and maybe still do, want to write a novel about 5 different women whose lives have been screwed up by this memory, the memory as a commodity system. Ghost was going to be like sort of the protagonist, through which this larger thing happened much later in her life. Not much later, but like in her 20s. I was trying to get her voice. So, for me, as a writer, if I cannot hook into the voice of the character, I cannot write the story. Which is one of the reasons I'm extraordinarily slow writer. Because I will rewrite the first paragraph and the first page over and over and over until the character sounds right to me in my head and I have some sort of instinctive sense of how they see the world and then I can move forward. Then it gets much easier. But that process can take a long time. So I could not hook into the voice of Ghost. I kept trying and I kept writing these horrible things I didn't like. So I was like maybe I need to go back and do a writing exercise for myself of some pivotal moment in her life early on that turns her into the person that she was at the time that the novel that I was writing, which is kind of a compulsive kleptomaniac, a compulsive memory kleptomaniac. Why become a compulsive memory kleptomaniac?

[Howard] I forget.

[Erin] I was trying to figure out what is the thing? Like, why… Where did she start going down this path? So I wrote… Started writing this writing exercise. I was like, oh, this writing exercise feels a bit like a story actually. Let me finish it. Then I did. I was like I think I could publish this. So it's sort of an accidental story that comes out of me...

[Dongwon] I love that.

[Erin] Trying to understand the novel form. Because I don't get it. I have this theory that I've told people before that there should be a… Like a Myers-Briggs of writers…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Where, first, like introvert/extrovert, I think some people tend long…

[Dongwon] Yup.

[Erin] And some people tend short.

[Dongwon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] As writers. I tend short. I think I tend to just… The way that my sentences are constructed, a lot of times, I try to jam a lot in there in a way that won't… Wouldn't work. It would be a lot for like a longer work. You need to kind of stretch things out and dole them out differently. So I… When I try to write longer works, I often end up coming up with ideas that I then break off into shorter things. Because I'm trying to understand and trying to get to a place where I could write a novel. I also… Yeah, I think like it is a lot of it's about natural tendencies and my own speed because I'm slow, writing a short story is a much easier…

[Dongwon] Totally.

[Erin] Kind of thing for me to set out to do. But I think even… I'm the opposite. We're going to talk later in this deep dive about what happens when all your short stories, people are like, "That should be a novel." Which happens a lot to my students. Like, they'll be like writing this short story, and I'm like, "This is not a short story, this is a prologue."

[Dongwon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I have the opposite, where even when I come up with novel ideas they sort of come out in short story form. Because I think I'm so focused on one character. Part of it is that I get so into the idea of the single character that you need a broader cast a lot of times in order to make a novel work, and I want to be so much in this one person's head that it's hard to think about taking them on such a long journey.

[Dongwon] It's funny, you and I were chatting before recording, and you… Just talking about an idea that you had. I was like, "Oh. That actually sounds like a short story…"

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Not a novel." I think you would need to do something to make it more novel size. So it was really funny to hear you say that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, I want to sidebar with you and talk to you about how to fix that, because…

[Erin] Oh, cool.

[Mary Robinette] Because I've…

[Dongwon] Would you, because she needs to write the novel [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I know, I would like it too. Yeah. It's… You're right. You are so… Because I also went from short story to novel. So I know the thing that happens. But I'm pretty sure we can talk about that at some point later in the deep dive. Right now, we should probably pause for homework.

[Erin] Yes.

 

[Mary Robinette] The homework assignment is take a line that you've written a while ago that you absolutely love and try rewriting it is the writer that you are now, because your style changes, your understanding of how language changes, your interaction with it changes, your taste changes. Take that original line, read it once, put it to the side, and then rewrite it as you are now.

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

 

[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple Podcast or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/25/17-39-writing-bodies-and-intimacy-with-k-m-szpara/

 

Key points: Content warning. Bodies and intimacy, without euphemisms. The intimacy of what you and your partner call body parts is rich with knowing yourself and/or character growth. Communication is key, and the growth of trust. Think about how the context of the scene changes the action. Think of intimate scenes as fight scenes or conversations. Or as dances? Metaphoric language, fade to black, or simple direct descriptions?

 

[Season 17, Episode 39]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with special guest, K. M. Szpara.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon Song.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Howard] I'm Howard Tayler.

[Mary Robinette] We are here live on the Writing Excuses cruise with a live audience of writers.

[Applause]

[Mary Robinette] Also, our special guest, K. M. Szpara. Kellan, say hello.

[Kellan] Hi. This is my first Writing Excuses cruise. I am the author of books such as Docile as K. M. Szpara, and I write a lot about like sex and vampires and blood.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are going to actually give you a content warning for this particular episode. We're going to be talking about bodies and intimacy, and we're not going to be using euphemisms. We're going to be talking about adult acts that adults do with actual adult bodies. Adult bodies run in a full range.

[Kellan] Yes. Which is to say that as somebody who writes queer and trans bodies a lot, if this episode might trigger you on any of those axes, please take care of yourself.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So with that, let's dive into the actual content. So you pitched this episode to us, Kellan. What are some of the things that you think about when you're thinking about like writing bodies and intimacy? What are some important aspects of that?

[Kellan] Sure. I mean, for me, it's so important to show especially queer and trans bodies. There's such a mystery sort of around us, even to our own selves sometimes. We do a lot of manifesting of our own bodies when we are alone with others. I have sat down and struggled with what do I call these character's genitals that makes me feel okay and makes the character feel okay and makes the character's partner feel okay. Or what conflict does that bring up. So, for me, like settling on that intimacy between one or more people and being alone or with others with your body is so rich with your inner external conflict tension, but also a sense of knowing yourself and/or character growth.

[Piper] I love that. Because communication is so key. You can really see that in the development of the relationships through the course of the book, because you can find during different moments through the story that they're more likely to trust, and there is a building of trust over time as they feel more comfortable communicating with each other and also being self-aware. Like you said. Just aware of themselves and what they need.

[Kellan] Yeah. It's funny because I was talking earlier on this retreat with my agent, actually, and I brought up how when I first started writing, I learned to sort of like the meat and then there's unresolved sexual tension for the entire book and they kiss at the end and that's the prize for the reader and the characters. That was real bad for me. I've instead fallen into the thing which I think is very queer, which is very queer not applicable to everyone all the time, but, for me and many other people, which is that there's sex first. Intimate moments first. Then, sort of like dealing with the emotional and/or communications that lead right up to it. Also the falling out, and how that manifests over the course of the rest of the novel or story.

[Piper] Oh, yeah. Definitely. Because I know that we think of romance in particular as being rather structured in the order, and I have even taught how there is often a progression of intimacy that happens. But once you know what that progression kind of is expected, you can also explore how it happens not quite in that order, and what that does to the character, that reaction time, and that thinking about it and exploring what works for them. I love that.

[Kellan] For me, in real life, there is no order. Right? So we do different things with different people at different times. It's really important to me that characters feel like emotionally true. So, yeah. I mean, yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that as you're talking about this, as emotional truth, I'm thinking about some of the scenes in Docile and the way the context of the scene changes the action. You want to talk a little bit about how you communicate context and safety or not safety?

[Kellan] Sure. The context is interesting because my first thought was like where is the sex happening.

[Chuckles]

[Kellan] Sometimes it happens in your like executive office at work, which I guess you're allowed to do if you're the CEO. But I think the actual context is who are you having sex with, what kind of sex you're having, what are the power dynamics between you. So, for example, even though there are many sex scenes in Docile, there's the blow job scene, there's, as my editor has once said, one ass-eating scene per book as mandated by God.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Only one? Are we like limited to one or is it at least one?

[Kellan] No, it just happens that way.

[Piper] Okay.

[Kellan] So. But the point of that is the sort of context is… It is, for Elijah, the protagonist, it is I am being asked to do something versus something is being done to me, and, do you feel like more of a willing participant if you are doing the thing, which presents a whole different struggle emotionally than lying back and having something happen to you. Then, later on in the novel, he gets to have his first like real consensual sexual experience and navigates that with a totally different context using language she'd never had access to before, feeling emotions he's never felt, trying to deal with how to go about having some of the same experiences physically that you had the first time, but with somebody who is being very respectful about it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about some tools that we can use to do this well? Like, one of the most useful frameworks that I was given when I was first writing the kind of intimate scenes that I do, which frequently resolve into fade to black, but was to think of them as either a conversation or a fight scene. That with a fight scene, I have to think about the geography and things that human bodies will actually do. And that with a conversation, that there is something that each person is trying to communicate to the other through the physical actions of their body.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think a lot about fight scenes when it sort of comes to these kinds of moments in books. In part because we live in a society that can be very prudent… Not prudent, prudish and prurient about bodies and about sex and about intimacy. But we're a society that also glorifies violence. We have lots of scenes in movies that have very extreme explicit details about what happens to a body when violence happens to it. So, so much of fiction is already engaging with the collision of bodies in these high intensity emotional moments. We're just only allowed to talk about certain kinds of that versus what is a scene of intimacy versus a scene of violence. Functionally, in the narrative, they often perform a similar thing where two characters enter a scene with different goals, different emotional states, and they exit that scene having resolved some aspects of that, or evolved into a different emotional state. So there's a way in which I think of these functionally as performing the same thing in the narrative, hopefully with different outcomes, hopefully one of them's not dead by the end of it. But I think there is a way in which that, from a high level, mechanically they can be very, very similar. It really comes down to how we, as a society, can think about and interact with bodies in that way.

[Piper] Actually, I want to provide a contrasting approach. Because I'm really well known for fight scenes, especially in my romantic suspense, and body count, especially a lot of my other work. But I write romance. One of the things is while I have combat scenes and fight scenes in my stories, I often think about moments of intimacy as dance. It's one of those things that I didn't do on purpose, but because I was a dancer, and I was in dance from age 3 to 28 actively, and also, it's a part of my meet cute with my partner, Matthew J. Drake, that we danced together and we both enjoyed West Coast swing and blues fusion, that I often think of intimacy scenes and how I choreograph them as dance. Whether that's horizontal or standing up…

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Or a little bit of both and also the logistics of lifts. Right? Like it actually translates better for me. If it involves more than two partners, also, choreography helps a lot for that because what bodies can do. Right? Like, one person may be very bendy and one person may not be very bendy, and also, like, what are the logistics of actually being able to lift two people. Like a lot more of that actually translates better in my head to dance choreography. So that's another alternative.

[Dongwon] I think of fight scenes is also being about dance, right? It's about that movement and control and… In part, I love martial arts movies. I know we're wondering further off-topic at this point.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But I do think dance is a really useful thing to think about in terms of that interaction and that give-and-take in that interplay of power and connection and emotion are all things that flow back and forth in this.

[Howard] Let me circle this back real quick. One of my favorite MCU fight scenes is the one in Civil War where Falcon says to Spidey, "Have you ever been in a fight before? Usually there's not this much talking." Conversation during intimacy to me is one of the most wonderful things to read. I don't just want the choreography, I want dialogue. I want… It's a conversation. It's much more than just blocking. Much more than that.

 

[Kellan] I am also somebody who's deeply in love with a first-person present point of view. I can get away with it as much as I can. But I feel like not everyone chooses it and uses it to their full advantage. So, for me, like being in a different first-person point of view for a sex scene, and then flopping the points of view for the next sex scene, like, you are not just getting the… You, the reader, gets to see the conversation between the two people, but then you get to see later how the other character might have experienced that sex or contact totally different from the other character. I had a story out with two trends boyfriends. They both had different physical needs when it came to sex. So you really got to live in their heads and in the dialogue.

[Piper] Yeah. I think the progression is also important through the course of the story, because, again, we're also seeing the progression of how they work together. To come back to the point about communication as well, and dialogue, I think it's amazing and awesome, and I love it. I'm so into it. It's also really hot, I think, in romance that there is consent not just upfront, but repeatedly through each step of that interaction, and, if there's not, what are the reactions to it.

 

[Mary Robinette] These are, I think, wonderful points. Let's take a moment to pause for our book of the week, which is actually by Kellan.

[Kellan] Wow, what a surprise.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] That book would be First Become Ashes. It is a novel whose pitch I did not practice before this. It takes place in a cult. In the first chapter, they are all liberated from the cold against their wills. They were raised to believe that you could do magic. So when the FBI says you cannot do magic, and also, everything you believe is fake, one of them, Lark, spends the rest of the novel sort of unraveling what that means for him as a person, grappling with beliefs and his own body, especially since he took sort of like a sacred chastity vow with a literal chastity device. So, there's some really interesting sex that comes out on the other end of that.

[Mary Robinette] That sounds very exciting. It's called First Become Ashes by K. M. Szpara.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, let's move on to one of my favorite things, which is talking about how things can go terribly wrong. So let's talk about some tropes and euphemisms and ways of discussing this that are maybe not the most intimate. For instance, I had to narrate a book that literally had the line, "She released his love snake from its denim prison."

[Laughter]

[Piper] Purple prose.

[Kellan] I mean, if you say that during sex and the other person doesn't laugh and then you will have a great time… That would be a cool scene.

[Piper] I mean, yeah. Or is it monster f-ing? I would drop in f-bombs. We are going adult. All right. So, monster fucking is a thing. It is a very… It's rising in popularity right now. I know of at least two books with a prehensile penis going on. So, love snake would be applicable.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Yeah. I mean, people ask me this a lot, like, how do you keep writing so many sex scenes? Does the language get stale? How do you… Like, I name this very bluntly. I usually use cock in sexual situations, but then you'll see that I use dick when someone's just like alone thinking about their bodies. I… One ass eating per book. It's like does butt sound sexy enough? Like, I do want it to be hot, right? So, like, sex is both about characters and tension and intimacy, but also butts. So, like, for me, it's picking these words that titillate not just for the reader but for you as the author. I mean, I am…

[Garbled]

[Kellan] Be turned on by what you write, is, like, sort of a mantra that I think.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think that's true with any emotion that you're trying to provoke in a reader, that you are your own first reader. So I think that's a very natural thing. Not something that people should be ashamed of even though we are constantly told by different forms of media, especially anything that is remotely off of mainstream, that you shouldn't do that thing and should somehow be ashamed of it.

[Kellan] I actually thought I was a little bit odd because I have… I don't like to write the word butt because it's not pretty to me. So I like bum or behind or ass better as like a hotter thing when I'm writing. I'll actually have an editor call me up, and be like, "Do you have a problem with butt?" I'm like, "No. It just… I don't like the way the word looks."

[Mary Robinette] It is not a pretty word on the page. Like with the Regency, I get a lot… It's buttocks.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Yeah, buttocks is almost hotter to me. Or bum is more hot, hotter to me. Behind can be really hot, but then it gets confusing.

[Howard] I've found great uses for it, but they haven't been intimate uses.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Well, the words I struggle with are always like what do we call testicles. Balls, which is also not like a super sexy word. Then, like, apple, which makes me sound like you're saying you're an apple.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Weird side note. In Icelandic, a euphemism, or a term of endearment, for like when you're looking at a little baby and it's like, "Oh, how cute you are. Aren't you a little ass hole? What a cute little ass hole you are. What a little raisin ass hole."

[Wow]

[Piper] Yeah. The visual that I just had.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah.

[Kellan] Quite…

[Mary Robinette] My gift to you. My gift.

 

[Dongwon] One thing I was thinking about is something you touched on very briefly before, Kellan. I think there's a way in which… There's a demand and hunger for queer stories, but a lot of times, those queer stories elide over queer bodies. Right? I am also trans and queer myself, and one of the things that I become frustrated with is somehow… Sometimes that metaphoric language, sometimes that fade to black, sometimes being a little bit more clever about how you're describing certain body parts can kind of unintentionally erase the bodies of the people who are being presented on the page. Right? So, how much do you find that that directness is useful or not? I mean, because there's also kind of things where sometimes there are inevitably gender valences attached to certain body parts. That's become complicated.

[Kellan] I got you. I mean, one of the reasons I keep writing very explicit sex scenes, especially for my trans characters and my queer characters, there is this air of like are you exploiting bodies that are already exploited a lot. Like, us trans people, it's very much like the what's in your pants question. I answer that repeatedly because I want these characters to have agency over their bodies. Like, for example, in the novelette I wrote, Small Changes over Long Periods of Time, we have a trans character who… He's a trans man, he calls his clit a clit, he calls it… At one point, like, engorged like a swollen tick. Which is, like, not necessarily something that's like superhot, but, like, is the vibe for him right now. It's like sometimes our bodies, like, do feel like hot, but also kind of weird and gross at the same time. I have this agenda, which is not simply to write sex scenes because I think they're hot, but also because I want other people to think that I'm hot. I want other people to think that people like me are hot, and know that we are having good sex. Like, queer and trans sex is experimental in that we don't learn about it growing up necessarily. We are putting ourselves on the map as we go. I feel so honored to be part of that conversation.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that's wonderful. I also think that that segues us really nicely into our homework assignment.

[Kellan] Yes. So, for homework, I would like you to write a character undressing, either alone or with others.

[Mary Robinette] So, you're going to do a little bit of exploration.

[Wolf whistle]

[Whee!]

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.