wetranscripts | Entries tagged with mice

Writing Excuses 18.05: An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-05-an-interview-with-mary-robinette-kowal/

Key points: Puppetry and teaching a cat to talk with buttons? Before that? Art education with a minor in theater and speech. Art director. Puppets. Technique, and something to say. Curiosity and surprise. Challenge! Toolboxes. MICE Quotient. Axes of power. The go-to? Yes-but, no-and. What is the character trying to accomplish, what is their motivation? Next? How do we deal with tension without conflict. Subverted expectations?

[Season 18, Episode 5]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm driving. My name's Howard Tayler, and I get to lead this interview of my friend, Mary Robinette Kowal.

[Mary Robinette] Hi.

[Howard] Mary Robinette, I remember meeting you at World Con in… Gosh, was it Montréal?

[Mary Robinette] It was World Fantasy, but, yes.

[Howard] Was it World Fantasy?

[Mary Robinette] No, I think…

[Dan] World Fantasy. I'm pretty sure it was World Fantasy.

[Mary Robinette] It was World something.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm pretty sure it was World Con, because that was the year that I got to be in the People Versus George Lucas movie.

[Dan] Okay.

[Howard] But we podcasted, and episode 3.14 was Mary schools Brandon, Dan, and Howard about using puppets to teach us how to write. That was when I met you. But that is not when you started. You have done a bazillion things. I know that one of them is puppetry, and another is teaching your cat to talk with buttons. Where did you come from?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Where did you even…?

[Mary Robinette] Were did I even? So, I was actually an art major in college. Art education with a minor in theater and speech, because being one of those kids who wanted to do everything, that was the closest I could get to doing all the things I wanted to do.

[Howard] The everything major!

[Mary Robinette] Yes. The everything major. I was firmly convinced… So, before that, I was firmly convinced that I was going to be a veterinarian specializing in cats. Then I looked at my math grades, and… Actually, just looked at my grades in general. I was like, "Oh, hey." It turns out I'm good at art. Went to college to do that. I… Like, I can render. I have good technical chops that I have used outside of school. I've been an art director. I've even illustrated some things. But I looked at the stuff that my friends were doing and realized that I had technique, but I didn't actually have anything to say. With puppets, I had both. I had the technique, and I had things I wanted to say. I had a voice that was specific to me. I fell in love with that, and chased it, and did that for 20+ years. Somewhere along the way, also started writing again. Because I had stopped. Again, had that moment of, "Oh. Not only is this fun for me, but there are things I want to say." It's very much the storyteller with any tool you will give me. But some of them I have more things to say than others.

[Howard] That is fascinating to me, because I feel like… Well, you and I are clearly very different people. Because I feel like if I got something to say, and I have technique, then I got something to say using that technique. I've seen your art and was… You drew a picture on a tablet at one point when we were in Chicago. I remember looking at it and thinking why are you not just doing this. You've got so many wonderful things to say, and clearly you've got mad art chops, why don't you say them that way? So that… I don't understand that. I'm not denying that it's a thing, but I just don't understand it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me either. Honestly. I don't know…

[Meow]

[Mary Robinette] Elsie however does have things to say.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well, let me ask you a question, Mary Robinette. Was there a specific moment or project or story that helped crystallize for you either visual art is not for me or puppetry is for me? Because of that, I have something I want to say. Is there anything specific attached or is it more broad than that?

[Mary Robinette] It's broader. Some of it is the difference in where I am in my life, I guess. But with the… I mean, with the writing, I very clearly remember that I was… When I came back to it, my niece and nephew had moved to China with my brother. Skype was not yet reliable thing. So I started writing this story for them. If you go back pretty far into episodes, you can find a thing where we do a deep dive on an outline for… I think I was calling it Two Ordinary Children or Journey to the East, I can't remember which. But it's the novel that brought me back to writing. I remember that I was starting to write this thing as a serial for my niece and nephew. I thought, well, you know, I'll just write an episode and all kind of choose your own adventure my way through it. And that I was… I was starting to think about what happened next and starting to wonder where the story was going and that I wanted to know what happened next. That was this moment of going, "Oh, I think I have something here." That curiosity, that wonder, that is the next thing, what's the surprise. For whatever reason, when I draw, when I paint, I love it. I really en… It's very satisfying. But it is not surprising for me. There's no curiosity about what's the next thing around the corner for me.

[DongWon] I think that is such a wonderful way to think about it, and I'm so glad that you expressed it that way. I… One thing that I always encourage people against is this idea of comparison. That moment you had when you looked at the stuff that your friends were creating and what I thought you were going to say is, "And I could see they were so much better than me." That's not what you said. That's a really important difference. What you said is that you found your voice and your excitement in a different style of art. So I don't want people out there to just get discouraged and stop doing one thing. But the way you did it instead is you got very encouraged by something new and exciting and followed that passion. Which is such a better way of making that decision.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like I… As I said, I use those skills. It has framed the way I approach things. I still take enormous satisfaction from it. It's just I get more satisfaction from other things. I have stories to tell that I… The tools for me are better with puppets than with fiction.

[DongWon] You're exploring all these different media, you're exploring all these techniques. To sort of refill your creative tank? To sort of get back to the writing side, or is it all kind of orthogonal, incidental to each other?

[Mary Robinette] It's… It depends. There's… A lot of this is a new understanding of it. If you had asked me this at the beginning of… When I joined Writing Excuses, I'm sure I would have answered it differently, but I don't know how I would have answered it. Because at the time, I didn't understand that I had ADHD. One of the things that helps is the new. Like, I'm drawn to the new. In hindsight, it's like, "Oh, that's why I had a very successful career in theater," because theater is… Everything is… It's constantly moving to a new show. You do that show and you get really good at it. Then the season is over and you go to a new show. Or you're doing a television show and it's a different… Each episode is different, and you have to learn this technique and that for this particular thing. So it was constantly… New was constantly happening. With the writing, I think that's one of the reasons that I keep moving genre is because that's some of where that newness comes for me. But I also… One of the other things for me that is a driver, and again, it's like, "Oh, in hindsight," is the challenge. So the refilling of the well, it's less about going to something else to refill the well, and more about finding something new to challenge me. So sometimes that's the "I'm going to take my friend's advice and try to write this book without an outline."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's "I'm going to learn to make a Regency gown that is entirely handsewn."

[Oh, wow.]

[Howard] Okay. On that terror inducing note, let's take a quick break for a thing of the week, and then were going to come back and… I've got some cool questions queued up.

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk about The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope. So I met Leslye through a friend of a friend and was told this person is great. Then I was like, "You know, I'd like to…" Correct, Leslye is fantastic and extremely talented and smart. Then I was like, "Let me read this person's fiction." So I listened to The Monsters We Defy. It is such a good audiobook. So it is prohibition black Washington heist novel with ghosts. It is so good. The heist is so beautifully structured. Like, I spent a lot of time looking at how to construct a heist, and this one is so just exquisitely handled. There is the assembling of the team beats, and I love all of the teams. There's the… There's… Every heist, there's a twist, and the twist is… It's just so cleverly handled and moving in the way that it's handled. It's… I can't tell you about it, but you need to listen to this book. It's also really well narrated. It is smart, it is moving, it's funny. It's dealing with generational trauma. It's dealing with fashion. It's dealing with magic and ghosts and I love it a lot. I keep talking about it on kind of everything I go on. So, this is The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope.

[Howard] I have a question about the toolbox. Because, Mary Robinette, you have thrown so many tools at us during the last decade or so. The MICE Quotient, obviously, we come back to a lot. The axes of power that you've talked about a little more recently. Discussions of creation of tension. Discussions of the way learning to read things aloud changes the way you write. Do you have a go to favorite when you're stuck? When you fall back on craft, what's the first tool you reach for?

[Mary Robinette] Yes-but, no-and. Because almost always, when I am stuck…

[Howard] Sorry. I thought you were yes-but no-anding my question. And I'm like, "It wasn't enough?"

[Laughter]

[DongWon] The worst improv tool ever.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's going to be my new response when I get interviewed in like someone else's podcast. Just…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It sounds like a game. Yes-but, no-and.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mary Robinette, please continue.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But…

[Howard] No.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, the reason that I said, "Yes-but, no-and," is that almost always when I'm stuck, it's because of the "Okay, but what is the next thing that supposed to happen next?" It's usually I have a general idea of the scene and I'm in the scene and I'm like, "Oh. This is okay. But where's? What's the…?" So I look at what my character is trying to accomplish. So I guess in many ways the actual answer is that I go back to my theater roots and I'm like, "But what's my motivation?" Then, once I got the motivation, it's the question of does she succeed at this thing? It's going to be yes, she succeeds, but there is a negative consequence. Or, no, she doesn't succeed, and there's a negative consequence. Then, more recently, when I'm in the latter part of the book, realizing that the but and the and represent directions of progress. So, yes is closer to the goal. But is a reversal. And is continued motion. So yes-and gets me closer to the goal. So it's yes, and a bonus action. That has helped me so many times when I'm kind of trying to inch forward towards the ending. It's reaching for that has been very useful in a scene. Especially if it's like something is coming too easily for the character, or it's coming… It's too hard. I can, like, "Okay, you can adjust direction of action."

[Howard] Okay.

[Erin] I'm curious…

[Howard] Who else has questions? Erin?

[Erin] I'm curious, yes, what the… So, you have all these amazing tools. I'm curious if there's anything you wish you had a tool for, but you haven't yet figured out. Something that you're working towards figuring.

[Mary Robinette] Um… Hah… Yeah. That's a great question. So… I'm sitting here… What… For the people who don't have the video feed, I'm staring into the middle distance as I think about the novel that I am writing right now. I wish that… So. Huh. A thing that I have been thinking about a lot recently, which I will talk about later in the season, is the difference between conflict and tension. I wish I had a set of tools for talking about tension that is not conflict based and how to manipulate it. I'm starting to kind of be able to identify it and some of the tools to manipulate it. But it is still such a new concept to me because so much of my training as a writer has been story must have conflict. I've been coming to realize that a story must have tension and that conflict is the easiest way to teach that. But that I don't think that it has to have conflict. So, like, one of the things that I'm actually trying to do in this book is have people… Is have the conflict come from the cooperation. Or have the tension come from the cooperation. It's… It is such… Like, it is working, but I don't have a toolbox for it. I'm definitely feeling myself… My way through it and am looking forward to being at a point where I can reverse engineer it, and can reverse engineer what other people are doing. Like, I can tell that other people… It's like, "Okay. This is a subverted expectation." What are the dials for setting up that expectation? What's the point at which you subvert it? Does it matter which direction that you do the subvers… Like, when you veer off of the expectation, does it matter which direction you go? How do you control that? Like, I really… I am… That's, for me, the toolbox that I'm excited to get my hands on next.

[DongWon] That's so cool.

[Howard] Let me know when you've got that one labeled.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I love watching your process, Mary Robinette. Because… This reminds me of, like, there's a thing that the physicist Richard Feynman said at some point about you don't truly understand the concept until you can teach it to a freshman seminar.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I see you over and over again tackle these new ideas, these new techniques, these new things. Like, watching you sort of figure out how to internalize it, how to do it, and then how to explain it to other people, seems to be the cycle that I see you go through. It's always really exciting just to watch that and participate in it, and end up getting to reap the benefits of the results at the end there.

[Mary Robinette] My dad says that actually what I is an engineer, really. He's sad that I didn't go into programming.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The rest of the world is happy that I did not.

[Howard] There is a computer somewhere that is very sorry that it's not running a Mary Robinette Kowal program. But it's not running one, so it's unable to speak to us, so… Meh. Oh, well.

[Howard] Hey, do you have some homework for us?

[Mary Robinette] I do. What I want you to think about is, I want you to think about the skills that your non-writing life has given you. I talk a lot about the stuff that I've brought from puppetry. Dan has talked about the stuff that he's brought from doing audio. Which is, granted, still writing, but it is the non-writing aspect. Howard talks about the stuff that he gets from drawing. DongWon and Erin are going to be talking about these things as well as we go through the season. So think about your own life. What is a lens that you have that gives you a toolset that is exciting to play with in your writing?

[Howard] Thank you very much, Mary Robinette. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/04/17-49-bodies-are-magical/

Key points: There's a common trope where a disability becomes a superpower. This also often makes the character super useful. And depersonalizes them, too. Be careful of plot relevant abilities. Write your people as people. Do your world building so that your characters can have agency without their abilities becoming a plot point.

MICE: In a milieu story, often people will have someone live in somebody else's body or have a temporary disability, which makes the disability exotic and the person non-human. Idea stories often focus on "What's wrong with this person?" This often reveals an invisible disability, and shows that we are better people for knowing about it. It also makes the person non-human, again. Character stories often mean the person is trying to solve themselves, and focus on dissatisfaction with self. Very inhuman! Event stories often start with a diagnosis that disrupts the status quo, and looks for a cure that either restores the status quo or sets a new status quo. Q.E.D., try to avoid making the disability a plot point, a driver for the story.

Superhero comics often focus on what happens when A and B fight. This is not a good model for exploring abilities or other characteristics.

Final summations:

Chelsea: As speculative writers, try to imagine environments that remove barriers for people with disabilities.

Fran: If you have a disability, or acquire one, write your experience, write your story.

[Season 17, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies Are Magical.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we're going to be talking about bodies are magical. This is the thing where someone with a disability, suddenly, that disability becomes a superpower. Which is not necessarily the way things work.

[Nope, nope, nope]

[Mary Robinette] As we've discussed, there are times when the modifications that you have in the ways you've adapted, that those can be useful, but the disability itself… The classic one that people point at is, of course, Daredevil. Where losing his eyesight gives him magical powers on multiple axes, because all of his other senses have become heightened.

[Fran] Elsa Sjunneson, who we've talked about before, with her book Being Seen, but also online in different essays, has some great breakdowns of the Daredevil problem, by the way. You can Google those, they're amazing, we should probably have a link to that. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] But it is a very, very common trope that you'll see. Sometimes it's also a thing that people will do as a form of overkill. That they're like, "Oh, I don't want the person with the disability to be weak, so I'm going to give them these extra things."

[Chelsea] What I find is that when you have that character with the disability who has the disability, but then they have something that makes them super extra ultra powerful, it also conveniently makes them super extra useful to the narrator and other characters. It de-persons them in a lot of cases.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Fran] Plot relevant disability and plot relevant superpowers both have that same icky feel to them. One of the things that I tend to do is I have a lot of disabled characters in my fiction, but people don't notice them, because they're doing things on the page like protagonizing and antagonizing and making things and breaking things. Their disability doesn't necessarily have to jive with that or be part of the plot, it's just part of who they are. Having that sort of superpower that's utterly convenient to the plot or, unfortunately, sometimes the disability that is plot relevant, really does… It de-personalizes, like Chelsea was saying. What we have been talking about this entire series is seeing people as people and writing people as people and finding places for empathy rather than any other approach towards writing people.

[Mary Robinette] So, these things, let's unpack what we mean about it not being a plot point. What we're talking about is, like, it will absolutely affect the way the character moves through the world. Just the same way that the fact that I am 5'7" affects the way I move through the world. Fran is…

[Fran] 4'10".

[Mary Robinette] 4'10" and one of the things…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That she said to me when we saw each other in person for the first time is that one of the nice things about masks for her was that she could no longer see people's nose hair.

[Fran] Please, please trim. Anyway…

[Mary Robinette] But that is… Like, that's not a plot point. As Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Strokes his mustache. That is a mustache. But the point is, like, that affects the way we move through the world. We see different things, we experience different things, but it is, someone's nose hair or lack thereof is not, like, a plot point. I hope. I mean, maybe. Go for it. If you feel the urge.

[Howard] To use an example that is perhaps less abled in nature, someone with very long hair on a windy day without a hairband, the hair gets in their face. That doesn't mean they're Rapunzel.

[No]

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Fran] On the other hand, just to use the height thing for a different reason, one thing that impacts me directly is when I'm at a stand up cocktail party. Most of the conversation happens directly over my head. I will miss things because people are talking above me. If I have everyone sit down, which I tend to do, then everybody's talking out my level, which is, like, the same thing with Zoom. It was great. Except that people now insist on coming up to me and saying, "I had no idea you were so little. You seemed so…" They want to use the word normal. I'm glad that they stop themselves. I'm really proud of people who stop themselves from using that word. But the aspect of… Like, Zoom is a great leveler for lots of people, but not for others. None of these things are necessarily a plot point, but you can use them as a way to express how you move through the world.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, an example of this… Turning this height thing into a superpower…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Would be… A superpower plot point, would be that if Fran is at a cocktail party and discovers a special clue that only she could discover because she happens to be the right height to look under the table without anyone…

[Fran] Exactly the right height.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly the right height. That's the kind of thing where… I can hear people going, "But sometimes you do need a character who's smaller." It's like, yes. But that can't be their only purpose in the plot. That can't be… Like, every time there's a problem, it's like, "Let's get the small person in."

[Howard] A bomb could also be discovered by the horrible creeper who has a mirror taped to his shoe.

[Fran] Eew! Okay. Eew.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks for that, Howard. Thank you.

[Fran] I'm uncomfortable now.

[Howard] I'm sorry. Hey. You know what. I'm 5'6". I traveled a lot on business. It really did feel like a superpower that I could be comfortable flying coach.

[Mary Robinette] I mean… Those chairs. But at the same time, those… The headrests on those chairs are not built for someone with a short torso.

[Chuckles]

[Fran] To go back to the phrasing that you used, Mary Robinette, where you said, "But you sometimes need someone who is smaller as a character." That idea of, "Oh, I need a person who is like this so that the plot can do X," has… There are points at which that thought process is useful, but when you are constructing fully rounded characters without bias, taking a look at why you feel like you need them for this is an interesting exercise in self examination.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment and pause for the book of the week, and then I… When we come back, we have more to say about this. Our book of the week is…

[Fran] Is not a book!

[Howard] Not a book.

[Mary Robinette] It is not a book, it is something that Fran has been wanting to talk about the entire time we've been recording.

[Fran] Yep. This is the TV series Killjoys. It came on the air in 2015, 2016, and ran for three or four seasons. A couple of those seasons get a little nebulous and a little weird, but then it brought itself back. What I want to talk about with Killjoys is that the premise in definitely season two, especially with an episode called Dutch and the Real Girl, is sort of what we've been talking about. This is an episode with a character who has been hack modded into something where her arm is a gun. But, also, she's got lots of other mods and things, and there is a whole discussion in there about being human, but also having a different role to play in both the series and in society. One of the things that I love about Killjoys, and there's a lot to love about Killjoys… It's got some cyberpunk elements. Victoria Modesta, the model that I mentioned with the prism for one of her legs, is in the show as a special guest for season two. The hack mods are part of a marginalized community group that is a long running theme through this show, Killjoys. One of the things that Killjoys did with this is they hired actual disabled people to play the hack mods. So you've got this amazing… I think Killjoys hired more disabled people to play roles on the show then all of Hollywood at that point. It was amazing to see. It's fantastic to see these actors operating with just the plot points that they have, playing lots of different characters. It's a great show. Especially Dutch and the Real Girl, that's one of my favorite episodes of all time.

[Mary Robinette] So. This is Killjoys, which apparently everyone needs to go watch. As you were talking

[garbled]

[Fran] It was actually produced in Canada, as many good things are. It did run for five seasons, started 2015. Hannah John-Kamen plays the lead in that. She's also in the second Antman as Ghost. So she's all over the place.

[Howard] Cool.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking about that, I'm going to take us a little bit off topic and then bring us back. The… You made me think about discovery. I'm doing a rewatch of parts of it, but in season two, there's some good disability wrapped in that. There's just [background characters]… Just, like, you're watching and somebody just rolls through in a chair, there's… It's really great. None of these are main characters. None of these are main characters, and also, when you look at the bridge, it has steps just built into it.

[Fran] Yep.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So this is a world in which…

[Fran] Also, all of the chairs are fixed. So that character that rolls by can never actually sit at the bridge.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep. That's a great point which I had not thought about.

[Mary Robinette] So part of what we're talking about here when were thinking about bodies are magical and not being plot points, is also, like, the world building that you're doing so that your character can move through this world. So that whatever it is that you have, however you have designed this character, that they can have agency in this story without becoming a plot point. So. I do want to dive in a little bit into what I talk about, about what I mean personally when I'm talking about having it become a plot point. People who are longtime listeners know me and my fondness for talking about the MICE quotient. So, here, the MICE quotient is this organizational structure, right. So, in a milieu story, it begins when you enter a place, and ends when you leave it. Often what you'll see is that you'll see someone have a character… They want to explore disability by having someone live in somebody else's body or they'll have a disability that is a temporary disability. That, basically has the problem of making that disability exotic and it's very, very othering. The idea structure which begins when you ask a question and ends when you answer it is like, "What is wrong with that person?" That's another plot point that you can see… Sometimes see where people will have someone who has like an invisible disability and it's all about, "Oh, now we discover it. Oh, we're better people because we know the answer to this question now."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Again, it's othering because it becomes… That person's the character. Character stories begin when the character is unhappy with their role, some aspect of themselves, and it ends when the character becomes happy with the role, which then means that they are having to… The problem that they are trying to solve is themselves. Which is, again, it is setting a very specific form of normal and having somebody be dissatisfied with who they are. As a plot point, that can be, again, very othering. Then, events begins with a disruption of the status quo, which is often diagnosis. It ends with restoration of the status quo, or the establishment of a new status quo, which means that you're always looking at a cure.

[Howard] Can I just say that I love that in a minute and a half, you've taken the MICE quotient and used it to explain how to do everything wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep.

[Howard] This is beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Thank you. So this is why when you've got a character with a disability, you actually don't want it to be a plot point. You don't want it to be a driver, because if you do… Or, if you do, you have to know that that is the story that you're telling. You're telling one of those versions of stories. You don't want to do it. If you're going to do it, you don't want to do it unintentionally, for certain. But if you want a character and you don't want them to be like, "Hello. I have this magical superpower. I am here because I am useful." Then, it needs to be decoupled from the plot and just affect the way they move through the world. Which is different than these are the story questions that we're trying to solve and answer.

[Howard] It's… While we are chewing on that amazing deconstruction, which I'm again going to say that I love, it's worth pointing out that a lot of where we see disability as superpower done wrong is in comics. One of the tropes of comics, and you see this in especially the ensemble MCU movies, is that at some point there is an idea milieu element which is what happens when Hulk and Thor fight? What happens when Thor and Iron Man fight? What happens when Iron Man and Capt. America fight? Comic book writers… This trope, everybody at some point has to fight everybody else, that is not a great model in which to explore ability, disability, age, old age, youth, whatever, because it is going to be inherently othering for a large portion of the audience.

[Fran] This is where I get to shout out to Marieke Nijkamp who wrote the Oracle Code, which is the story of Barbara Gordon. It's a graphic novel. It was published in 2020, before the rest of things happened. It's fantastic. Marieke is an amazing advocate for disability and disabled writers. Just wonderful to talk about. But if you get a chance to check out The Oracle Code, it is worth your time and does exactly the opposite of what Howard is talking about.

[Howard] To be sure, or to be clear, I say comics. What I mean is the superhero genre. Obviously, comics are a medium which can be used to tell all kinds of stories.

[Mary Robinette] Well, we are approaching the end of our time together. So, before we go into our homework, I just want to check to see if Chelsea or Fran, as our guests for this series, if either of you have any big takeaways that you want our listeners to carry with them before we give them their homework.

[Chelsea] I mean, I think the thing that I've been talking about mostly in all of these episodes is how very much I want us as speculative writers to take the opportunity to imagine environments that are… That basically take away barriers to people with disabilities. Because they're… Well, I'm just going to be opinionated about this… Designed properly.

[Fran] I'm going to direct my comments to those listeners who have a disability, as well as those who may, in the future, have a disability, and just say, "Write your experience. Write your story. In whatever way you want to tell it. If you have the opportunity to reach for empathy, go for it." This is a really important thing, but find… Finding ways to put your story down is actually a wonderful way to just feel present in a way that doesn't mean you're educating people, it's just you're telling a story, you're doing a thing. It's… Please, please write. I would love to see everything you write.

[Mary Robinette] Well, with that, we come to our homework. For your homework assignment, we've had this conversation that at some point, everyone is going to be disabled. So, look at your cast of characters for your work in progress and decide what disabilities your characters have. Some of them will be visible. Some of them will be in visible. Some of them will be things that the characters themselves don't recognize as a disability. Decide what those are, and then make sure that none of them are a plot point. That these are characters who just get to exist and have adventures the same way all of the other characters do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.52: Structure is a Promise

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/26/16-52-structure-is-a-promise/

Key points: A structure you pick may set expectations and make promises you didn't expect. Kishotenketsu. Police procedurals. Mysteries have clues! Three act structure, and hero's journey. Be aware of the structure you use, because audience satisfaction may depend on it. Save the Cat! M.I.C.E. Quotient. Use the structure, but paint over the color-by-numbers, too. Younger readers may need to be taught about the structure. Consider using the nesting of M.I.C.E. Quotient because it is satisfying to audiences.

[Transcriptionist note: Again, I may have confused the labeling. Apologies for any mistakes.]

[Season 16, Episode 52]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Structure is a Promise.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[Howard] I'm here to tell you that whatever structure you picked for the thing you're working on is making a promise that you may not know you've made. For instance, if you're using the hero's journey, you may have promised people that the nice mentor character who is helping your hero is totally going to die. If you haven't decided that they're going to die, your audience may actually be disappointed when your Gandalf or your Yoda survives all the way into Act Three. We're going to talk about how the various structures we use set expectations for audiences and make promises. Often, these are cases of audience bias where we have no control of what people are expecting when they pick up what we've made.

[Kaela] Yeah. I kind of have a fun story about this. When I was younger, I watched Spirited Away for the first time. I'd watched a few Ghibli movies, but I wasn't really much into anime. So I was really unfamiliar with non-Western story structures. So I started watching Spirited Away, and it was this delightful charming thing, but I got about a third of the way into it and I started feeling this underlying anxiety about where is this story going. I don't… Like, we just keep… Like, ah. It actually interfered with my ability to enjoy the movie at all. Because I… My story brain was expecting three act structure with peaks and climaxes and pinch points and all of these things. Instead, Spirited Away is a much more kind of kishotenketsu, which is long slow buildup, world changing event, and then resolution. Because I as an audience member had no idea that that structure even existed, it was so hard for me to engage with the story that was on the screen. Because my brain was like, "What is happening here?" That is, to me, a beautiful example of the way that the structure creates a promise, and because I, as an audience, brought an expectation with me that the story didn't deliver on. I've since watched it multiple times and I love it for exactly what it is now that I know where it's going.

[Megan] Something you find in a lot of especially Hayao Miyazaki's films is that sort of exploration of the world before we get to what you were saying, with the structure wise, because he does not start with a screenplay. Hayao Miyazaki storyboards his whole movie. I'm not going to say like free-form stream of conscious, but he'll just start with the images of a theme, and he'll build just right in a row the whole film before he turns it over to the animators.

[Kaela] Oh, that's a fascinating process.

[Megan] You can buy books of his storyboards. You can see his hand drawings of the entire film. He does it all himself. It's incredible.

[Howard] Well, sadly, we are recording this too close to Christmas for me to say that's what y'all should get me for Christmas…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And have it actually arrive. I think that the story structure underpinning a lot of Hayao Miyazaki is kishotenketsu, which is a four-part structure that we haven't talked about much in Writing Excuses. We talk a little bit about it in Xtreme Dungeon Mastery. But it wasn't until I looked at that story structure that some of the Miyazaki films actually made sense. I was like, "Oh. This is why this happens here instead of happening here." Because my expectations were wrong. But let's talk about some other structures. What are some other structures that make promises and what are those promises?

[Megan] I love hour-long police procedurals. Detective procedurals, murder mysteries. I like, in any language, any like country, I love watching hour-long procedurals. One of the things that that usually promises…

[Howard] By hour-long, you mean like 47 minutes?

[Megan] Yeah. 47 minutes with breaks for commercials. Because those commercials or act breaks are an important part of the structure. That cliffhanger you'll get three act breaks in, where you're like, "Oh. There's another body. What are we going to do now?" [Garbled] there. One of the frustrations I had with watching the BBC Sherlock is that show is all about, of course, what a genius Sherlock is, so it didn't drop the audience clues the way most procedurals would. Sherlock just knows the answer. Or he paid someone offscreen to do the research for him. Instead of somebody dropping a line early on about, "Oh, yeah. Diatomaceous earth. It's used for tropical fish, and is used for this, and it's used for this." And the murder tool has diatomaceous earth on it. Then somebody in Act III casually mentions, "I love my tropical fish," and if you're paying attention, you're like, "That's the murderer."

[Chuckles]

[Megan] Because I'm someone who likes to guess along with it.

[Oh, yeah.]

[Megan] So shows that break that storytelling, or telling a different kind of story, like BBC Sherlock, it's very hard to guess what happens next, because it's not relying on the structure I was expecting going in.

[Kaela] yeah. I would say the BBC Sherlock is not actually a procedural in any way. Which is a surprise for a Sherlock show.

[Yeah]

[Howard] But this actually kind of steps across the line from structure to genre. Because… That's okay. But police procedural is its own kind of genre that comes with an embedded structure. It's weird to me that Sherlock failed to adhere to that, because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The police procedural with the Sherlock Holmes books. We circled back around and BBC said, "Pht! We don't want to do a police procedural, we want to do Sherlock Holmes, who is also Doctor Who and Merlin."

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Howard] But that's me [garbled]. Kaela? You had something you wanted to…

[Kaela] Yeah. So I guess the three act structure's probably my bread-and-butter as a writer. Like, that's how I do… And the hero's journey. Those are like two of my favorites. I guess I like that the hero's journey is just something that you do find embedded in all mythology. Mythology is my… That's my house, man. Mythology… I love the way it speaks universally. But also, it gives you a pretty strong structure for character growth and, like, that's the number one thing for me in stories as well as… Character growth in the hero's journey is just so good. That's why I think that when I watch a show that's kind of promising a hero's journey structure and then they don't really grow, I get frustrated. I'm like, "Ah, that was kind of the whole point, is that you change, but you didn't. Now I feel a little bit cheated. Can I have my refund for this Netflix?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh. Oh, goodness. So, book of the week. I'm going to pitch to you Eragon by Christopher Paolini. Because this is a book which unapologetically draws from the three act… Or not the three act, the hero's journey structure as deployed by Tolkien and George Lucas. To the point that a friend of mine was reading, I think, book 2 and his friend was reading book 1. His friend picked up… Looked up from his, and he says, "Hey. Have they met Yoda yet?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "What do you mean, have they met Yoda yet?" "Well, because I…" These were guys who were super familiar with the form. I'm not knocking Christopher Paolini. He was incredibly successful by delivering a hero's journey which telegraphed the fact that it was a hero's journey and made it super approachable for audiences. So. Eragon, the book.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Howard] I've been told that the movie is not something we speak of in our house.

[Laughter. What movie?]

[Howard] Eragon, the book, by Christopher Paolini.

[To me]

[Howard] Let's talk about some other structures. Sandra, you had something?

[Sandra] [garbled what I was going to say] is that… Taking this back to the whole idea of what can we as writers do, it's important to be aware that the structure you pick is going to create an expectation for the story you're creating. That means that when you are pulling back and looking at the craft and looking at… You had a head full of ideas and characters and what have you, you need to pay attention to the structure, the framework that you're going to stretch your characters and stories across, because that will determine some of the satisfaction of the reader when they're done reading your story, and that kind of thing.

[Howard] Meg.

[Megan] When I was first reading the Eragon books, they actually ended up not being for me, because I loved the original Star Wars trilogy so much that I felt like the books were too close. So, there's that precarious balance of "Yeah, I wanted something like Star Wars in a fantasy world, but. Not. This. Close." I remember getting really frustrated and not finishing the series, because I'm like, "Well, I know everything that's going to happen anyways, so why should I even…" So that's something about… I'd like to segue a little bit into Save the Cat! That I deal with a lot working in the animation industry. Because you will have people that'll be like, "Okay. Make it Save the Cat, but a little different." Because now everybody knows it, and everybody reads it. I have some development friends who, when they're reading a script go… It'll actually be marked against you if you hit all the Save the Cat beats on exactly the pages that Save the Cat recommends you do it in your screenplay.

[Laughter]

[Megan] [garbled] feeling that, "Oh, this writer is just painting by numbers and they're not telling an emotional authentic story."

[Oh, that's…]

[Howard] When you take a structure… When you use… We've talked about this in our episodes on M.I.C.E. Quotient and hero's journey and Hollywood formula and whatever else. I've used this metaphor before. When you adhere to the formula so closely that every beat is predictable, it's like people can see the lines in the color-by-number. You just filled in the little spaces with color, you didn't actually paint over it and make your own picture. It's the difference between canned beans and fresh beans. It still beans, but if you can taste the can, something's gone wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Which is interesting. I mean… This… I think we'll get more into this talking about genre, but there are certain audience segments where… I'm sorry, but they want to taste the can. Like, they showed up for canned beans, and they want to taste the can.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] That's, again, a thing where you're paying attention to your audience, who are you speaking to, and is this an audience who really wants like to taste the can as they go through their media or are they going to be grouchy because you didn't cook fresh?

[Megan] Knowing your audience I think is definitely an important part of how you handle your structure. Like, who are you speaking to, and things like that. We'll get more into that in the next episode with the genre and media promises, too.

[Well, I mean…]

[Kaela] It can be frustrating…

[Go ahead.]

[Kaela] I was going to say, it can be frustrating as a creator when the person who's in charge of publishing your book or distributing your film project, where you're like, "No, listen. Fresh beans are so good." They're like, "Ah. But the can sell so well."

[Yes]

[Kaela] That sometimes it can be hard to break expectations and conventions and still get a large enough audience that's interested in your niche fresh organic beans.

[Chuckles]

[Then…]

[Howard] This is a case where I err on the side of understand the structure first. Know how the structure works. Apply the structure in your writing or your rewriting. Then, if your alpha readers or your beta readers say, "Your structure didn't make promises and then keep them, it telegraphed your punches and sucked all the energy out of them." Then you know that it's time to go back in and over paint the color-by-numbers so people can't see the grid. Sandra.

[Sandra] Another factor to consider… We have three authors here who write for young audiences. You have to remember that what is old and tired and uber familiar to an older audience is brand-new for someone who's 12. They've never encountered it before. One of the reasons that Eragon succeeded so well is because it hit a generation that hadn't grown up with Star Wars. They may or may not have been exposed to Star Wars. But, like, for example, my kids just all rejected Star Wars, which meant Eragon was amazing and fresh and they'd never encountered this before. So our oldest child latched onto Eragon as this brilliant, brilliant thing because it was the first encountering of that hero's journey and it really spoke to her. So when you are writing for younger children, sometimes you need to teach them what beans are.

[Laughter]

[garbled new product]

[Sandra] You are te… You are… As you're writing for young children, you are teaching them the story structures that they will then have in their head as expectations for the rest of their life, which is amazing and scary as a creator.

[Howard] One of the structures that I want to mention here is the M.I.C.E. Quotient because M.I.C.E. works so well. It's milieu, interrogation, character, and event. This structural formula in which you determine what types of sub stories are being told in your story based on these elements. One of the principles of structuring things by M.I.C.E. is that… It's the FILO principal, first in, last out. If you open with milieu, then your story ends with milieu. Milieu was first in, milieu is last out. It's this whole idea of nested parentheses. If you go milieu, idea, character, then it ends character, idea, milieu. This is something that audiences are not typically conscious of when they're consuming a story that's… Because those things are so blurry by the time you've backed all the way away from it. But if you keep that promise, if you adhere to that structure, it's inherently satisfying and it's subtle. It's something that audiences often don't know has been done to them. That's one of my favorite things. That's, for me, the difference between the fresh beans and the canned beans, is that, hey, I delivered the beans, and I delivered them fresh, and you can't tell that I used the recipe off the back of the can or whatever. The metaphor's falling apart.

[Chuckles]

[garbled second metaphors do that]

[Howard] Metaphors do that. Especially from my lips.

[Howard] Hey, we're 18 minutes in. Kaela, do you have homework for us?

[Kaela] I do. Get your pencils ready everybody. I'll be grading.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] No. So, your homework for today, of course, is to first you want to look up all the things that we talked about today. M.I.C.E., the three acts, Save the Cat, hero's journey, kishotenketsu, all of the good stuff. Then, I want you to take your favorite thing, like, if it's your favorite movie, your favorite novel, your favorite web comic, whatever it is. Sit down with it, have these structures out in some way. You can pick one at a time if you want, and watch it all the way through and reverse engineer what it's doing. So you can see how it is hitting or you can even identify which structure it's using or going off of, at least as a skeleton. Then, for bonus points… You want those bonus points, right? Go ahead and take your least favorite thing. I recommend it be a short thing, just so you don't have to spend too much time with it. Then look at the structure again. Reverse engineer why it's not working. You'll learn a lot by reverse engineering things. I highly recommend that process.

[Howard] Thank you, Kaela. Thank you, Megan and Sandra. We're out of time. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.40: Nesting Threads in the M.I.C.E. Quotient

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/03/16-40-nesting-threads-in-the-m-i-c-e-quotient/

Key points: Nesting threads, or first in, last out. Symmetry! When you close a thread, there is a tension drop. You need two or more threads to give most stories an interesting dynamic. You don't have to use them all, and pay attention to how much weight you give each one. Pairing M.I.C.E. thread types can work well. Be careful about braiding too many, though.

[Season 16, Episode 40]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, talking about the M.I.C.E. Quotient, Nesting Threads.

[C.L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C.L.] I'm C. L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette, with Elsie, who is purring very loudly.

[Dan] Hello, Elsie.

[Dan] I am very excited for this episode. We have been circling the concept of nesting threads for five episodes now. Here we are in episode six. We get to dig into it in detail. So, what do we need to know that we haven't already talked about with nesting threads?

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, nesting threads is basically first in, last out. It works because of the length of time that we have to invest emotional energy into a problem. So, there's a couple of things to know about the way people are wired. I am going to say that this is specifically Western storytelling style. There's many different traditions, but the way we are trained is that when a quest… When we ask a question, we want an answer to it. Right? We also want symmetry. Humans tend… And babies tend to respond really well to symmetry. We like recognizing patterns. So it is helpful to have this kind of mirroring thing happen in your story, by having, like, if you begin milieu and then you open an inquiry, to close the inquiry and then you close the milieu. People recognize patterns. The other piece, and this is the more important piece, I think, is the amount of emotional energy that you've invested into something. So going back to my idea of elastics, the longer you stretch an elastic, the more tension it's going to be on it. So if you got something that you start to stretch on page 1 and you don't release it until page 597 if you're Brandon, then that's going to have… There's going to be a lot of tension remaining on that. Whereas if you have another thread that you start on page 100, you have 100 fewer pages to spread that over the span. So knowing that, what happens is if you release the tension on the one… That longest thread before… So, let's say my longest one is milieu, and I release that before I release the one on inquiry, what happens is that there's a tension drop. So when I get my… When I get that other answer, I haven't had as much time to invest in it. Thinking about Wizard of Oz, which you have all watched now, hopefully, when you get to the end, we close things out in sequence. That Dorothy exits Oz… She gets the answer, ruby slippers will carry you home, she exits Oz, she gets back to Kansas, everything is fine, she didn't have to live in a… Kansas farms are all yay and happy. If you remember in the witch's castle when Dorothy is looking at the hourglass, and we see Aunt Em sitting on the porch… Or looking around frantically going, "Dorothy? Dorothy?" That exists to remind you that the status quo is still disrupted. If instead in that hourglass what we see is Aunt Em sitting on the porch, everything about the farm has been restored, status quo is reestablished, that closes that event thread early. So when Dorothy gets out of Oz and goes back to Kansas, it's no big deal. You get a dramatic tension drop because the status quo… We already know that the status quo is restored. There's no… There's no doubt about that in the reader's mind. So that's why nesting threads are very… And thinking about this first in, last out concept is very useful for maintaining that tension through the story. I'm talking about the frame of the story, not the stuff that's happening in the middle.

[Dan] Yeah. Let me use another example. I'm going to talk about my book, Ghost Station, again. So it begins with this… It's about spies in Berlin in 1961. It begins with the message that comes in from a double agent that is gibberish nonsense. So the main thrust of the novel is figuring out what is actually going on. Why was this message weird? What does that mean? Etc. Then it hits a point where the main character and another one he's working with cross over the wall into East Berlin. Then it becomes a milieu section, inside of the larger inquiry section. They are trying to survive in East Berlin and then escape back out again. While inside… Big spoilers for this book… The person that he is working with attacks him. It has this event of, "Oh, no. The person I thought I could trust, I no longer can trust." There's this event that takes place inside of there. Then we tie them off in reverse order. He learns that, "Oh, yes, that person actually I can trust. There were very good reasons for that attack." Then he escapes out of East Berlin. Then he solves the overall problem of what's going on and what this message means. Using what you were just saying, Mary Robinette, if we had resolved those in reverse order. If he had, for example, solved the entire problem of the message and gotten that taken care of while he was still in East Berlin, then it would feel very unsatisfying. Like, well, yes, you've solved this problem, you dope, but now you're stuck on the wrong side. It would be this kind of dragged out ending of, well, the real story is over but he's still in a pickle and he's gotta get himself home and we have a few more obnoxious chapters of that. I had not thought of it in those terms, until you described it that way. But that makes perfect sense as to why you need to close the brackets in the same order you opened them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We've… You've all seen films or things where you're like, "Ah, it's over. No, no, still going." Usually that's because they're closing things out in the wrong order.

[Dan] Yeah. That is really interesting.

[C.L.] I was just going to say that there is something that I have been trying very hard to hold back while you've been going through the previous episodes. It's this. I'm thinking maybe that calling a particular story simply a milieu story or an inquiry story, etc., can't really accurately describe a story because you do need a second ingredient to give the story kind of like… An interesting dynamic?

[Mary Robinette] So, yes, C. It is exactly that. That you have all of these things going on all the time. With like my book, Ghost Talkers, which is coincidentally our book of the week, that has multiple things going on in it. It is an inquiry story. It's a murder mystery, whodunit. But it's also an event story. Because it's a wartime novel. There's constant status quo disruptions. And it is a character story, because the character is learning to… Learning things about themselves and how they move through the world. But it's primarily event inquiry. Those are the major drivers. This helps me… The M.I.C.E. Quotient helps me understand what things, what elements to bring into that story and which ones to focus on. It helps me understand how to end it in a way that was going to be satisfying. While, at the same time, trying to do things that were fulfilling these promises, but hopefully in unexpected ways.

[Mary Robinette] But, Ghost Talkers, for people… Since it is book of the week. It is probably actually my favorite of my novels, and it is the one that the fewest people have read.

[Dan] It is actually my favorite of your novels.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. It…

[C.L.] I love Ghost Talkers.

[Mary Robinette] I went on book tour… My book tour started on election day in 2016, and weirdly… Weirdly!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There was just not a lot of interest in books at that point. I don't know what was going on them. But it is a World War I spy novel in which mediums work as advertised. The soldiers are trained, conditioned, that when they die, they have to report in as ghosts. So you have the Spirit Corp. Then things go wrong. Someone gets killed, and they aren't supposed to. Not that anyone is necessarily supposed to get killed, but… You know what I mean. But it kicks off this murder mystery. Then it's a look for who the betrayal… The person who… That's the spy and the saboteur is. So World War I spy novel with ghosts is basically it. Ghost Talkers.

[Mary Robinette] But when you listen to it or read it, one of the things that I think you'll notice is that I could have weighted it differently. Because all of those elements are there, and I could have made different choices about where I was putting the emphasis in the story. That would have shifted dramatically the direction of the story and the way the ending plays out.

[Charlotte] That's great. I mean, what I'm hearing is that you can have as many M.I.C.E. threads as you want, and actually maybe it's a good idea to have more than one for a little bit of spice, a little bit of texture as C was talking about. I remember, when I was plotting my novel, I was like I'm going to… It starts with character, then it leads into event, and then it goes into milieu, and then it goes into inquiry. I remember talking it through with you, Mary Robinette, and you were like, "You don't have to have them all." I was like, "Oh. I don't?" So maybe it's a question of how many and also what weight you put on each quotient?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes, exactly. It's… It is how heavily you weight them. Because you can… Like, all of these things will exist in the story. It's just how much of them are you letting drive? That's… That is the thing that is tricky to figure out. So what I have found when you're doing this is that one of the things that works well is to pair disparate M.I.C.E. thread types. So one of the things that will happen, particularly in multiple POV books, you've got one major plot and then the other one feels extraneous. You're annoyed every time you have to switch over to the B plot. What I find is that frequently when that is happening, it is because they are the same M.I.C.E. thread. So that they are… Or the same M.I.C.E. type. That they are, say, both events. But one of the events is lower stakes than the other. So it is difficult to care as much. So it always feels like a tension drop. Whereas, if you have one event and one character one, they can intersect each other in different ways. But the other thing that they can do is that they can have comparable stake levels. So that when you move from one to the other, you don't have that same tension drop.

[Dan] Would you also suggest or recommend that when you are nesting them, not so much multiple POV's, but nested inside of each other, that they be different types of elements as well? If you've got a milieu inside of a different milieu, it can start to feel repetitive. We have to escape from this place, and now we have to escape from this other place, with no variation in tone.

[Mary Robinette] So, the… Yes and no. Mostly what happens when you do that is that it just reads as an extension of the original problem. So in Star Wars, the rescuing the princess, they have to get in, they have to get the princess, they have to get back out. While they're in there, Storm Troopers… Surprise! So they have to escape by jumping into a garbage… A chute. Does that work? Yes, it does. But it is a garbage chute. So now they have another milieu within the larger milieu that they have to escape. So that… That's just a long series of obstacles… Consequences, obstacles, that's just an extension of that original one.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So that's… Actually, blowing up the Death Star itself is, we have to get in, drop this package off… Which is this bomb, and then get back out without being killed. I mean, it's still, that's… It's… There's just a lot of milieu driving that. But that is not, I would say, the major driver. What are you thinking, C?

[C.L.] I was just thinking about like the idea of having like the two milieu stories in one. Because I was thinking about like the Lord of the Rings where it's like basically they're going on a journey to reverse heist a ring into a volcano. But, like, the first part of the story is about them leaving Hobbiton. It's just like the segments of, like, we're in a place, we're going to leave a place. We're traveling across a place in order to get to a place. I think it works. Generally. What I was thinking about was you want the variety of story type things going on in order to have some variety, but at the same time, I always try to think of my different plot threads as they have to be braidable. Like, they have to… Like, if I have an inquiry thread and I have a character thread, then each one has to affect the other one.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[C.L.] So it's just like two strands twisted together, like a rope. But if I add a third one, then it has to… Then things get a little bit more complicated, because each one has to affect the other two. Then, if you add a fourth one…

[Chuckles]

[C.L.] Like, lots of people know how to do three strand braids, but not a lot of people know how to do four strand braids.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Exactly. That's a great analogy. We're going to be talking about that when we get to the next one, which is the middles and conflicts. We're going to be talking about how to braid the stuff in the middle. The nesting stuff is mostly like where do you start the thing and where do you end it. But, yeah, you're exactly right, the more you layer in there, the harder it is to juggle all of those things.

[Mary Robinette] So. This brings us to our homework. Take your fairytale. What I want you to do is I want you to look at two M.I.C.E. threads. You're going to… Now you get to do it with two of them. Okay? So maybe you decide that you're going to do character and event, or you might decide that you're going to do milieu and inquiry, or milieu and character. Whatever. So I want you to figure that out and nest it neatly, so that you begin with character, then… So, Goldilocks is tired of being treated like a child, then she enters the Bears' house, does some investigating, and decides that actually maybe she should go home, so she goes home and then she's like, "I am actually happy being a child and my home is much nicer than the place I explored." So we have this very nice little nested thing. So you're going to do a two strand thing like that. Then the thing that I want you to do is I want you to take those tags and I want you to invert them. So, in mine, Goldilocks would enter the Bears' house, and while she's in the Bears' house, she would make a discovery about herself because of her exploration that would then cause her to go home. As opposed to the other way around. So, your job is to do a two strand version of whatever your fairytale is. Then, after you've written that out… You don't have to write the entire story, you can just bullet point it. Flip that, flip the tags, and do it the other way. See what that does to where the conflicts land and how the beginning and end feel.

[Dan] And you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/09/26/16-39-deep-dive-into-event/

Key points: Event stories are driven by disruptions of the status quo, the normal. They tend towards externally driven conflicts. Begin with a disruption of the status quo, end either with a restoration of the old or a new status quo. Events happen! But mostly, sequences of breaking, over and over and over. Cascades following one decision. But not just big events, small disruptions too. Obstacles are when each action further disturbs the status quo. Complications are when one problem opens up a different problem. Focus on where the characters are expending effort, what are they trying to solve. External events can be overwhelming, how do you avoid that? First, every try-fail cycle does not need to be the same size, or have the same difficulty. So, control pacing by picking smaller events and consequences, and stacking them. Make a list of possible problems, and slowly escalate them. Consequences are what matters to the character. When you start a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of a story, you only have one. Gradually take away choices, close doors, until there is only one left. Make it a hard choice!

[Season 16, Episode 39]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive into Event.

[C.L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C.L.] I'm C.L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We are back with the fifth episode of our M.I.C.E. Quotient master class. So excited to have you all here for it. Today we're going to talk about the fourth and final element, event.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So event stories are driven by disruptions of normal. These are… Tend to be very externally driven conflicts. They began when a status quo is disrupted, and end when it is restored or there's a new status quo. So many things that we think of as plot are actually event. There's a tendency I've noticed among particularly science fiction and fantasy readers to think that the big actions that are happening are all of the plot, and they forget that all of the other pieces are also plot.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But event is all of the things that happen. But it's mostly about things breaking over and over and over again. It's that thing that happens in the real world where you're like, "I'm just…" And I should say, we are having our bathroom remodeled as we are recording this.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The cascading effect of making one decision to change a status quo, which is, let's have a new bathroom, winds up impacting everything else. Because once you decide that you're going to peel up the floor, then you discover that since your grandfather built the house, that the floor beams are actually two by sixes instead of two by tens which is standard for a floor. So that then in turn breaks their ability to put in water lines and air conditioning because they have to fit them into smaller spaces. Also, then you have to have things reassembled. Then, when you're trying to record a podcast, there are contractors who are constantly coming in and interrupting. None of you have heard any of this because we have solved it by managing to record around things. But it is this cascading chain led from one decision to make one change in the status quo that is then breaking all the rest of my normal. Good times.

[Charlotte] Good times. I'm so glad that you said that, because I think certainly for me when I was starting out with event, I always thought of it is something massively big, explosions, a meteor coming, Independence Day type thing, but it can actually be something much, much smaller, like a bathroom or a tap on your sink breaking, something like this. Anything that disrupts the status quo, or your normal. Right?

[Mary Robinette] That is absolutely correct. So, again, as you say, this is… But a lot of times when we think about ramping up the tension in event stories, we think about needing to make things bigger and bigger and bigger. It's really just about this cascade of normal breaking, that you attempt to fix something and not only does it not work, but something else breaks next to it. So, again, in the obstacle versus complication thing, obstacles in this form are when each action causes the status quo to become more disturbed. So, again, in small frame world, if someone has a problem with their boss, that's an external problem. That's not the problems they have with themselves, that's an external problem. So they want to change that status quo. They go to HR to try to resolve it. That action then directly causes them to get fired. So that's an obstacle. It's where they tried to change something and a problem in the same thread line causes it to just go wrong. Complications are when a question opens up to a different problem. So someone has a problem with their boss. They go to HR. That, in turn, leads to them being held prisoner by terrorists. Who are the terrorists? Where did they come from? This is heading things in a completely different way. So these are… This is the kind of thing that you're looking for. I mean, you could make the argument in some cases that this is a continuation of a disruption of status quo. I am thinking of it is kicking off an inquiry thread about who are these people and the milieu of escaping a hostage situation.

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say, event is the one that is the hardest for me to get my head around. Is that your experience as well? Is there something trickier about event, or am I just thinking about it wrong?

[Mary Robinette] I think that it is that… Because event is action driven, everything feels like it's an event. Stories are inherently about change. That's a thing that happens in stories. So when you're looking at… Let's say that you're doing a milieu story and your characters… Let's say your characters crash land on a planet. If they arrive on the planet, that is definitely a milieu story and the thing that they're trying to solve is getting off the planet. If they are explorers and they land under a controlled set up in the story begins after they have already arrived on the planet and they are attempting to… Their ship breaks. Okay, the ship breaking is, at this point, an event. Because it has disrupted their status quo. Because they're supposed to be there and they're supposed to be exploring. Whereas if they are crashing on the planet, if they are there unexpectedly, and trying to leave, their primary goal is to leave the planet and fixing the event of the problem with the ship is incidental to the primary thrust, which is getting off and surviving the planet. That's why it is… With this one, and with all of them, the question that you're looking at and the thing that is often the deciding factor isn't necessarily… I mean, a lot of it is where you start and stop. But a lot of it is what are they trying to solve. Where are they expending their effort? In a murder… If someone is murdered and you put the focus, the primary effort goes into trying to answer questions, that's an inquiry. If the primary focus goes into learning to live after this person has been murdered, and someone else's dealing with the question of who did it, there are detectives who are going off and solving things. But the focus of the story is on how does the widow survive, how does the widower learn to fold his own laundry… It's a little bit of gender stereotyping, and…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We're just going to roll with it right now. My husband is actually the one who does laundry in our household. So… But this is… That's the… One of them, the focus is on trying to establish a new normal, and the other is on trying to answer a question. That tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle and where you're putting your emphasis.

[Dan] Okay. So, as with some of the other ones we've looked at, the value then of figuring out what kind of story, which of the four M.I.C.E. elements you're dealing with is that it helps you to focus your story and it helps you take it in the right direction, so that you're not spinning off like you said into story bloat and adding unnecessarily unnecessary elements because you know more exactly what your story is about.

[Mary Robinette] That is correct.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, I'm going to talk… Pause here to talk about our book of the week, because I think that's a good example of this, and the trickiness there. So I am the audiobook narrator for Seanan McGuire. Also, currently, as we are recording this, I am in the process of recording When Sorrows Come which is her new book. When you hear this, it will be out. It's book 15 in the October Daye series, so FYI. But the thing about these books is that they are a combination inquiry-event with character going on as well. But the thing about the inquiry… Toby is a detective, and there are things that she needs to answer. But really, when you're signing up for the books, what you're interested in is watching her kick some ass. So the primary driver in a lot… Is arguably that these are event books. Chaos just surrounds her, things are constantly going wrong. She's constantly getting stabbed, she's constantly needing to solve problems. There is much less emphasis put on the actual detecting. The detecting exists is a set up to give us all of the events that go wrong. Are we there and interested in it? Yes. Does it need to carry weight? Absolutely, because it's a novel, and it has multiple threads. But the driver for most of this is about this… These events, these things going wrong. There's also character stuff that's happening that is wonderful. There's… It's kind of a constant coming-of-age. But it is a coming-of-age that is always being kicked off by things going terribly, terribly wrong. And that affecting everything else in Toby's life. I like these books a lot. I enjoy narrating them. I… In every book, Seanan makes me cry while narrating.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I highly recommend them. I get better as a narrator, FYI, over the course of 15 books. So don't judge me too harshly on the first books. But…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] But that was… The new one is When Sorrows Come. Correct?

[Mary Robinette] When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire. Yes. It…

[Dan] Awesome.

[Mary Robinette] Is absolutely a… It is status quo disruptions, just constant status quo disruptions. Like, we're going to check this thing out. Then the process of checking this thing out causes someone to get killed. The process of checking out how they get killed causes someone else to get killed. This is not a spoiler if you ever read an October Daye novel.

[Chuckles]

[Charlotte] So, with an event story, if it's about action, external things happening, status quo's being disrupted, how do you keep that from becoming overwhelming? Like, something happens and then something else happens and then another thing happens and it's all related, it's all consequence and staying in the same M.I.C.E. element. I guess it's a question about pacing, really. Like, how to control that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, pacing… The… One of the things that I misunderstood what I was first learning to apply the M.I.C.E. elements to things is thinking that every try-fail cycle had to be the same size, and that they all had to be the same levels of difficulty. So, similarly, that I that all of the consequences had to ramp up at the same proportional level.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that you can do when you're trying to control pacing through the events that happen in the consequences of those events is to think about smaller consequences and stacking them. Sometimes what I will do is I will make a list of possible consequences, things that can go terribly wrong. Then I'll… This is in a… I should say, this is in a phase when I'm stuck and brainstorming. It is not the way I just… Normally I just write. But when I'm stuck and brainstorming, I'll list the consequences and then I'll rank them in kind of best case scenario to worst-case scenario.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Then remove the best case scenario and sort of dole out the worst-case scenarios in a slowly escalating piece of rolling disasters.

[Charlotte] Right. This is all…

[Mary Robinette] But, like pacing is… Go ahead.

[Charlotte] No, I was going to say, this is always in relation obviously to your character, because what is devastatingly awful to me might not be the same for my sister or my friend. So it's always with the character in mind, right, the list of consequences?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlotte] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Right, right. Exactly. Because you're thinking about the character's status quo being disrupted. Although… So it is their sense of normal and their place in the world. The world being disrupted, for instance, there are big disruptions like the horrible disruptions happening in Greece right now as we're recording this. Terrible, terrible fires. Those are not affecting me. So it is a disruption of the status quo, but it is not a disruption to my status quo. C?

[C.L.] There was something I wanted to add around pacing. One thing that really got my head around the concept of pacing was the idea that when you begin a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of the story, you have one. Pacing is all about taking choices away, gradually. Closing more doors until there is only one thing left to do.

[Dan] Oh, that's brilliant.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here going, "Yeah. Yeah, because it really is…" It is about getting to… Trying to get them to a point where it's an impossible choice, it's a choice that is hard.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Speaking of things that are hard, should I give them homework?

[Yes]

[Dan] I think that's great.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Grab your fairytale. You are going to attempt to strip out everything except the event stuff. So with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the three bears come home, there is a home intruder in the bear's home. Furniture has been broken. They have to drive this little blonde girl out of their home. Their dinner has been eaten, they have to re-make dinner. Papa Bear has to repair furniture. Then, and only then, after they have restored their status quo, are they truly safe.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Mary Robinette] Or there's a home intruder and Papa Bear just kills her. Now they have to live with the consequences.

[Laughter]

[garbled… Porridge. What are you doing, Papa Bear? I'm retiring.]

[Laughter]

[Dan] Okay. So I want to ask, and I know this is homework, but I want to dig into this for a second. Is there a way to cast Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an event story from Goldilocks' point of view without making it just a milieu story?

[Mary Robinette] So, it is about a disruption to the status quo. If we start…

[Dan] If we start the story when she's in the house and the bears show up?

[C.L.] I think in this case…

[Dan] I don't know.

[C.L.] Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as an event story, Goldilocks is the antagonist.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. The only… Like… I think if you… Huh. So, it is about a change in the status quo. If Goldilocks wants to make a change in the status quo, then she would need… What does she want to change? Goldilocks. Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch. You have to start it at a different point.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch and is trying to force her to take a nap. She doesn't want anything to do with that. So she is going to make a forcible break from her family and she's going to run away from home. It gets back into character again.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wow. I'm not sure. I think there's got to be a way to make Goldilocks an event story.

[Dan] Well, rather than puzzle over it now, that'll be a bonus homework. If anyone comes up with a really good one, let us know.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] But, for now, you are out of excuses. Go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.38: Deep Dive into Character

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/09/19/16-38-deep-dive-into-character/

Key points: Character stories are driven by character's self-doubt, angst, internal conflicts. A problem with themselves. They begin with "Who am I?" and end with, "This is who I am." Often paired with an external catalyst to cause the moment of self-doubt. An exploration of self-discovery. Wanting to change, to be somebody different. Character stories do not require a deeply flawed character. Struggles with priorities, struggles with expectations. Obstacles are when each self-revelation opens up new problems with self-identity. Complications are when the self-revelation opens up different problems not related to identity. Coming-of-age stories are often character stories, trying on different identities, coupled with event stories, changes in the external status quo. In try-fail cycles in character stories, the character is either clinging to an old self-definition or trying on a new one, asking, "Is this who I am?" Many stories have an outer character frame, because it provides a satisfying emotional payoff at the end of the story. How do you avoid navel gazing? Multiple threads, stakes, or... make sure you externalize the internal changes!

[Season 16, Episode 38]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. Deep Dive into Character.

[C.L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C.L.] I'm C. L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We are continuing our really wonderful M. I. C. E. Quotient class taught by Mary Robinette Kowal. Thank you so much. And thank you to C. L. and Charlotte for being here. Today we get a talk about character in nice juicy details. So, take it away.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. To recap, in the M. I. C. E. Quotient, character stories are basically stories that are driven by the characters' self-doubt. Angst. They are very much about internal conflicts. They are about a problem that the character has with themselves. They began when your character basically asks, "Who am I?" and they end when they say, "This is who I am." Most of the time, when you see a character story told in the wild, it is paired with something else, and there is a catalyst, an external catalyst, that causes that moment of self-doubt. That moment does… Can… Doesn't have to be a major driver of the story. So if your character is plagued with self-doubt because… It's like I thought that I was a charming philanthropist, and someone is like, "No, actually, I find you very much an asshole." They don't need to necessarily try to fix that person's opinion of them. But that can be the moment that causes them to have the self-doubt, and they're like, "Am I? Am I? I thought I was charming?" Then kicks off this exploration of self-discovery. It also can be something that they are trying to fix. So in a romance, that relationship that misin… That probably completely accurate impression is something that they would be trying to fix, because they wanted to have a relationship with the person. But they don't have to. So, in a classic one, it is just about the character being sad about who they are and wanting to be somebody different. I'm also going to say…

[Charlotte] So in my…

[Mary Robinette] Oh. Yes. Go, Charlotte.

[Charlotte] Sorry, Mary Robinette. I just completely spoke over you. But I think while it's true that an event can help kick off a character story, also, the reverse is true? So the novel that I'm currently grappling with, it's the character and their flaw who makes a mistake, and then that kicks off an event that upsets the status quo. So you can play around with which order these things happen in.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Absolutely. One of the challenges sometimes with this is that the urge when you're doing a character story is to make the character deeply flawed so that they can come to some magical realization and become a better person. The fact is you don't have to make someone deeply flawed to have a character story happen. It can be just two pieces of themselves warring about which… What they're going to prioritize. Do they prioritize work or family? This is a thing that we often have to struggle with. That is enough to be a character story.

[Dan] Yeah. A great example that came to mind is It's a Wonderful Life. Which is a character story about a really, really good person. Who, kind of his problem is he's got big ambitions and big dreams that he keeps giving up because he's too nice. He gives all his money and all his time to other people. That does eventually lead him to a suicide attempt, so there's definitely flaws at work. But in general, it's a character story about a very good person rather than about a very flawed one.

[Charlotte] I'm also thinking about the kind of character story where someone is trying really, really hard to be who they think they are supposed to be, and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with character flaws at all. That the process of their character story is to question all of these things that they are supposed to be, and discover who they actually are. So, in a way, it's actually a story about rebellion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Which actually leads me to talk a little bit about the obstacles versus complications in this form. So, obstacles in… When you're looking at a character story, is that each self revelation, each time they discover something new, it opens up additional problems with their self identity. So if they're like, "Well, this is who I'm supposed to be, this is how everybody sees me." When they're going through that, and then they realize, "Oh, but this doesn't actually fit me." That shows them… This one piece of how everybody sees me doesn't fit me, and if I try to shift that, it shows this problem with this other piece of me. So you can have this cascading sense of problems with self identity. But complications are when self revelation opens up a different problem that is not related specifically to their identity. So this would be things like where… That… Imposter syndrome makes them decide that they aren't going to turn in… That they aren't going to turn in the manuscript, say. And they aren't going to communicate to their editor about this. I'm not speaking to anyone in our audience at all.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's all being motivated by this sense of self, but what it kicks off is this whole cascade of event problems, where everything has to move around because the manuscript hasn't been turned in. It could eventually lead to a status quo change, where they are… They have to return the advance. To be clear, just for anyone who's afraid of this, it is totally okay to be late with your manuscript as long as you communicate clearly with your editor.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I say… And I am late with my manuscript.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I have a question, but before we get to it, I'd love to hear about the book of the week. So, Charlotte, you're the one who has our book of the week this time.

[Charlotte] That's right. It's me on book of the week. So, my book of the week is Popisho. P. O. P. I. S. H. O. In the US, or This One Sky Day in the UK, by Leone Ross. It is full of amazing, magical characters. It's a super sensual novel. It conjures a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits. It just brims and blisters with life and love and grief and magic. The overarching, I guess, thread is character, because it's also a love story.

[Mary Robinette] I think I need to read this, a lot.

[Charlotte] You do. Everybody should read it. Popisho…

[Mary Robinette] Popisho or This One Sky Day.

[Charlotte] This one… That's it!

[Mary Robinette] Dan, what was your thing?

[Dan] Okay. So I am wondering about coming-of-age novels. Coming-of-age stories. Something like Little Women or Huckleberry Finn. Are those character stories?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I'm asking mostly because I can't think of where else they fit.

[Mary Robinette] They are. I mean, so, coming-of-age often is coupled with event, because they are experiencing a change in external status quo. Not always. But frequently. But really, what it is is that the character is trying on different identities, a lot of times, as part of the coming-of-age. This is something that we all go through when we are teens, and sometimes it continues on. The thing to understand about character stories is the try-fail cycles. So in try-fail cycles, your character is basically clinging to their old self-definition or they are trying on a new one. It's basically, it's this… The idea is that we… Our self-definition is super precious to us, and shifting it is terrifying. Because it completely redefines who we are. So every time you have a try-fail cycles, what your character is doing is like, "Is this who I am?" is the question that they're asking. If they're trying to break out of a role, it's like it's someone that they don't want to be. If they're trying to take on a new role, this is… They're experimenting. So, "Is this who I am?" is the question that they're asking. When they fail, the answer is no, this is not who I am. That leads them to their next level, because they have to try something else at that point. So, that's… That is basically what's going on with the try-fail cycle. In the coming-of-age stories, it's… They're… They are doing two things, frequently, when it's a kid growing up. They are trying to cling to the safe things of childhood, and they're also trying to reach to the adulthood. So frequently what you've got is they're doing both. They are trying to cling to their old self-definition and they are trying to try on the new ones at the same time.

[Dan] Yeah. It occurs to me as well that character might be the most common. As we talk about nesting these things, character might be that the most common outer frame. You look at something like Shawshank Redemption, which is clearly a milieu story overall, but it doesn't really end until the character Red learns to hope again. Which is how we started the movie. There's this thin shell of character development around it. There's countless examples that we don't necessarily have to go through. But whatever story you're telling, there's this character frame around it, because that's kind of that really satisfying emotional button on the end of the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, as you were saying that, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. This is… Reluctant hero is the same…" That's the… Like, "Am I a hero? No." Then you get to the end of the story. "I am a hero."

[Dan] Yeah. I mean, not to do another Morgan Freeman one, but Seven does the same thing. It is obviously an inquiry story, through and through. But it begins with Morgan Freeman saying, "This is a horrible place and my life is awful and I gotta get out of here." It ends with him saying, "You know what? I can do a lot of good if I stick around here." Again, he has learned to hope, he has grown as a person. That is the shell around the inquiry story, is this character frame.

[C.L.] That is the most optimistic reading of the ending of Seven that I have…

[Laughter]

[C.L.] Ever heard in my life.

[Dan] Well, but it's true, though, because the inquiry story ends horribly, but the story itself ends with him kind of getting a little bit of hope. Yeah, it's… You gotta really dig through some mud to find any kind of optimism there, but it's there.

[Charlotte] It's there. Mary Robinette, and my other people in this podcast, question. Character story. How do you get it… How do you stop it from being navel gazey? How do you make it a driver, how do you keep it going? How do you make it exciting?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, this is… That's such a good question, because frequently people are just… They think, "Oh, if my character is dealing with this internal self-doubt, it's all my character just going, 'Oh, woe is me. Woe!'"

[Charlotte] Absolutely. A lot of describing of the thoughts and the feelings and the… There's no action.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So…

[C.L.] As… It's… I was going to say, like, the thing about all of these elements so far that I'm seeing, especially with character, is that it needs some juice.

[Charlotte] Yes.

[C.L.] Like, we're doing an escape from this place because… We are answering these questions because… We are examining ourselves and changing because…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. This is, again, why you almost never see them solo, because they can be super dull. You need the juice that another thread gives you. Or the stakes, what… Why does it matter to the character. The… For me, the thing that I think about is that while you have an internal conflict, you have to externalize it to make it visible. So, again, I come out of theater, and so what you're looking… One of the things that we say is, "Acting is reacting." That the character… It's not just the character sitting there and having feelings inside themselves, it is them reacting to their environment and moving through it and taking action. But the actions that you take and the reactions that you have change from person to person. What happens in a character story is that a character is becoming a different person as they go through the story. So the actions, the externalization of that change means that they are making different concrete choices in the physical world, based on the internal changes that are happening to them. So making… Figuring out why… What are the… What does the way their mind is built, what does that do to affect the way they move through the world? Then you make… You frequently windup presenting them with increments of the same choice and that they respond to that choice in slightly different ways each time they come upon it. It doesn't mean that it has to be exactly the same beats, but it's the same kind of thematic choice. Like, do I kick the puppy this time or do I not kick the puppy?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] The question we all must ask ourselves.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I may have just revealed too much about myself there.

[Dan] Awesome. So what homework do we have for character?

[Mary Robinette] Shockingly, we're taking our fairytale and we are converting it straight to being just a character story. So, in our story of Goldilocks, there are four different characters and I can decide to center that story on any one of them. So if I center it on Goldilocks, Goldilocks is tired of being treated like a child. So she is going to prove that she's not a child by going out and having adventures. Then realizes the adventures are too frightening for her, and that maybe she's better off being a little girl after all. Or, it can be Mama Bear desperately wants to be a great porridge artist. But no one appreciates her porridge. Her family doesn't. She's disconsolate. Her family takes her out to try to cheer her up. She attempts to pack a picnic to fit into the mold that they want her to fit into. She's just so unhappy making sandwiches. Sandwiches are for a different kind of bear. She returns home nearly broken and discovers that someone has eaten her porridge and loved it. She has found her audience. A little blonde girl. So you can do this in any way you want. Now, obviously, there is in my very dramatic Mama Bear telling, there is an event that happens in there that's the catalyst, which is someone comes and eats her porridge. But what we're looking at there is her attempting to fit herself into the mold that people are expecting her to be in, and her sadness that she is not appreciated for who she truly is. A great porridge artist. So…

[Dan] Well, now I want to read that version of the story.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So your job is to take whatever you're working on and try to strip it down to being just character. Good luck.

[Dan] Excellent. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/29/16-35-what-is-the-m-i-c-e-quotient/

Key Points: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient? Milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Milieu stories are driven by place, beginning when a character enters a place and end when they exit. The conflicts keep the character from leaving. Inquiry stories begin with a question and end when the character answers it. The conflicts keep the character from answering the question. Character stories start with "Who am I?" and end with recognition of self. The conflicts focus on blocking change. Event stories are action, starting with disruption, and ending with return to normal or establishing a new normal. The conflicts are all about blocking that restoration. Most stories have multiple threads, nested like Matryoshka dolls. The M.I.C.E. Quotient can help you decide what to include or remove, by identifying what kind of thread you are working on. The M.I.C.E. Quotient originated with Orson Scott Card, although his idea element has been renamed inquiry. Almost all stories, from short stories to novels, have multiple threads, involving several M.I.C.E. elements.

[Season 16, Episode 35]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, deep dive into the M.I.C.E. Quotient, episode one, What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

[C. L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C. L.] I'm C. L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We are very excited to have you here. This is the start of another eight episode master class. We're going to have Mary Robinette teaching us all about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. This is something she's an absolute expert on. We're very excited. Before we get into this, let's get some quick introductions. We've got two incredible guest hosts with us this time around. C. L. Polk and Charlotte Forfieh. C. L.… C, can you introduce yourself?

[C. L.] Hi. I'm C. L. Polk. I write fantasy novels. I wrote a trilogy called the Kingston Cycle. I have a standalone book called The Midnight Bargain. I had a short story read on LeVar Burton Reads.

[Dan] [Oooo] That's awesome.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dan] Well, we're excited to have you. Thank you very much for being on the show. Charlotte, how about you? Tell us about yourself.

[Charlotte] Hi. Hi, everyone. My name's Charlotte Forfieh. I'm coming to you out of the UK. I'm an emerging writer. I've written a few short stories and had them published. I'm currently grappling with a novel.

[Mary Robinette] I invited both C. L. and Charlotte to join us for this for related reasons. We've all… All three of us have had long conversations about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. But C approaches writing in different ways than I do. It's been interesting… I subscribe to their Patreon and it's been interesting to watch the way they talk about writing. It's really cool. Highly recommended. Charlotte is early career, but actually has formal education in writing, which I do not, and is one of my mentees and is actively working on her first novel using the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Some of the conversations that we were having around that also made me think, you know, this would be useful, I think, to a lot of the… You, listeners, because one of the things that happens with Dan and I is that we've been doing this for long enough that we forget sometimes about the things that are hard at the beginning. We also shorthand so much that frequently it's like, well, obviously. Obviously you're doing that. Everyone's like, "Uh, excuse me. Um, that? What is that?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, with all of that, here's how this is going to go. We're going to do an overview of the M.I.C.E. Quotient today. You're going to hear a lot of me talking today. Then, in the subsequent weeks, we're going to take each individual element of the M.I.C.E. Quotient and look at it, do a deep dive into it, and then we'll look at how you can use these tools.

So, I should probably explain what the M.I.C.E. Quotient is. The M.I.C.E. Quotient is an organizational theory. It's an acronym. It stands for milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Longtime listeners will have heard me talk about it is the MACE Quotient, because there was a time when I was experimenting with using Ask-Answer for the inquiry. But I realized that in podcast it frequently sounded like I was saying Ass Cancer, which was not helpful…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] As a descriptive phrase. So, inquiry. It turns out that you can pretty much explain every story, fiction and nonfiction, through this fairly simple organizational theory. I'm going to talk about this through the lens of fiction, but it is everywhere. So, stories are made of these four elements. They're mixed in different proportions. Milieus, inquiries, characters, and events. These elements can help determine where a story starts and stops and the kinds of conflicts your characters face.

So, for instance, milieu stories are driven by place. These stories begin when a character enters a place and they end when they exit. So, things like Gulliver's Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, are classic examples. The neat thing is that if you know where a milieu story ends, this also tells you what sort of conflicts go in the middle, because your job as an author is to figure out what your story needs to do and then systematically deny them the solution. So, milieu conflicts end when your character exits the place. That means that the conflicts are all about keeping the character from leaving. So these are things like struggling to exit, trying to survive, and attempting to navigate. That's milieu.

Inquiry stories are driven by questions. They began when a character has a question and they end when they answer it. It's a super complicated structure. So, mystery stories, classic inquiry stories. Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot. For an inquiry conflict, your goal is to keep your character from answering the question. They're lied to, they can't understand the answer, the answers lead to dead ends, so many red herrings. These are inquiry conflicts.

Character stories are pretty much driven by angst. In the simplest form, they began when a character's unhappy, they end when they are happy. But the real start of a character story is when a character says, "Who am I?" and it ends when they're like, "Oh. This is who I am." They begin with this shift in identity, the self identity, and they end when that character solidifies their self-definition. So, coming-of-age stories, romances. The big thing there with conflicts, your character's trying to change, stop them. Don't let them break out of their roles. Fill them with self loathing. Have the change backfire. I'm not really a writer. I mean, that's a character story, right?

Event stories are driven by action. These began when the status quo is disrupted. So when normal breaks. They end when it's restored or there's a new status quo. Yes, everyone dies does count as a new status quo so this is disaster stories, like Inferno, Deep Impact. By this point, you probably understand the drill. You do not let your character restore the status quo. You get fight scenes, chase scenes, explosions. They try to set things right. It has unintended consequences. Just being mean. Like, that is your literal job as an author.

Now, it is easy to confuse character stories and event stories. Character stories are about internal conflicts. I'll never be popular. Event stories are about external conflicts. Oh, no, an asteroid is coming at the Earth.

So that's what the individual M.I.C.E. elements look like. We are going to do a deep dive into each one of those. But as we do that, I'm just going to go ahead and flag for you to think about, that you almost never see single thread stories. Most stories are made up of multiple threads. Because, honestly, the single thread stories tend to be really dull. So, how do you do it? Think about nesting code. For those of you who have ever done any HTML, if I just say nesting code, you understand what is happening. You'd have milieu, inquiry, inquiry, milieu. For those of you who've never done any HTML, think of it like unpacking a box from IKEA. You open the box… Or just a toy chest. You open the box, and you pull out all of your inquiry toys, and you're going to play with those. Inside that box, there's another smaller box that is made up of character. You pull that box out and open it and you pull out all of your character toys. You play with those toys. Then, at the end, you pack them back into the box. In order to get the boxes to nest neatly, you have to put the character toys back into their box, put it back inside the inquiry box, and then put those toys away. Otherwise you will never be able to return it to IKEA.

So, to use a concrete example, Wizard of Oz is a beautifully nested story. It begins with a character story. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her role as a Kansas farm girl. Then we open an event. Tornado! Then we open the milieu, Welcome to Oz. Then we get the inquiry. What do the ruby slippers do? We get to the end of the story, the movie, and then Glinda says, "Oh. The ruby slippers will carry you home. Oo…oo…oo." Which, honestly, she could have said at the beginning. But that closes the inquiry. Dorothy leaves Oz, which closes the milieu. She returns to Kansas, where everything is fine, which closes the event. Then, Dorothy says, "I didn't need to go looking any farther for adventure than my own backyard," which closes character.

So when you have stories that feel like the endings fizzle out or the ones that feel like they end and then end again and end again. Two Towers, I'm looking at you. This is often because the nesting code is broken. So, what we're going to be talking about is how to understand what each piece of the nesting code does so that you know which toys you're pulling out, and which ones you're going to use, and how to put them back.

So, there is my big overview. Now we're going to talk a bit as a group, after I've just blathered for quite a while.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Should we pause for book of the week before we talk as a group?

[Dan] Yes, we should. You've kind of already covered the book of the week. Why don't you tell us about the Wizard of Oz?

[Mary Robinette] [laughter] Why? Why, yes, thank you, I will. I'm going to recommend the Wizard of Oz as my book of the week. This is the film version. One of the things… It's a film that comes on frequently in the US. But in my childhood, with broadcast television, when you only had three channels, when it came on, you watched it because it was on. I have watched it as an adult. It is beautifully nested. It is fun. To my surprise, it's actually quite funny when you watch it. There's a lot of jokes in it. I got to see it broad… Broadcast. I got to see it screened on the big screen with a full auditorium [in the before times]. I was amazed that it is really very much a comedy. When you think about it, this makes sense because all of the… The scarecrow, the cowardly lion, and the tin man all came out of vaudeville and were noted comedians and song and dance people of their day. So, it's good. It's like worth watching again. Then, we're going to give you homework about it. But that's the thing I'm going to recommend watching this week.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It is maybe beside your point of M.I.C.E. Quotient, but I will also say, the Wizard of Oz has entered English vocabulary to a Shakespearean degree. It gets quoted by people who don't even realize they're quoting it. Because it has so many incredible lines of dialogue that have just kind of become part of the fabric of how our brains communicate.

[Mary Robinette] Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, I have a question for you to kick off this conversation. What do we do if we are not really a planner or an outliner? How can we still use M.I.C.E. Quotient stuff?

[Mary Robinette] I'm so glad you asked. Yeah, so this is one of the places where I actually think the M.I.C.E. Quotient shines. If you are writing instinctively, and you're going along and you hit a point, you're like, "Oh, no. I don't know what happens next." The thing that the M.I.C.E. Quotient is really good at is it's not talking to you about pacing, it's not talking to you about like how things… Like, the moment by moment structure. What it's really good at is helping you make decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. So if you're paralyzed by choice, what you can do is look at what you've already got happening. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking, okay, my character is trapped in this room and I need to get them out. Oh, I'm in a milieu. This is a milieu. Okay. What are the things that can go wrong related to trying to get out of the room? Then you can find your way out that way. Where you run into problems and you get story bloat, which is one of the things that can frequently happen to someone who is pantsing, is that you're like, okay, my character's trapped in a room and I need to ramp up the tension. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have their sister call them and ask them why they aren't at… Why they're not at the wedding yet. Why they're late to the wedding. Okay, but now you just introduced this whole wedding thing that you have to close down, and, that's a character thread, because now they feel like a bad sister, and that's terrible. So it can help you make that choice about what things you want to… What toys you want to play with in that moment.

[Dan] Awesome.

[C. L.] Very nice.

[Charlotte] Choose your can of worms carefully.

[Charlotte] I have a couple of questions, actually. Where did the M.I.C.E. Quotient come from, because the first time I heard of it was on Writing Excuses and now I'm on Writing Excuses talking about it.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I learned it from Orson Scott Card, when I took his Literary Boot Camp. He and I do not see politically eye to eye at all. But he was a gifted teacher and he had a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which included the M.I.C.E. Quotient in it. I have done some tweaking and expanding. In the original, inquiry was called idea, which was confusing. What he meant was that a character was trying to chase down an idea. But it began when you asked a question and you ended when it answered it. So I renamed it to ask-answer and then inquiry.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I think the nesting code thing is me. I'm not sure about that, though.

[Charlotte] Okay. Thank you. My other question is there's a rumor going around… I mean, you've already said that M.I.C.E. stories have more than one element, but there's a rumor that I've seen in more than one place that a short story has one thread, a novella has more than one, maybe two, and a novel has two plus, maybe three or four. Is that right?

[Mary Robinette] So, no. I mean, yes and no. It is extremely rare to see something that only has one. You'll see that in flash. But most of the time what you have is, you have what I call kind of a major and a minor, or a light frame with short stories. The thing is that all of those elements are present. What you're looking at is which ones are pulling you all the way through the story. So if you think about the thread as a piece of elastic and you stretch that piece of elastic out. That, you're putting tension on that. The reader is holding on until that elastic releases. When it releases, you get this cathartic burst. So the more pieces of elastic you pull on, kind of the more strength you need to stretch that, and the more cathartic bursts you're going to get. But in a short story, you don't necessarily have enough room to tie on each of those pieces of elastic. So what you have is… Like, this moment right now is an inquiry thread within a larger thing. Arguably, Writing Excuses is frequently all about inquiry. But you'll… If a character is asking a question within a scene, and it's not an inquiry story, then asking it and then getting the answer, that is a very tiny M.I.C.E. thread that's happening within it. Whether or not you want to let it become a driver and be something that you maintain and sustain all the way through, that's the thing that adds the length. So anything that you're trying to sustain all the way through, those are the things that add length to the story. Which is why you almost never see more than one or two. I see, usually, that there's… Most short stories have two.

Wait, wait. I think we've just been joined by a tiny cat. Yes, there is a tiny cat who's just joined us.

[Inaudible little tiny cat]

[Mary Robinette] If you hear a small mrrp sound, that is Felix. So, anyway. So, that's basically it. A novel can have 50 bajillion of them. But every time you add one, it kind of has the potential to make the thing half again as long, because you're… Every scene that you're sustaining it in, you're having to spend words to sustain it.

[Charlotte] Right, thank you.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, we should wrap this episode up. It was long this time and mostly me talking. The next… The rest of them will involve other people way more. But, as it happens, I'm going to talk just a tiny bit more to give you your homework. Which is to actually watch Wizard of Oz, but what I want you to do is I want you to watch it with a piece of paper and I want you to track the M.I.C.E. elements. So you're going to be using M, I, C, E. What you're going to be looking at when you're watching it is when the elements open, when it closes, but you're also going to look for the smaller elements within it. For instance, when Dorothy gets to the witch's castle, she has to go into the castle and back out of it. So that is a milieu within the larger milieu of Oz. So, just track when she's keeping them alive… When things are being kept alive. The initial disruption of reminding us that things have been disturbed. So track them through, and see what you learn from doing that.

[Dan] Awesome. Well, thank you very much. I know that we all have lots more things we want to say, but that's what the other seven episodes are for. So join us again next week when we're going to dig really deep into milieu. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now. Go. Write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/26/15-04-revision-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: How do you know what needs to be changed? Trust your own reader reactions. Mark it up, Awesome, Bored, Confused, Disbelief. Walk away from it, then come back and ask yourself do things need to change? Or write something else, read something else, then ask yourself. Also, try breaking your story down to scenes, or even French scenes, and identify the purposes for each scene. If you are using a structure, make sure it doesn't feel like canned beans, that all the pieces are there, and that it is what you wanted to do. Think about MICE, and check the threads. Do you have extra threads that aren't needed, or that are never resolved? You may want to pull them out. Consider moments of tension and resolution. What do you do if a secondary character is taking over? Don't worry about it. You can have multiple interesting characters in your stories.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Four.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We are super excited to have a special guest for you today, Pat Rothfuss. Pat, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Pat] I write fantasy novels sometimes and I do charity sometimes and I'm a dad sometimes.

[Dan] Awesome. Your main book that most people know you for is…

[Pat] The Name of the Wind.

[Dan] The Name of the Wind. One of the best-selling fantasies and best written fantasies…

[Pat] Oooh.

[Dan] In my opinion.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we've got you on to talk about revision.

[Dan] Revision. So let's… We're going to talk about, and the first thing that I want to ask the… You guys is, how do you know what needs to be changed? When you look… You've finished your first draft, you're ready to start revision, and it is time to cut something out or make something better. How do you know which parts need to be cut out or made better?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I do is I actually trust my reader reactions. I… I'm talking about before I hand it to a beta reader, that… Or sometimes even after I hand it to a beta reader. One of the things that I look at are the ways that I respond to it. When I get a piece of media that I love… Like, I cannot tell you how many times I've seen the Princess Bride. I still have an emotional response to it. So I can trust that if there's something that I really love, I will continue to have an emotional response to it, even though I know exactly what's going to happen. Therefore, I should still be having an emotional response to my own work, even though I know what's going to happen to it. So what I do is I pay attention to places where I'm bored, or when I'm reading it and I'm like, "What? What? What does that mean?" Like, when I don't know…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What I meant with my own stuff, like, that's a problem.

[Dan] That never happens to me.

[Laughter]

[go ahead]

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes… So, I have awesome, where I'm like, "Hey, that's good!" Which you do have, you know. Bored, confused, and disbelief, where I'm like, "What?" Sometimes the disbelief is it's just like an itch. It's like that doesn't quite… It feels off. So I pay attention to those. Generally speaking, what I found is that most of the awesome things, I can leave alone. Not all of them, but most of them, I can leave alone. The bored ones are usually an indication of a pacing issue, which means I need to tighten it or I need to unpack it to give the reader a reason to care. The confused ones are always an order of information thing, where I just haven't passed it to them in the right order. Sometimes it's still in my head. The disbelief is something where I've violated their sense of the world. Either the natural world, the physical world, or the metaphysical world, which is the character's life. So I address those based on my own reactions. But I have to like pay attention and trust it. The thing that I do is I mark it, but I don't make the changes, because that flips me out of my reader brain.

[Pat] Hum. That's cool.

[Dan] Now, I couldn't help but notice though that that's A, B, C, D.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That's awesome. I'm going to add to that Evil. If you want to go all the way to E. Because writing horror, if my readers write back and say, "How dare you do this? Why are you such a monster?" That's something I know I probably want to keep in.

[Guffaw]

[Mary Robinette] I would call that awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Might have been a [scream]

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When you do that.

[Howard] That also begins with A. For my own part, I don't get to begin with what needs to change. I have to begin with do things need to change? Because when I'm scripting the comic, I will sit down, I will script a week of scripts, and I want to sit down and I want to start drawing. I want to move to the next stage. If I put art on a bad script…

[Groan]

[Howard] I've wasted a whole bunch of time. So my rule is I write it. Then I walk away from it. I come back to it, and I look at it, and rarely, rarely do I allow myself to put art on something I wrote that day. Because the answer to if… Does it really need to be edited, is always yes. The answer is always yes. But it's not the Howard who woke up this morning and wrote it who will say that. It is the Howard who went to bed having written it and woke up the next day and realized that yesterday's Howard is just not as smart as he thought he was.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I actually… I love that, because I always talk to like my students, or if I'm talking to people about writing, like, how do you get distance? That's what you always need from your writing is distance, and it's so hard to get objective space away from something you made yourself. Sometimes it's time, but honestly, time is magnified by a good night's sleep. Or, like physical distance, or change of venue, in addition to other things. But, yeah, a good night's sleep, especially if you didn't… I would say, the night's sleep is almost… The benefit of that is eradicated if you do what I do, which is you write until you're exhausted, and then you immediately fall into bed.

[Howard] Collapse.

[Pat] Then, like you wake up, and it might as well have been five minutes ago that you wrote it. Even though you might have been asleep for eight hours.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I think about… Like, I do the things that you're talking about. But the other one that I find useful to speed up, like when you're on deadline and you don't have time to take time, to like set it down and let it breathe for six months or year or what have you. I found that narrative distance will often help me. That if I write something else or I read something else, that it resets my brain. So that I'm coming back to it as a new story. It resets my reader expectations.

[Howard] Going back to the well is not going back to the well because I need water, it's going back to the well because I need to throw myself into the well…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And climb back out, new.

[Mary Robinette] I will say that this for me is a revision thing. It doesn't work for me as a drafting thing. Drafting thing, I have to be careful about holding the right story in my head…

[Yes]

[Pat] I always think of that is effectively like loading up into active memory the world. Although, honestly, if I'm revising plot or structure, I need to hold all of the world and the structure and the tension and the pacing. So that still needs to be in active memory, which is why that's dangerous for me to like really get engaged in a compelling piece of TV or… But especially print stuff.

[Dan] So… When the time comes, then… We've talked about getting distance from the work. We've talked about using readers and trusting in their feedback. What other methods do you have for knowing what needs to be changed?

[Pat] I've got a good one structurally that I didn't mention today, that I kind of wish I would have remembered. This was way back in the early days of Name of the Wind. I was trying to get the beginning to work. I struggled with the beginning more than any other part of Name of the Wind. Even so, I got it to the point where it's passable. I honestly still don't think it's good. But I broke down… I… Every chapter into scenes, and every scene, by which I mean every… Where I broke it with asterisks. Then I subdivided it even further into French scenes. Which I don't know if that's a common term, other than in like the study of Shakespearean drama. Because you have like Hamlet, Act II, scene four. But every time somebody enters or leaves the stage, it is a new French scene. Even if there's not a scene break. One of my drama professors pointed out that every time someone entered or left, it was a different scene, and there was a new purpose to the scene that Shakespeare was fulfilling. Because Shakespeare was a really amazingly tight writer. So I broke down every single French scene in the first huge chunk of the book, and I talked about what I was… What the purpose of them was. Some of them had like three purposes. That was great. But some of them only had one purpose. Then, stacked up against each other, it said it was like Kvothe is smart and cool. Shows Kvothe is smart and cool. Shows Kvothe is smart and cool. I'm like, "Oh. That's why this is draggy and dumb. I'm doing the same thing again and again." These all also kind of talk about the world, or they build character, but their central element is all the same. That's why this seems boring and it's not compelling and it's not tracking along like it should. So that helped me spot the problem that I then needed to like figure out how to fix.

[Dan] Was… If I can ask, just to dig a little deeper here, was there something specific that you're like, you know, if all of these are just showing Kvothe is smart and cool, what did you decide to add? Like, I'm going to have a scene that shows he's fallible. Or were you thinking more tonal, or…

[Pat] That was actually back in… I can't remember where I was writing up this document. That was in 2001. So it was still six years before I was published. So this was really in the early days of me getting a good grasp on how I thought about tension and pacing and reader curiosity and all the things that now I consider myself quite good at, although I think of them… I think I conceptualize them a lot differently than a lot of people who like have studied them or worked in writers groups. Just because I was sort of like foraging in the wilderness, and I came up with my own weird things. So now, like I look at the old Star Trek, and I'm like, "Oh. A plot, B plot. That's what they're doing." This is a story shape. So I was like if I have a short arc, then I just need to make sure you start something, and then eventually you have tension until it resolves and you need to support it and tell it resolves. But you also don't want to have… You don't want to started in one chapter and end it in the next, because then you haven't given any room for tension to grow and your reader to be curious and engaged. So, I just wanted… I always now make sure that there's space and difference. But I don't do A plot, B plot. It's a mess.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I mean, mine is… It's all held together with like bailing twine and barbed wire.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, barbed wire holds things together pretty darn well.

[Pat] Yeah, but it's painful. Like, don't follow those footsteps. It's… It works, but it's not a system that I think can be necessarily emulated or recommended.

[Howard] Funny you should say that, because in terms of defining a structure using A plot, B plot as an example, if I can look at something I've written and, after the fact, tell myself, "Ah, I'm doing A plot, B plot." That's awesome, because it's something that I know the reader knows how to resonate with. If I'm working… If I can't tell what the form is, what sort of structure I'm working in, unless I have done something to tell the reader that their expectations are going to be subverted, unless I've warned them, they're going to run into that and perhaps have problems. So I love finding that I'm working in a given structure, because then I can say, "Ah. Okay, I'm doing A plot, B plot. How do I do it so that it doesn't feel like canned beans?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "How do I… What are the pieces that are missing, what are the pieces I'm doing right?" And, the question that I always have to ask the moment I discover I'm doing something structurally or trope-wise or whatever is, "Wait. Is that what I meant?"

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Is that what I wanted to do? But I love finding it because I know that if I speak using a structure… Three act format, hero's journey, A plot B plot, whatever, the reader will know how to respond.

[Dan] Okay. I've got another really cool question I want to ask you guys, but first… Let's break for our book of the week. Well, it's actually… Oh, it is a book this time. Yes. Tell us about it.

[Pat] I have to gush about The Murderbot Diaries, which I'm guessing a lot of you already know about. They won a ton of awards last year. They're a series of four novellas by Martha Wells. I… No offense, Mary, but…

[Mary Robinette] They're really…

[Pat] They're my favorite things that I read…

[Mary Robinette] They're really good.

[Pat] In, like, these last couple of years. They're so good. I have not empathized with a character, with a murderbot, with a character more than murderbot maybe ever in my life. I cried. They're amazing. So good I actually hugely geeked out on Martha Wells at the Hugos…

[Laughter]

[Pat] It was so embarrassing, because I was just like… I was just like, "Oh, I want to mention that I like her books." But I was just, "Bwah..." I'm just like, oh, I did that. That's so embarrassing. I can do it, too.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] They're so good. Make sure you read them in order, though. Read the first one, because there's a continuous storyline. I can't recommend them highly enough.

[Dan] Awesome. That is The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Who has an excellent last name.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now, before I get into my other question, you… Mary Robinette, you looked like you were going to say something?

[Mary Robinette] So, we were talking about tension. One of the things that can happen when you're looking at revisions and you're trying to decide, you're like, "Oh, this doesn't have tension. This doesn't have a thread." Like, deciding which thing to keep and which thing to get rid of can be tricky sometimes. So, I talk about the MICE quotient in terms of frame a lot. But it's also really good for defining which pieces of conflict to keep in a story. What I find is, like, if I have an inquiry story, what I know is that the story ends when my character answers a question. So all of the conflicts in the story need to be preventing the character from asking a question. So, if that's one of those 14 plot threads that are going through the story, then I can't let the character actually get to that question. So if I have a thread in there that is… If this scene is like… Is about an inquiry, and it's about a different inquiry than the main one that I've been asking, then that may be a thread that I don't need. Or, if it's something that I never resolve later, it's like get rid of that. I just went through, I… I blame Brandon, but I just finished writing the Relentless Moon. My finished draft was 180,000 words. The previous novel in the series was 99,000 words.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… I completely blame Brandon, but I wanted to cut it down significantly.

[Howard] Now you have two more books.

[Mary Robinette] Now I have two more books. Exactly. So one of the things that I looked at… Looked for were threads that I never really used. A lot of times, you use something and it raises tension in a scene. It's great in the scene, but you don't pay it off later. So those things when you pull them out can dramatically reduce the length of your work, but also tighten it and make it structurally a lot more solid. It's not that everything needs to wrap up at the end, because life is messy. Sometimes, it is nice to have something that's still a little fuzzy at the end. But that's… Those are things that you look for. It's like, is this serving the story? Does this have a payoff at the end? That's the kind of thing I look for.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to absolutely second that. We'll make sure to put this in the liner notes, but I recommend you all go and find the YouTube videos by Lindsey Ellis. She's a film critic and she has one on three act structure where she re-contextualizes three act structure entirely around moments of tension and resolution. Which redefined it for me in a way that I had never understood it before. It really has changed the way that I revise, because now I'm not looking at, well, is this thing done, but what is the tension of this scene or this act or this whatever and when is that going to get resolved. So it's really great.

[Dan] So, anyway, I want to ask another question that I'm excited about. Which is, let's say that you are looking at your work, you've finished one or more drafts and you realize that a secondary character has become far more interesting than your primary character. How do you fix that problem? How do you approach that? Do you just make that character more boring, do you make the main character more interesting, like, what do you do?

[Pat] My… Because this happened to me, and I struggled with it a lot early on, because it is scary. You're working hard to make your main character compelling. Then, suddenly, you create like sort of a charming fairy who steals every scene in the opening, when what you need is for everyone to be interested in your mysterious innkeeper. And…

[Mary Robinette] What are you talking about?

[Laughter]

[Pat] Just in theory. These are archetypes.

[Howard] They are now.

[Pat] In the tarot. Mysterious innkeeper. I should do my own… Oh, sorry. But the big solution, I feel, is don't worry about it. Because you certainly don't want to say, "Oh, this part is too cool. I better take it out." That's always a losing proposition. Okay? Come at me, later…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] Because what I just said isn't true.

[Laughter]

[Pat] But the vast majority of the time, what is lovable about Bast is that Bast is simple. Bast is… He is not actually one note, but he seems very one note, and simple things are easy to digest and sort of… Some of these, like Han Solo, like lovable rogue type characters, are sort of compelling in themselves. Whereas more complex characters… It's the difference between your high school crush and the person that you marry for 10 years. You marry that person and you stay with them for 10 years because you have a rich important relationship with them, but that doesn't mean that like, that week you went to Morocco, you didn't have something really amazing and tempestuous with a dark-eyed woman there. Both of those are good, and honestly, in the same way that I think having both of those leads to like a rich and satisfying life, you want both of those things in a book. It's just they both satisfy different needs, even if one of them is a little shinier on the surface.

[Mary Robinette] I completely agree with you. I'm going to say that I got distracted by the analogy, and I would love for you to do a different analogy that's slightly less sexist.

[Pat] Yeah. Well, I mean I… Mary, which part is sexist? Like…

[Howard] Morocco?

[Pat] Morocco?

[Mary Robinette] No, the… If… Comparing… Sorry. I've seen you use this analogy before, and it bothers me every time. Comparing moments of writing with women.

[Pat] I see. I think of it as I have relationships with characters, and I have relationships with women. So I'm mostly thinking of my own experience, but I see what you're saying because what you're kind of coming at is I'm presenting this as a universal as opposed to my personal experience.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Pat] That does seem sexist. Yeah. So…

[Dan] Do we want to… I mean, we'll keep rolling. But do we want to go back and cut that out?

[Mary Robinette] That's up to Pat.

[Pat] I could do it either way. I mean, I think it's valuable to see a misstep and correction for some people. It kind of depends on the tone that you want to achieve here. It sort of eats up some airtime.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean we are talking about revision. So this is actually a good revision.

[Laughter]

[Pat] Yeah.

[Dan] Well, actually…

[Mary Robinette] Like, when you get called on something in a critique and you have a pushback, you have a no, I don't think this is right. But then you think about it, and you're like, "Okay, well, what is my area of intention with this, and how do I get this across without triggering that again?"

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Pat] That actually is great, because like… I was like, "Oh. I was trying to achieve this." You're like, "You might have been trying for that, but here's actually the effect of what you said." I'm like, "Oh. Right. I probably, for some of my audience, I hit that effect with this, because I was coming at this from my own experience. I wasn't anticipating the effect on other people." So, now, an attempt to revise, like… That's the tricky bit of revision for me, is thinking… This one came out of me very naturally and it seems compelling because of its organic nature. But now I've got to stop and sort of disentangle myself from the affection of the original. Because it came out of sort of an honest emotional place in my personal experience. Then I've got to think how does that work? Than that, in my opinion, is the real work of writing. Because when it comes naturally and it's good, you're golden. That's not work. The work is looking at it and saying, "Uck. I've got to lay some bricks." Honestly, I don't know what I would do. I don't know how I would revise that analogy.

[Howard] Can I take a stab at it?

[Pat] Yeah, yeah. Help me.

[Howard] Can I take a stab at it? There is the music that I write to, and there is karaoke night.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] Karaoke night is a thing that… It is music. It is performative. It is songs that we are familiar with, but karaoke night is not what I want to listen to when I am trying to write. I have thousands of hours logged on the same 200, 300 songs in a playlist that I use for writing. Those are my go to, those are my main character. But without karaoke night, that's kind of lifeless. Without singing in the shower, without these other pieces. So coming back to the original question, which was, what do you do when a character is… When a secondary character is overshadowing your main character. What do you do when karaoke night… Everybody is loving that way more than the main musical theme of your book.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, what is it that there loving about karaoke night more? Why is it… Oh, well, it's because the characters are interacting here in a way that is energetic and fun. Why is that missing from my main character?

[Mary Robinette] This is why I don't play D&D more than a one shot, because that narrative…

[Pat] Becomes…

[Mary Robinette] is often… Is that becomes more compelling to me. That's a side quest in my quest for writing. It is the secondary character that has become more interesting. But I did like what you are talking about the relationship that you have with the thing. You were going to say something.

[Pat] That's what I want to ask. Because what you did… When you were talking about that, I'm like, that makes sense. But it also gave me a moment to sort of stop, and to back away from it, and think about the primary issue you had with it. Was it the fact that I was talking about relationships, or the fact that they were gendered female?

[Mary Robinette] It was that they were gendered female, but specifically, that they were gendered female and based on appearance.

[Pat] Well, the first one wasn't. I said the marriage of 10 years…

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Oh, that's true.

[Pat] The other one was…

[Mary Robinette] But the second one…

[Pat] No, the other one was a week in Morocco. It was a vacation. I said a beautiful dark-eyed woman. What if I said a dark-eyed beauty and a marriage of 10 years? Does that resolve the sexism?

[Mary Robinette] Oh. That…

[Pat] Because that might be a simpler fix than changing my entire analogy.

[Mary Robinette] That is an interesting idea. I'm not…

[Pat] This is revision. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That may in fact have solved it for me. Although I think because beauty is still a gendered word in modern…

[Pat] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That I would still probably read it the same way. Also, because… There's also than the Morocco and dark-eyed and what are you [implying] there…

[Pat] There's some racism stuff there potentially. This is why we revise.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I really wish we could say that we had planned this, because I think it worked out perfectly to tell you all these points of revision and then to demonstrate them all in order…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Like trusting reader feedback, then work shopping, and all these different things that we did, to getting distance from it. But that is all the time we have. I'm really glad that this worked out the way it did. This is been a fantastic episode about revision. We have… We want to leave you with some homework to do, which Mary Robinette has.

[Mary Robinette] No, I think Pat actually had this.

[Dan] Was it Pat? I don't remember who it was.

[Mary Robinette] I think we both had the same one.

[Dan] Okay. Well, we're going to have Pat say it, then.

[Pat] Mine actually might have been the one that I already mentioned, where, go through your chapters and list your purpose. Because if you have never done that, it is incredibly informative. Also, it helped me realize that I want the scene to have at least three purposes, so that if two of them don't land, there's still something in it for the reader. But what was your's?

[Dan] You get to homeworks this time.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. It was the 10% solution.

[Pat] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which was… Which I think we've done on the podcast before, and it is still worth revisiting. Which is to examine your work and look at cutting it by 10%. You can go through and say, "Okay, I'm going to cut this paragraph by 10% or this page by 10%." But this process forces you to examine it and think about why is this word here? What is it supporting? A lot of times, you cut that 10% from your thing by saying, you know what, I'm going to pull this entire subplot out.

[Pat] Yeah. This is something I did repeatedly to Name of the Wind. I would always think, well, that's it. I cut everything that could be cut. But then another couple of months later, I would go through it again, and I'm like, "Actually, now that it's cleaner and tighter, I can see other things that weren't as clean and tight." And I do… I aim for every page 10%. So if I'm not cutting a line or a sentence or a phrase… It really forces me to consider what is essential on a page.

[Mary Robinette] If you're someone who writes short, which happens too sometimes, it is also worth, as an experiment, adding 10%.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To decide where things need to be fleshed out.

[Dan] Cool. Well, that's great. This has been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/07/14-27-natural-setting-as-conflict/

Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.

[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.

[Brandon] Yeah, we are.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?

[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.

[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."

[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.

[Brandon] That's a very good point.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.

[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."

[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?

[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.

[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?

[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…

[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.

[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.

[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.

[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In a science fiction setting…

[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!

[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?

[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]

[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.

[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Coconut glass.

[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?

[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…

[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.

[Howard] Boy versus nature.

[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.

[Mary Robinette] Whoo!

[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.

[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.

[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.

[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.

[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?

[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…

[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.

[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.

[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.

[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?

[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…

[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.

[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.

[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/31/wx-14-13-obstacles-vs-complications/

Key points: obstacles versus complications. People, things, or circumstances that impede the progress of the character or the story. Obstacles can simply be overcome, but complications cause ramifications that make the story take a turn. In terms of MICE threads, obstacles keep you on the same path, but complications take you to another thread. Obstacles are linear, complications change the direction or goals. Obstacles often are within scenes, while complications strengthen act breaks and make the audience come back. A story that is all complications may be too twisty, while a story that is just obstacles may be too linear and frustratingly slow. Try mixing yes-but, no-and with complications and obstacles. A couple of major complications may be plenty.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 13.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Obstacles vs. Complications.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm in the way.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, I wanted to do this because a couple of times on Writing Excuses, you've heard me say, talking about obstacles versus complications and how I learned about it from Margaret Dunlap, and it occurred to me that we actually have Margaret here, so instead of having to listen to my fumbling attempt to distill this theory that she has come up with, we could just have her explain it to you. So, Margaret, tell us, please, about obstacles versus complications.

[Margaret] Okay. So, obstacles versus complications is, I think… I was trying to think back to the origin of this. For me, it goes back to learning how to write to act breaks. Because you… Classically, you write to the act break, you're going to stop, have commercials, and you want something that's going to drive the audience to come back. The problem of writing television today is the television audiences have watched hundreds of hours of television, and they kind of know how television works. So if you put in a classic kind of cliffhanger of like, "Oh, no. Is Mulder going to die?" on the X-Files, well, probably not. Most of your audience is pretty well aware that at the end of act one, it's likely Mulder's probably still going to be with us for the rest of this episode. So, TV writers had to get better at making stories twistier. So, obstacles versus complications, both of these are people, things, or circumstances that are somehow impeding the progress of the character or the story. The difference is, while an obstacle is something that your character can overcome and then keep moving, a complication is something that they have to deal with and then causes ramifications that causes the story to take a turn.

[Mary Robinette] If I can jump in here, one of the… Because we spent a delightful period of time talking about this, and for me, one of… It clarified something that I've talked to my students about, which is when I talk about the MICE quotient and talk about how you can have multiple threads and they can be braided together, I intellectually like… Not intellectually. I had an intuitive sense of what it meant, but I had a difficult time articulating it. So an obstacle keep you on the same path. It's like a straightahead thing. If you're on a milieu line, you stay on a milieu line. Whereas, a complication will kick you off over into a character line.

[Brandon] That is really fascinating.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it!

[Brandon] Yeah. That's really helpful.

[Howard] Obstacle is the speedbump, complication is the detour sign which you're not actually sure which side road it's pointing to.

[Margaret] Right. Or the detour sign that someone has taken away, or… I have an example of if I am a renowned thief and I am trying to break into Mary's home, the locked door is an obstacle. The fact that Mary is home, and I thought that she wasn't, that is a complication. Potentially. If I knock her out because I am awesome, because I'm an internationally renowned thief, then she is effectively an obstacle. But if she provides information that the thing I have come to steal, I'm not stealing it back, I'm just stealing it, that creates a complication.

[Brandon] Yeah, this is really interesting, because a lot of plot formats, particularly some of the ones rooted in screenwriting, talk about this idea of at some point during the story, you're… The characters are going to realize their goals are larger or different than they wanted them to be. Knowing the difference between obstacle versus that complication that can open their eyes to a greater plot could be really helpful.

[Margaret] Yeah. It's also a way to take a story that has a very linear progression, and think about… Because often we know where we want a story to end. It's like, "All right. Well, the character starts and they had that way." If you think in terms of complications, maybe they start out going in this direction… Yeah, as you can tell from watching me moving my hands on the podcast…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] They start moving to the right. A series of complications might bend them around 180° and get… Or, more likely, 90°, speaking narratively. We rarely have a character start out seeking the exact opposite of what they wind up getting. But those are the complications that can create those twists that aren't… A shocking twist that you'll never see coming. But just those little shifts in the narrative.

[Howard] There is a classic twist in the… Elementary, CBS's Sherlock Holmes thing, that I've described to my kids as the act two corpse. Which is the point at which we are moving along, and then someone is dead who we are not expecting to be dead. Maybe it's an obstacle, because we can no longer ask that person questions. But we discovered that it's more complex. What's fun is that even though my kids will now watch TV with me and lean forward and say, "Act two corpse? Is it… Yay! Act two corpse!" The episode still works, because we don't know what the complication is going… We don't know what's going to happen. We just know there's been a complication, and we are on board for where our heroes take it.

[Margaret] It's the murder mystery where your prime suspect is the second victim.

[Brandon] I've done that before. It's very handy.

[Margaret] And classic for a reason.

[Brandon] Let's break here for our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So our book of the week is Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a fantastic book. On one level, you can read it as just monster hunters going after monsters. But it's so much more than that. So this is after the world has basically drowned under the big water. It's set on what used to be a Navajo reservation. It has been reborn as Dinetah. All of the gods and heroes of the land are kind of there again. So, like, there's Coyote. It's wonderful. It's relevant to this because it has a great series of obstacles in complications. There are obstacles that are just getting in the way of her tracking down the monster, and then there are complications which are completely affecting the way… A relationship with herself, her relationship with other people. It's wonderful, wonderful storytelling.

[Brandon] So tell us one more time.

[Mary Robinette] It is the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Since we are talking about obstacles in complications, one of the things that I wanted to also talk to our listeners about, we've talked a little bit about how to use them. I also want to talk about the dangers of them. Like the dangers of a story that is only complications.

[Margaret] Only complications. The danger of a story that is just piling complication on top of complication on top of complication is that it can be easy to lose track of the stakes. If we are constantly shifting what's going on, what are we after, how is it happening, it's tough for the audience to… It can be difficult for the audience to remain invested. Because it's who's on first. They're losing track of what is our ultimate goal, what are we actually pushing towards, are we making progress towards it, or do we keep just getting derailed into detours? It is possible to make a story too twisty.

[Mary Robinette] Is it possible to go the other direction, and just have just obstacles?

[Margaret] Yeah. I think the danger of a story that is only obstacles is that, one, it can feel like your character isn't getting anywhere because anytime they're building up a head of steam, they're hitting another wall. The other risk that we sort of talked about earlier is that the story can feel very linear. It's like I am headed to grandma's house. The road goes out. So I've got to get a boat. The boat blows over. It just keeps going. One thing to another thing to another thing, but we never shift years. You can do it. But there is a risk that it just feels like a straight shot down a hallway, and why is it taking you so long to walk?

[Brandon] I've worried about both of those things, with the yes-but, no-and methodology that we've talked about, that Mary introduced me to, which is great. I use it in my class for those discovery writers who don't know how to outline, and don't really want to outline. I say, here's a method. But I worry about if they do this the wrong way, you're going to end up with only complications, because it's so easy to say, yes, they do accomplish this, but weird wacky things happens that sends us off in another direction.

[Mary Robinette] So that brings up the question of progress in pacing. One of the things that I talk about sometimes with the yes-but, no-in is, since in Western storytelling, we have the rule of three. Which is three times are funny, third times a charm, three times are unlucky. We just… We're geared to think in terms of threes. That you can use that in hack with it. If you want something to feel easy, then you have it happen with less than three trial error cycles. If you want it to feel hard, then you do more than three try-fail cycles. So with a yes-but, it's like yes, but complication. Then with no-and, it's like no, and obstacle. To a certain degree. So you can… I feel like you can control pacing to a certain degree that way. How do you con… Do you use these as tools to control pacing?

[Margaret] Um…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, it's hard… It feels like it when you're talking about act breaks.

[Margaret] Yeah. I mean, it is a way to control pacing. I think when writing in television format, it's such a set structure. Even now, as we're seeing more TV being written without commercial breaks. If you're writing for a Netflix or one of the other premium services, you don't necessarily have commercials that are coming in between, but I like to try to write on that 4 to 5 act structure anyway, just because it ensures that things are happening. That you're not getting the episode that feels like, "Okay, this is just an installment, but nothing's really happening. It's a lot of kind of dithering around and nothing is really changing, nothing's really progressing." Having those sorts of stops along the wheel of setting up the problem of the week, making our first attempt at it, a big turn at the midpoint that shifts things around, having to recover and prepare for that, and our final confrontation act five, having that is a kind of baseline structure sets up that… One, the idea that we're accomplishing something in a single episode, even if it's a piece of a much larger story. But also, again with a television audience that watched a lot of television, there are certain rhythms that you get use to. You can shift those rhythms. I watched a lot of Law & Order in high school and college. Then I started watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I realized that I would start getting really antsy around the half-hour point in Homicide, because subliminally I was waiting for the cops to hand it over to the lawyers to handle the second half of the show.

[Mary Robinette] [Ooooo]

[Margaret] But Homicide is all cops. It took a while to get used to the different pacing and the different rhythm. But having that television falling into those… Saying familiar patterns feels like it's cliché, but just that sort of the storytelling rhythms that at a certain level feel comfortable that you can use or shift up in order to really unsettle your audience.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, I realized that when I earlier said yes, but complication, no, and obstacle, that made it sound like those are the pairings that you have to do. Which is not actually true at all. Yes his progress towards the goal, no is progress away from the goal. Then, complications and obstacles are additional tools that you can use in terms of shifting. I find that I am more likely to use obstacles as a… Within a, roughly put, within a scene, and then use the complications kind of as I approach a scene end.

[Margaret] I think, complications, you do have to be judicious with them, at least in terms of major complications. If you look at… If you look at the Leverage pilot, which I'm guessing many listeners and people here on this podcast are familiar with, you get a couple of really big complications in that, but only a couple. We've been hired to steal airplane plans. It turns out those airplane plans, we didn't steal them back from the person who stole them. We just stole them from the people that created them. Then they have obstacles in trying to get revenge from the person who set them up. With… There are some additional complications buried in there, but they aren't all necessarily… A complication doesn't have to be earthshaking. It can be you have to take your little sister with you on this heist job, and how are we going to handle that?

[Howard] The nice thing about the Leverage show format with regard to complications is that when the heist is one in which we are going to be shown, after the fact, that there was a piece they were actually prepared for this. The final complication looks to us like the nail in the coffin that, nope, they're not going to survive this twist. Oh, wait, this is the one they were ready for. That bit of formulaic TV writing… Yes, if formulaic, and yes, if you watch an entire… You binge watch Leverage, you can start to see the seams, but… It's beautiful. I love the way it's done.

[Margaret] I would just like to say, John, Howard said it was formulaic, I didn't.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right. Let's… This has been really fascinating. It's really helped kind of frame this in my head. Something that… Like Mary said, I've always kind of known, but never been able to put words to.

[Brandon] You also have a piece of homework for us, right, Margaret?

[Margaret] What I'd like you to try to do is take a story, either something you've written or another story, and either find or insert an obstacle into it. Then, brainstorm what might happen if that obstacle were actually a complication. It's something that forces the narrative to take a turn. See what happens.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/13/13-19-backstories/

Key points: Backstory affects everything a character does, so it is one of the most important aspects of a character, but you also don't need to map out everything and try to fit it all in. A broad overview, similar to what you have of your friend's backstory, is probably enough. Then, when you are writing a character, you may find yourself inventing back story in the moment to explain their reaction. When you find you need more backstory, stop, make notes, and then later go back and weave it in. Sometimes you may want to build lots of backstory, but be very conscious of what the reader needs to know versus what you may need to know. Where can you fit in backstory? At the end of every action scene, as a pause or rest. Or when a character is interacting with something that triggers it. In conversation! Flashbacks are not just to give information. They should be presented at the right time to shape the interaction the reader is having with the story, to propel a story forward. Flashbacks that break the forward momentum of the story fail, while flashbacks that add to the momentum work well. You can use flashbacks to build a mystery and answer it, or to deepen it. Put your flashbacks in when the reader wants it. Avoid tangential zoom flashbacks. Think about what your character inherited, where they are now, where they want to be, and where they think they are. Those four parts are your character's cultural backbone. Then discover the rest as you write.

( When they were young... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Backstories.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We are talking character backstory.

[Hooray! Yay!]

[Brandon] This has been really hard to not talk about…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Before this point.

[Mary] That is, in fact, my backstory for this episode, is that I've been wanting to talk about this for months.

[Brandon] So, go! Backstories.

[Mary] All right. So the thing is, like, backstories are simultaneously one of the most important aspects of your character, and also the thing that you need to worry about least. Because a backstory is going to affect the way your character moves through the world, they're going to affect how they interact with other people, but at the same time, you do not actually need to map out their entire backstory, their entire life, and then try to fit it all in.

[Brandon] Yeah, because you will… If you work too much on it, you will try to fit it all in, and… Boy, the infodumps are really…

[Mary] So, generally speaking, what I try to do with my character is have a kind of broad overview of what their backstory is, in much the way that I have a broad overview of what someone else's backstory is. Like, I don't actually need to know more of my character's backstory than I do of Amal's or Maurice's. I don't need to know their entire life history, unless it is specific to the moment that I am encountering in that particular story. It's absolutely affecting the way they move through their life, and it's affecting the way I interact with them, but I don't need to know all of it to be able to have an effective, moving interaction, and satisfying one, with them.

[Amal] Do you ever find yourself inventing backstory in the moment, because as you're writing a character, you realize that they're having a very strange reaction to something, maybe more than you'd planned for, because you're caught up and then you retroactively invent backstory to…

[Mary] I'm, in fact, doing that right now with a novel that I'm working on. Where I knew that my character had previously been on this planet as a military surgeon. She's 78 now, she had been there when she was in her 30s during occupation. And she's back. I knew that about her. As the… As I've been working on it, I've realized that actually something went wrong when she was here previously. It wasn't just that she was a military surgeon. I mean, obviously, war is a lot of things going wrong for an extended period of time, but that there was a backstory that I actually needed to unpack. So what I've done is I've gone ahead and stopped and made some notes to myself, and then am continuing going forward as if I had already written that stuff. But this is the mistake that I see people make, that I have to go correct, is that I will see a lot of writers who make that discovery and never go back to weave it in previously. Which either results in the reader feeling as if they've been coy all the way through, and not… Or feeling as if the writer lied to them.

[Amal] Interesting. I had a moment like that reading a book that came out recently called Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. Where you're basically introduced to this character, who, in my case anyways, I just despised. Like, hated, hated this character. Then, you're kind of given a flashback very late in the book that does actually explain a number of the behaviors that made me detest him. But it felt like too little too late. It felt like no, actually I didn't… I feel like without having had… And that can actually absolutely be a decision. Like, maybe she just never wanted me to like this character. So it doesn't actually matter that I have this information, and so on. But timing those reveals needs to be a deliberate choice as well, I think.

[Maurice] So, I'm horrible at following any of this advice.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled to save myself]. I literally did 3000 words worth of world building for a story that was 6000 words long, so, I mean, that's the kind of guy I am.

[Mary] I mean, I've been there and I've done that.

[Maurice] I'm the same way when I'm building my characters and doing their backstories. I try to be conscious of the fact that yes, I've done all this work, the reader doesn't need to know all this, but I need to know this. Now, the one time when it did come in handy was with the first book of the urban fantasy trilogy. Because when I turned it in, it was a 60,000 word novel, because I was… I don't know, I was doing a thing. But when they accepted it, they were like, "Okay. But this is an adult urban fantasy novel. You need to add 30,000 words to it." I was like, "How I'm I going to add… The story is there, it's done." But what I ended up doing was, I have all this backstory material. All of a sudden, it's like, "Wait. 30,000 words? I now have room to flesh out and to show some more of that backstory for some of these characters." So you get an even deeper feeling of why they're doing the things they do. Because sometimes they're arb… And I realized that, when I was doing the draft, sometimes they are behaving in this nonsensical way. To me, it made sense, because I knew there backstory. It was like, "Oh, wait, I have gone to the other extreme of so not showing enough of this." It was like, now, forced to add that 30,000 words back, I was like, "Oh, why don't I bring the readers up along for the ride, so they can see this too?"

[Brandon] So, Maurice, let me push you on that. How did you get that in there without it feeling like an infodump? Because I think that you're absolutely right, you need this stuff. But it also needs to be natural.

[Maurice] Right. So, it became a matter of how am I going to dramatize this information? So, then it was like… So, basically, I would go through the narrative and see where the brakes were in the story, to go okay, now… There were like… For example, there was a… Wherever there was a big action scene, I needed to sort of reset anyway. So I've learned that during those reset moments, that's where I can slip in some backstory, because it gives the reader a pause, come down from that action scene and sort of reset the stage. During those moments, it's like, "All right. Here's a little bit more about this character."

[Mary] I also find… So I'll do things like that where I use it as a rest point. But I also will often handle the character's backstory in the same way I'll handle other pieces of infodumpy stuff, which is I will save it for moments when the character is interacting with something. So like if I want you to know how a mason jar works, I'm not going to go, well, a mason jar is a glass object that is used… What I'm going to do is I'm going to have the character pick up the glass, and I'm going to have them put water in it. I'm going to have them put a lid on it. I'm going to have them boil it. So that… I will have them interact with it. It's like, "Oh, that's how a mason jar works."

[Right.]

[Mary] So a lot of times, when I'm trying to slip backstory in, then I will have it arise naturally through conversation, or through something… Some environmental trigger, some concrete trigger that… Like with the mason jar example, my grandma use these all the time, these mason jars, and her dill pickles were amazing. That's the kind of… It's like, well, now you know that I had a grandma who canned things.

[Amal] Right. Exactly. The… It's funny. I'm thinking back to a short story I wrote called Madeleine which I've mentioned in another episode. Where, just talking about triggering things, literally the whole plot is that she has no control over the fact that she's encountering things and they are triggering these memories and hallucinations, which are also flashbacks… But are also weird, because there are new intrusive elements that are happening in them. But for… In order to choose what those would be, because they were… Like the fact that they were happening was the plot, I didn't want them to actually be moving in a way that advanced… Like… I don't know if that makes sense. Basically, I wanted them to feel as random and intrusive as memory kind of is on its own. And as unpredictable. So even though it didn't necessarily make plot sense… Like, it wasn't necessary to the plot that she be sipping a cup of warm milk, or that she needed to remember that when she was a small child, she sipped a cup of warm milk in the same way and blah blah blah. The… Like, I tried to just through moving through my own environment, kind of pick things, things that are sensory, things that are weird and interesting and stuff to try and trigger those things. Because ultimately, the point of those flashbacks was something beyond giving information about the character.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Which is Racing the Dark.

[Mary] Yes. So this is… Alaya Dawn Johnson is a wonderful writer. This was actually her first novel, which I had read years later. She wrote it, I think, 2008. It's YA and it is phenomenal. Especially when you're talking about character backstories. It's set in a series of island nations in which people have learned to bind the spirit. So they have bound the spirit of fire and death and water. They have been bound for about a thousand years at this point. Wind got away about 500 years previously and wreaked havoc. It's this young girl who is… She supposed to be a diver. That's what she does. Much like the pearl divers, but for this specific type of fish. The environment is changing in ways that make people think that a spirit might be breaking loose. It just… Things just keep getting worse for her, in ways that always seem… It's like and what other choice did she have? It's forcing her down this very specific path. It's just phenomenal. But her backstory, this… This… The fact that she was a diver is so important. Sometimes in things that she is able to do within the story, but also in the choices that she makes and the regrets that she lives. It's a wonderful story. I'm actually reading the second book in the trilogy right now. But Racing the Dark is the first one, by Alaya Dawn Johnson. I highly recommend picking it up.

[Brandon] Let's dive back into flashbacks. Because I love me a good flashback.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I just do. It's interesting, because when I first got into writing, I remember one of my professors saying, "Don't use flashbacks. Flashbacks are a crutch." That is kind of some writing advice, and yet I have series that use extensive flashbacks. In my current book, I would guess that there are 50 or 60,000 words of flashbacks.

[Mary] But you know how to use them. This is the thing, is that a lot of times when people are using a flashback, they're using it just to get information in. You understand that what a flashback is actually doing for the reader is allowing you to present information to them at a time when they need it. So, if we hearken back to a previous season, where I talk about the MICE quotient a lot, the MICE quotient is not about the linear timeline that a story… That a character goes through. It is about the order in which you present information to a reader. When you're using backstories, you are presenting it in order to shape the way the reader is interacting with the story, not just to hand them a piece of information.

[Brandon] Right. I mean, handing them a piece of information is really important…

[Sure]

[Brandon] But the issue is you don't want to frontload that into the story, you wanted when it will be relevant, and also when you're dramatically… You'll be like, "Oh, I can get the context of this scene now," and things like that.

[Mary] Which then you can use as momentum to propel the story forward. A lot of times, and this is when flashbacks fail, it is because they break the forward momentum of the story. When flashbacks work well, they are adding to the forward momentum of the story by giving the reader information that they need to understand the emotional context of what's at stake.

[Brandon] It also lets you build a mystery, and then answer it, or build a mystery and then continue it in an interesting way.

[Amal] I love that idea about momentum. I'd never heard it that way before. Because I found myself just now thinking of when I have found flashbacks successful. Interestingly, I'm more often thinking of film, because it feels as if it's a filmic device, literally showing you in a visual way things that happened before. I was thinking of like Ratatouille… Everyone's seen it, right? You said mice and I thought of…

[Chuckles garbled]

[Amal] Yeah, so in fact, it opened a flashback to Ratatouille. Where basically the climax of that film is absolutely about pushing that forward momentum. It's about… I think… I don't know if there's more than… No, there are a couple of them. But this flashback involves… To spoil the film…

[Mary] It's been out long enough.

[Amal] It's been out. So, basically, there's this restaurant critic and he is impossible to impress, he's made this restaurant lose its Michelin stars because he's so asorbic, and our hero, the rat, has to cook a meal that's going to impress him. So instead of trying to build up these airy things, he cooks a very, very simple country meal, ratatouille. He cooks like a vegetable dish. Then, to show how delicious this dish is, as the critic is tasting it, literally, the camera kind of like sucks you backwards into a flashback and you see him being a small child tasting ratatouille for the first time and loving it. It's all warm sepia tones. Like, everything about the texture and the light and the timing of the flashback is such that you realize yes, he's eating the best thing he's ever had in his life, partly because it's reminding him of being a child. It builds so much character stuff into that one moment. Which then resolves the film. It's... So it's not, you don't need to know any of that stuff about the critic beforehand, you need to know everything opposite that. You need to know the critic is a jerk, who... It's so great. Anyway.

[Maurice] I was just thinking about that… I tend to write a couple projects at a time, so like, I have a short story and a novel project I'm working on right now, and they both kind of hinge on this use of flashbacks, which I hadn't really thought about until this conversation, how much they're hinging on the flashbacks. So in the short story, you have this woman, she has a shattered psyche, and so as she's trying to… I love the idea, again, I love this idea of the forward momentum… As she's progressing through the story, there's stuff that she's dealing with in the present, as she's remembering the past at the same time. So there's kind of this going back and forth, going back and forth, but it is about building that forward momentum of what I'm trying to reveal about her and her trauma and her overcoming it. Within the novel project, and partly, don't get me wrong, I love a good flashback. I just love a good flashback. So I was just thinking about how I'm using the flashback now in the current scene I'm writing, which is almost, in a lot of ways, just to set the mood for the rest of the chapter. So it opens with a flashback in order to just… Part of it is to just you're going to get some insight into the character, which sets the mood for what's going to happen in the rest of the chapter. So I love the idea of flashback and how it just… We all have these secrets that lay buried deep within us, sometimes we're not even always aware of. So just that slow revelation of what that might be reveals a character to us.

[Brandon] Put it in when the reader is going to want it. I think of when my students do it poorly, or when I did it poorly when I was a new writer, is you're writing along and you'll be reading this story, and then… Tangential flashback, just zoom, and the author thinks that they're giving lots of character, but really what happens is your reader, you're in a scene, and then suddenly you're off reading about grandma's pickles…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And this extended thing, where really all you needed at that point was, "Oh, my mom… Or my grandma used to put pickles in jars like this. Hmm. Every time I take a sip, it tastes like pickle juice to me."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Or you need a… Don't do it this way, but a "Oh, no, not one of those!"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You need that hook that later on you're going to get the explanation to.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] That is my reaction to pickles most of the time.

[Brandon] Obviously.

[So good]

[Brandon] Depends on if they're kosher or if they're not. Anyway.

[Mary] Pickled okra, y'all. I'm just sayin'. Pickled okra is just... Ah'm just goin' ta go full out Southe'n on y'a. It is just...

[Brandon] We are almost out of time, so...

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Last comments on this?

[Mary] Yeah. I'm going to say that when... That you can spend as much or as little time building your character backstory as you want, but I do think that there are some things that you should know about your character going in. That you need to know where they are… That their cultural backbone, I would say. Which is how… And when I say cultural backbone, it's four things. The inherited one, what is the culture that they have inherited? What is the culture that they are currently living? What do they aspire to? And then, what is their perceived culture? That if you know those four pieces of your character's backstory, that most of the rest of it you can probably discover as you are writing. If you want to dig deeper into any of that, then I think you can. But don't feel like you need to create a 3,000 word biopsy for each of your… Not a biopsy.

[Laughter oh, my God.]

[Mary] Well, you know, their backstory was…

[Amal] An exquisite corpse.

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Mary] All right. So your homework is I want you to explore what these different tools do. So I want you to write a scene where a character has a flashback that exposes some aspects of their backstory. Then I want you to reset that scene again. And this time, in that same scene, they are going to talk to another character about their backstory, so that they're having to deal with the ramifications of it in real time.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

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

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

( A plot, B plot... Save the cat! )

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/06/12-32-structuring-a-short-piece/

Key Points: Flash fiction and short stories. Short fiction is usually just two MACE elements. Flash fiction is usually a single MACE element, often one problem to solve. Introduce the problem, a couple try-fail cycles, and solution. Often MACE elements get nested, or form frames. Also, changing POV often changes MACE elements, because they are all about affecting the primary character. MACE is often useful for pruning -- focus on what you really want to tell, and remove extra threads. Sometimes flash fiction, short fiction, implies questions or endings for the reader, instead of explicitly describing them. This is good for issue stories (elemental genre).

MACE: Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character, Event.
Milieu: starts when a character enters a place and ends when they exit (often returning home); main conflict is getting out, returning, stopping the main character from getting out of the milieu; journey, quest, man against nature.
Ask/Answer: the character asks a question, ends when they find an answer; main conflict is stopping the character from getting the answer: mystery, puzzle, trying to solve or find an answer. Sometimes getting the answer introduces a bigger question.
Character: internal conflict, starting with dissatisfaction with self, end with new self-definition or acceptance of self; conflicts block the character from finding satisfying self-definition; love, romance, coming-of-age.
Event: external conflict, status quo has been disrupted, ends with new status quo or resolution of some kind; conflicts block character from achieving new status quo.; action, adventures. Often event story introduces character story, as the disrupted status quo causes the character to question their self-definition.
(For more details, see the liner notes!)

( Swing that MACE, hit them in the gut... )

[Brandon] We're out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework to help us practice the MACE quotient?
[Mary] Yes. Now, ironically, this is probably the longest description…
[Laughter]
[Mary] For a homework assignment. What I want you to do is, I want you to take either a new idea or something that you're working on that you'd like to be a short story. I want you to write… Pick one of the MACE elements. Whichever one you want to pick. Whichever one you feel like is your major driver. I want you to describe that in three sentences. So the first sentence is where the story opens. The second sentences what your major conflicts are. What your major conflict is, or the type of conflict. Your third sentence is where that winds up. All three of those things should match. Then, I want you to pick a second MACE element and do the same thing. So you've got two things. Say you've got one that's character and one that is ask/answer. So that's part one and part two of your homework. Part three of your homework is to nest them. So that you start with the ask, then you introduce the character, then you close out your character tag, and then you close out your ask tag, so it's nested. Part four of your homework is to flip it, so that the character is on the outside… It doesn't have to be character, whichever of these you picked. Character is on the outside, ask/answer is on the inside. I have this written out in full detail, you'll be happy to know. It is in the liner notes. So that you don't have to remember all of the things that I've just told you. And all of the description of the MACE elements is also in this.
[Brandon] You get a worksheet this time!
[Mary] You get a worksheet.
[Whoohoo!]
[Mary] This is the benefit of the fact that I teach classes sometimes.
[Brandon] Excellent. That actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys should all totally do that. But for right now… This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.13: Elemental Idea Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/03/27/11-13-elemental-idea-qa/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you keep obstacles in an idea story from feeling just like a boring lock that's waiting for the idea to unlock?
A: Good ideas for books are magnet ideas, that attract more and more ideas.
Q: I have a great idea for a story, but I'm not sure how to tie my character motivation to it. Any advice on how to connect characters to a great idea?
A: Start with the geewhiz idea. Figure out where it takes place. Then look at the character and question all the MICE possibilities. Brainstorm them all. What about the environment could cuase problems? What do they wonder about the idea? What challenges their self-image about the idea? What could go wrong? Finally, consider what motivates the character, and what's at stake, what will they lose if they fail?
Q: You've got an idea, but you're struggling to really flesh it out and dig deeply into it. My biggest fear is that I will do this idea, but I won't extrapolate far enough, and the reader will just feel that it's full of untapped potential. What advice do you have for a writer?
A: If the story is good and engaging, untapped potential is a feature! That's for the next book. But in short stories, readers expect you to leave things out, while in novels, they may assume you hadn't thought about it and missed it. If it fascinates you, let it grow and see where it goes. Brainstorm, especially why and what is the effect. Is it a dragon with a magic sword or a monkey with a propeller hat? Sometimes you have to keep reading, keep writing, and keep living until you can write what you want to write. Trust yourself.
Q: Is it possible to make every idea story viable, or are there just some that you have to give up on?
A: Sometimes an idea is problematic and damaging. But some people never give up on one, because if they give up on one, they will give up on them all. Sometimes you're not ready to make an idea work. If it doesn't seem viable, maybe the story is flawed. Go back to the beginning and think about it again.
Q: How do you avoid using too many ideas at once? Is there such a thing as idea clutter in an idea story?
A: Not too many ideas. You can have the wrong ideas. Beware the gorilla in the phone booth, a throwaway line that is cooler than what the character is focused on. Watch for too many ideas for the length of the story you are telling. Don't hold back on your cool ideas, you will not run out of them.

( When you've picked your idea, what happens next? )

[Brandon] I'm afraid that we are out of time. Unfortunately, I'm sorry that we didn't get to all your questions. Mary has some homework for us.
[Mary] All right. So last week, Nancy gave us a homework assignment in which you were supposed to brainstorm about 20 different ideas. What I want you to do is I want you to pick your favorite of those ideas. Take that idea and then start thinking about consequences and reasons. I want you to basically look at it and go what-if and why. I want you to work in opposite directions. So I want you to go why as far back... I want you to go back 10 steps of why. And I want you to go forward 10 steps of what-if.
[Brandon] Maybe go back last year and listen to the podcast we did on brainstorming during Season 10's Master Class. Thank you so much, Shannon, for joining us.
[Shannon] My pleasure.
[Brandon] Thank you to the audience here at Life, the Universe, and Everything.
[Whoo! Applause and whistles.]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: silly

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/07/writing-excuses-6-10-scott-cards-m-i-c-e-quotient/

Key points: MICE: milieu, idea, character, and event. Milieu: where the story takes place, starts when you enter the space, ends when you exit it. Stories about setting. Idea: start with a question, end when you answer the question. Character: start with a dissatisfied character, end with satisfaction or at least reconciliation. Event: something is wrong with the status quo, and ends with a solution. The MICE framework can be used at multiple levels, story, chapter, scene. Make promises and fulfill them. These can be nested, but close them in the order you open them. (Actually, reverse order -- MI ... IM).
( Mickey... Donald DUCK! )
[Brandon] All right, then. So, writing prompt. I should probably make myself do it, because I haven't done it in a while. So, writing prompt is do this with a different fairytale. Let's pick one.
[Dan] MICE quotient for Red Riding Hood?
[Mary] Red Riding Hood's a good one.
[Brandon] Red Riding Hood. That's a great one. MICE quotient for Red Riding Hood. Try and write a page of each story of the different things for MICE. Okay.
[Dan] Sweet.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: waiting

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

April 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.05: An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.52: Structure is a Promise
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.40: Nesting Threads in the M.I.C.E. Quotient
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.38: Deep Dive into Character
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.13: Elemental Idea Q&A
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with mice

Writing Excuses 18.05: An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

Writing Excuses 16.52: Structure is a Promise

Writing Excuses 16.40: Nesting Threads in the M.I.C.E. Quotient

Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event

Writing Excuses 16.38: Deep Dive into Character

Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories

Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

Writing Excuses 11.13: Elemental Idea Q&A

Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

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