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Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark
 
 
Key Points: Multiple influences. Make it a people story. Food is an unsung hero of worldbuilding. People live in color. Relax with a meal, then a monster comes. Fight scenes in places that shouldn't have fights, like schools, hospitals, playground, kitchens. Clues and seeds in the beginning, then bring them out later. Tell a story that sings to people and can change them. Write something for yourself. Absurdity, trauma, and horror. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 40]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 40]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] Today, we are joined by our special guest, P. Djèlí Clark. We hope that you've been reading along and listening as we've been talking about this phenomenal book, Ring Shout. We've brought him on to talk to us about the ways in which he tortured us through the tension. Phenderson, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?
[Phenderson] Sure thing. Thanks for having me here. I'm Phenderson Djèlí Clark, people probably know me as P. Djèlí Clark. I write stuff. Mostly science fiction when I can. Apart from my day job, where I'm an academic historian. So, this is how I attempt to let off steam. Thanks for having me.
 
[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much. So this was… I've talked about this with the listeners before, that this was a really difficult read for me, because you do crank up the tension quite a bit. There's a number of scenes that we will… We will discuss. But one of the things that I'm wondering about, when you sat down to work on this, were you thinking about, like, the historical era, or were you thinking about how can I make people super uncomfortable? Like, what kind of…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] What drove you?
[Phenderson] Yeah, that's a great question. I think perhaps a little bit of both, one subconsciously, one consciously. Certainly, I was thinking about the historical era. As I said, I'm an academic historian, and one of the classes I teach is Slavery in Film. So I've gotten to know Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the 1915 film where the Klan are heroes, quite well. I was trying to figure out a way to bring that story to people in the genre I love. So, Ring Shout came about from that central focus, as well as, as we can talk about, a lot of other little interesting ideas from ex-slave narratives that I've read, from stories that I've liked when I was younger, people may catch some Miss Whoozits, Miss Whatzits, what have you, from A Wrinkle in Time, down to the aesthetics of Beyonce's Formation Review.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Phenderson] There were multiple inspirations that I threw into this big pot of gumbo and hoped that it would work.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] Absolutely. I love that. Like… I will say, I did not catch all of that, or most of it, probably. But I remember when I… The Birth of a Nation comes really early, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see what he's doing. He did this thing, he did this other thing, it's and he puts them together into this thing." It really made me feel good. It made me feel like, okay, like, all the time that I've spent, like, watching like, sad narrative slavery [garbled twenties] and all those eyes on the pride where my parents were saying, like, it's all [garbled] like, paying off, which I thought it was a really, really fun thing. But I have to wonder, like, does that… I mean, does it ever feel like too much? Do you ever feel like I'm trying to juggle all these influences and not get overwhelmed by them?
[Phenderson] it's Well, yeah. When I was… To answer your question, when I was doing this, when I finished it, I was, like, well, this is a mess. I was like, this is just way too much going on here. I want to just throw some space aliens in here while I'm at it. Right? There's just so much going on. I didn't know if this thing would work. I always say, as writers, sometimes you create something that… I didn't have a full genre for it. I was like, this is all over the place. I didn't know how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even, at times, that you guys liked this. Okay. Great. So, it's one of these things where you take scotch tape and you put together this giant thing, you don't know if it's going to work, and it did. I don't even know if I could re-create it again. Because it was such a in the moment type of creation.
[Howard] Say, you're looking at your editor, you're like, "Wait. You took a heat gun to the scotch tape? No, are we supposed to fix that?"
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] So, I have to ask this question, did you still feel like it was a mess when it went to print?
[Phenderson] Again, luckily, so many people had read it and given it all these great… I was like, "Oh. It worked. Pshew." I guess what I was going for worked. I was so surprised, I still am surprised, at how many people like it. How much it's liked. All the countries that people have read it. When it was something that I wrote kind of as a stopgap. For my first novel. [Garbled] remember, hey, this guy's a writer.
[Howard] Okay. I'm here to tell you that whatever that gap was…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] You stopped it.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.
[Phenderson] So it worked. I'm happy. Right? I… Certainly, anything, I think, of any writer, you certainly have these deeper meetings. But I didn't know if anybody would get them. Like, Erin was saying. I didn't know if people would be able to latch onto those things. People really did. I'm just grateful.
 
[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things that we talked about when we were… Earlier, when we were discussing the idea of the narrative versus contextual tension. That there's the tension that happens on the page in the story, and then there's the tension that the reader brings to it, the contextual tension, that the reader brings to it by what they know about history…
[Phenderson] Right.
[Mary Robinette] And what they know about the larger world. You do a really good job, I think, of making sure that there is narrative tension there even for people who do not have a deep understanding of the contextual tension. I think that's why it works when you go to another country that is not as familiar with the history of American slavery and oppression. Were you thinking about that? Like… When you were structuring scenes, that you were like, oh, I need to make sure that there's something here for people who are a little clueless?
[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] I mean… I could hold forth and have a very long discussion, like Max Gladstone on how things work. I wish that I had, like… That I had that ability. But really so much of my writing is from the fact that I love reading, I love listening to storytellers, I come… My mother was an excellent storyteller. My mother could give you directions and it was riveting.
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] Right? She would build up tension… You're like, oh, man, I got it, which Lane I'm supposed to switch into. That's amazing. So I think I've brought some of that to this. It's just… I mean, I want to tell the largest story. Like you said, about ideas of oppression, about being in slavery and everything else, but I also want to make it a people story. I wanted the characters to shine. I wanted it to have their own lived experiences and how I would imagine people dealing with everyday life. Having a love life. Not getting along with the people in your little monster fighting group. How you would butt heads with people that you have to work with. I wanted to bring all of that to the story as well. In some ways, to make it more human, so people could relate to it. Also, to show that in the midst of this oppression, people still go to a juke joint. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] People still talk about sex and all these other things in life. That it's not just fighting the oppression, it's people living their lives. I wanted to make sure I got that across as well.
[Erin] Oh, my God. I…
[Howard] There was a lot of joy in that book for me.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] I… Gosh, I can't remember which scene it was. I remember which scene it wasn't. It wasn't the scene in the butcher shop.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]
[Howard] But there was a scene where I literally had to go make some jambalaya. Because you made me hungry for…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] The food of my people.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.
[Phenderson] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think food is one of the unsung heroes of worldbuilding.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] There's a way that I think food can evoke things. I've been in moods before where people like show a plate and I can hear people behind me going, "Mmm. Mmm."
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] I heard someone's stomach growl once in a film. I think it was in the movie Soul Food. Somebody's stomach growled in reaction. You know what I'm talking about, Erin, when they show that one plate…
[Erin] Yes.
[Phenderson] And I'm like… They're like, "Mmm. Mmm." I always thought it was ironic, though, the very plot of this movie is that food kills. Anyway.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] People do love their food. So I think there's a way that… I'm glad you said that, that… I know that… I think I know the scene you're talking about, like, when they're sitting down to eat. Because I just wanted to show that that communal experience of eating and enjoying these things after having a hard-fought battle… What's better than sitting down… Like, in the first Avengers movie. You go and you have some [garbled]. Right? There's something about that that is just very real. I… So, yeah. I think food is the unsung hero. I tell that to writers all the time. Don't neglect your food.
[Erin] If the food is bad, that tells you something too.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] You get out there, with [garbled vibration] plate after [garbled]
[laughter]
[Erin] It's not a good thing.
[Phenderson] Exactly.
 
[Erin] [garbled] When you were talking about oppression versus the real life, it may be think of one of my favorite things to do is to look at old black-and-white photos where they actually colorize it. Because I think people forget, like, people were living in color. You know what I mean? Like, well, instead they like put them on the wall, like they're not…
[Phenderson] Yes.
[Erin] Real. When you see them, like, I just think I saw one the other day, I think it was like Martin Luther King looking…
[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?
[Erin] Yes!
[Phenderson] They've re-announced it. People are like, "Whoo, they was fly." [Garbled]
[Erin] It was…
[Phenderson] Did you think they dressed in black and white? I think that's so true, is a historian, how people think of the past. It's hard sometimes for people to think of the past as these were people. Right? All of these events were happening, but they were still people, living their lives, bickering, getting along, joking. They were just people, and yes, they dressed in color. They matched the things. [Garbled] it was just, I guess, my gray drab suit. My other drab suit, now. No. It was… But there is something about that, how it brings it to life. I'm so glad you brought that up. I saw that effect in this. [Garbled] I understand that. It's still… It's something human about seeing those colors that makes you understand, like, yeah, these are people.
 
[Howard] When you… Coming back to tension for a moment, being able to sit down to a meal. That's a relief. That is a…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] Relaxing thing. If you let your leader… Your leader? Your reader relax…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] Into some food that they are imagining and you're describing it and they're getting the smells and the tastes…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] And the sounds and all that. And then you spring a monster on them later. It's going to be even sharper. It's going to work even better.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] I loved that. I don't know if you were doing it deliberately, but as I had gone upstairs eating the jambalaya, I was thinking, I may have walked into a trap here.
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] I may have walked right into a trap. I'm letting my guard down. Something terrible's going to happen very next.
[Phenderson] Yeah. I think that's good points you're making. I don't even know if I do it deliberately, but I think, like, I'll tell you, there's some stories I read and there's so much action and, like, do people stop and go to the bathroom? Right, you gotta stop someplace. Give me a pause. Right? I'm really big into if I'm reading a story, I want to pause. I want people to [garbled] I want people to stop. I think… It's okay if they don't have a big scene, I want a pause. Nothing like that communal, like you said, this way that people let their guard down when they're eating, especially if they feel they're in a safe place here for people. Then there's also still a time… That was my time to let people… For Sadie and Maurice to still have their little bickering bit. All right? But also to show that they're closer than people know. Right? Also, the juke joint, right? I could have easily made this a weird mean girls thing where they just don't get along, but I wanted to show that, no, underneath all that, they absolutely love each other. Right? That Sadie will tear down this world for Maurice even if they also bicker. I think there were those scenes that allowed me to do that. I really liked it… Like I… When I started the story, for instance, starting there, that conversation. I didn't worry, because you know we're taught, like, oh, the story should start. Don't have them… Don't have people in conversation. I was like, no, I want this conversation. I want this convo in the very beginning to start the story off. I thought there I could build a little tension between this group, and then the tension explodes, and, oh, there's a monster.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!
[Erin] I also think in real life, I think we talked about this on the episode, like, we all are much more, like, going to have tension in our conversations than because monsters attack us. Like, that's a kind of tension we understand. Like… I don't know what you all do in your spare time…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] But, in general, so it's like it feels so real, and then you're like and it goes to 11. It's sort of… I was thinking about, Howard, what you said about the food. When you read a food scene, it's like your nose opens up. Like you suddenly think about how things smell. Then, if the next thing you smell is like monster, like, you are… You're taking that in with a soul whiff, you know. Because you're in that moment.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] You're ready for it, and all your senses are already being engaged, versus, like, sometimes when you know tension is happening. As a reader, like, you'll tense up. Your hands will curl, you won't take in full breaths because you're in the moment. So I kind of like the idea that there's enough slowdown, that we're just chillin', laying back, and then [crunch].
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I… It's one of my favorite things also that… The… Making the reader feel like, oh, no, you're safe now. Everything's all fine. All fine… Then very not. Very, very not. I actually… Since we were talking about that first scene, I had a question as well. That kind of… I been thinking about it while I was reading it, but then when Howard said, oh, no, this is a trap… There are potential narrative traps as a writer in some of this… In some of the things… Any time we're writing. One of the things that I was… When I was reading it, I was waiting for the parade to turn on them. Because that's something that I would have seen in cinema or…
[Phenderson] Right.
[Mary Robinette] In the hands of another writer. You take us a very different place.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] With, hello monsters, and then going into the warehouse, which, like, is full and should not be full, and, like… So you keep ratcheting up the tension, but you avoid the obvious one. Did you avoid that because you were just not interested in writing it, because it was a little bit of a trap, or… I realize that's asking someone to tell us… Tell us what you were thinking when you were writing this however many years it is after you wrote the book is like monumentally unfair, and yet I'm still asking.
[Phenderson] Well, you know, as a writer, it's also like a ret con. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Like, people are always asking you to figure out why you did the thing you did. I end up coming up with an answer, and I'm like, "Is that true? Or am I…"
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] Just [garbled] like, am I imagining that was what I was thinking at the time? So, I know that's interesting that you say that, that you thought the crowd was going to turn on them. Right? Because they're in this dangerous place, that certainly was a Klan march. Right? So I don't think I ever thought of the crowd turning on them. I knew that they were going to be doing something away from what most people could see, only because what they have to do is so wild that everyone can't see this. Right? It has to be like this is the secret underground world. Like Blade. Like, nobody knows I'm fighting vampires. Right? This is what I do. This is the… What does he say in the movie? There's the candy coated world, and there's the one underneath. Right? I wanted to get that idea of, like, there's this underneath world that most people are simply unaware of. For that, to me, it had to happen away from the main crowd. It had to happen away from the main block of people for them to be able to have this open warfare. So, yeah. The warehouse came to me, I mean, this is where I literally had a… I've been to Macon, Georgia, but I had a map and I had a warehouse that was actually there. That's from an actual warehouse. It was… I have photos of it. It was actually used to house cotton. So it gave me the… It gave me something from the landscape to look down upon. Then I would be, like, I want a fight in a warehouse. That's a great thought. All right. So I like having fights in places that you just shouldn't be having fights in, right? Like in schools, hospitals, warehouses. It's just like that's not what this is for. But this is what we're going to going to turn it into. [Garbled] So, yeah. That's how that came about.
[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Now I'm sitting here going what is for having battles in…?
[Erin] I was just like… I was like playgrounds, playgrounds are really…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] That's a top place.
[Phenderson] Some of the best fight scenes, right?
[Howard] There really isn't a good place to have [garbled] battles
[Phenderson] If you like Star Wars, like, they're constantly having fight scenes in industrial centers. Hey, we're working here. [Garbled] with light sabers running around. They're just trying to get this work done.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.
[Howard] We are on a space station. If you break that, everyone dies.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Does ownership know what you guys are doing right now?
[Mary Robinette] Right. Every time there's a battle, a fight scene, that runs through a kitchen and the cooks just keep on cooking while they're going through…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm like, what? How does that…
[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.
[Erin] Table 17 needs…
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] They're more scared of the chefs than they are… 
[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.
[Howard] [garbled]
[Phenderson] Basically.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of interrupting things when fights come running through, we're going to interrupt right here and be back in just a minute to talk a little bit more about tension.
 
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[Phenderson] My thing of the week is… I am always late on TV shows. I say this to everybody. We live in a golden era of television. There's more fantastic TV that has ever existed in my lifetime. I no longer have to choose between the A-Team, Knight Rider, and Auto Man. That was like a weird show about a guy who turned into a car. Very ridiculous. In the eighties, eighties was a wild time. But now there's so much TV. But I'm always late. So what I've decided to watch this week is something that came out in 2019. It's a series, a short series, called The Terror. It is on Netflix. It's about these two British ships, the Erebus and I think it's the Terror, trying to find a way to the Northwest passage, and, whoo boy, these strange things begin to happen. I've long wanted to watch this film, then it went away. Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix, it's returned. I'm able to watch it. When this is over, I'm going to enjoy another episode. As I do constantly. So, yeah. That's my thing. Some of you have seen it. If you haven't, The Terror. Watch it at night.
[Erin] No.
[Mary Robinette] Making mental notes, do not take Phenderson's advice.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Here we are, back on the other side. The heroes have fought their way through our kitchen, and we have to talk about some more ingredients of tension. So, I was so pleased with myself for that metaphor, it's not really great.
[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you. I appreciate you. Some of the other things that we talked about were things like anticipation and resolution. There's a bunch of stuff that you set up early on that then has a nice payoff later. For instance, talking about the film that's going to be on Stone Mountain. You talk about that right at the beginning of the book, and then it comes back and plays… It continues to play a larger and larger role as we move through the book. Did you always have, like, and we're gonna go to Stone Mountain?
[Phenderson] Yeah. I always knew we were going to Stone Mountain. We were always going to Stone Mountain, because part of the origin of this entire thing is the fact that in real life, the second Klan has its origins on Stone Mountain. Right? And literally is created after D. W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is where the Klan arose. By this time, the first Klan is mostly died out, because they got what they wanted. They've taken over… They've instituted Jim Crow. The second Klan comes about really based on the film. The film so inspires this guy, Al Simmons, in Georgia that he decides to create the second Klan. The second Klan now has… It's still hates black people, but it has a larger enemies list. Now it doesn't like Catholics, it doesn't like German immigrants. It really doesn't like Jews. In fact is the killing of Leo Frank, the murder of Leo Frank is very much tied up with the second Klan being born in Georgia. He goes to Stone Mountain and they do a ritual. The ritual is based heavily on the film, the Birth of a Nation.
[Mary Robinette] Wow.
[Phenderson]'s It would almost… I mean, the group is not a terror group. It would almost be funny to call the movie Klan. Because the way they do many of the rituals they do are based more on the film Birth of a Nation than the first Klan that comes about. Right? This second Klan, of course, is much more massive. Where is the first Klan was maybe tens of thousands, this Klan rises to some four and a half million. Where is the first Klan was mostly in the South, and also in California where they're harassing the Chinese, the second Klan is everywhere. It swallows up the Midwest. It's in Maine, it's in Connecticut. It's everywhere. They're running people for office. They're not even wearing masks, because everyone can be a member of the Klan. Right? So I always knew I was going to Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain was that symbol. To this day, Stone Mountain is still a place where Klan and white supremacists meet. It has these giant reliefs on their, actually, of Confederate generals like Lee and others. Right? So it's still this place, this tension. So I always knew I wanted to go there, and, yeah, I definitely seeded it in the beginning. Because I'm a believer that if you give somebody something late in the story, I want to see it later on, but don't just put it there. I like people… I like to give people clues so that they can know that it's coming. Like, when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan… What's the movie with Bruce Willis? In the…
[Howard] Sixth Sense.
[Phenderson] Sixth Sense. I love the fact that when we figure it out, we're like, oh, the clues were always there. Right? We just saw it differently. So I like to make certain that I've seeded things so that when they do happen, people aren't like, whoa, what are you doing on Stone Mountain? I want them to get these little hints before, and then take them back now. See, I gotta do it, I'm an academic historian, so if you ask me things, I have to plug the history.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] I was right there with you. I spent a lot of time in Atlanta, and as you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was… Went to Atlanta for a job and was picked up by his boss at the airport. His boss took him, the first stop they made on the way from the airport to the job was at Stone Mountain.
[Phenderson] Okay. It's good that people go. It's beautiful scenery.
[Mary Robinette] Well, yeah. Contextually, a little more challenging when the person who's showing up for the job is a young black man and it's an older white guy who takes him there.
[Phenderson] It's not the best place. Especially if you know the history of, like… Why are we here?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, those are questions that are still being asked.
 
[Howard] So, one of the things that I love the most about Ring Shout… I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up in Florida. I have zero childhood knowledge of the history that you're talking about. That was all completely obscured from me. I… It's just been the last 10 years that I've been looking back and realizing, oh, wow. I know nothing. Well. Less than 50 percent of what was happening in that time. In that area. The way you wrote the novel, I was able just contextually to tell immediately, okay, this is P. Djèlí Clark creating fiction and this is P. Djèlí Clark telling me history.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] That dance that you did between the fantastic that you wove through your story in order to create a mythos that was brilliant and wonderful and horrific and full of scary meat versus…
[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.
[Howard] Versus the history which is… I am ashamed for not knowing it sooner. But that dance you did was wonderful. I loved the book for that.
[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Unfortunately, in Florida, they're trying to make it so that people will not know about these things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] I just think that there is this way that I think you're hitting on the head, there are these aspects of American history that just aren't spoken of. I think about when HBO re-did Watchmen and they decided to do it from a perspective of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma is something that I've known about since I was a kid, because in black spaces, it's just talked about. Even if people don't know everything, they've heard of black Wall Street. They know what happened there. People just bring it up. My parents are from the Caribbean. So they didn't come here and tell like the late sixties, early seventies. They knew about it. I heard about it in a barbershop somewhere. This is just something I knew. But most people, even the show runner for that show. He was a 40 something-year-old black male. He had never heard of it. Right? Until, like a few years before. It fascinated him. He went to look for it. Therefore he knew he had to put this into the film. That night that it premiered, I think Google almost broke because people were googling what is Tulsa Oklahoma? What happened there? Now it's just become something that everyone knows, but there is this way that there are a lot of things that the national narrative doesn't like to talk about. That doesn't make us feel good. So these kind of things become knowledge to like a few people where it's just known in the black community, like this thing happened, but in the larger community, it's just completely unheard of. So, yeah, I wrote… Part of what I was doing as the historian in me, I'm trying to bring these things out by using fiction. Right? What inspired me, for a lot of this, what inspired the story, were actually the ex-slave narratives taken from the last generation of enslaved people who were living in the 1920s continuing into the 1930s, during the depression, the WPA narratives. They talk about this first Klan. They described them as monsters. When I first… I was like, whoa. That's amazing. Now they know they're not monsters. But they're using this notion of describing the Klan as haints, saying that they have horns, that they could drink tons of water, do these supernatural acts, that they have chains, and they would blacken their faces I always had this idea that the using this idea of storytelling to talk about the trauma that they were faced with. Right? Turning these people… Who they knew who they were. They're like, yeah, that's Judge so and so. I know who he is. He owned me, or I worked for him. But he dresses up and he comes and he terrorizes us. What better way to talk about your trauma then using horror? Which is what the scholar Kinitra Brooks, she always says this is what horror is. Right? It's about us trying to find a way to talk about trauma. So, all this to say, I took my cue from these former slaves using folklore to talk about this history, and saying, what if I did that as well. It was just me trying to… Constantly trying to make it not get to historical, so that people like, oh, no, it's history, I'm running away. But yet, imbuing it with the fiction enough to keep people there in the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think you just did a great job of walking that line. I also enjoy writing historical fiction.
[Phenderson] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] The tension…
[Phenderson] Very well.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you. The tension that you can put on things by inviting the reader into…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I feel like when you use real history, you are making space for the reader, because your engaging their curiosity.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] In a way that is harder, I think with some other forms of fiction. One of the things…
[Erin] Oh, sorry.
[Mary Robinette] That you did…
 
[Howard] This might be a little on the nose, but I feel like our listeners at this point really need to be able to draw a line between the way Birth of a Nation as a medium, as a story, was so incredibly destructive… I mean, it was very influential on culture, but it was very, very destructive. And the stories that we tell now that attempt to correct that can be so corrective. Writing is important, and getting it right is important. Telling a story that will sing to people and can change them is important. This is a good work that you did, that we want to do. It is a good work.
[Phenderson] Thank you. Thank you. That's great to hear. I mean, so much of… Yeah, I can't say I didn't write this in a sense of this is a corrective or for my own catharsis. You know? People hunting Klan members? Yeah, it's cathartic. So, thank you, that's great to hear. I… Like I said, when I say I wrote this with the idea that a few people might like it, I still had this idea this is what I want people to get from it, and that people come away with this notion of it's a corrective, but also this… Giving them this inspiration to go, I want to find out more. As a historian. Of course, I want you to find out more, I want you to be able to look and say, oh, wow. This was a real part of history. This is a fictional part, like you said, these things actually happened. So, thank you very much. That's… You make me want to go write.
[Erin] Please do.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Please do write more. One of the things that I just wanted to draw a line under that Phenderson is talking about that Howard has mentioned is that Phenderson wrote this for himself. We talked about the idea of writing for… Of having a story that's written for an in group, a group that has a shared common experience. Then, knowing that people who are outgroup are also going to read it and engage with it. I want you to understand… I want you to bear in mind that this is something that he wrote for himself, and it is… When you are sitting down to write something, the thing that you can do to make it most true and most interesting is to write something for yourself.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] I think not be apologetic about it. You know what I mean? I think that there are… The world will tell you, like, oh, you need to approach this really carefully and you need to… It's not to say that you can just do whatever you want, but, especially when you're talking about things that are about what you know, what you grew up with, and things that your family talked about, things that are part of your history. I think it's what I really liked about this book is that it's bold. You know what I mean? It's not shirking from engaging the past. It's going all the way in. This is going to… I'm going to take a complete 90 degrees turn here for no reason other than I can.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Don't try to stop me! Which is that I also think tone is so interesting and important, because one of the things I always… I was about to say one of the things I always loved about the Klan, not an actual thing, but…
[Laughter]
[Erin] My favorite part is that one of the things that undercut them was when comic books started mocking them, that actually it was these are ridiculous people who took hate in the weird movie and decided to like cosplay evil. When that was being made fun of by like old-school comics, they were like, oh, we can't recruit as much because it turns out that our stuff… Like, we aren't able to get the recruitment. It's not scary anymore.
[Phenderson] Right.
[Erin] It just feels silly. So I think there's so many different tones, and I'm curious, like, what made you decide to go, like, all the way on horror? Because there's something ridiculous about it, but also something horrifying.
[Phenderson] Yeah. I thought that's a great… That's interesting. Thinking about recent happenings in politics, the notion that when you can make hatemongers and fascists, you make them feel weird and simply laugh at them, how much power does that rob from them? Right? The fact that you can do that. So that's an interesting point that you're making their. In this case, again, I was taking my cue so much from those ex-slave… To a great… You're… I mean, I should point this out, that I first read those narratives when I was doing a Masters degree. 10 years before I would sit down to write Ring Shout. Those ideas, I was introduced to those ideas there, I was introduced to the night doctor in those narratives. I kind of sat… I know, like I said, I want to do something with this. I didn't know what. So, it took me 10 years before I was, like, okay, I'm ready to actually approach this. So I want to say that I was really trying to honor… The fact that they gave me these wonderful ideas and trying to be truthful to it. Yeah, like, so much of it was I wanted to show the horror of it. Some of it's also absurd. Right? Like Butcher Clyde is absurd. But he's also terrible. I wanted to have that bridge between absurdities, but also it's frightening. Right? I just wanted to get that down. The notion that, you know, there's a point where Nana Jean says, like, "The Klan members we haven't turned yet," and she calls them, like fools. Right? I wanted to get this idea that they're dressing up and they're clowns. They're fools…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Right? But if they let that hate consume them, they can become this monstrous danger, that can destroy others. But she says of the ones who aren't, she just says, they're fools. Right? She said… She makes this distinction between the fools are the ones who turned. But I wanted to get that across. Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, you just… I think you walked those lines really nicely. On the subject of the narratives, the slave narratives, you've got a bunch of the sections that are transliterated from the Gullah.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And… I loved… Like, I got… They're just so juicy, and I love them all. But I'm looking at notation 25 in particular, the shout Eve and Adam tell about them to that wicked snake and the fruit from the forbidden tree. That one, it's interesting to me the way it is talking about the shout and how you wind up using the shout later. So I'm curious again, like, having… There's so many decisions that go into making these kinds of interludes. There is the where you place it. There's the content. There's the tone of it. There is the… Like… How many of these are you jumping straight off of something that you had read, how many of them are you are completely riffing on your own? Tell us… I don't have a question there, I just want you to talk about them.
[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Because I don't get asked about [garbled] those parts are so important to me, because I thought they set the tone for each chapter, they set… They were able to say so much in their… In between interludes. I actually pulled a lot of that from, first of all, I looked at actual shouts. I wanted to know what the shouts were about. So each one is pulled from an actual different shout. I thought the shouts were so fascinating because I said this is philosophy. People are giving phil… And I even have something in their where somebody says how many intellectual philosophers were lost to the droning work of slavery, and so forth. How many did you lose? How many minds that could have thought up these fascinating things? I thought when I was… So I… There were the shouts themselves, and I read people who were interpreting the shouts. Some of these were Lomax and others who were first doing interviews. Later there are books that talk about shouts where people say, well, this is what the shout is about. As I'm listening to people, I'm like, this is philosophical. They're talking about how humans think about themselves and their place in the universe and how… It was all of that. Right? It's as deep as Kant and anybody else. That's what I wanted to get across here in these shouts by… So some of it comes from quotes that I've read, and I'm also adding my own take to it, and my own riffing of it, and trying to give an interpretation, but trying to let their voices come through there. I have this transliterated because if anybody noticed that supposed to be [garbled] not memory for name… Our favorite Jewish radical who's a member of the monster fighting crew. If anybody knows, those are her initials, she is the one who supposedly a hero throughout this. So I'm putting a little bit in there. I kind of have her as a Lomax or something, like, using that the way that they would write about what they saw. So it's a bit of that. But, yeah, each one was important, each one was supposed to be kind of linked to the chapter that was coming. And you should know that I also had little quotes that I wanted from the slave narratives themselves, direct quotes. They ended up having to go, because I think, like you said, if people were like, okay. You have the interludes, then you have the little narrative parts…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Phenderson] Of the chapter, it's too much. So it was one of those things, okay, it hurt, but I had to cut them all out. But I kept one. That is in the very… In my acknowledgments. The one about Oma. It was like the Klan came into her house and she whooped them one at a time. That's an actual quote. I love that. Because here she's talking about her mama's like… I mean, just fantastical that her mother's just… It's so Paul Bunyan, John Henry. Klan members came in, I'm home with the baby, I'm just beating each Klan member one at a time. I said, that's… I have to have… I have to keep this quote in here. So there were a lot of quotes like that, I wanted to get these voices of these ex-slaves. But I definitely kept that one about Ma. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Awesome.
[Erin] I love the way you were thinking about… As you were talking about the shouts in the stories and the narratives, because so much of the way I took some of this actual story is that it's about the stories we tell ourselves.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] It's about the stories we allow ourselves to tell, the ones that we hold back, the ones we are afraid of, the ones we should fear. So, so much of it being rooted in you wanting to tell people's stories.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] I think is just really cool and deep and like an extra level, knowing that that was part of what went into it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When you said that the shouts were philosophy and about thinking about their place in the universe, I'm like, that is what this entire book is, Maurice trying to figure out her place in the universe.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, well done.
 
[Howard] This episode is titled discussing tension, and the real tension I'm seeing here is your tension that is relieved by writing this book.
[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.
[Howard] So, this was done and it was out and you told that story.
[Phenderson] I wrote this book in a few weeks because it was one of those things you know, as writers, you have this idea. I pitched the idea months before. It was due, like, in August. I hadn't written a thing. This is when I had the idea in my head. I'd been percolating this story for several years. But I just hadn't let it flow out. When it flowed out, like, I think it was like two or three weeks, I just wrote it. Let's get it all out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, this is where one writer says to another in a friendly collegial way, "You ass hole."
[Phenderson] Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] There's something, again…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] wrote this award-winning book in just a couple of weeks.
[Phenderson] [garbled] The idea for it, like I'd taken this stuff like a decade before. It was sometime around… I would say around 2015 or so, I really started thinking about it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] I was on a fellowship. My last fellowship. I was working on my dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania, literally nowhere Pennsylvania. My wife came to visit me one time there, when she was living in DC. She's like, "I'm not going back again." I saw tractor pulls and people chasing greased pigs at a fair.
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] Okay, at a fair. So I would drive almost every weekend back to DC, several hour drive. I'd be driving through this misty mountain, I don't know if anybody listens to Old Gods of Appalachia, but it was that. Right? I was… So, while I'm driving, I'm listening to some shouts. I'm listening to these songs sometimes I'm just imagining. So there was a way where some of my built-up tension, I had so much of it in me, that when it came out, it just all poured out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Because it was something I'd been spinning with for so long that when I finally came to write it, I could just write it.
[Howard] So what I'm hearing is if you want to write a book in three weeks, think the book for a decade.
[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Erin] I find that reassuring. There are several things I've been thinking about for a decade, so, like, I feel like any day now…
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I have… I've had things that I've had to sit on for a while. That's a question that we get a lot from listeners or early career writers who are like, "I have this idea, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice." I'm like, it's okay to sit on it.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It's okay to sit on it and think about it and noodle on it until…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And write other things while you're leveling up.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of leveling up, and writing other things, I think it's time for us to give some homework. Phenderson, I think you have homework for us?
 
[Phenderson] Yes. If anyone is really interested in building tension and storytelling over a short amount of time, I have something that you can go watch. If you seen it already, go to Netflix, I want you to find somebody else's Netflix if you need to, and I want you to watch Midnight Mass. I want you to watch a show that builds so many different areas of tension that by the time it all hits, you will have realized I haven't slept in 12 hours watching this show. And you are a balled up knot of tension watching and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. It's an amazing show. Midnight Mass if you haven't seen it yet. By Howard's face, Howard has seen it.
[Howard] That's awesome homework.
 
[Howard] You're out of excuses. Now go turn into a balled up knot.
[chuckles]
 
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
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Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?
 
 
Key Points: Deep Dive into A Function of Firepower. The title comes from a maxim, "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." AI, Oafans, Petey, all these guns versus "The pen is mightier than the sword." I.e., an academic conference. Mutual assured destruction. Fermi's Paradox. Comedy depends a lot on subversion. Petey is an antagonist, but not villainous. Being a villain and being sympathetic are not necessarily separate. Sympathetic and monstrous at the same time. Sometimes you need a new tool. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, A Function of Firepower.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Howard] And I'm in charge for this episode, and I have been for some of the other ones. Kind of in charge. Mostly, the questions from my friends here are going to steer what happens…
[Laughter]
[Howard] The title of this book, A Function of Firepower, title comes from one of the 70 maxims. The maxim is "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." Which obviously means sometimes who is in charge is not a question of who was elected to be in charge, who is most qualified to be in charge, it is who is the best armed. Which is, as I think we can all agree, a terrible way to decide who gets to run things. The story here begins with a crazy AI who has lots and lots of big guns and who is bound and determined to blow up anything that could cause the sort of mess that she's upset about. Then we have the return of the Oafan race, who own a whole bunch of spaceships that our heroes took because they didn't think the Oafans were still alive. But, hey, surprise, they are. Now we want our stuff back. Now, instantly, they are the largest armed force in the galaxy. Then, of course, throughout Schlock Mercenary, there's been Petey, where I always imagined as the sci-fi equivalent of an enlightened desperate. A benign god-king. Who is not as powerful as he used to be. Then I balanced those questions, all of those guns against the old saw… I say the old saw. It's Shakespeare, isn't it? The pen is mightier than the sword? That's Shakespeare?
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say yes. I don't actually know.
[Howard] It's probably Shakespeare.
[DongWon] Odds are high, let's say.
[Laughter]
[Howard] [garbled ballad] is Shakespeare. So, yeah. The pen is mightier than the sword. I wanted to drive some of the actual solutions from an academic conference where people are trying to answer the question, where did all of the civilizations go that came before this galactic civilization? Are we doomed to wipe ourselves out? Is there a great filter? What is it that's going on? I really enjoyed writing it, but it was a challenge, because I knew it had to be more than just a thing that keeps the conclusion from sitting right next to the beginning. It needed to be more than a spacer.
[DongWon] You managed to create in the way that middle volumes are kind of a really dark chapter of this story. Right? I mean, the thematics as you just laid them out, tapping into Cold War era of mutual assured destruction. There's, like, overtones of almost, like, indigenous reparations. Then, answering this big question about like Fermi's Paradox in certain ways. Right? I'm… I know you grew up sort of child of the Cold War in some ways. How much was that weapons of mass destruction, mutual assured destruction, finding other answers to that and asking that question in a slightly different way… How much was that [garbled driving]
[Howard] That's been… I mean… Sigh. People use the word DNA wrong in this way all the time. That's been part of my DNA my whole life. I grew up… Yes, child of the Cold War. Parents telling me how incredibly scary the Cuban missile crisis was. And I think it was Korean Airlines flight something or other… Seven… KLA… I want to say 007, but it couldn't have been that because nobody would name their plane, their flight, 007. Korean Airlines flight shot down by the Russians in the early 80's.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I remember that.
[Howard] I remember everybody at school thinking this is it. This is the thing that sets it all off. So, yeah, there… That's in my blood, that's the thing that my brain grew up with and grew out of… Not in the same way that you grow out of a pair of clothes, but in the way that a tree grows out of a given patch of dirt. So, yeah, I had to explore those themes. Also, those themes are… When you look at the various solution sets for Fermi's Paradox, one of them is the set that says intelligence always gets greedy and destroys itself in a way that leaves no traces. Which is a horribly negative thought to have, but it's fun to ask the question.
[DongWon] I think, because you've kind of created inverted war games here in certain ways. Right? Like, Chinook has decided that the long guns are bad, we need to get rid of the long guns, and she's going to do everything in her power to make that happen. Unfortunately, that also means the Cold War is now a shooting war.
[Howard] Yep.
[DongWon] And a lot of people are going to die as a result. Also, the actual problem is completely external to whatever is happening here. This is a misinterpretation of the data. But I guess I'm kind of curious, like, how did you get to that iteration of this? It seems like you took the basis… The base narrative that we see a lot, of the AI goes amok, decides humanity is the problem, but pushed it one step further in this way that she really is trying to save civilization in a certain way. Right? She believes she's doing the right thing. In a way that I found to be very relatable and kind of fascinating, watching her kind of go off the rails, even as she's editing herself and coming to some erroneous conclusions. But what was… I don't exactly know what I'm asking, but there's something very interesting in how your thinking about mutually assured destruction that I don't feel like I've ever quite seen in this way before.
[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because at some level, everything Schlock Mercenary is, is derivative of things that I've consumed. I named a book Big Dumb Objects because there's this whole sci-fi trope about big dumb objects. Better authors than I have gotten to many of these questions long before I did. So when I addressed them, I wanted to subvert or distort… Because comedy depends a lot on subversion, and maybe that's just… Maybe that accidentally resulted in something that from a philosophical standpoint is interesting rather than comedic. I'm so glad you noticed.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, like… Circling back to Chinook when we're talking about the goals. Like, there's the authorial goal of these are the things, the questions that I need her to take. Then there's the character goals of this is why she's doing that. When you were mapping it out, when you were doing that outline, how aware of her internal motivations were you, and how much of that did you discover in the process of writing it?
[Howard] Ah. I knew pretty much all of what was driving her from the word go. There were the overt motives which is that her creator, her jailer, and her savior were all killed at the same time. It was very emotional for her. She suddenly had no way to process it. But also, the event triggered or set off a trigger like a timebomb in the system that she was now inhabiting, because the intelligence that had all of the Oafans trapped was so unhappy with themselves for what they'd done that they built this thing that would let them rewrite themselves so they could forget having committed the crime so that they could continue to keep the Oafans trapped. Well, now Chinook was there, the AI that used to live there moved out because they were ready for a new life, and she has this horrible emotional event and trips a system that begins rewriting her psyche in ways that she doesn't know she's doing. I got… I mean, when I first described that to myself in the outline, I got chills. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. Oh, what a landmine you've created for this character."
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] "This is going to be fun." Then, everything after that…
[DongWon] Well, the core metaphor…
[Howard] Everything after that was just exploring the outgrowths of it.
[DongWon] I love the core metaphor of for these cycles of violence to perpetuate, for us to continue these wars, to continue these oppressions and genocides, we have to erase our own memory of what happened and rewrite our memory so we don't remember what we did a generation ago.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And then we will repeat the same error, which keeps people oppressed, which keeps people in these positions, which perpetuates this long Cold War and all of that.
[Howard] Yeah, that when I did do on purpose. But… And I can't remember when, but I recall at one point deciding, "Oo. You know what? I don't want to say that part out loud. I want to just leave that at that level as a discovery exercise for the reader." Speaking of discovery exercises, we're going to go discover something and come right back after the break.
 
[Howard] Hey, everybody. It's Howard. If you go to kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler spelled T.A.Y.L.E.R. all one word, you will find that we are getting ready to put Mandatory Failure, Schlock Mercenary book 18 into print, and you can get a copy for your very own self. We are super excited about this. I've done a bonus story for it that [Ethan Kozak] is illustrating. The book is glorious and wonderful. It's one of my very favorites. It's one of Sandra's very favorites. I'm sure that the moment we're able to put it into your hands, it will be one of your very favorites. Kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler all one word except not with the all one word part, I didn't need to tell you that, you knew that. Just spell it with the ER and you'll be fine. Thanks.
 
[Howard] And we're back. What are we going to discover next?
[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk a little bit about Petey and what Petey is going through here.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Again, like, by this point, we really like these characters. You're doing stuff to them that I have feelings about. Why? Why?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] For a long time, when I created the character of Petey, the trope that everyone expected and they been waiting for this shoe to drop for a decade or more, was, "Oh, yeah, he runs a galaxy. He's going to turn out to be awful. We're going to have to kill him, we're going to have to fight him. He's going to be a bad guy." I needed to set things up so that that didn't happen. The easiest way to do that was to put pressure on him where he has to do violent and unpleasant things, and he always manages to do it in as nonintrusive a way as possible, and actually to back away from the options that a true tyrant would have taken.
[DongWon] Do you consider Petey a villain?
[Howard] I don't, but I consider him frightening.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, he definitely serves an antagonist purpose, but…
[DongWon] Yeah, he fits the antagonist role, especially in volume 3, which will talk about in [garbled episode]
[Howard] He's an antagonist, but I don't see him as villainous. Does that make sense?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Which is, I think, why I'm like these are characters that I wind up caring about because it's not just the… It's like all of them.
[DongWon] I mean, Chinook is like the primary villain of this book. Right? I also find her probably to be the most sympathetic character in this book as well. Right? Those things aren't necessarily separate. There are ways in which I really like Petey. Also, I find Petey to be the scariest thing in these books. I consider the arc of all of this is… Or the fundamental arc really is as much what do we do about Petey as it is what do we do about these dark matter intelligences that are determined to destroy the universe.
[Howard] Well, the fact that… There's that… The UNS, they're having some High Admirality meeting and somebody mentions Petey and somebody else says, "What are you doing? You might as well just invite him in." Then he shows up and says, "I don't actually need to be invited."
[DongWon] I was already here.
[Howard] "I've been here the whole time." One, that's a fun joke to tell. Two, that's yet another cementing of, guys, when something is super intelligent and superpowerful whether or not it is super benign, it's scary.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Howard] That's actually echoed by something that happened very early in Schlock Mercenary, which is my discovery that from any perspective other than Schlock's, Schlock is a monster. So, placing a character we like in a way that you don't have to turn the book very much to one side or the other to realize, "Oh. You're really scary." That was very fun for me.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Well, I mean, you do such a good job of that, of so many of your heroes are also quite monstrous in certain ways and capable of truly mind-boggling acts of violence. Right? Like, even your human scale protagonists are often capable of truly astonishing acts of violence. Right? Whether that's pulling the arms off the enemy ship's captain or…
[Mary Robinette] I was thinking that that…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] When you were talking, it was like…
[DongWon] Or one person in power armor just destroying an armada.
 
[Erin] It seems like it's really on cue with the theme… Like, getting back to that kind of mutual assured destruction, like, I think there's something really… Wholesome is not the right word, but in realizing that monster… Like, everyone is… People are both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time, and that's what makes the whole situation so terrifying.
[Howard] Yeah. The… Again, coming back to the question of Fermi's Paradox, the idea that as civilizations developed technologically, their ability to destroy themselves permanently… Not just a portion of themselves, but to just wipe themselves out of existence, increases. That's an important theme here, and I wanted to illustrate it in a way that lets us explore a possible alternative. Which is what that whole scholarly convention was, and is… Elizabeth, who ends up running the scholarly convention, she was roped into traveling with the Toughs because her boyfriend was one of the mercenaries and she just followed him onto the ship and suddenly realized she was cooking for a group of professional sociopaths and wasn't sure she fit in. In this book, I wanted to put her in a position to steer things, to guide things away from all of the violence and disaster.
[DongWon] Well, she's really the antidote to the title. Right? Like, rank is a function of firepower, but also, we see her get promoted out of being a cook, just for being smart and competent and willing to say the thing that no one else is willing to say. Right? It's almost like your… In creating this hero organization of these mercenaries, the antidote to just taking power at the end of a long gun really is recognizing and rewarding competence and forthrightness. It's in a world where not only rank is a function of power, firepower, but ethics is a function of firepower, to have an antidote to that, I think, really essential to making this book work.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, along the lines of making this book work, it also had to function as setting up in the launchpad for the final book. So when you were… So let's talk about, since this is a deep dive and we're full of spoilers, let's talk about the ending.
[Howard] In the end of the previous book, the end of Mandatory Failure, the Pa'anuri, the bad guys, blow up one of Petey's cities. It was during this book that someone figures out, "Oh, I think I know how the Pa'anuri long gun works. They don't have a targeting mechanism… Their targeting mechanism… They can see certain kinds of power sources, and they are walking their shots. What are they aiming at? They're aiming at Petey. They're trying to destroy his core power generator, which, by the time we get to the end of the book, we realize that's the tool that he needs in order to fight back. They blow a piece of it up. I knew that was… That was part of the original outline, is that we blow up something that creates a puzzle in book 18, we blow up something that creates a disaster in book 19. Cueing that up was a lot of fun. Honestly, one of the things that was the most fun about it was… And this is going to sound silly, I'm sure. Using brush pens and circle templates to create some of the energy effect shapes that I wanted to create, and then sending them to the colorist and saying, "Look. There is no actual astronomical or physics analog for the colors that these things should be. Just make it look scary and dangerous and loud and hot and big and whatever." Travis ran with it.
[DongWon] Yeah. I was going to say, we… We're a writing podcast, so obviously we're talking about the narrative structure and the writing, but on the art front, you really pushed yourself to a different level it feels like here. You got on… I don't know, you kind of got on your Jack Kirby bull shit in the best way.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It was really fun to see some of these bigger scope, bigger scale intergalactic war things happening. You really start pulling out these big guns, no pun intended, by the end of this one.
[Howard] I leveled up the writing earlier in my career than I leveled up the art. That might be because I joined the Writing Excuses podcast…
[Laughter]
[Howard] In 08, and have never been part of an art podcast. Never. But I remember, it was a convention, it was at GenCon, I was talking to Lar deSouza and complaining about how much my hand hurt using this one pan trying to create lines. He looked at what I was doing and said, "Here. Take this." A [fidona suke] polymer nib short brush pen. I grabbed it and was like, "Oh, my gosh. A light touch makes a skinny line, and a hard touch makes a fat line, but it doesn't splay like a brush. Oh, this is amazing. This is so cool." Took it back to my booth. He gave it to me because he's a hero. Took it back to my booth, and drew a book cover with it. I think that was 2015. Just started to learn to use those tools and that piece of the toolbox was critically important for the finale, because now I could render some of these pictures that I just didn't have the skill set for earlier. Weird to talk about that on a writing podcast.
[Mary Robinette] But it's I think it's very much to the point, that there are… There is a tool that you don't know that you need to add to your toolbox. Like, that's… We talk about it as a metaphor all the time, and you're talking about it is a very literal real thing.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, here's a new tool. Physical tool." I think that that's something that everyone can take away. It's like you… Just getting the tool is not enough, it's learning how to use the tool that's really where the magic is.
[Howard] I think one of the things that Lar said was "When the student is ready, the master will appear." I had tried to use brush pens before and just couldn't. I tried several. Simply could not make them work. Then I sat down with him, and in 30 seconds, the lines were coming off my hand the way they needed to. I was like, "This pen is magical. I never…" Then he said, "When the student is ready, the master will appear. You are now ready for this tool. Congratulations." We are just about out of time. The conclusion of this book needed to set up the final story. That involved what I call like character arc blocking. Where I had to put chunks of the cast in different places. I had to scatter them because I knew that the final act, the next book, was going to come together with them in the very end coming together. I know that sounds shallow and silly and obvious, but shallow and silly and obvious… I've made the Schlock Mercenary joke already. Which of those words suggested that I would not do this? But sometimes those simple tools are the best. We work with those forms, and then, as you drill down on them and make them your own, they actually work. Hey, work. Homework. Who's got that?
 
[Erin] Yeah. I do. Speaking of tools you can make your own,what we're going to ask you to do for the homework this time is to work three words into your work in progress. They are expeditious, sock, and dragonfly. The best words. So, enjoy those and set them right into your work.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any questions that are on your mind.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are
 
 
Key points: To write a character who is super clever, amazingly smart… Gift the character with your indecision. Show the character going through the process of thinking, then show the character making logical jumps. Clean the brain vomit off the screen, but keep the key portions. Give the reader enough clues to understand the problem and try to solve it themselves, so they participate in the intelligence of the character. Brainstorming, pacing, and cleaning it up. Letting the reader arrive at a conclusion before the character does is satisfying, but don't overdo it. Make sure the key clues are all out there for the reader. In mysteries, the reader is one step behind the detective, but in thrillers, the reader is one step ahead. It may take the writer some time to figure out a clever answer, but if the character does it in seconds, the reader is amazed at how smart they are! Similarly, if all the other characters react as if this character is very smart, the reader will accept it, too. If the character knows they're smart and displays that confidence on the page, the reader sees it. Also, borrow expert knowledge from other people. Sometimes, for instance in a heist novel, later revelation of how something gets done works best. But when you reveal the monster, make sure it's horrifying! Lastly, consider Dave and the fizz buzz test.
 
Bits and pieces... )
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Amal] And we're not… That… Smart? Are we smart?
[Howard] We… Okay.
[Amal] We're pretty smart.
[Howard] We are rejoined for this episode by Amal El-Mohtar, who I personally believe is very much that smart.
[Hah!]
[Howard] But even at that level, if she takes time… Yes?
[Mary] We should actually introduce all of ourselves.
[Howard] Oh, damn.
[Dan] He's just demonstrating how not smart we are.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm just… 
[Laughter]
[Howard] I was so excited to be able to do something right.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then Mary told me I didn't.
[Dan] You know, at some point, the opportunity might arise again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm thinking 2020…
[Mary] What's er name?
[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.
[Mary] What's your name?
[Howard] My name? Or her name?
[Mary] Your name.
[Howard] My name. I couldn't hear you. I said, "What's her name?" I was missing like a little piece of the syllable.
[Mary] He's Howard. I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan. 
[Howard] I was going to start again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Hey, you know what, we're keeping it.
[Amal] We're keeping this?
[Howard] We're keeping it. I was going to pre-roll over the whole beginning again. Amal, thank you for joining us. I'm so sorry for how not smart we are. It's so nice to have you back.
[Dan] Because you are.
[Amal] It's a pleasure to be here.
 
[Howard] Thank you. One of the trickiest things to do in any of our writing is to write a character who comes up with a solution that is super clever, amazingly smart, in just seconds, and we try to write that in the same amount of time, or even in 10 times that amount of time. We try and write characters who are far cleverer than we are. What are the tricks that you use to make that happen?
[Mary] One of the things that I often use is actually gifting the character with my indecision. Because what I find is that there are two things that will make a character seem smart. One is watching them go through the process, and the other is watching the logical jump. Strangely, I often find that watching them go through the process, especially early in the piece, will make the character… Make the reader think, "Oh, this character's smart," because they can see all of the logical chains. So when I'm struggling, like how would you solve this problem? Having a character who is thinking, "Okay, I'm stuck in a room. How do I get out of the room? Do I try that door? No, that door has killer bees outside.
[Hah!]
[Mary] Do I try this door? There's someone with a drill outside it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Whatever it… Okay. So, I know, I will open this third door, and there's a balcony, and I can hang glide from it. Whatever that process is, that gifting… Basically what's happening there is I am brainstorming on the page in the voice of my character. What the reader is receiving is a character is thinking logically through the problem. Then, later in the story, I don't have to do that. I can brainstorm off the page, and just have the character jump to that, and the reader will then assume the character has exhibited all of those smarts, because I've laid the groundwork earlier.
 
[Dan] Yeah. When you write that kind of brainstorming scene, and I do it a lot as well, I find that I almost always need to go back and clean it up a little bit, because you don't want to have the full brain vomit all over your screen. But keeping the key portions of it, do… They set it up so your audience trusts you that the character is figuring out all the rest of the things that you don't have to show.
[Amal] I think that… What you're describing there too is sort of a pacing issue more than anything else. There's a difference in demonstrating an intelligent character's intelligence in film and television which I think we're really used to seeing at this point with… Especially in genre with Dr. Who and with Sherlock and with all the iterations thereof, we're used to this kind of fast-paced banter stuffed with things that you the audience can't keep up with how smart the characters are. But on the page, I think that for that effect to be achieved, there's a certain degree of working the readers through the situation. So what you were describing, both of you there, is that giving the reader enough cues to understand the problem and get to solving it themselves as they're reading it is, I think, a big part of sharing in the intelligence of the character. I think part of the question here is not only how do we make our smart characters smarter than us, but how do we make our smart characters have smartness that the reader participates in in a degree that is enjoyable, and to what degree we want that joy to come in. There are… Like I think of… There are narrative level joys there where you have a kind of meta-experience of it, and there are character level joys where you're tense and nervous and wondering how you're going to get out of that locked room as well with this character, and a big part of that is seeing how impossible it is to do that. So it feels like… Like it's… The pacing of it is kind of the middle of the Venn diagram between the brainstorming it in the first place and then the cleaning up of it afterwards that you just described.
 
[Howard] There's also a piece that if you're… I'm going to go back to the escaping the room. Where you have something that many savvy readers will already know. A character says… Grabs one doorknob, "Oh, that doorknob's really hot. I'm going to need a towel. No, wait. Doorknob's really hot, I shouldn't open it, there might be a fire on the other side.
[Right]
[Howard] Because the reader might already know that thing, and the reader arriving at the conclusion before the character does is very satisfying for the reader. This is the… That's a quick thing that you can give them. You might not want to give them that for the whole book, because then, oh, they totally saw it coming.
[Amal] Exactly. Oh, the doorknob's really hot, I'm going to use it to burn the ropes that are holding my hands together before I do anything else, and so on.
 
[Dan] I love what Amal said about characters… Or the reader participating in the character's intelligence. That, I think, is really important. You can look at mysteries, which I think are a fantastic example of this. Because there's always… For me, the very disappointing mysteries are the ones where the key clues that solve it are stuff we hadn't heard before. Or something that the amazingly brilliant detective has pulled out of the air. We're like, "Well, I didn't know about that offshore account. I couldn't have solve this mystery." Conan Doyle does this really well with Sherlock. One of the reasons that Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic character is because, for the most part, he does give us all the clues. We can look back and go, "Oh, it was all there, and I could have done this." One of my favorites is in The Redheaded League, where he has an entire interrogation of the character, and we think that that's important, and then, at the very end, as they're walking away, Watson says, "Well, what did you learn?" He says, "Oh, it doesn't matter what I learned. I was just there to look at his knees. They're dirty." We don't know why that's important, but we start to think about it… 
[Wow]
[Dan] And we realize his knees are dirty. He was kneeling in dirt. He was digging through into the next building.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's so cool. That makes us feel smart. Which makes us think the character is smart.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] One of the things… I'm glad you brought up mysteries, because one of the things that I often go back to is that there is a difference between the thriller and mystery, which is that in mystery, you're one step behind the detective, in thrillers, you're one step ahead of the character. So when you're looking at whether or not you're making the character smart, part of that participatory aspect is whether you let the reader figure it out before the character, or if they figure it out after. I think if you want the reader to feel like this character is supersmart, you let them figure it out one step after the character. It doesn't have to be like pages and pages later, but if you let them figure it out just a little bit later. One of the tricks that I will do sometimes with that, I will gift them with my uncertainty, but with what Dan was talking about, about cleaning up afterwards, I'll sometimes pull steps out. Because that allows my character to figure it out a moment before my reader does.
 
[Howard] Let's pause for our book of the week. Dan?
[Dan] Yes. Our book of the week is a really fantastic nonfiction, called What If by Randall Munroe. This is the guy that does XKCD, which is a really cool science-based web comic. He did a book that I believe is subtitled Ridiculous Answers to Serious Scientific Questions. He will take… People will ask him things like, "What would happen if you had a mole of moles?" Then he will go through into exhaustive detail all of the actual science behind if you had literally millions of moles, the animal, just floating in space in a giant ball, and how would gravity affect them, and what would happen to them? And things like what would happen if a submarine went into outer space? All of these things. In the process of answering these questions, you learn so much about the science and you learn it in a very engaging way. It's something that I have continued to go back to as I write my fiction, because there's really good science in there, presented in a really intelligible, accessible way.
[Howard] There's good science in it. It's quite funny.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] What would happen if the pitcher threw the ball at the speed of light?
[Hah!]
[Howard] He begins by telling you, "Okay. Bad things are going to happen once we're moving at this speed. So, let's assume that a moment after he releases the ball, it accelerates to the speed of light. Because that way, the bad things are going to happen in a more interesting way."
[Laughter]
[Dan] He's got one where somebody asked if the planet in The Little Prince could actually exist, and have its own gravity, and people could live on it. In the process of exploring what would happen to a planet like that, what would it have to be like, how dense would it be, what would the gravity be like, I have gone back to that exclamation over and over as I write my outer space science fiction because of the way he explains gravity. So, What If, by Randall Munroe, is a really great resource. We recommend you look it up.
 
[Howard] Okay. Coming back around to our tricks for writing characters who come up with solutions that are bit more brilliant than we've come up with. Have there been moments where you've been stuck and the solution you've arrived at is one that you're particularly proud of and would like to share with the class?
[Dan] I do have one. In the first Mirador book, Bluescreen, I've got the characters caught in the middle of a drive-by gang war. Two rival gangs are shooting at each other, the main character needs to stop them, but she does not have combat powers. She is a gamer and a hacker, and I wanted to make sure to solve that problem with intelligence, rather than her just picking up a gun and going Rambo on everybody. I had to stop and think about it for a couple of days before I figured out, "Oh, okay. I think some of those seeds that I've earlier put in about how pop up… Everyone has a computer in their head, and pop up ads will come and kind of intrusively come into your vision." So she was able to use that advertising system to blind all of the gang members essentially, so they weren't able to attack each other. It took me a few days to figure that out. She does it in seconds. I'm very proud of it.
[Howard] DDoSed with pop-up ads.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] That's horrifying. While you guys… While you all are thinking about the answer to the question, I want to clarify something. This episode actually airs just three and a half weeks from us recording it, because it's a replacement episode. So, Amal, you're not appearing a season later than you appeared before, you're appearing right in the middle of the season in which we're already enjoying episodes with you. The thing that feels weird is that Dan and I have not had the opportunity to record with you.
[Amal] This is true. This is a delight. I have now recorded… Well, when we are done recording, I will have recorded with all the core cast of Writing Excuses.
[Dan] Hooray!
[Amal] Which is really awesome.
 
[Howard] Any other boasting you'd like to do?
[Mary] So, with Calculating Stars, one of the challenges… And Fated Sky… One of the challenges that I had is that I have someone who can do math, who's a mathematician, and I am… I have dyscalcula. I like legit cannot do math. Not in the math is hard, but like I… Geometry? Fine. Absolutely. My spatial awareness, wonderful. Arithmetic and I are, wow, we are really not friends. We have not been on speaking terms for decades…
[Laughter]
[Mary] At this point. I have this character who is a computer, who is a calculator. What she does is she does math. So my problem was I don't. I'm not actually that interested in it. So what I did was I treated it like a magic system. Rather than having her do all of the math that I need her to do in these books, I laid the groundwork ready early that Elma can do math. Then I decided that Elma can do math in her head and that she visualized it. Which is the same thing that they do in the television Sherlock Holmes films, series, that the BBC series. Where you get to see… Things whipping around him, that's the visualization. Because that way, rather than having to explain the logical leaps, it's like, "Oh. Magic system happens. Math is magic."
[Hah!]
[Mary] So I am particularly proud of that, because it allows me to get around my own weakness in this area. While at the same time, because early on, I have every other character treating her as if she can do amazing calculations. Actually, through the entire book, everyone is like, "Oh, yeah. No one is faster at math than Elma. She can do amazing math in her head." Everyone reacts to her as if this is a truth in the world. Which means that I can just put the conclusions on the page. I don't, in that case, have to step through the process to get there.
 
[Amal] Similarly, so I have this novella, which… I've talked about it… No, I haven't talked about it yet. Oh, no. Sorry.
[Howard] You will have talked about it…
[Amal] I will have talked about it.
[Howard] In an episode previously recorded.
[Amal] That's exactly it. That's exactly it.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I wish I could… I wish I were smart enough to make that seem like something that I just know from understanding times…
[Howard] It's happened to us enough times, that I already have all those parts of speech.
[Mary] They are used to our time travel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Amal] So, Max Gladstone and I have co-written a novella that is coming out in probably… I think it's… Probably, I think it's July 2019. It's a book of two dueling time traveling super spies. One written by Max and one written by me. I have a number of insecurities in this regard because, first of all, I mean, they're time traveling super spies, they have all of time and space at their disposal, they are the best there… They are the best there are at what they do. But Wolverine quote, "And what they do is not very nice." Etc. So, they're brilliant, and they're constantly outsmarting each other and one upping each other. I am not a time traveling superspy.
[Howard] Probably.
[Mary] What!
[Amal] Probably not. But… The thing was, the insecurity I had around this, is I also haven't read a time of spy fiction. Like, there are, I think, a lot of protocols around this genre, that I only feel glancingly familiar with. So what I started to do, I realized, was writing this character… And especially because Max has a lot more of those protocols than I do. He is far more savvy with all of the kind of… Especially Cold War era stuff. He's literally writing a serial for Bookburners… Not for Bookburners. A serial for Serial Box, which is not Bookburners. Which is the spy… The witch that came in from the cold. Anyway, it's literally Soviet era spy stuff. So what I found myself doing was kind of the opposite of what you described at first, Mary Robinette, of the… Of giving… Gifting the character the uncertainty. I had my character strike constant confident poses. That confidence, like that maintaining of I know I'm a brilliant superspy. I know that I can outsmart you. And stuff. And to just kind of dwell in the affect of knowing that she is that brilliant helps to overcome those hurdles. So I feel like it was like a sustained thing across the whole project, to just find the confidence to display that confidence on the page was the [fall] for me in that situation.
 
[Mary] One of the other things, like that confidence and the I don't know this thing, that I also find that I use is expert knowledge from other people.
[Uhum.]  
[Amal] Ah. Yes.
[Mary] Which I have talked about in other places. That I am totally comfortable with going to someone and just leaving blanks in my manuscript, and going to someone who actually is an expert in this field, and then having them fill in my blanks, so that my character is literally smarter than I am, because they're talking about things that I know nothing about.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] Whether or not that's one of my astronaut friends.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Wait, wait. Do you have astronaut friends, Mary?
[Mary] I do. I know, I know, it's shocking to everyone.
[Howard] You want to know something funny?
[What?]
[Howard] This episode airs immediately after Writing Excuses interviews an astronaut.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That's so great.
[Howard] We couldn't will have timed this better.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Well, that was exactly why we did this. Will have done this.
 
[Amal] There is one quick thing I wanted to say, too, just about things that we've been discussing. It occurs to me that some of the things that we've touched on are kind of generic distinctions between… In ways to talk about… To convey the smartness of characters who are smarter than we are. Because I think of… So we've talked about mystery, we've talked about other stuff, but I… If you're writing a heist novel, for instance. I have to assume that part of the way you display the smartness of the character is by revealing afterwards how a thing was done. What you're doing, instead of showing how smart they are, is showing how impeded they are throughout, in order to then kind of just reveal at the end the way that those things fell together. It feels like writing kind of backwards the things that we were initially talking about.
[Mary] I think that gets into that thing we were talking about earlier, about whether or not you want the reader to be ahead of or behind the character. You were going to say something, Dan?
 
[Dan] Yeah. The more that Amal is talking about this, I'm kind of coming to this epiphany, that a lot of this intelligence that we see in characters follows the same principles of a horror movie when you finally reveal the monster.
[Oooo]
[Dan] Right. It's the monster…
[Mary] I'm shocked that you refer to this as…
[Dan] I know. Isn't that weird that I would go there?
[Laughter]
[Dan] If you've been building up the monster as something horrible, and then you finally show it and it doesn't live up to our expectations, then it feels very disappointing. It feels so much worse than if we'd never seen the monster at all. If you're doing this, if you're building up your character's confidence or intelligence or capability, and then we finally get to the point where we see them, for example, do some math and it's like super simple math…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Then that's not going to impress us, and we're going to be like, "Really? That's the math that Elma's so good at?" So that's one of the things I thought, for example, that Elma did really well, that you did well with Elma, was when we finally saw the monster, so to speak, when we finally revealed that capability that we'd been hearing so much about, it lived up to, if not superseded, our expectations.
[Mary] And because… The reason it did that was because I was using someone else's math. The one scene in the novel where I actually have her talking at length about a formula is when she is at the Congressional hearing, and there is a formula, and she is explaining it to the Congressman. That formula comes out of Wernher von Braun's Mars, A Technical Project. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern rocketry.
[Dan] Modern rocketry.
[Mary] So… And that formula, by the way, is ridonkulous.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It is so long. So she explains the first maybe 16th of the formula. It is that… Again, it's like I don't give the reader everything. But I give them… It is competence porn, is basically what we're dealing with.
[Dan] Well, one of the reasons, again, that that particular scene works well is that she is presenting it to a group of very smart, very capable, very competent people, and they can't follow it. So we're seeing not only her own intelligence, but her comparative intelligence.
 
[Howard] There is a… A test, a quiz, that's often administered to people who are hiring for programming jobs. It's called the fizz buzz test, which is write a program that prints the numbers one through 100, that if it's a multiple of three, you substitute the number with fizz, if it's a multiple of five, it's buzz, and if it's a multiple of both three and five, do fizz and buzz. Write a computer program that will do that. Elegant is good, writing it quickly is good, writing it so it is tight is good. Solve this problem for me, let me see what kind of a problem solver you are. My friend Dave had an interview in which the guy asked this question. Dave said, "Well, first thing I'd do is I'd write a program that says call FizzBuzz.lib from whatever this hub is because somebody else has already solved it."
[Laughter]
[Howard] The guy laughed and laughed and laughed. Then Dave provided his solution. Then, that night, Dave went home, wrote a very elegant, over the course of about four hours, fizz buzz program that he uploaded to the library, so that when his boss to be came in the next morning to look it up, he found it and saw who wrote it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is smart.
[Howard] That is brilliant and beautiful and kind of hilarious.
 
[Howard] On that note, I would like to offer our listeners some homework.
[Mary] Yes, please.
[Howard] Time. Is. Your. Friend. Your character might not have a lot of time, but you do. Write a solution, off of the top of your head, to a character problem that you are currently facing. First thing you can think of. Now, over the next couple of days, it might be two days, it might be a week, it might be longer, spend time researching on the Internet, in books, from friends, anything even tangentially related to that problem. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's climate, maybe it's geography, maybe it's pop up ads. Research these things and as you are doing the research, write down the solutions that come to you. Then, after you've done all this, order these solutions in a list of what you think is dumbest to smartest, and see how much smarter you are able to get with time. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Because this is Writing Excuses. And I got those out of order. I'm terrible at this.
[Laughter]
 
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Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/07/30/12-31-what-makes-a-good-monster-with-courtney-alameda/

Key Points: The best monsters subvert the status quo and remind us that we are not the top of the food chain. Frightening means posing a threat to the protagonist or that culture. Some monsters are people, too. Subverting expectations. Monsters also reflect or represent other aspects of the stories. But beware of parallelism that turns into too on-the-nose, or pushing the subversion beyond fear into comedy. Building a monster? Start with folklore from all over. Look at the role of the monster in the story, themes, and symbolism. Think about fears, and what frightens you, and then spin that into a monster. Make the protagonist super-competent, but let the monster be powerful in ways that leave the protagonist incapable of responding. Look for the patterns that cross cultures, the fears that are universal (Yungian!). Then make them your monster. And shiver a bit.

Did you hear something clank? )

[Howard] Well, on that note, we should probably wrap this up. Because we don't want to leave our listeners just terrified all night. Susan, can you give us a writing prompt?
[Susan] Yeah. It's funny, because Courtney actually mentioned the writing prompt that I was thinking about. Which is that Neil Gaiman's American Gods kind of envisioned like an American monster… I'm sorry, American Gods, like what using all of the different mythologies and kind of coming to America and kind of creating a uniquely American God. So I would like you to write about a uniquely American monster. Whether or not he has orange hair and [inaudible]
[laughter]
[Susan] I'll leave up to you.
[Courtney] Really great. I mean, really great.
[Howard] I love it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.21: Q&A on Elemental Horror, With Steve Diamond

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/22/11-21-qa-on-elemental-horror-with-steve-diamond/

Q&A Summary:
Q: If I want to make something ordinary, like peanut butter, terrifying without coming off as silly, how do I do that?
A: Start with the character's reaction. Then look at specific words you are using. When familiar things start acting in unfamiliar ways, it scares people.
Q: What is your personal line between good horror and gore-nographic?
A: Does it change the character? What is the purpose? What is the audience reaction? Remember, gore is not horror. Context.
Q: How do you avoid going too far?
A: Again, gore is not horror. Who are you writing for? Your first reader is you -- is it too much for you?
Q: In movies, horror is often communicated through subtle incidental things like lighting, sound, and music. How do those things transfer into the written word?
A: Details and mannerisms. Get into the character's head early and understand what makes them fearful. Word choice and rhythm. Establish the familiar, then change a small aspect of it.
Q: For someone who has written similar genres to horror, thrillers and suspense, what would be the best way for me to start edging into writing a horror story instead?
A: Write for your audience. Atmospheric details. Beta readers who love horror. Don't flinch. Lay out your plot, then find a way to force the character to make a horrible decision and deal with the consequences.
Q: How do you decide when to show the monster, and how does it change your story once you have?
A: When it fits your plot. After you prepare the reader to be scared, and when it will cause the most harm. When you show the monster, either make it different than we expect OR far worse than we expect.
Questions, and more answers! )

[Brandon] All right. That's all the time we have. But Dan is actually going to give us some homework.
[Dan] All right. We gave this homework to one of our listeners. We're going to give it to all of you. We want you to plot out a story and build an outline that will force your character to make a horrible choice. Force them to do something they shouldn't do, to compromise themselves morally, to do whatever awful thing. Then build it so that that's the only choice they can make when the situation arrives.
[Brandon] All right. Well, thank you again, to Steve Diamond.
[Steve] Thank you.
[Brandon] Let's also mention Residue, his book, which you can get at fine bookstores everywhere, but mostly Audible and online is your best bet, right?
[Steve] That is the best bet.
[Brandon] And you guys are out of excuses, now go write.
[Chuckles fading into the distance]
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.11: Micro-Casting Number Two

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/11/14/writing-excuses-5-11-micropocasting-2/

Key points:
-- How do you do bad things to your hero character without feeling bad about it?
I do feel their pain.
-- How far into writing a novel should you begin letting others read it for feedback?
When you are finished with the story. Beware of story hijacking.
-- Do the bad things you do to your characters always have to suit the story?
They need to be motivated and properly set up.
-- How do you design frightening monsters?
Take away the eyebrows. Let them do mundane, real things. Keep them in the shadows.
-- How far into the outlining process do you actually start writing?
When I am excited and want to start writing. When I have a good sense of where the story is going, where it needs to end, and more or less how it needs to get there. When it's done.
And lots more words... )
[Brandon] All right. Well. Let's go ahead and go with our writing prompt. I'm going to say Howard, give it to us.
[Howard] You, in an extremely, extremely spur-of-the-moment sort of living-in-the-moment thing have decided that instead of fight club, it's zoo club. And you have just punched an elephant. Hard. What happens next?
[Dan] You get arrested.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses...
[Howard] Now go to jail.

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