Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-05-lens-1-who

 

Key points: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I'm so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 05]

 

[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining our writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 05]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The lens of who. 

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

[Howard] And we've got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what's the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must've read a different book, moment you've ever had with a friend?

[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it's one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it's a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, "Oh, I love that dragon killing game." I'm… I was like, "Dragon killing game? I guess there's a side quest where you can kill dragons…" He was like, "Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there's no achievement for that." I was like, "Yes, because that's not what the game is about at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The game is not… That's not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.

[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[DongWon] I mean, it's called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.

[Howard] The point here is that, and I've said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can't count the number of times where I've come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They're like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I'm like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can't be friends.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.

[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I'm a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they're most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you're not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you're not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn't be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it's a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that's maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.

[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they'd be like… I don't know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that's so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it's easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you're like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don't get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you've created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's also… That's one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don't have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that's when you can start making a character that's multidimensional.

 

[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what's around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what's on the page. If you don't understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn't expect, that you didn't want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there's so many pieces to this that we're going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we'll be covering in upcoming episodes.

[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character's eyes, view, gaze. Even though it's obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It's always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character's having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character's eyes. They're going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.

[DongWon] It's important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It's why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I'm always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That's where tension comes from, because… But that's true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person's emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that's how you pull people into the story. That's how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There's… It's impossible for us not to do so. I think.

[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don't have to share… And I don't think any of us are saying this, the character's lens, in order to care about that character.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don't want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it's still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don't wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it's really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.

[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don't necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don't have to do an awful character. I think that's fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Howard] I've got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.

 

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[Howard] So, we've talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character's biography before sitting down to write the story. But I'm pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where's the shortcut?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.

[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there's a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what's here] character's name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character's coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who's an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they're going to bounce off each other, how they're going to react, how they're going to see the world.

[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character's afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Erin] For every meal. Don't know why. Then I'll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I've decided that she's just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that's an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it's a very discovery… Because I'm a discovery writer, it's a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it's like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?

[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That's not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people's pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I'm now speaking as if I'm the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don't remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they're afraid to face, which is that they didn't depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don't use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it's the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it's the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don't have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I've got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn't know and didn't care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it'll be a different tool for each character probably.

[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we're giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it's the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I'm very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you're right, doesn't know what tool you used. They're enthralled by the story, they're charmed by the character, they're connected.

[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there's really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…

[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin's thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you're trying to be general, you're trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you're trying to be broad, you're saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn't work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can't control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that's okay.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's not just okay, that's essential.

[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you're seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That's one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it's important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you're going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don't see it, if they don't get it.

 

[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it's because you did this and this and this, and the response is, "Oh, I'm so glad you noticed that."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "I didn't put that in there on purpose," is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, "I'm so happy you noticed that." Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else's lens. It's really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we're talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we're talking about let's give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You're having a bad day, you're going to bring a different lens to the table. You're having a really fantastic day, different lens. It's just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.

[Erin] I also just think that's a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it's like you love your characters so much that you don't want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it's the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.

[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it's entirely about character. Right? You're always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character's perspectives. But because it's collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character's perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.

 

[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-25-from-the-classroom-to-the-page 

 

Key Points: How do you take what you learned in the classroom and use it when you're writing? Take time to internalize it. Be aware that motivation shifts! External or internal, how do you keep it going? What works well for you? Build the craft through intentional practice. Make notes! Reflection soon after. Look at the aggregate, the common or repeated comments. Take a chance, try it! Audition techniques. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 25]

 

[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 25]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. From the Classroom to the Page.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

 

[Erin] I wanted us to have this wildcard so that we could grill Marshall a little bit, who's finished an MFA program recently...

[Marshall] I did.

[Erin] About all the things that you learned. Please repeat them to us. No. Like, actually, how do you take all the things you learned in the classroom, for people who are listening on this podcast, and actually, like, turn it into something you're doing when you're writing?

[Marshall] I think it depends on what you… For me, it depends on how I started… Why I started the program in the first place. I started the program to make myself make the time to write. Because I really wanted to do… Get as much as I could out of it. I was paying the money. I had some amazing instructors, and my goal was to figure out how to make writing a bigger part of my life amidst all of the chaos already, that's teaching full time, parenting, and all that. I'll be honest, I graduated in August of 2023, and I took a break. From writing. For a little bit. A lot of what I'm doing… What I was doing was soaking in some of that stuff that I learned and trying to figure out how to go back to a schedule and remember that I can do this, and the big part is keeping that connection with my community as well. Keeping that motivation going. Now, specifics? Also, I think, depends on the type of classroom you're taking. In the beginning, we were taking a lot of classes around different genres. So, I personally, now… This is one example… Am trying to incorporate some of the studying of mystery and romance and those components and those beats and stuff like that into my science-fiction and my fantasies that I'm writing. Because I love those genres, so much, but I may or may not be working on a mystery/sci-fi novel right now. So it's fun to kind of think about. I learned all these specific things, studied all this work, but I really want to figure out how to make it my own.

[Mary Robinette] I like something that you said, which is, I think, a piece that a lot of people miss. Which is that after you learn something, that it takes a while to internalize it. I see a lot of people who will take a workshop, and afterwards, they stop writing. But they never start again. It's not an intentional break. Some of that is that, I think, that they aren't… They aren't thinking about the action of internalizing, that that takes time and it takes energy.

[Marshall] Yeah. Part of the clarity… To clarify kind of what I was saying, why I'm taking a break to is when… At the end of the program, I ended up with a pretty decent draft of a novel. So, at this point, I am… What I'm trying to make another pass at it, and I need to… I want to start querying agents, because I really want to try to get something out there. I've been working on this for years and years and years. I finally went back to school. I'm teaching creative writing to high schoolers. I'm trying to get a job teaching at the college level. I also want to publish. So it's going to be that editing work and that revision work and putting myself out there. That's terrifying.

[Mary Robinette] So… Yeah. Yes. It does not stop being terrifying, honestly.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] But I think, like, one of the things that I find is that the motivation shifts. That when you're in class… I see this also, a lot, where I will have a student and they come and they talk about how they had written all of this while they were in their MFA, and they can't find the motivation to write afterwards. I find this, for myself, that I go to a writing workshop and after the writing workshop, it's hard to find that motivation, because it's like, well, there was a deadline, there was body modeling, there was a teacher that I didn't want to let down. So I had all of this external motivation. Then, when you're cut loose from that, you suddenly have to find an internal motivation. Which is a whole different racket.

[Erin] Or just different forms of external motivation.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like one of the things…

[Mary Robinette] Money.

[Erin] That…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Money is a big one. But also, like, I've created… I've been in groups of people. That's why people have critique groups, sometimes, is that you want to continue to have people you can disappoint.

[Laughter]

 

[Erin] It's like the disappointment of others… Such a driver in my life. Maybe just my life. But that way there's something else, there's another deadline, there's another way to make yourself do things. I think that's one good thing that you can actually take from the classroom. That's not a direct lesson that your taught. So it's not something that your teacher tells you. It's more how you learn well. What are the kinds of things that work well for you? Are there exercises you did in class when you were like, "Doing six short flash pieces really got my engine going," or "Oh, I was much better when I was able to do a back and forth on email with my professor about this particular part of my novel." Then you can say, "How can I create those same structures in my life now?" Like, what can I… Where are the people that I can reach out to who can fill that role in my life?

[Marshall] Yeah. We're all at different stages. I talked to my cohort, we're all really close. We get on zoom here and there and kind of try and bring each other out. A lot of us are all in different places in that journey. It's like are you writing? Are you working on this? Are you working on a new project? But something you said earlier, a very specific lesson. It wasn't necessarily a specific lesson for me, but it was the way they structured the thesis project that worked really well for me. I really liked just sitting down and writing. But I'd noticed that when I outline, I more productive. In the thesis process, there was multiple outline stages. It wasn't like, okay, throw this outline together, and then just start writing. I changed stuff as I went, and we had amazing advisors that supported us, but that kind of living outline and keeping up with that, and tracking my character wants and needs and arcs and relationships and that kind of thing as I wrote really changed how I plan on approaching novel writing going forward. I think without that, I'd probably get stuck pretty quickly. Because now I know I can lean back on that structural part of it that wasn't in my toolbox before.

 

[Mary Robinette] I find that… So when I started writing… I've talked about this on the podcast before, that I would write a story that had a really good beginning, a really good middle, and a really good end, to three completely different stories that happen to have the same cast of characters.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Oh those [garbled] totally [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] No, they're just not… They're just like…

[Erin] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] It's not… No, the story ends and you're like, "That was the ending?" They just kind of stop. So, for me, the thing that I had to learn, like, the practice that I had to learn was how to… Was structure. So I had to spend a lot of time doing very intentional practice on learning structure. So I would do the thumbnail sketches, or I would just write beginning, middle, and end for things that would fit on three by five cards. Just to get the sense of, okay, making sure that all of those things were actually connected. That craft, having that craft to lean on, is very helpful to me now at a point where I have internalized structure and I just write and trust that I'm going to have that beginning, middle, and end. But when I'm having a bad brain day, having the tool, having the craft to reach for and being able to articulate what that craft is, has been incredibly useful. Did you find, when you were doing your sessions, that there was any way that… Like, are there things that you found that made it easier for you to start internalizing things or for you to identify the things that you needed to internalize?

[Marshall] What do you mean? Sorry?

[Mary Robinette] So, like…

[Marshall] Like, after the program, you mean?

[Mary Robinette] After the program or even during the program. It's like, oh, this is a really good tool that I'm having to use consciously right now, but at some point it won't be… I won't have to think about it.

[Marshall] Yeah. I mean, like, I say, I was really lucky to have some awesome instructors. So one of the classes, we actually took, was short forms. We were all… The number of short stories I have now I'm really thankful for. But short stories are really difficult to do well. So internalizing some of the feedback from my workshops and my instructors was kind of the… Not the challenge, but just making sure that as the workshop was over, I made some notes. I looked back at my work relatively soon after, just so I could, "Okay. When I go back to revise, this character was flat because of this reason." Or "The feedback on the ending was it was too abrupt and I didn't… I didn't… The promises weren't kept at the end." Things like that.

 

[Erin] One of the things that I really enjoyed doing what I did work shopping in my MFA program was to actually take all… So people would write things on the paper, like [garbled] your story, they'd right marks all over it, and then they give it back to you. I would put all of, like, the page ones together, all the page twos together, all the page threes together, and then actually just kind of, like, flip through them and look for where everyone… Like, if everyone highlighted the sentence, it was like, "Amazing," I was like, "That was a good sentence." If everyone wrote question marks on the same corner of a page, I was like, "Maybe that is confusing." It was a way to actually make… Because a workshop can be hard for people because sometimes it can feel like people are coming for you. I generally enjoy it, because I'm like, "I just forced like X number of people to read my work and talk about it."

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I'm like, "Ha ha…"

[Marshall] I wish I could think about it that way.

[Erin] "Fooled you." But even so, like, when you take it and look at it in aggregate, it's a lot easier to look at the patterns and not get stuck in one particular person's feedback, but look at, like, where those systems happen. It made it a lot easier for me to figure out when… What were the kinds of things that I was doing that I kept getting flagged for, what were the things that maybe I should internalize. Looking at my own work in aggregate, and what were the things that kept coming up over and over again.

[Mary Robinette] I love that technique. I also look for patterns and, as you were talking, I'm like, "Oh, because I use Google docs, and everyone will comment…" Like, you can easily see that everybody is commenting in the same spot. I have to go through and clear them so that people aren't commenting because other people have commented. But that's a whole [garbled other] So…

[Marshall] Well, something Erin said, to. Work shopping was always really terrifying for me, and it still is. But, throughout the course of the program, I figured out, kind of like you were saying, I would get all this feedback and depending on the story and depending on… How well I knew these people, some of the feedback, it was… To be able to take the feedback that mattered the most. Not that some people's feedback didn't matter, but it was just like, okay, this person is confused because they really aren't… They don't really like fantasy. They told me that. I get it, they don't understand this element. But everybody else really liked this element. So I put this person's feedback aside and focus on the clusters of stuff. So being able to take that and having the confidence to eventually get the writing group together and willingly go forward and workshop things together. That's what I want to… That's what I'm moving up to.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said earlier, but I just want to circle back to that I really liked was that you would make notes about what you had learned. I find that that's one of the best ways for me to solidify things is to write them down, because I have to articulate them. One of the reasons that I love teaching and doing the podcast is because when I have to explain it to someone else, that's one of the best ways for me to start internalizing it myself, because now I'm taking words that someone else has said and I'm internalizing them. I have to, in order to be able to express it in my own language. That, for me, is one of the ways that I will try to put into practice things that I'm learning after taking a class. Speaking of after, we're going to pause here. Then, when we come back, we're going to talk about some other ways that you can go from the page… From the classroom to the page.

 

[Howard] The Fall of the House of Usher, created by Mike Flanagan from various stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, is some of the best storytelling I've ever seen on TV. It's horror, full of jump scares, dread, and… Well, horrific things. But it opens in media res to defuse the tension. Or at least to get you to let down your guard. In the first 10 minutes, we learn that all of CEO Robert Usher's children have died. So, hey, that's cool. We know who will live and who will die, so we can relax and enjoy the ride, right? That was my thinking, and, right or wrong, I'm happy to let you think that too. Yes, there are some surprises, but relax. What really carries this series is the outstanding performances upon the brilliant script. The words, they are delicious. Like lemons. So very lemon. The show carries a TV MA rating due to language, sex, smoking, substance, suicide, and violence. That rating, unfortunately, omits the fact that there's also some violence to animals. Especially in episodes three and four. The Internet has spoilers and explainers if you're concerned. I watched the entire eight episode run four times in an eight week period. Once for fun, once for more fun, and twice more so I could learn things while watching other people see it for the first time. So, I guess, all four times were for fun.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the other techniques that I am a big fan of is taking a chance. The… I don't know about you all, but I've been in classes where the teacher is talking and I'm like, "Well, this is some bull shit."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] This is…

[Marshall] As a teacher, I know for a fact that a lot of students think that about me a lot of the time.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. It's the same. Absolutely.

[Marshall] I know it's because they don't want to be there. But continue.

[Mary Robinette] What I've learned is that if I go in and think that, that I'm going to get nothing out of the class. But if I think, "Okay. Let me just try this thing that they're talking about." Even if I think it is completely absurd and not going to be useful, I will get something out of that even when it's not the thing that they intend for me to get out of it. So I think of it as auditioning a change, or auditioning a technique.

[Erin] Yeah. Also, I… One of the things I'm now remembering that they had us do in my program was to write these annotations, where we would try to, like, analyze a story for what it's doing while doing a close readings of our own. One thing they suggested was to do a few close readings of things you hate. Books and stories that you're like, "This story, I would burn it." But you don't burn books, don't do that. But…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Figure out why. I think the same is true for techniques. Like, occasionally somebody tells you to do something or asked you to do an exercise and you're just like… Who knows, maybe one of our homeworks, you're like, "Nah. Nah. Not doing it, dog." But it's nice to kind of try it and see what is it about it that you're reacting to so strongly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Is it because, like, it goes counter to the way that you think about storytelling? Is it just because you're in a bad mood that day? What is it that's going on? If you can identify that anything you feel that strongly about, there's probably something there that you can use for yourself.

[Marshall] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… I'm just going to use a concrete example of this kind of thing. I was… I took a workshop and the instructor said to put all five senses on every page. We were doing standard manuscript format, so this is 250 words and all five senses on every page. I'm like, "Well, that's… I mean, I agree that you should use all five senses, but that's extreme, and I don't think that…" So I did it. Then, when they started critiquing, the instructor said, "I just… You know, I started reading your story and I just fell asleep."

[Marshall] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] First of all, you should never say that to a student.

[Marshall] No, that's horrible.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But, second, they were right, it was really boring and it was hard to tell what was going on. I knew as I was writing that it was a problem. But I was like they told me to do this. What I realized was that by writing all five senses on the page, I was making everything in their of equal value, and that I could use the senses to anchor things that were important. That when I put in a sense, that it was going to ground the reader and that if I reserved those for the important things, that it was significantly more powerful. So I would not have come to that understanding if I hadn't tried this technique that I hated. That is, I think, why it's worthwhile to audition… So I love this idea of doing a close read of things you hate.

[Erin] I hear, see, and smell you.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Just do not taste me, please.

[Marshall] So, one of the things they… When I heard this talk a few minutes ago, I thought about was… At the end, the tail end of the program, my program, was the thesis project. Right? They paired us up with a thesis advisor. I got really lucky to work with an awesome writer, his name is Isaiah Jonah Everett, and he rocks. But I… His style of suggesting things to me was kind of what Mary Robinette was saying, I feel like. Like, he's like, "Hey, have you thought about this thing? Have you thought about maybe this character's think… Responds this way instead?" The way he suggested things wasn't like, "you need to change X, Y, and Z because I hate this character." It was like, "Well, this character… Really interesting." Then he made suggestions about a character who doesn't have a POV in the book, but he does at the very end. He goes, "What if this is this character's story?" I said, "Okay. That's not really daunting. It really is his story. Not his story yet. It's not his POV now." That really helped me power to the end of it. Because I knew what I was leading up to. I knew that that character, at the end, was going to step into his own and then it was going to be about him. More about him.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Marshall] All about him.

[Erin] Another thing that you… Like, there are two things that you said, maybe more than that, where your… It feels like you're keeping a really open mind. Like, there you sort of were like, "No, because…" Not just like not doing that. But, like, let me consider it, and let me figure out why it is and isn't working. Way at the beginning, you were talking about using other genres…

[Marshall] Yeah.

[Erin] I think sometimes people… You get really comfortable in the genre that you know, and school is a time when often you will have to read or work with or try out genres and formats that just may not work for you. Like, some people don't like writing short fiction and may never.

[Marshall] Right.

[Erin] But the exercise of trying it, maybe you take a little bit out of that in terms of the way that you write a sentence to try to get so much you can in and make it dense, and you can use that, in a part, in your novel in which things are really emotional and heavy. So, I think that it's great that you did that as opposed to being like, "Mystery? Whatever."

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Instead, you brought it into what you were doing.

[Marshall] The result, actually, by the time I got to that thesis project was I knew I wanted to write a black space opera. Then, I'm like, "But the alienness of…" I wanted horror elements. I knew… I know it's not all the way working yet. But when I go back again, I really want to make that… I want to make it terrifying at certain parts. It's not a horror novel. But the enemy is horrifying. So I want to make sure that I want the reader to feel… Feel a certain way with the characters that we are supposed to love. I hope they do, encounter those things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I love… I actually really hate and love at the same time that moment when you can feel that something is not right, because at that point, it has shifted from being… Into being a known unknown.

[Marshall] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like you know that there's a problem there. You don't know exactly what the problem is. Which is so much better than I don't know if this is any good. That's like, yeah, this is good. There is an opportunity here. Just interrogate it and try to figure out where… What that opportunity is and how you can get into it. Sometimes I will do… I have this intentional practice that I do where… It's like reverse engineering an outline, but I will… It is… I will also say, it is a thing that I discovered as a teaching technique, and then realized that it was actually incredibly useful, which is I go through and I highlight the things in the story that are, like, loadbearing and important in a scene. Then I kind of categorize them based on MICE quotient's, which, for people who are listening to this in isolation, is an organization structure, milieu, inquiry, character, and event. So I do that, and then I see, "Oh, like, actually, the bulk of this scene is this event shift, this status quo shift. But when I come into the scene, I'm not signal… I'm not doing anything about that, and there's a whole bunch of me figuring out what I'm writing." I knew it was flabby, but I couldn't figure out why it was flabby. I love… This is one… Again, one of the reasons that I love teaching is because it gives you these tools that you can use and then do some intentional practice on your own work.

[Marshall] That was one of the shifts… I feel like, as a cohort, we got to. Really, in a heightened way. Like, our instructors at some point, I feel like, were kind of sitting back and letting us discuss each other's work in such a way… We would come out it, like I said, being like him, "Well, I know something's not working." But we would tag a couple questions to a short story. I mean, like, I feel like this character's this. Or I don't feel like this part of it is working. When we come back to discuss and workshop it, the language we used, the feedback we were able to give each other, was in valuable. I mean, at that point, because we had all leveled up in such a way, we were able to look at each other's work and know each other's work well enough to be like, "Okay. I hear what you're saying, but I actually think it works. But I think what you really are missing is this." Those conversations are something I'll never forget about being in this program. Of course, we made plenty of excuses to get together before residency and stuff like that. So we got more of those conversations. But, again, that's part of that community thing.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of community, I think it is time for us to give you some homework.

 

[Erin] Yes. I have the homework. Which is for you to become the teacher. So what I want you to do is find something that maybe you're struggling with in your work, something that you're not completely sure about. Maybe it's POV. Who knows? Maybe it's voice. Maybe it's one of these things. Think, how would you try to teach this concept to someone else? What homework would you assign them?

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-44-nanowrimo-week-1-getting-started 

 

Key Points: NaNoWriMo, writing 50,000 words. How do you get started? Writing your opening? Meet the characters and set promises for the readers. Confidence and authority, voice! And information! Promises to me, to motivate me! Voice, character, or setting. Voice driven or action driven? Hook the reader! Write a little, then ask what excites me about that. Do some freewriting, meet the character or setting or voice, before starting. [If you don't start, you can't finish.] Give readers reasons to care, to connect. Think about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Breadcrumbs, not infodumps! Character stakes, what is at risk. Where are we, who are we with, and what genre is this? Within 13 lines, what is the character's goal? Remember, Nano is a time to play, to try out things. Dive in!

 

[Season 18, Episode 44]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 1 - Getting Started.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about National Novel Writing Month. All month, in fact. For those of you who haven't participated in this, National Novel Writing Month is a month-long challenge in the month of November, where you attempt to write a novel or 50,000 words, depending on how you want to define that. So what we're going to be talking about is what you need to do in order to try to have something that's vaguely coherent at the end of the month. These are tools that you can use the rest of the time when you're working on novels or short stories, but we're going to talk this week about getting started.

[Pause]

[Erin] So, how do we do that?

[Laughter]

[Erin] I mean, it's like…

[Mary Robinette] Surely, someone else will start talking now?

[Erin] That's often the problem…

 

[Dan] Getting started is hard.

[Mary Robinette] Getting started is hard. So, in getting started, what we're talking about on day one is that you're going to be writing your opening. This is where you meet your characters and you set promises for your readers. So we're going to be talking about both stuff that you need to establish, but the order in which you establish things is very much up to you. So, what do you all find are some, like, consistent things that make an opening, like, that first page?

[DongWon] I personally really love openings. They are my favorite part of the book. As a literary agent, I'm mostly looking at openings as I'm going through queries and new projects and things like that. So, for me, the thing I'm looking for in that first page, in those opening sections, is a sense that the author knows what they're doing, and they're going to take me on a journey that I'm excited to go on with them. Right? So, projecting a certain amount of confidence and a certain amount of authority in those opening pages are really important. Some of the best tools to do this is with your actual voice. The words that you're using and the sentence structure that you have is a great way to bring readers in and project that kind of confidence that you are going to be telling us a story that we're going to be excited to read. That can be everything from word choice to sentence structure to a kind of musicality and rhythm that you have in those opening sentences. But that really needs to be balanced with all of the information that you need to give to your readers. Right? It can't all just be voice-y beautiful prose, you also need to be communicating a ton of information in those opening pages.

[Howard] I'm a sucker for a good first line. It can take a long time to write a first line that you're happy with. Often, the first week of NaNoWriMo is not a great time to grind on that.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Howard] Caveat. If the first line is good enough to excite me, the first line might be good enough to continue to excite you. So, I always try and fill my first page with things that are not just promises to the readers, but are promises to me, to get me motivated, to remind me how much fun this story's going to be.

[DongWon] Right. This is Nano. You're not here to make perfect prose, you're not here to make sure everything's super refined and edited to perfection, you're here to get words on the page. Right? So, I'm telling you this as ways to think about what your goals are for the opening, but don't stress about anything that I'm saying right now.

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned voice. Voice is one of the 3 things that I try to do in an opening. You don't need to do all of these 3. Really, your goal is to hook the reader and get them interested. The way I think about it, you can do that with a really great interesting voice, or with a compelling character, or with a fascinating world or setting. One of those 3 is going to grab that reader in the want to learn more about it and come on in. If you can do all 3, that's even better, but…

[DongWon] Yeah, you can only do…

[Dan] Do one of the 3.

[DongWon] Some combo of those. Right? It's not going to be pure voice. If it was pure voice, then they're like, "What is this story about? I'm out." If it… But you want to have character in their. It's sort of like you're readjusting the levels to sort of fit the story you're trying to tell.

[Mary Robinette] So, I find that what you're talking about, I see as kind of 2 different paths into a story. That you can have something that's kind of voice driven, where the voices doing all of the lifting and carrying, or you can have something that's action driven, where the character is in the middle of doing something. That… There's overlap between those 2 things. Like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, nobody is doing anything. It's all voice driven. Whereas, if you look at the beginning of Ghost Talkers, using my own novel, that begins with a character saying, "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died." Ginger Stuyvesant was sitting with the spirit circle… I don't remember the rest of my actual lines…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But she's in the middle of doing something. But it is that hook, that both of these have different ways of hooking the reader and pulling them in.

 

[Erin] I would say that you may not know which of these you're doing because it is Nano and you're just trying to figure it out. So one thing that I find really fun during Nano is to write a little bit of a beginning and then go like, "What could this be? What excites me about it? Like, what about the voice that I've just written is really interesting? What about the action that's happening is really intriguing?" It's a great way later in the month if you get stuck to go back and look at what are 2 or 3 things that I was really excited about, like Howard said, right at the start, that can continue to motivate me when I'm not sure, like, where I went or how the story has taken a twist or a turn.

[Dan] Well. One thing that I do, and I've talked about this on the show before, but I still do it, and I still think it's valuable, is I will do free writing before I start a book. I will write some dialogue, let a character talk for a couple of pages. Or I will describe the world. I will describe my favorite aspects of the world, the part of the setting that gets me excited. I will try to write something and nail down a tone of voice, or find a weird turn of phrase. Never intending to actually use any of this in the novel, but just to kind of get me into the right headspace so I can hit the ground running when the actual writing starts.

[Mary Robinette] I do something similar, that I will often do a couple of exploratory attempts. Sometimes I am planning for it to be the first chapter, but it's just me saying, "What is this? What is going on here?" Much like Erin does, also. It's just like is there something here that excites me? For those of you who are doing NaNoWriMo seriously, all of these exploratory attempts count towards your total word count.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Save them. No writing is wasted.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about Nano is that it really teaches you that no writing is wasted. When we come back from our break, what were going to be talking about are some of the pieces of information that you're going to need to pass to your reader. But, right now, let's take a brief break.

 

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all of my decision-making for the story. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak freshness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping! Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

 

[Howard] It's the first week of NaNoWriMo. It is time to get started. I'm going to throw a couple of aphorisms at you. You must be present to win. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. [Sigh] If you don't start, you'll never get to finish. I speak as someone who has never actually won at NaNoWriMo. I've started it several times. I think one time, I actually got 30,000 words in on a project. But I've never actually completed something that I would consider to be a first draft of a novel during NaNoWriMo. Do I feel bad about it? No. Do I feel in the least bit conflicted about encouraging you to start NaNoWriMo? Absolutely not. I am giving you permission to start and maybe fail. Because that happens to the best of us. I don't want to suggest that I'm the best of us. There are way better than me who have failed at NaNoWriMo. But you miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. Sit down at the keyboard and write something. Let the words flow, or let the words don't flow. Because until you try it, you won't know whether or not you can do it. [Sigh] I've heard it said that the limitations that affect most people are what they believe their limitations to be, rather than what their limitations actually are. So, whether or not you think you can finish NaNoWriMo, I think you should start.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right. So. Now that we're back, what I'd like us to talk about is some of the information that you want to try to get to the reader early, early in your novel or short story. One of the reasons you want to do that is that part of the promises in all of those things is that you're giving the reader reasons to care and to connect. Readers are desperately trying to ground themselves at the beginning, and they will grab hold of any piece of information that you give them and begin to build a world. So you want to make sure that you are giving them information in order to build that world in their head.

[DongWon] One of the biggest mistakes I see in openings is not giving enough information. Right? A lack of information density can make for an opening that feels incredibly slow. It's just not pulling me into the world. It's not giving me information about the character and not giving me a sense of what the shape of the story is going to be. So, the way I always talk about opening pages is I want them to be like a layer cake. Right? Where there's so much stuff put into those opening pages that are giving me a sense of world and character and all these things. So one way to do that is to kind of play with your voice a little bit and play with time and interiority and perspective to be able to give us lots of different pieces of information from lots of different angles as quickly as possible.

[Erin] Sometimes I actually like to think about this is literally the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Like, these are the things that your reader's going to want to know in the beginning. You don't have to give them all in one sentence. Though, if you can, that's exciting. But, really, I like to think about when am I answering like, who. Who is this happening to? What. Like, what is actually going on at this moment? When and where is our setting. Like, when and where are we? Then, for why and how, how is a lot of tone. Like, how is this story going to be told? Is this humor, is this a light touch, is this like dark and foreboding? Like, how is the story being told? Why is a little bit of sort of the if there's any theme that I want to put in there, that I want to seed early on. Sometimes, I'll actually go through the pages of a story and be like when our each of these elements clear? If one is clear very, very far down, then, am I doing that for a reason? If I'm not, can I bring it up, and at least suggest what's going on so that it doesn't feel missing?

[Howard] On that point, or to that point, I love the idea of descriptions as being either additive or corrective. I see corrective as inherently problematic. If I've given you some description, you're going to start building independently of me continuing to write things. If I lead you in one direction and you keep running in that direction, but that's not what is actually happening, the next piece of description I give you is corrective instead of additive. Every time you do that, you are breaking a trust with the reader. Now, in a humor novel, you can absolutely get away with it. In fact, it's a fantastic technique. But, I started thinking about it in this way, where, yes, I want to order things, the who, what, when, where, why, but I also want to make sure that if I start people down a path, I don't let them run far enough that I have to correct my description later.

[Dan] I think it's important to point out… We don't want to freak you out with this thought that you have to explain everything in your first couple of pages. That's not what we're talking about. Think of it as providing evidence of what's going on, rather than providing us answers for what's going on. You don't need to explain your entire magic system, for example. But you do need to give us the information that pertains to the scene itself. If your first scene is a fight between wizards, then, yeah, we need to understand some of the magic system. If it's not, you can just drop hints here and there, give us some breadcrumbs, and explain the rest of it later.

[DongWon] One thing I always say is that I need character stakes in the opening scene, I need some sense of, like, what's at risk here. The other thing I always say is these can be lies.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] This goes a little counter to what Howard was saying, but this doesn't have to be your main character's biggest problem. This can be a minor set of stakes that they need to get through for this scene, that will then lead them into bigger inciting incidents. Right? So, I need a sense of the shape of the story. Don't feel pressured to communicate your whole novel to me in this moment. I just need a story, a subplot, a little something for me to chew on that's going to pull me into the rest of the book.

[Howard] Coming back to additive versus corrective real quick. If you tell me someone is desperately trying to get a hold of someone else, but can't, and you don't tell me why, I… Well, if you tell me because my cell phone has no charge, then you grounded me in the 21st-century. If you tell me that I can't get to a pay phone, whatever, then you grounded me maybe a couple decades earlier. Or smoke signals or whatever. I need to know if we're in Civil War era or 21st century fairly early on with the descriptions end up being very, very corrective when you deliver them.

[DongWon] This brings me to one another point is to be a little careful of metaphor in these opening pages. Because everything… I don't know anything about your world, so sometimes somebody… I'll run [inaudible into fantasy?] where somebody puts a metaphor in and I'll think, "Oh, literally, people are fish in this world." Not they were like a fish in this moment.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? You can take stuff that is completely wild because I am… It's all open skies for me. I don't know what it is I'm engaging with yet. So, those metaphors can be taken incredibly literally in those opening pages. So, something to be a little careful about.

[Mary Robinette] I… I… I'm going to give like some metrics for a really mechanical way to do this. For people who like rules and are feeling freaked out. I want to be really clear that this is exercise stuff, this is not books must be written this way. But if you're like, "I don't know, this is too much." Using Erin's idea of who, what, where, why, I do something very similar. That is, I try to make sure that my character's… My readers know where we are, who we're with, and something about the genre or mood. I count when as part of the where. I try to do that within the first 3 sentences. So that I'm just like giving… And it's not that… When I say who, it's not that you have to know my character's entire back story. It's just giving a little bit of an idea of whose eyes we're going to be looking through, who we're going to be connecting to. Then, within the first 13 lines, I try to make sure that we know something about my character's goal. The reason I say the first 13 lines is an entirely mechanical and mercenary thing, which is that it's about the first half page of a manuscript, and that's about how long you have to hook an agent or an editor when they are in the slush pile. So if you can give them something that your reader… Your character wants. To DongWon's point, it doesn't have to be the big thing, but something that's, like, somehow thematically linked. Like, if we're going to be on a big quest later, they're just looking for the remote control right now. But something that they want.

[Erin] Let's say 2 things about that. One is that I think those small things, like looking for the remote control, build the trust that Howard was talking about earlier. You show that, like, I'm going to show you something and I'm going to deliver on it. Then you don't have to deliver on it as quickly the next time, because you've built that trust. But also, to be like a chaos gremlin…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, in opposition of what you're saying, I also feel like one of the things that's nice about Nano, it's, like, a time to play around and find out what…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Surely.

[Erin] And find out what happens if you break all these rules. Do you want to write 50,000 words where no one knows where they are the entire time, including the reader? Hey, go for it. You may find out that you've discovered a new way of writing fiction, or you may find out that it's confusing and you need to go back and add that in. But this is a great time too, like, play around with what you're doing and how you're doing it.

[Mary Robinette] I actually completely agree with that. So we're in great shape. And, I think, that we've set you up to begin your first nano day. Hopefully. So, dive in. All of the words you count write.… All of the words you write count! Now, we're going to give you a little bit of homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that I want you to write 2 different openings. The first one is going to be more action driven, where your character is doing a thing. The 2nd one is going to be voice driven, where you are ruminating on something and kind of just exploring voice. You may wind up using neither of these, both of them count. You can do them in any order you want. But explore 2 different ways of opening that novel.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're now offering an introductory tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/31/17-31-everyone-has-an-agenda/

 

Key points: Characters want something. Dialogue is like a series of reveals, with each character trying to move their agenda forward. Interrogation scenes are a stark contrast, with what's at stake, and the gamesmanship of trying to get information out of you, while you are trying to hide that information. Characters may not use the right tool to accomplish their objective! People are unreliable communicators. Sometimes one character will draw another character out. Mysteries tend to slowly unveil things in dialogue, with delays, distractions, and obfuscations galore. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 31]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Four, Everyone Has an Agenda.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So we are going to talk about agendas today. Characters want something. That's why they are in your story. How... What does this... Maurice, what does this have to do with dialogue?

[Maurice] So I've been loving some of the analogies that we've been having during the course of this conversation. So, the whole idea of like a series of reveals has been just fascinating to me. So, when I think of each person having an agenda, I mean we… Each conversation means something. There's either something I'm trying to figure out or there's something I'm trying to hide. Now it becomes a game of us trying to move those two agendas forward. So that's a lot of ways that I tend to view dialogue. Which is why my favorite dialogue scenes to write are actually interrogation scenes. Because that's when it becomes a really stark contrast, what's at stake and how are we going to go about this sort of gamesmanship of you're trying to get information out of me, I'm trying to hide it, and yet, get information out of you, too, that you're trying to hide. So in a nutshell, that's, for me, is at the heart of everyone having agenda.

[Mary Robinette] This is that thing that I was talking about in episode one about the idea of area of intention, that there is an authorial area of intention, and then your character has their own area of intention. As Maurice says, everyone has a reason for doing something. Like, sometimes you're saying a thing because you're trying to appear smart. Sometimes you're saying it to score points. Sometimes you're saying it to convey information. Sometimes you're saying it to woo someone. Sometimes it's come out of your mouth and you're like, "Oh, I wish I had not said that out loud." So thinking about why… What your character's objective was for why they said that thing. They may not use the right tool for accomplishing that objective. Which is part of what makes dialogue fun is that it is… Its own version of a try-fail cycle.

[Dan] Yeah. I do love that idea. We talk about unreliable narrators sometimes, but I think we also need to remember that people are just unreliable communicators. We are often very bad at saying what we mean, or saying it in a way that will make people angry or that will not make people angry. What I often find myself thinking… We talked last episode about big conversations with multiple people. Those are one of my favorite things to write. From an author intent point of view, often one of the reasons that I will have a character speak is as an author I need to remind you they're in the room.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It's important to make sure that this character says something so that you don't forget that they're there. But the character needs their own motivation to speak.

[Mary Robinette] I'm here, I'm here!

[Laughter]

[Dan] They need to say something other than just, well, the author wants to make sure you didn't forget me. So, thinking about, well, what is their agenda? Making sure they have an agenda. Why are they in the conversation? Often, and I've been in these conversations before with friend groups and things like that, often I have no agenda in a conversation. Sometimes my only purpose in speaking is just to tell a joke to make people laugh. Maybe I'm bored. Maybe someone else is having a very meaningful conversation and I'm just stuck there awkwardly. Those are still motivations, even if they are not driving the story forward.

 

[Howard] I call some of those "look, I'm just happy to be here." What's fun about the "I'm just happy to be here" is often during the course of a conversation, there will be a reveal and "I'm just happy to be here" becomes "Wait. We're doing what?" Those… I mean, I've described it comedically. I'm reminded of… Oh, I can't remember the class and none of it's important. A passenger and a driver in a car, they're driving down the road and there is a fast food place up ahead. The passenger says, "I'm thirsty." What the passenger means is I like the milkshakes that they serve there and I want you to read my mind and let's go get milkshakes. But they haven't said that because even for themselves they don't… They haven't unpacked their own agenda. They just "I'm thirsty." "Yeah, we'll get something to drink when we get home." Then they're upset. Well, how come you didn't pull over? Well, because we didn't complete the conversation. Because the character had an intent that they didn't fully understand and which they didn't communicate.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to push back on that slightly as an interpretation, and just say that this is an example of, and we'll talk about this later, about where conflict can come from when two people have different understandings of the conversation. There's an idea of high context culture and low context culture. High context culture is full of this kind of indirect communication. So instead of saying, "Will you pass me the salt?" you say, "Is there any salt?" The code is this means I don't need you to say, "Yes there is salt." What I need you to do is pass me the salt. So sometimes someone is saying something like that because what they're act… The encoded stuff is basically around I would like to stop for a milkshake, but I don't want to put you out if you don't also want to stop for a milkshake.

[Maurice] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So this is… This gets back into the thing we've already talked about, knowing their agenda and knowing the character.

 

[Dan] I have an agenda right now. Which is that we need to pause for our book of the week.

[Howard] Oh. I've got the book of the week. The book of the week is kind of a technical manual. It's by Nate Piekos. It's called The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering. Why on earth would I hand you what is a graphic designer's technical manual if you're a writer? Let me read a little blurb off the back, because they said it better than I can. "Well-crafted comic book lettering is the visual soundtrack that guides a reader's eye along the page with the mode of dialogue, intuitively placed balloons, and dynamic sound effects. But these elements are just the beginning. In this book, you'll also learn the unique grammatical traditions of mainstream comics." I'm going to stop there for just a moment. If you want to write comics and you don't know the syntax of comic book dialogue, your letterer is going to choke. Your artist is going to choke. The whole project grinds to a halt because the writer is a novelist and not a comic book writer. The book is so loaded with information. Now, as a comic book guy, I'm probably getting more out of it than non-graphic designer folks will, but if you're using, for instance, Photoshop and Illustrator to build your own book covers, there are going to be elements in here that you're going to love to have. So, it is the Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering by Nate Piekos.

 

[Dan] Wonderful. Okay. So, Maurice, you had something you wanted to say before the break.

[Maurice] Oh, yeah. It's just something… Something actually my therapist told me once. I will use anything for applying to writing. But she was saying if people were clear communicators, she would be out of a job. It's just we rarely say what we feel when we feel it. So my application for that is just that, as I was listening to Howard talk earlier, is the whole idea of like when I… I tend to, as a person, make you work for it. You have to ask me directly. You have to… There's a lot of intentionality when I'm in a conversation with somebody. It drives my wife absolutely insane. But I realize that's a tick of mine. It's just like, oh, no, I'm not just going to casually say things. Everything is with intentionality. Then, if not, I will disappear in the room and not blink twice about it. I'm happy to disappear in a crowd. Which I know sounds counterintuitive for those who've actually met me and interacted with me. But I will happily disappear into that crowd unless someone draws me out of it. So I think about that a lot in terms of dialogue and my character interactions. So for that person in the room who disappears or who speaks just to remind people they're in the room, well, there are some people who are like, "No, no. I'm trying to avoid detection." So now what does this mean in terms of how you write dialogue or your main character trying to ferret out information they need?

[Dan] One good trick that you can use for that sort of situation is exactly what Mary Robinette did in our previous episode where I had not spoken in a while, so she asked me to talk about my own writing. Which is a way to draw people out if they are not speaking and you need a good character-based reason, that character intention, for them to be speaking. Have another character force them to…

[Mary Robinette] Or have them do something that Dan was talking about, like derailing things slightly. I… It's… It is… You can have them tell an inappropriate joke which can then introduce tension into the scene. You can have them say, "Does anyone want some tea?" And go and putter someplace, which can reveal character about them. It's like this is someone who's nurturing. This is someone who doesn't feel comfortable being not busy. There's a number of different things that you can do that can bring that character in. One of the things that… Going back to the authorial area of intention and character area of intention, that I will think about as a person, and then I will use that tool with my characters, that I will think, "What am I actually trying to accomplish here?" So, let's use, as an example, an apology. So an apology is a part of a conversation between two people. A character wants something when they apologize. There's a number of different things that that character can want. You can tell which one they want when you read that apology. You can tell, because you've read these bad apologies. You can tell when it's not an apology, they just want you to think nice things about them. You can tell when it's an apology, when they want to actually win the argument under the guise of pretending to apologize. You can tell it's an apology where they want to fix the problem that they have created and let you know that they are no longer a problem. All of those are different like areas of intention that inform the ways that they are constructing that apology. It's exposed in the language that they use. So the idea that everybody has an agenda, the reason that we want you to think about it is because it affects not just what your character says and how they say it, but also, like, the impact of it. Because if their agenda is one thing, I want people to think good things about me, and they do the apology that is not apology, the faux-pology, it's not going to fix the thing. People are not going to think good things. They're just going to get angrier. So that agenda item is a failure. Right? So they've got an agenda and what you've got there is then a try-fail cycle. So you… There's a thing they want to accomplish, they try something, and it fails. Which is part of why like understanding what your character's goal is is so important when you're constructing dialogue.

 

[Dan] Maurice, I have a question. I'm very intrigued by one of the lines in the outline you gave us that says slowly unveiling a mystery. What do you mean by that? How does that refer to this agenda dialogue conversation?

[Maurice] Well, I mean if the four of us are in a murder mystery, and someone's like, "Hey, who killed them?" And I go, "Oh, oh. My bad. I did that."

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] That kind of cuts the mystery pretty short.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's a great micro fiction, though.

[Maurice] Right.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] My bad, I did that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Who killed him? My bad, it was me.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Tada! So. I mean, again, it's just the problem in microcosm, it's like, all right, so, one of you being the detective, and I'm sitting there trying to hide this information. That now charges each one of our interactions. Right? So I'm going to be as indirect, I'm going to obfuscate, I'm going to allow for distraction as much as possible during any interchange that we have in order to hide the fact that my goal is I want to get away with this murder. Right? So that's kind of what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about that question.

[Mary Robinette] That is so often my goal.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That is one of the lessons that I had to learn very early on with dialogue is, I would have two characters talking. One had information they didn't want to give up. But I, as the author, knew that this scene was the scene where they gave it up. Yeah. It just ended up being clunky. I won't tell you, I won't tell you, I won't tell you, okay, here it is. Making something like that feel natural is so difficult sometimes. You need to allow for distractions like you were saying, one character is trying to delay the conversation, the other character is asking probing questions, because you can't just say, "Hey, did you kill the guy?" You have to start asking other things. For that specific conversation, there's a really wonderful series of YouTube channels where they will actually show police interrogations. I find those to be really fascinating. In particular, there's one, and I can't remember the name of the channel, where they will do police interrogations for people who are… Who are claiming to be insane. They're clearly trying to set up an insanity plea. So there's commentary along with it, saying, well, this is what they're trying to accomplish by this sentence or by this behavior. And here's why it doesn't work.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I love that kind of stuff.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] I remember the first time I played How to Host a Murder. I was the killer, and my what's my motivation book, the first two pages were stuck together, and I didn't know that I was the killer.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I totally won that game because I lied so convincingly. At one point, they said, "Hey. You're a rock climber, you brought rope with you. Obviously, you swung to the balcony and committed the murder." I was like, "Don't be ridiculous. Yes, I'm a rock climber. I'm not Tarzan." Just making fun of what they were saying, even though, from the clues that were presented in the book, oh, he's totally the killer. I totally got away with it because I didn't know. I learned a lot from that. You want to lie convincingly, hide the facts from yourself.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right, right. I was actually just thinking… I love watching police interrogations. But there was one that was recorded… It was literally following the Indianapolis police detectives. It was a reality show, they followed them around. There was this… This was like one of my all-time favorite police interrogations. But it would almost never work on the page. Because it was basically, "Did you do it?" "No, I didn't do it." "Did you do it?" "No. I didn't do it." "Man, I know your mama." "All right, so here's what happened."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] I mean, it's like… Really, he dumped out because the detective said, "I know your mama." It's like… Oh. Okay.

[Dan] I have found the specific YouTube channel that I was thinking of that's all about criminal psychology. So, Howard, I've given you that link. You can include it in the liner notes for when we post this episode live.

[Howard] Okay.

 

[Mary Robinette] Which means that we are probably at that point where we should talk about homework.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I have your homework. I want you to identify your character's area of intention. So go through and look at a scene with dialogue, and identify, just flag next to it, what is your character trying to accomplish when they say this? You should know what their area of intention is for the overall scene and also for each line of dialogue. When I say you should know, I want to be super clear that most of the time, this is stuff that you have internalized and you're doing it instinctively. This is something that you should know for the purposes of this exercise and, if you've ever got a scene where you can't get traction or it's not working, this is a tool that you can pull out. Identify their area of intention for the whole scene and also for each line of dialogue. Bonus, when I say your character, I do mean every character that is engaged in that dialogue.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/06/17-10-structuring-with-multiple-povs/

 

Key points: Multiple points of view. How does going from a single POV to multiple POVs affect worldbuilding, pacing, and character? Start by asking yourself you want a single POV or multiple POVs. Police procedurals often use an A plot for the main mystery, and a smaller B plot. Multiple POVs can also help control pacing. It also provides a way to flesh out side characters, and even main characters, by looking at them from other sides. It can also help examine motivations. Remember, you choose to use multiple POVs to let you dig into the complexities if you want to.

 

[Season 17, Episode 10]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring with Multiple POVs.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I've got the B plot.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Now, POV, that's points of view. We want to make sure that that is clear. When we have multiple points of view in a story, how does that change the structure? How can you build the structure to take best advantage of your multiple POVs? So, Peng, what are your thoughts on this? Where do we start when we've got a story with multiple points of view?

[Peng] Weel, I mean, I think the first thing you start with is do you want to have multiple points of view to begin with? Because some stories may not be served by that, and then others, it would really have a... So, when you have... When you think you have a story that you want to tell with multiple POVs, it has really important implications for, I think, a lot of different aspects of craft. We can kind of go one by one. But I would say worldbuilding, pacing, and character are some of the aspects of stories that can be changed the most by taking your story from single point of view to multiple points of view.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to…

[Peng] Mary Robinette, you…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm going to jump in real fast, because that thing you said about you want your story to be single POV or multi-POV. So, full disclosure, I'm about to do a spoiler.

[Peng] Oooh!

[Mary Robinette] For the Glamorous History series. But it's book 5. So in book 3, we had a discussion about… Excuse me, in book 4, which was Valor and Vanity, we had a discussion about whether or not I should do multiple POVs. Because I was doing a heist, and doing multiple POVs would have made it significantly easier to hide information from the reader by controlling which character… The character that was in the know would be the one that… Whose POV I was not in. So it was going to be significantly easier. However, I said no, I have to keep this single POV, because I know… In part, there was the thing that the whole series had been single POV up to that point, but also, in book 5, I had anything planned that needed the shock of suddenly switching POVs. Which is that… This is the spoiler part. You have been warned. This is your last opportunity. Okay. I make the reader think that I have potentially killed Jane, who is my POV character, by having her lose consciousness and switching to her husband's POV. We get his POV for two chapters. So it is… It was something that I did with the intention of using that POV shift for shock.

[Howard] Mary Robinette, that sounds like it might have affected some people.

[Mary Robinette] I have been told, and it is one of the things that I'm most proud of, is multiple people threw the book across the room…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When they got to Vincent's POV because they were shocked and appalled that I was doing that thing.

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That's wonderful.

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That would not have worked as well if you had done the multiple POVs in book 4, like you were saying. It wouldn't have been the shock that you needed it to be.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Howard] When I introduced myself at the beginning of this episode, and said, "I have the B plot," I was telegraphing the entire structural format of lots of police procedurals, the whole CSI franchise. Where a portion of the POVs are devoted to the B plot of the episode. You have an A plot that is the main mystery, and then you've got some side characters who are doing the smaller B plot. Sometimes they tie together, and sometimes they don't. The point of all this is that when you have an ensemble cast, or at the very least, multiple POVs, now you have the ability to manage A plot, B plot, CDE plot, whatever, and thread things together.

[Peng] Yeah. It also, when you've got multiple POVs like this, it's a good way to control your pacing, too. Especially for something… I mean, if we're going to talk about the police procedurals, if you just had on A plot, the mystery would almost seem… I mean, it would seem a little too fast and kind of surface and flat, because that's the only thing you're focusing on. But if you've got another POV to switch to, it can… It helps you control pacing because you can have one going slower or faster than the other. So your readers or your viewers will get a little bit of a break if you've got a really tense moment in the A plot, for example, and then you switch to something a little bit slower in the B plot. It can release a little bit of that fast pacing and give the readers a chance to breathe. It also indicates that both of them are related. It just makes the whole thing… It can make the whole thing feel a lot deeper. If you've got more than…

[Howard] I've seen B plots used to turn super obvious clues from the A plot into "Oh, wait. That must be a red herring." Because of the way it… It's the pacing of a mystery. Using a POV shift to convince the reader that the clue you just given them isn't as important or is way more important than they thought it was. It's cool. It's super difficult to do without multiple POVs.

 

[Dan] So, while we're talking about this, let's do our book of the week. Peng, you have that this week.

[Peng] I do. Our book of the week is Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey. It is a book with two alternating perspectives. It's this really fascinating clever mystery about these two people, a man and a woman, who keep meeting over and over again in different lives. Like, sometimes they're lovers, sometimes they're friends, sometimes they're colleagues, or sometimes one of them's very old and one is very young. But the weird thing is that they're always in Cologne, Germany, and they're always in the same time. Because everyone else in their lives is also the same. Like, it's the same bartender at the bar that they always go to, it's the same train conductor on the train. So at first, they don't know it, the way that the readers do, but they slowly start to recognize each other and realize that something really strange is going on. They set out to try to figure out what's happening to them together. It's such a great story. I won't spoil anything, but every time you think you have figured out what's going on, you're wrong. Just like the characters are. The ending is just so surprising and different that you think that there is no way that the author's going to be able to pull it off. Then she does. So it's such a great escape. I read it during lockdown in… During the early part of the pandemic. I think it was the first book that I was able to actually read. It was one of those one's where you sit down, and a few hours later, you look up and you're like, "What? Huh. What time is it?"

[Laughter]

[Peng] So it's really… It's great. It's fantastic.

[Dan] Wonderful. That is Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey. So, everyone go read that.

 

[Dan] We have recently been given a really wonderful example of how multiple POVs can alter the structure of a story. Who is it that put The Killing Floor…

[Howard] Oh, that was me.

[Dan] Into the outline? Howard, talk about that, because I find this fascinating.

[Howard] That was me. In Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel, Jack Reacher is the POV character and the story is told first person from Reacher's perspective, beginning to end. There are couple of side characters that he interacts with, who help… I say help with the investigation. It's really supposed to be their investigation. Reacher isn't a police officer. He has no authority here. But they're off doing police stuff. We get their clues, their information, when they touch back with him. In the Amazon's Prime series that just aired a couple of… Three weeks ago as of the time we're recording this called Reacher, those characters get their own points of view. It changes the way the story unfolds. It makes those characters… It makes those characters feel more important, more real to us, and it gives us tension that we didn't have before. We like them more, we don't want bad things to happen to them. If they die off camera… In the book, in Reacher's POV, lots of people die off camera. We don't see what happens. Reacher learns about another body. But actually having the camera on them changes the pacing, changes the tension. I enjoyed it a lot.

[Dan] Yeah. It was really interesting to watch that unfold. I'm glad that you pointed it out because adding in the extra POVs change the story and the characters obviously, but also required and demanded a different structure. In a lot of ways, the fact that they were turning this into a TV show, the structure demanded multiple POVs. They couldn't have done 10 episodes were however many it was solely with the one person. Now, on the other hand, Lee Child himself has come out and said that because there are multiple POVs, because we got to know Roscoe so well, for example, he is very sad that the structure of the series overall is that of a drifter, and we never come back to Margrave, we will never come back to Roscoe again. So in some ways, it kind of works counter to the book series because now we want to see Roscoe, we want to follow her just as much as we want to follow Reacher. Honestly, probably a little more.

[Howard] One of the thoughts that I had in that regard is that the emotional arc of Reacher being so disconnected that he can just drift. In the books, we don't really get a feel for the cost of that. But as audience members watching the TV show, there is a cost. I'm not going to get to see Roscoe again, and that makes me sad. Why do I have to be a drifter? Well, okay, I'm having an emotional experience because of the kind of story that's being told.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things for me about this conversation is that I think when we're talking about the characterization that it's easy to think about it as giving that multiple POV makes these additional side characters more fleshed out and more interesting. But the other thing that it does for me is that it gives you an opportunity to learn more about whoever tips us in a book where you have a main character, or even on ensemble, it gives you an opportunity to learn more about those other characters because you get to see them from the outside. That's something that a novel or a short story, that prose can do that is harder in film, is that having that second POV and the interiority of the character who is observing someone that you've already met can give you, I think, a greater sense of… Someone can feel like, "Hello, I am a hot mess." Then you see them from the outside, and they're cold and controlled. That's an exciting thing that multiple POVs can give you. One example that I'd love to bring up is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Peng] That was such a good book.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, so good. It's got so many different POVs. It's actually not so many. It's got…

[Peng] I think it's three, right?

[Mary Robinette] Multiple… Three? Is it?

[Peng] Yeah, I think it's three.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The thing that's wonderful about it is that it does this thing, that each of those characters at a certain point intersects with one of the other characters and you can see them from the outside and how they are perceived by the rest of the world, and it is at odds with how they perceive themselves. Which is, I think, true for a lot… Inherently true for a lot of us.

[Peng] Yeah.

[Dan] Definitely.

[Peng] I think the other thing that the multiple POVs in Black Sun does really well is not only does it allow Rebecca Roanhorse to illuminate the characters in that way, but it also helps you, or it can help you explain their motivations too. So it's not just the way that they see themselves versus the way that others see them, but also whatever their goals are. You… When you get to see the other side of it, it really helps you understand that… What each of them wants can be really complicated, it's not just black-and-white or… Like, for example, if you've got somebody that seems like the villain the whole time, if you're only viewing them from one perspective, like the hero's perspective, you're only going to see or get the hero's read on that. But then if you are able to jump to either the villain's perspective or someone else's perspective who can see the villain, you're able to flesh out the quote unquote villain's motivations in a way that you wouldn't be able to if you just had hero, because the hero can only see one way. I think that happens a lot in Black Sun where from the outside it might look like somebody just wants war, they want to conquer something or they want to preserve a way of life that seems very bad to the other characters. But then when you get to hear it from that character, it's so much more complicated than that.

[Dan] This is something that can work both ways, right? If you want to draw out those kinds of complexities, then structuring your book such that it has multiple POVs is a good choice you can make. It's not just an outcome that happens, but one that you can choose. Which I think is really wonderful.

 

[Dan] All right. It's time for our homework, and, Mary Robinette, you have that this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. So what I want you to do is take a scene in your current work in progress and rewrite from another character's point of view. I want you to look to see what changes, how the tone of the scene might shift, what new information or information might be revealed. If you want to really dive into this, try to make sure that the beats, the physical beats, don't shift. So, if a character enters at the top of a scene and pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, they still have to do that, but now you have to try to write it so that it makes sense about why they're doing that. I can't imagine what reason that would be. But maybe they're saving them from a fire, maybe that old lady in a wheelchair is actually a demon and you didn't know it. Whatever it is, see if you can make all of their motivations make sense without changing the beats. You can include things that the other character didn't notice, absolutely. You can have the scene start a little earlier or end a little later. But what you really want to do is dig into the why of the character.

[Dan] That sounds awesome. I actually think I'm going to do that with the work in progress that I currently have. So…

[Howard] You're going to push an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs?

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Is that not what everyone else got from the…

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the homework, yes.

[Howard] That's what I got, yeah.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/12/15-28-small-evils/

 

Key points: Small evils are easy to relate to, we all have felt them. Small antagonisms turn into small evils, which make nuanced villains. Motivation separates the antagonist and protagonist. Contrasting philosophies. Villains are interesting because they can move upward, while heroes can only fall from grace. Redemptive villains can become heroes. Team sports stories often have small evils villains. We like villains with small evils because they let us see someone who feels things we have felt, and acts out on them. We see ourselves in the negatives of a character, rarely in the positives. We like to watch people be bad. We, the writer, chooses who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. Consider what would happen if you flip the narrative, shift the perspective. It's important to know why the villain, the antagonist, feels the way they do about the protagonist. When you shrug off external costs, you become a evil. Use escalation, and remember the process that takes a person from human to villain or vice-versa. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 28.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Small Evils.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm trying to be bigger.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Victoria, you pitched this idea to us. Will you explain what you mean by small evils?

[Victoria] I do. I will, I will. I am fascinated by villainy and antagonism. It's one of the guiding principles in all of my stories. The thing that I'm really interested in is the idea of, as I said, small evils as compared to big ones. The way… The example I always give is it's Voldemort compared to Umbridge. Dolores Umbridge, one of the prime villains in chapter 5 of the Harry Potter series. The reason is that world domination is not a very grounded concept. It's not something that the vast majority of people can relate to. But almost all of us, I'm pretty sure, have felt a small evil inside of us. We've either been jealous or covetous, we've felt slighted, we've felt as though somebody hasn't given us the attention or the spotlight. I am fascinated by the way in which these small antagonisms can become small evils, that can make very grounded nuanced villains.

[Dan] I love the way that you told us about this earlier, that none of us have met a Voldemort, but we've all met an Umbridge. Right? Some domineering or tyrannical person that we've had to deal with at school or at work or in our own home. So we can relate to that, instinctively.

[Victoria] Yeah. I love it. I was writing a series I called the villain series, Vicious and Vengeful, which genuinely explored this on the most grounded level possible. I wanted to see if I could write a book without heroes and still make you root for one of them. So it became an exploration of small evils, it became an exploration not of the things that people do, but of the things that motivate them to do those things. It becomes about the relatability of the motive. I have a character who basically had a God complex. That was not relatable. So people had a very easy time casting him in the role of the villain. I had another character do the exact same evils in terms of the what, but his why was very different. The why was simply that he wanted revenge on this other character because of the massive falling out that they had. What I found was that people could absolutely relate to the sociopathic character who was bitter about his falling out, and nobody could relate to the sociopathic character who had a God complex. So it became an exploration of motive, and of really cre… Motive turning antagonists into protagonists.

[Brandon] We've often talked about how a lot of times the stories with the strongest villains tend to be the best stories. Strength of the protagonist is directly related to how difficult it is to overcome the villain and how interesting that villain is. It's not all one-to-one, but…

[Victoria] It's not, but… So I'm very anti the concept, like, when you're talking about love stories, that two halves make a whole. When we're talking about hero and villain, or protagonist and antagonist, I absolutely believe that two halves make a whole. That our hero and our villain, our protagonist and our antagonist, for a less dramatic turn of phrase, are in constant conversation. Really. One of the examples I always give of this is Batman and the Joker. Because if you look at what kind of character Joker is, he is formed directly to fit all of Batman's fears. Like, Batman is a complete control freak who wants to have power over his environment, control over his city, who wants to set things right. Joker is an avatar of anarchy. An avatar of chaos, and of everything that Batman fears and can't control. I absolutely believe in writing your heroes and villains not only with the same amount of thought in the same amount of humanity, but also of thinking about them as things which are foils, in constant conversation with each other.

[Brandon] Right. The best hero villain pairs are the ones that espouse contrasting philosophies about life, or have the same goal but very different philosophies getting there. Magneto tends to be my favorite…

[Victoria] Yeah. Mine too.

[Brandon] Villain from comic books. Because they have, over the years, built this contrasting philosophies between him and Prof. X that you can see they both are aligned on trying to achieve the same thing and approach it in very different methods.

[Victoria] Yeah. Talk about a philosophical divide. But one of my favorite things that I heard recently from another writer was that the thing that makes villains so much more interesting is that they don't have a fall from grace that can happen, they can move upward. So they tend to actually protect certain people, or have caveats to their villainy. Whereas the hero can justify almost anything they do for the right cause. So there's a fascinating space between the hero and the villain where one has the ability to rise and the other one has the constant tension of falling.

[Brandon] So, some of my best… My favorite moments in books are when the villain has a chance to… You see, and you bring it, and you're like, "Wow." They could, at this point, make the decision to go… Good… Good is kind of difficult to talk… They could make the decision we want them to make and they don't and we totally see why they don't, and it breaks your heart. Right?

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Brandon] Like, a villain breaking my heart is one of the things that I just… I love when a story is able to do that.

 

[Dan] Well, connected to that, I love redemptive villains. I love that moment where you get there and then they do the thing and you're like, "Wait. You've been the antagonist for two whole books. Now in the third one…" Zuko does this in the Avatar series. He becomes one of the heroes by the end. It's handled so well.

[Howard] In terms of genre, in terms of story type, I think that the small evils villain sees a lot of play in the team sports stories. Because ultimately the triumph of these stories is team comes together and wins. It's not team comes together and overthrows the Dark Lord. That story can work just fine if there is no villain at all. But they really become grounded for us when we have minor antagonists who may be on the same team. People were not getting along with who are preventing us from coming together, or a rival on the other team who is doing things they shouldn't be doing in order to undermine us. But that's still not super villainy. It's small and we can relate.

 

[Victoria] I'm going to make an argument for why we love villains with small evils as compared to large evils. It is the slight, almost like virtual, sadism of the reader, a little bit, but basically they allow us to look at avatars of people who feel the things that we have felt in our lives, and who act out on those things in ways that we cannot. I think there's an immense satisfaction in reading like a villain lowercase V or a villain with small evils because we do see ourselves in them. We always see ourselves in the negatives of a character, very rarely in the positives. Very rarely do we go in the adventure, and be like, "I can relate to that hero, I feel just as brave." Usually, it's like, "I can relate to that antagonist, I have felt this way before." So I think… I don't know, when I write my villain series, I get a lot of messages from people who are like, "This woman got to act out in a way that I obviously can't because society dictates that I don't go burn my ex-husband into ash, but it was very satisfying to read."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I think we get some satisfaction from getting to watch people be bad. It's sometimes why we enjoy watching a hero have a fall and descend. I remember growing up on Smallville and loving when Clark Kent got his hands on red kryptonite, because we got to see that let loose. That letting loose, which is the thing that villains do so much more readily than heroes, is a very enjoyable reading process.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is a book called King of Liars by the author Nick Martel. This is an arc that I was given by my agent for a new epic fantasy. I honestly don't know if it will be out yet, by the time this episode goes live. It should be around this time. I really enjoyed this. Debut authors are always fun to read. I like to see what the new writers are doing. Often, they make me try to level up my own writing, because I'm like, "Man, if the kids are doing stuff like this these days, I gotta get better." This story is very fun, because it's about a family, they're called the Kingmen, not the King's Men…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] The Kingmen. This family, whose job was to kind of help protect the throne. The protagonist's father, instead betrayed the throne. He lives under the shadow of his father having been the Kingmen who went against the rules they have. They have a very stratified society. It's got all sorts of interesting politics and things to it. It's got a very cool worldbuilding, with a shattered moon that is constantly dropping debris on the planet, which is a very science-fiction concept taken into fantasy, which is the sort of stuff I like. It's kind of about his story of deciding is he a villain, is his father… Was his father a villain, what is… Where is the evil? And there are small evils all over this story. It's less about superpowered characters fighting other superpowered characters and more about the sticky messiness that comes from family expectations and societal expectations, in an epic fantasy package. So. Kingdom of Liars by Nick Martel.

 

[Victoria] Also, you hit on something in that pitch that I want to talk about.

[Brandon] Yeah, let's go for it.

[Victoria] [It's about] perspective. It's about… We obviously… It's a very trite phrase, like, that the villain tends to be the hero of their own journey. But we really didn't think about the fact that we choose when we're writing who is our protagonist and who is our antagonist. It's fascinating to analyze a little bit why we choose these things, understanding that if we flip the narrative or we shifted the narrative, one scene to the left, or one person over, we could end up with a completely different dynamic here. So I often challenge myself when I'm writing protagonist and antagonist to make sure that I write the antagonist as someone who doesn't necessarily feel like they're right, but could, through a different lens… I would say it's the… Like the Gryffindors and the Slytherins. There's like the Gryffindors are written as the heroes in that story from a perspectival sense. So they get centered in the narrative. But I'm always interested in what happens when you shift the narrative one over. There's a book for younger readers out right now called Nevermore that essentially follows like a girl who is kind of set up to become like a super-villain, like a Voldemort, magic villain, and it's about like what happens if she didn't choose this, but the world is so afraid of the kind of power that she has that they have essentially vilified her in advance. I'm fascinated by the idea that we choose the perspective, and in so choosing, we do choose who our heroes are.

[Dan] One of the… One of my favorite villain kind of series to look at is actually the Oceans series, Oceans 11 through 13. Partly because they do what you're talking about. Like, there is this small evil. The first movie is this big heist and it's all very stylized and all very cute. But, at the core of it, is you ruined my life and you stole my wife. So now I'm going to steal her back. Which, not only is it that very relatable thing and a very small evil, but you could totally flip the story around, like you're talking. If the casino owner was the protagonist, here's this old ex-con who's coming to wreck my home and steal my wife from me. I think that that's amazing.

[Victoria] Yeah, it's the comprehension of both sides. You don't have to root for both sides equally, but it's really important that you understand why the villain or the antagonist feels the way they do about the protagonist.

[Dan] To follow that on, you look at Oceans 12, which is the least loved and least successful of the series. It does not have a strong villain at all. The villain that it has, has no personal connection to the characters. So that's why when they got to the third in the series, they're like, "Nope. We have to bring this back to basics. We have to have a villain that there's a reason to dislike them." Because the hole that not having a strong villain leaves ruins every other part of the movie.

[Brandon] That movie in particular, that series… Like, there are series you can get away with your villain being a little bit weak. It works for certain situations. But in that series, you have to root for the bad guys.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] To do that, that series puts you against someone worse. That's the whole framing device of why you can root for these people doing pretty terrible things. Those movies absolutely need a strong villain for that reason.

[Victoria] I… Oh.

 

[Howard] I want to bring up a principle here. The principle of external costs. The idea that you profit on something because there is a cost that you didn't need to pay, but that someone else did. For me, one of the easiest definitions of evil is once you know about the external costs, you shrug it off and say, "Eh. Somebody else will pay it." A horrifying example of this which doesn't actually end in horror, this morning as we were picking grapes to bring to the craft services table, Sandra found actual ripe deadly nightshade in and among the grape plants. Okay? A handful of these berries will kill a child. The neighbor child, the toddler, loves wandering over to our yard and eating grapes off the vine. Deciding not to weed when we don't know about the deadly nightshade is just deciding not to weed and there's a tragedy. But once you've seen that plant, deciding not to immediately drop everything and rip them all up and tell the neighbor… Well, now I've become evil. It's just a little thing. Maybe nothing will happen. But that's evil.

[Dan] You should get to that at some point, Howard.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Yeah. This has to be the last point that I want to…

[Howard] I made my son do it. By which I mean, I asked Sandra to make my son do it. Then I checked before I left.

 

[Victoria] This has to be the last point that I want to make, which is one of escalation. One of my favorite examples to give from recent pop-culture is Vulture, in Spiderman Homecoming. Michael Keaton's character. What's so amazing about that character is it starts from such a grounded place. It is an escalation of minute choices. It is an escalation of a man trying to care for his family, who ends up having his job taken away from him, who then decides he'll just have to sell the products that he has on the black market. Who then escalates into a much larger business, who then escalates into obviously a villain and murderer and terrifying human. I think that is probably my favorite thing is to remember whether you're rewinding from villain back into human or fast forwarding from human, like your standard human character, into villain, that there is a process that happens there. Nobody just starts out and is like, "I'm going to take over the world." There is something that happens to displace them or set them at odds with the norms of society or with the good guys, whoever's on the other side, that makes them feel not only self-othering but as though they belong in the place that they're in.

 

[Brandon] So, we're out of time for this episode. Let's go to our homework, which you are very excited about.

[Victoria] I am, because it's a direct extrapolation of the thing that I was just talking about. So, often you'll be told, if you were the hero of the story, what would it look like? But I essentially want the listener to become the villains of the story. I want them to take their own petty grievances, I want them to take their own perceived weaknesses, their own cracks in their armor of life, the things that they know get to them. I want you to start asking yourself what steps stand between you as you are now and you as a villain in a narrative. What would it take, and what would it look like? I think this is important, because it is that reminder that all villains started normal at some point. So, like, just start extrapolating it out and see what kind of villain you would be.

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

[Howard] And do the weeding. Please.

[Chuckles]

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/16/14-24-political-intrigue/

Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.
 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]

[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.

 

[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.

[This potted plant…]

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"

[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.

[Laughter]

[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.

[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.

[Brandon] I can…

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.

[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…

[Howard] Info heist.

[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.

[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.

[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.

 

[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.

[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.

[Brandon] Right. Whereas…

[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.

[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?

[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.

[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.

[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.

[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…

[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…

[Howard] Are two completely different things.

[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yes…

[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…

[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.

[Margaret] Oooo!

[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Margaret] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.

[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.

 

[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"

[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."

[Mary Robinette] Interesting.

[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.

[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?

[Howard] Go.

[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.

[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.

[Margaret] Exactly.

[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.

[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.

[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.

 

[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.

[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.

[Margaret] Da.

[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/04/13-44-alien-characters/

 

Key points: Don't just model your aliens on a human civilization, because context matters! Start with landscape and geography, and create characters from that, or start with characters and figure out what kind of environment would create them. How does the medium you use to portray your alien portray this? How does being alien affect their point of view, their communications? How does their communications affect their lives? Completely alien motivations? Shelter, reproduction, and food drive humans and aliens. But which side of the road do you drive on? Often, even very alien things can be related to something in our society, to make it understandable. What is their motivation? Don't use the sense of wonder as a bludgeon! If you throw in something confusing, that is a promise to the reader that you will use it, and fulfill the promise. Look for the moment when the alien and the human reach understanding, and let the reader get it, too. After your metamorphosis, you may not even remember your own name!

 

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our homework. Howard, you had homework for us?

[Howard] Yes. As I said at the beginning of the episode, the tool that you have is a writer in order to convey alienness is words. Most frequently, that is going to come up in the way someone speaks. If you are familiar with doge-speak, which is the Shiba Inu meme…

[Dan] Which you might know as doggy speak…

[Howard] Doggy speak.

[Dan] Because there are competing pronunciations.

[Howard] Take that language. You can look up grammar rules for that language. It's recognizable, even without a picture of a dog under it. Take the rules of that language, and take dialogue from one of your characters and turn it into that. An example here, and I'm just going to read two lines of it, of someone having done this to Shakespeare. What light? So breaks. Such East! Very sun. Wow, Juliet.

[Laughter]

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

 

Writing Excuses 13.16: Avoiding Flat Characters

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/04/22/13-16-avoiding-flat-characters/

 

Key Points: Flat characters, in theater, a cardboard cutout, a mannequin, but in your book, a character without depth, that doesn't feel like a real person. Spear carriers, however, are just that, a group to fill out a scene. In different situations, characters may act differently, but still be consistent because you, as author, know why they are doing it. Motivation! If readers say a character feels flat, it may mean that you haven't put enough on the page for the reader. Layer more backstory in. Sometimes it means you as author haven't figured out why this character is there, what role they are playing. Beware the boneyard dialogue, where you have written a scene and it is in your head, but not in the story. One fix is to make sure characters reflect on why they have done. Watch for multiple characters who all tell the same punchlines, the Marvel formula or Joss Whedon problem. If all the characters are answering the same questionnaire, it may feel flat. Let the characters ask each other questions. Ask questions that most characters are unlikely to answer the same way. Use a verbal silhouette test, to check whether your characters are different enough. Build your characters around their differences!

 

 

[Brandon] Howard, you're going to give us some homework.

[Howard] I've got the homework. We talk a lot about the flat characters. We complain about the flat characters that we've seen in movies or read about in books. Take a memorably flat character from something you've recently consumed. Identify what story purpose they are fulfilling. Then write a back story for them that would satisfactorily make them interesting while still allowing them to fulfill the story purpose they filled in that story.

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

 

 

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/11/13-10-handling-a-large-cast/

 

Key Points: The length of the story often influences the size of the cast. When you have an ensemble cast, you may need to give them all weight. Name, distinguishing characteristics, backstory, motivation? But with short stories, you often want bit players who come in, do something, and leave. With large casts, you may need spreadsheets or even a wiki to keep track. If they have a name, they need motivation, backstory, and all that. Or write one group straight through, another group straight through, then weave and blend them. Big casts often start with one character, then expand, and grow over time. You don't really start with a huge cast on page one! Small casts, characters often wear lots of hats, and you can show they are skilled in one area, but ... the story challenges them in an area where they aren't so good. You can also use the relationships between your characters more. And delve deeper into your characters, and their interactions. Think of screen time -- how do you balance and give each character enough screen time?

 

 

[Brandon] Awesome. You were going to give us some homework, Maurice, that's kind of along those lines?

[Maurice] Oh, yes. Very much along these lines. So, it's out of my dialogue class I teach. I call it, it's a talking heads exercise. Again, one of the roles of dialogue is… By the end of dialogue… Dialogue, you have characterized… You use dialogue to characterize… To develop characterization. So one of the goals is that by the end of… You should be able to write characters with such a distinct voice, I shouldn't need dialogue tags to tell them apart. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the audio plays. Very much… It makes you very conscious of that. How do my characters sound, distinct from one another, even in those brief interactions? So that what I… So the exercise is. So you have a married couple. They bump into each other at a coffee shop, when neither one was supposed to be there. One's supposed to be at work, one's supposed to be doing their other thing. They bump into each other at a coffee shop. So, obviously, they have an agenda and they have a secret they want to hide and the other one's trying to get that out of them. Write that scene.

[Brandon] Write that scene with no dialogue tags?

[Maurice] With no dialogue tags.

[Mary] Awesome.

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