Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-15-building-a-mystery-now-with-more-tools/ 

 

Key points: Using a toolbox of ways to build tension in mysteries? Anticipation! Unanswered questions. A foundation of character tension, relationships and stakes. Handles or business ends of the tools? It's not just information, there's also emotion, revelation, and consequences.

 

[Season 18, Episode 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools.

[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 talk about mysteries again, but now you have this whole toolbox of different ways to build tension, and you see why we were so excited about it. So. Let's start  talking about mysteries. So we've been talking about mysteries and anticipation. Okay. So how do you apply anticipation to mysteries? What are some of the classic ways we've seen it done or ways that you're like, "This! This is a really meaty juicy way to do it?" I can talk about... I was like, "I'm just going to riff until one of you has an answer…"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was anticipating something and then it fell through for me. Seriously, though, one of the things that I did a lot in the Spare Man was that I was using anticipation. I was using the anticipation of waiting for that body drop is one of the things in the first scene… Or second scene. In the second scene, I set up a fight. So that is building for the reader the anticipation that something is going to happen with one of these three characters. That then allows me to have… To keep you moving along. Then we get into the second scene… Or I guess it's the third scene, actually. The next scene where we have a scream. That builds an anticipation of oh, something has gone wrong. Which I then ramp up further by giving you an unanswered question of who is the screamer? So what I find a lot of times you can do with these is that you can take one of the tools that we've used and then use it as a… One of the tools we've mentioned and then use it as a handoff or a funnel point…

[Howard] A page turner.

[Mary Robinette] Page turner. Use it as a way to keep you going, and then give you another. Another piece of tension.

 

[DongWon] I'll say that those are the mechanics of a plot structure that you have there. Those are the beats that you used to move us along. What works really well, and the reason all all that engine goes, is you've established underneath that the character tension. Right? You've established the relationship and the stakes for these individuals of like her trying to figure out how do I relate to this other person, what is marriage going to be like for me, and also like dealing with her own trauma, her own history. Like those are all questions you've introduced fairly quickly. I cannot remember exactly when each piece of that comes in, but by the end of the first few chapters, I have a lot of questions about the future of this character, the future of her relationship, the future of her sense of self, that are pulling me through all of this as your giving me the plot details and the unanswered questions that layer on top of that.

 

[Howard] Coming back to the toolbox metaphor for a moment, as we talked about these as tools, we're kind of talking about the business end of the tool. The way the blade of the screwdriver fits into the head of the screw. The way the hammer slams the head of the nail. We haven't talked a lot about the handles of the tools. For my own part, I don't start with anticipation or juxtaposition or conflict. I start with what is the answer to the original unanswered question of who committed the murder. Then I start making notes about where I want readers to feel the different things. This is where I want them to be excited. This is where I want some sense of wonder. This is where I don't know what's going on or what's going to happen, but I've got to get them to turn the page, so here's a question mark. Then as I sit down with the manuscript, that's when I open up the toolbox and start looking at, "Oh. Oh. This is where I'll throw in micro tension, because the characters are talking about things that don't really matter, but I need to explore them. I need to explore the characters so I need them to be passionate about what they're talking about and to be perhaps a little bit in conflict during the discussion." So my approach to the use of the tools is… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I will say that with Spare Man, I actually started with not who committed the murder, but how the murder was committed. Because for me, the thing that is interesting in a mystery is the puzzle. That puzzle is around the murder. So I figured out what is a really interesting way to murder someone. Then who do I have that can commit that murder. That was actually the way that I built that particular thing. Which… What I'm hoping that you're noticing, dear listeners, a thing that we keep talking about is that there is no one right way to do things. Each of these is a correct way, it's just whatever is feeding you as a writer.

[DongWon] Yeah. I don't want people to come away from this feeling like with all of these different tools, you have to have some kind of master plan. Right? That you need to know, "oh, I'm going to deploy a red herring here, I'm going to deploy tension here, I'm going to deploy this that and the other there." Because I think a lot about the apocryphal thing about Agatha Christie, about her not knowing who the murderer was until Poirot said it on the page or something along those lines. Right? You can approach it from… I mean, yes, you do need to know which end of the tool's the business end, and which is the handle, but you can deploy these tools as you go and sort of see where that leads you and sort of build up to something that feels really consistent. A lot of making a mystery feel right is a thing that happens in editing process as you go back through it and say, "Hum. I was giving a little too much information here. I need to withhold that there." Or, "This is really confusing because I knew what was going on, but I didn't set that up properly two scenes ago." Right? So, mysteries. Think of them more as magic tricks rather than like perfectly executed plans. Right? You get to go back through it and adjust and tweak and make sure everything's set up right for your audience to get there when they get there.

[Dan] So, as we've been going through these last few episodes, which really stood out to me talking about all these different forms of tension and how to use them are overlaps between them and ways to solve multiple problems with a single tool. So, for example, we've talked a lot about how we need to care about the characters in order to be invested in them. That is a perfect match with the concept of micro tension, because if you give your character enough texture that they have a hobby or a job or something that they love outside of the plot, then suddenly you've given them something that they can be working on in the background of a scene or these other kinds of little micro tension problems they can be dealing with while trying to solve or trying to ignore the much larger mystery and problem that they are faced with. That solves a lot of things all at once.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example… Sorry, I'm going to use… A great point, and I'm going to use the character of Fantine in Spare Man as an example of that. So, there's two things, two micro… Two points of micro tension for her. One, she's doing crochet for much of the thing. At one point, she is so distracted she makes a mistake, and in yelling, she's mad, not just about all of the other things that are happening, but about the fact that she had to rip out 20 rows. It's like having to rip out 20 rows has no bearing on the overall mystery at all. But it is… It's a piece of character detail and it adds just a little bit of micro tension. Then the other piece for her is her weird pattern of cursing. Because she had made a deal with her priest that she wouldn't use swearwords. So she curses by a combination of Shakespeare and Catholic martyrs. Again, she hits a point where she's so upset that she accidentally does swear. Again, it's just this tiny bit… Little bit more tension that I'm applying to that seen, and texture to the character, which is a lot of fun.

[Dan] Fantine ends up as a lot of people's favorite character, or one of their favorite characters. Because of all these things that you've done.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. Hashtag team fantine or team gimlet, apparently.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] Why don't we take a moment and pause? We'll come back and talk about some of our other tools and how to apply them to mysteries.

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Mark Oshiro's new young adult novel Into the Light. It is a very twisty thriller that's told in a nonlinear way. It focuses on a young teen named Manny who was first pulled into a cult called Reconciliation and then subsequently kicked out of said cult. We sort of meet up with him while he's on the road after all of that. His sister stayed behind, and so he's trying to reconnect with her. Then sees on the news that a dead body has been found in the hills near where Reconciliation is based. There's multiple timelines, there's different POVs, as we try to get to the heart of what exactly happened at Reconciliation. What is his trauma around his experience with this cult, and what is it like to navigate the world as a queer adoptee who's been sort of neglected by the system. It's a really fantastic pointed sharp funny weird novel. I think people are going to be very excited to find the spoiler at the core of what makes this novel tick. It's a real thrill.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, when we're talking about mysteries and tension, there are a number of other tools that we have not even gotten to yet. One of them which… One of my favorites and one of the core things is the unanswered question. So we talked about that a little bit in the first one. We've got a whole episode on unanswered questions. But when we're applying them specifically to mysteries, one of the things I want to look at is not just the ways to do it, like misunderstanding the question, but also some of the dangers in that. Like, what are some of the pros and cons of delaying an answer in a mystery?

[Dan] Okay, so I've got a pretty good example of this one. One of the things of the week that we promoted earlier was my new book, Dark One Forgotten. Which is a mystery and it is a prequel to a Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel. What that means is that even though it is structured as if you are listening to a true crime podcast, you go into it knowing that there will be a supernatural angle. You know that eventually… It's got Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson on the cover, there's going to be magic or some kind of speculative element to it. Especially if you've read the novel it's based on, you know exactly how the mystery gets solved. So the problem that I ran into in writing it, and that I had to send multiple drafts over and over through my writing group to figure out is, it is obvious to the reader what's going on. We know that the reason no one can remember the killer or the victims is because there is some kind of magic effect. So, how long can I drag out that anticipation for the reader for the characters to finally catch on without making them seem stupid or without frustrating the audience? It's difficult. It was very hard to write a story that kind of fundamentally ignores one of its core premises for the first half or so of the story. So there is that unanswered question like who's the mystery, but the fact that it's… Or who's the killer. The fact that it's a prequel means that I needed to start… And here's the solution. Here's why I'm saying all this. What I eventually had to do was to just give you as much information as possible. It was essentially a story about tying off every possible loose end before they finally conceded that maybe magic was real. Because it takes place in our world. They aren't predisposed to believe it, even though the audience is predisposed to expect it. So, three episodes of them exhausting every possible other explanation made it interesting enough to get through that. So the anticipation and the unanswered question was very difficult to deal with.

[Erin] I think this gets to something that we've talked about before. Which is that sometimes you can give the answer to the reader or to the listener. I think it's what's really cool about that example is the question, it seems like to me, becomes less is there magic involved with this, because everyone knows the answer is yes, but more how will people deal with the revelation that magic exists in the world? So that's a different unanswered question. So sometimes shifting from the informational question… I think one of the dangers sometimes in mystery is you think everything has to be about information and plot. But, sometimes some of the most interesting unanswered questions are the ones about emotion, revelation, and consequence, as opposed to the ones about who did what to whom at what point.

[Howard] Touching on something that Dan said toward the beginning of this episode, and something that Erin just said, we've talked about how it's like setting up a magic trick. In the second edition of Xtreme Dungeon Mastery, Tracy and Curtis Hickman point out that magicians entertain purely by deception. When they explain how the trick is done, it just kind of makes us feel dumb for not having seen it. Which is why they typically don't do it. Storytellers entertain by setting up deception, and then with revelation. Erin, you use that word twice. So when I think of unanswered questions as a tool, I'm always thinking of the revelation that is going to come at the end. The reveal of this is the answer to the question, this is how it was done. The magician typically won't show us that they were using a trick knife with a collapsible blade, but in Knives Out, famously, we are told about a trick knife in the first act, and we are shown the trick knife at the very end of the show.

[Mary Robinette] Interesting that you say that, because I have some friends who are magicians and we talk about the overlap between magic and story all the time. Because one of the things that a magician must do is that they must tell the rea… Tell the viewer what they're about to do is impossible. Because you go into a magic trick knowing that they're going to do something. I think that that is also one of the things that you have to do, in different ways, but it's still a narrative thing, that you using a lot of these tension tools in a mystery to signal to the reader that this is actually hard to solve. A lot of the conflict things that you're using are ways to say this is… There are reasons that this is hard to solve. Much like what Dan was talking about with, well, why don't they just think it's magic. There have to be… It has… You have to present the impossibility to them in order to get the payoff of, "Ah, here's the solution and the answer." So a lot of the tools that we've been talking about are tools that you can use for that.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's important to remember in all of this is that there's a way in which mysteries and the structure of a mystery is a fantasy. You are selling people on the idea that there are easy answers to complex problems. That there is a trick behind the whole thing. I think when we think about unanswered questions, sometimes it is almost more interesting to not answer every single unanswered question you put out there. Right? Like, sometimes you have a Darrell who's still wandering around the island and nobody knows why he's there. That adds this extra layer to what you're doing and you can sell the fantasy of, "Wait. We do know who the killer is. We do know what happened. We do know what exactly was done to pull this magic trick off." But things are hidden from the audience in that. Right? There are answers that we won't see, and that's okay. I think that can add a really interesting layer to how your presenting your mystery, how your presenting your answers, and what questions are you really asking in the story that you're telling.

[Mary Robinette] I think these are all great points. I'm hoping that our listeners have some new tools for when they're going back into their mystery and can apply all these different forms of tension to the mystery.

 

[Mary Robinette] We also need to set you up for success for the next episode. We are going to be doing a deep dive on The Dark One. Dan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what people should do?

[Dan] Okay. So, as we explained several episodes ago, our next little series that were going to do, we'll start with a deep dive on Dark One Forgotten, an audiobook by Brandon Sanderson and me. Then we'll have some other episodes spinning off of that. So, in preparation for that, you've had several weeks, you have one more week left to listen to Dark One Forgotten. This is audio only because it is a fake podcast. You can get it pretty much anywhere that has audiobooks. Audible and LibroFM and Google Playbooks and Barnes & Noble and all these other places. So it's about six hours long, a little more. Listen to that. Then get ready for next week, when we are going to dive deep into everything about its structure and its… The process of creating it and why I love it so much.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that we're doing these deep dives, and then building episodes off of them, is so that you can see the tools that we use and hopefully start to build a toolbox of your own. Which brings us to our homework assignment.

[Howard] Okay. So. Yeah, part of your homework is if you haven't listened to Dark Ones yet, go listen to Dark Ones. But the other part of your homework is make a list of the tools which you regularly return to when you're writing. That might be MICE Quotient, three act structure, Hero's Journey, whatever. Just make a list of the tools that you already use regularly. Then make a separate list of the tools you know about, perhaps tools like tension via micro tension, conflict, anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions. Make a list of the tools you know about but don't think you're using yet. Then, try to move one tools from the second list to the first one.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-09-unpacking-the-tension/

 

Key Points: What drives a story? Tension! So what kinds of tension are there? Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Tension is emotional, it requires engagement. Narrative tension is what the characters feel, contextual tension is what the readers feel, and they don't have to be the same. Anticipation, expectations about how we think things are going to go. Juxtaposition, contrasting expectations and actually how things go. Unanswered questions, mystery, but also other levels. Cold start horrible situation, then back off to earlier, making us wonder what happened. Mystery box storytelling, what's in the box, what's the solution to the puzzle. Do a question and answer quickly to build trust with the audience. Anticipation is expecting an outcome, while unanswered questions, where you, the reader, don't know the answer. Micro-tension is smaller tensions, often lower stakes. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 9]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Unpacking the Tension.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be spending the next several weeks talking about tension. I'm going to go ahead and frame this a little bit, because as we were trying to set the season, we each brought something that we have been struggling with a little bit or a new toolbox that we've been noodling with. Erin and I happen to have simultaneously just taught a class on tension. So she's going to be chiming in here in a moment. But I want to start explaining what's going through my head with this. So, we are often taught that a story must have conflict. I think that actually what drives a story is tension, but that conflict is the easiest form of tension to teach. I started thinking about this while I was reading Japanese literature, which often does not have any visible conflict, but there's a ton of tension. It really solidified for me while I was watching Ted Lasso. Slight spoilers here, but when you look at… Watch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso, there's no villain. Everyone is being kind. There's no conflict. All of the conflict comes from this anticipation of something that you think is going to go wrong. For instance, at the beginning of the Christmas episode, he's watching It's a Wonderful Life and he's drinking, so, obviously, the next thing that's going to happen is he's going to go on a bender, and he's going to have a dream sequence. None of that is what happens. But they so clearly signpost it that it builds this tension, and then you get this release… So, what I want to talk about is looking at some different types of tension. So we're going to kind of give you an overview, and then for the rest of the episodes, we'll be digging into each type of tension. So. I'm going to break them down, and then let other people talk. The types of tension that I am identifying as I am attempting to build this toolbox are anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and then micro-tension. Erin, on the other hand, is building… Is constructing a tension toolbox in a different way.

[Erin] Yeah. I will say that one of the things I love about tension, just to start, is that tension is emotional. Just the word tension feels more emotional than conflict. I think it's an amazing reminder that you need some sort of engagement with the thing in order to be tense. If you don't care, you won't be tense. I think sometimes because we think a lot about conflict, people will open a story or a novel or a movie with a conflict that we haven't bought into. So we're not feeling the tension. We just see the conflict. Like when you have a little… Your two dinosaurs, as a kid, and you have them fight. The two dinosaurs are fighting with each other, but why? Does anyone care? So, to me, tension is a lot about building in and thinking about the emotion. The other thing that I really love about just tension versus conflict is that conflict is something that is felt on the page. Your characters are in conflict with each other. Perhaps. Or with nature, or what have you. But your reader is not in conflict. They are observing the conflict. The tension is the thing that both the readers and the characters can share.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dan] I love this description of tension as requiring an emotional investment. For me, the way I have always thought about it, tension is a combination of anticipation and hope. You anticipate something bad is going to happen, you hope it doesn't. But without that hope, without that one outcome I like and one outcome I don't like, there isn't really any tension. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

[Mary Robinette] I think the outcome of tension and hope is where a lot of romance comes from. It's like, oh, you know that they're going to get together. So that's the thing that you're hoping for the entire time, but you keep seeing all of the reasons that they aren't going to get together, which is what builds that tension. That's a… I really like that framing, Dan.

[Howard] Yeah. I've… Without going into detail, one of the things that for me makes a good action scene is if I care about what's happening. If the action scene… Fight scenes are often inherently conflict, because they're fighting, but if I'm not feeling tension, if I'm not emotionally invested, all the great fight choreography is just eye candy. I don't care. So tension is key. It's critical.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think that brings up a really interesting point, because for me, tension is almost always about relationships, because stakes aren't necessarily about survival, stakes are about consequence and how you see yourself or how you see other people in connection to other characters. Because that's how we think about it, and that's how we feel it, so just for a quick example going to what you're saying, Howard, like the lobby scene out of the Matrix is them fighting a bunch of goons. The tension in that scene doesn't come from are they going to shoot these security guards. It comes from is Neo starting to realize who he is? Is he in tension with himself? What matters to him? So we're excited by that scene because we see, as Morpheus says, "He's starting to believe." We see that relationship starting to change. So the tension comes from an internal journey that the character is on, not the conflict of there are 10 random goons that need to get out of their way at this point.

 

[Erin] I think you can also, like, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm just starting my story. Nobody yet cares about my characters. How am I going to create this tension?"

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] One way to do that, also, is to tap into kind of primal tensions I think that we feel. So if you're on a spaceship and the spaceship is breaking, that's bad. But it's also this person's first day on the job, like, there's a certain primal, "oh, crap, I just got this job, and now everything is breaking." Or I have to give a speech. The things that people freak out about in their dreams. Like, that kind of thing, if you put it on the page, it's a way to tap into tensions that people might be feeling in their own lives. Then use that to kind of move the action forward while you build up the character engagement.

[DongWon] Yeah. The thing that you said about conflict being something the character sees, but tension is something the audience sees. Conflict for the character is am I going to survive this. I, as a reader, at the beginning of a book, I don't really care yet. I don't know you. Sure, if you fall out into space and die, that's not particularly interesting to me. But what is interesting to me is are you going to feel bad about it being your fault that you fall out into space and die. Right? I think that's the difference between tension and that conflict in that way of stakes matter… Survival matters to the character, but you have to give me a reason to care. That's where tension comes in.

[Howard] Circling back to Mary Robinette's five things here, can I talk about juxtaposition for just a moment?

[Mary Robinette] I think you can, after the break. That is going to create tension for our readers, our listeners…

[Gasp]

[Mary Robinette] As they wait to find out what Howard is going to say about juxtaposition.

 

[Dan] All right. So our thing of the week this week is Dark One: Forgotten. The first official collaboration between Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson. This is the prequel to a story that has been out in graphic novel form for a while, called Dark One. It's a portal fantasy. This is presented… The prequel is presented as a… As if it were a six episode podcast. Someone is making an amateur true crime podcast about a mysterious murder that has remained unsolved for 30 years. Over the course of the series, discovers many more mysteries and a much larger thing going on. This is a lot of fun, because of that nature of a… As a faux podcast, it is only in audio. It's available pretty much everywhere audiobooks are available. Take special note of this thing of the week, because several episodes from now, we're going to do a deep dive on this one. When we finish our whole tension class that we're doing, we are going to do a deep dive into Dark One: Forgotten and talk about the process of writing it and producing it and everything at length. So, it's a little over six hours, and it's a lot of fun. They did an amazing job on the recording, the cast is wonderful. So, Dark One: Forgotten by Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard. Tell me. Tell me about juxtaposition. [Garbled]

[Howard] Okay. Return of the King, the Peter Jackson, we have the scene where the Steward of Gondor has sent troops into Osgiliath to try and take it back. While those troops are in Osgiliath, the Steward is eating and making… I can't remember if it's Merry or Pippin… Making them sing…

[Dan] It's Pippin.

[Howard] It's Pippin. We are watching… Is it John Noble? Is that the name of the actor?

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] I think it's John Noble. We are watching him crush food in his mouth and dribble on his face and tear meat from bone as we watch these soldiers drive into Osgiliath. It is brilliant and beautiful as juxtaposition and also serves as a way to give us X-rated levels of gory horrible violence without actually doing that. Our… Your brain does all the work because of the juxtaposition. It makes you terribly tense because the soldiers on the horses have not yet been turned into grapes in John Noble's mouth yet and you don't know if they will be.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Something that it makes me think of that I've been thinking about a lot is how much of storytelling is a collaboration between the author and the reader. We talk about this in puppetry that the difference between playing with dolls and a puppet show is that one of them has an audience, and that the puppet exists in this liminal space between us. It is also true for writing, that I can write something, but the moment you start consuming it, you're going to bring your own lens to it, your own experience, and you're going to combined things in your own head in ways that I can't anticipate.

 

[Erin] That makes me think a lot of something that I find really fascinating about tension. It is that difference between what readers are doing and what the characters are doing is narrative tension versus what I call contextual tension. So, narrative tension is the tension that characters feel, and contextual tension is the tension that readers feel. They don't actually have to be the same. If the characters are blithely walking into an ambush, but you signal to the reader that there's an ambush coming, there's a difference there. Versus where both folks, both are feeling tense. So there's a lot of really, really fun things that you can do there, in separating those two, and playing with where your character's feeling tension, and where do you want your reader to be.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think of this really as genre expectations. Right? So if you're in romance, you're in horror, you're in mystery, in the ways that we've talked about it in the past, the audience has certain expectations. This is why, when I talk about storytelling, I always talk about pattern recognition. Right? We have read and absorbed thousands upon thousands of stories over the course of our life. So, we have ideas about how these things are supposed to go. You can use those expectations for a lot of these techniques which [we mention?] here, in particular, anticipation and juxtaposition. Anticipation being sort of like we think we know how it's going to go. Then, juxtaposition is the contrast of we thought it was going to go this way, but now it's going that way. I think you can use that tension between the audience expectation and what's happening in the text to kind of create a discordant note that automatically creates a sense of tension that the audience is so hungry for it to be resolved. Waiting for that resolution, waiting for that next cord to progress, so that we know where we're going, is one of the most effective ways to create tension between the book and the audience.

 

[Dan] So one of the elements on Mary Robinette's list that we haven't talked much about yet is unanswered questions. Which, at one level, that's just what a mystery is, right? Somebody is dead, we want to know who killed them and how. So we have that question. But there's a lot of other ways to use this type of tension. The example that comes to mind is the old TV show Alias, which kind of leaned a little too heavily on this particular trope, but many, many… I would go so far as to say, most of those episodes started with the main character in a horrible situation, and then we would cut away and say, "72 hours earlier…" Then, that leaves us with this unanswered question of "Oh, no. I know she's going to be in a horrible peril at some point. How does that happen? How is that situation created? What is going to go massively wrong?" That creates the tension that draws us through the episode to get the answer to that question.

[DongWon] This is also what's commonly referred to as mystery box storytelling. This is this J. J. Abrams idea of asking what's in the box, what's in the puzzle, can be a driving force for your entire narrative. So, Lost is probably the most famous example of this. Sometimes they can be unsatisfying if it's clear they never knew what's in the box in the first place, but you can really connect with an audience who also wants to know what is the core of this mystery, what is the core thing that's happening. A more recent example is Severance. It's a good example of like, "What the hell is he actually doing down there?" It's something that really drives the story forward.

[Erin] Speaking of boxes, literally, since we've done Glass Onion as thing of the week, maybe you've all seen this, but it starts with a box being opened. I think that why this is so important is because in order to have your audience trust that you will answer the unanswered questions, it helps to pose a question and answer it early on. So that you're like, "I am capable of answering questions." How will they open this box? They do. You saw it. So then you're actually willing to give them more space. Each time you answer a question for an audience member or for a reader, I think what happens is you lengthen the amount of time that you can put between question and answer as they trust you that much more.

[Howard] Dan's example, from Alias, 72 hours earlier, is the in media res, and we're familiar with that structure. One of my favorite reversals of that can be found in the first paintball episode of Community. I think it's episode 23 of season one, where Jeff leaves the room. We've been told, "Oh, there's going to be a game of Paintball Assassin," whatever. Jeff leaves the room and says, "I'll see you losers later. I'm going to go take a nap in my car." Then we see, kaching, one hour later. Jeff wakes up in his car, steps out of the car, and the campus is a wasteland, with sort of zombie wasteland music playing. For a couple of minutes there, you're wondering, "Okay. What happened?" I now have a lot of questions about what could have gone this wrong in an hour. Now, obviously, it's a community… It's a community? It's Community, so it's a comedy. So there is exaggeration. But the tool is still there for you. Running the clock forward a little bit and things have changed, and how did it get this bad this quickly?

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to briefly cut into say that one of the reasons that we separated unanswered questions from anticipation is that… We went back and forth on whether or not they should be lumped together… Is that with anticipation is something that you know is going to happen. Like, you know that when they walked down the basement steps, that a bad thing is going to happen, and tension comes from that. It's anticipating an outcome. Versus unanswered questions, where you don't know the answer. So in one… You can be… With anticipation, you can be wrong about the answer. Like, often you build tension by having them go down the stairs, and then something jumps out at them. But it's just the cat. So you can build anticipation and tension and let the reader be wrong about what they're anticipating, but that is different than the reader does not know what is going to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, so, like in Severance, I'm actually expecting not to get answers to many of the questions I have. It's sort of a genre expectation, that I would almost be unsatisfied if they did answer all those questions, but finding out more so I can start piecing together the puzzle is one of the narrative things that's pulling me through this story that I'm loving.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The last piece of it that we need to define, and then we'll go to our homework, is micro-tension. I'll try to keep this short. Micro-tension are smaller tensions that happen within a larger scene. So if your character is attempting to deal with a murder, but then they also have to make spaghetti dinner and the water boils over. That's a micro-tension. They're small tensions that pop up often from mundane sources, but not always.

[Howard] They can be related to the plot. I need to get the autopsy report, and in order to get the autopsy report, I have to apologize to the coroner. Now, macro-tension would be I'm going to steal the report.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

 

[Howard] Hey, should I do the homework?

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a great idea, Howard.

[Howard] I should do homework. Okay. In this episode, we covered five types of tension. Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Look at your current work in progress or something that you're reading… Last week, we invited you to read a mystery… And try to identify examples of each of these. That's it.

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Imagine working with horses as a way to explore and enhance your creative process, all while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of Bear Lake, Utah. Led by me and Dan, this four-day workshop is suitable for writers and riders of all levels and experience. Come make new connections, receive valuable feedback, and set your writing goals in motion. Visit writingexcuses.com for more information about Riding Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go ride.

 

 

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/2021/12/26/16-52-structure-is-a-promise/

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 16, Episode 52]

 

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

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Oh, yeah.]

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

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

[Yeah]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

 

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

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

[Laughter]

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

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

[Laughter. What movie?]

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

[To me]

 

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

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

[Howard] Meg.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Oh, that's…]

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Well, I mean…]

[Kaela] It can be frustrating…

[Go ahead.]

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

[Yes]

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

[Chuckles]

[Then…]

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

 

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

[Laughter]

[garbled new product]

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

[garbled second metaphors do that]

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

 

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/19/15-03-self-publishing/

 

Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun! 

 

[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.

[Nandi] 15 minutes long.

[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tamie] And we're not that smart.

[Bridget] But we are all self published.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]

[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]

[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]

[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]

[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.

[Whoo! Applause!]

 

[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?

[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.

[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.

[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.

[Howard] That's a solid number.

[Bridget] For my first year.

[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?

[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.

[Howard] Tamie?

[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.

[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?

 

[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.

[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?

[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.

 

[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?

[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.

[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?

[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.

[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.

[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.

 

[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?

[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.

[Howard] Okay.

[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels

 

[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.

[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.

 

[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.

[Victorine] Yep. Yup.

[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…

[Howard] When you say three of us…

[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…

[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.

[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.

[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.

 

[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?

[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.

 

[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?

[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.

[Chuckles]

[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.

[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.

[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?

[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.

 

[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?

[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.

[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.

[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.

[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.

 

[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?

[Nandi?] Absolutely.

[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.

[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…

[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.

[Garble]

[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.

[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."

[Cheers]

[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…

[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.

 

[Howard] Who's got our homework?

[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.

[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

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/2018/10/28/13-43-characters-who-are-smarter-than-you-are/

 

Key points: To write a character who is super clever, amazingly smart… Gift the character with your indecision. Show the character going through the process of thinking, then show the character making logical jumps. Clean the brain vomit off the screen, but keep the key portions. Give the reader enough clues to understand the problem and try to solve it themselves, so they participate in the intelligence of the character. Brainstorming, pacing, and cleaning it up. Letting the reader arrive at a conclusion before the character does is satisfying, but don't overdo it. Make sure the key clues are all out there for the reader. In mysteries, the reader is one step behind the detective, but in thrillers, the reader is one step ahead. It may take the writer some time to figure out a clever answer, but if the character does it in seconds, the reader is amazed at how smart they are! Similarly, if all the other characters react as if this character is very smart, the reader will accept it, too. If the character knows they're smart and displays that confidence on the page, the reader sees it. Also, borrow expert knowledge from other people. Sometimes, for instance in a heist novel, later revelation of how something gets done works best. But when you reveal the monster, make sure it's horrifying! Lastly, consider Dave and the fizz buzz test.

 

 

[Howard] On that note, I would like to offer our listeners some homework.

[Mary] Yes, please.

[Howard] Time. Is. Your. Friend. Your character might not have a lot of time, but you do. Write a solution, off of the top of your head, to a character problem that you are currently facing. First thing you can think of. Now, over the next couple of days, it might be two days, it might be a week, it might be longer, spend time researching on the Internet, in books, from friends, anything even tangentially related to that problem. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's climate, maybe it's geography, maybe it's pop up ads. Research these things and as you are doing the research, write down the solutions that come to you. Then, after you've done all this, order these solutions in a list of what you think is dumbest to smartest, and see how much smarter you are able to get with time. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Because this is Writing Excuses. And I got those out of order. I'm terrible at this.

[Laughter]

 

 

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/15/13-15-what-writers-get-wrong-with-mike-stop-continues/

 

Key points: Gay people just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about gay topics. Gay people often lean into stereotypes. Gay people create their own culture. There is a whole spectrum of ways that you enact being gay. Even passers support flamboyant gay people. The media does seem to have more flamboyant gay characters than subdued gay characters. Pay attention to the order of reveals. Happily married, loves sushi, and gay OR gay, happily married, loves sushi? Look at characters as a mystery, reveal clues, and then the big reveal. Be aware of you and your readers' defaults. Do your research, get gay readers from within the gay community, and talk to people on the Internet to write better gay characters. "What's his secret?" Mostly, just make characters who happen to be gay. 

 

 

[Dan] This was a really interesting discussion. So, do you have some writing homework you can give us?

[Mike] Yes. So take your work in progress. Take any… Start with a scene. Take any character in that scene, and make that character… Change their sexual identity. So it could be to gay, to lesbian, bisexual, asexual, pansexual. Whatever it is. Rewrite the scene. But see just how little you have to change to make that character a different… Have a different sexual identity. You'll be surprised. It might be zero words. You might have to change literally nothing.

[Dan] Awesome. I think that sounds fantastic. Well, thank you again. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.