Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 20.26: Gaming as a Writing Metaphor 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-26-gaming-as-a-writing-metaphor

 

Key points: What's the difference between experiencing a narrative as a game or prose? Choice, direct agency? Narrative games? Energy and complexity? Games are simulations. What are the actions, what are the verbs? Buy-in! Between games and writing, there's a middle ground of control in games. Competence. Not all books or games are for everybody.  What makes a narrative game? Obvious narrative? Present me with a story, don't make me randomly discover it. Make room for the audience. Let them make their own interpretations, draw their own conclusions. How much do I love the characters? How much do I care what happens to them? What are the levers in your game or narrative? Invite the reader in... 

 

[Season 20, Episode 26]

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 26]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. 

[Erin] Gaming as a writing metaphor.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Erin] And we get to talk about gaming...

[DongWon] Yay! Prepare for a six hour long episode.

[Erin] Yeah. Yeah, I know. I was like, this is actually sort of hard because there's so much that...

[Dan] Yeah.

[Erin] You can talk about when it comes...

[Howard] This play-through of Writing Excuses...

[Erin] Exactly.

[Dan] Kind of a speed run.

[Erin] Oh, my gosh. Yes. But I've been thinking about sort of what is it that separates the way that we game from the way that we write, the way that we experience prose narration from the way we experience being in a game. And the thing that I... the reason I really love games is I actually think that sometimes giving the person experiencing the narrative more choice and more direct agency over what happens, whether that's true or you just make them feel that it's true, changes the way that we experience story. And, for me, that's the big difference between them. But I'm curious, for you all, like, what makes you pick up a game instead of a book for that day? Like, what is the difference between having the same story as a television show versus a game that that show was based on?

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I love narrative, but I don't love narrative games a lot of the time, like, if a game is very story heavy, I'll often be like… Like I tried to play Last of Us a little while ago, and I just was like, I'm putting this down, I'm going to watch the TV show. Because it… The way it was giving me the story felt so slow compared to what I wanted in terms of my ability to consume a narrative, and then all the opportunities for player choice were so constrained to things that felt like they didn't matter, a.k.a., how I searched the drawers in this room versus the big narrative stuff I was interested in, which is, what do we do about this outbreak plague situation? Right? And so, I think, for me, when it comes to what am I looking for from game experience, I want something that's more energetic and more complex than you can get from somebody telling me a story. Right? So this is why I love FromSoft games so much, where I build the narrative by interacting with the world rather than them telling me what the story is.

[Howard] I think it was… It must've been 15 years ago now. I was at a convention and had the opportunity to go out to lunch with Steve Jackson. And he dropped a bit of wisdom that I have never been able to shake. He said, "All games are physics simulations." And I thought, now, that's not true. That's… Wait. Crap. Every game… Chess! Is a physics simulation, at some level, all games are simulations. And so, when I sit down, when I think of gaming or playing a game as a metaphor for writing, I often think, why would I want to play a game like Burger Time instead of working fast food? Why would I want to play a simulation of fast food restaurants instead of working fast food? Well, because I don't want to smell like hamburgers at the end of the day. But these simulations that we play can teach us things. And in many cases, they can teach us the same things that the job would teach us, only without the risk of smelling like [frieda?].

 

[Erin] And, I think that also they create a game play loop. So if you're writing a game, the main thing you have to figure out is what are the actions of the game? What are the things that the game lets you do?

[DongWon] What are the verbs?

[Erin] What are the verbs of the game? And so, like, in a… And it limits them. There are always less than the verbs that you can experience in life. Because a game is not going to be able to, like, do, like, and then I scratched my nose for three seconds for no reason. I mean, who knows… Maybe in the future. But it's hard to get to that level of granularity. And so, they then have to make those verbs things that you are going to want to choose. And, it's funny, I'm thinking back to, like, weeks and weeks and weeks ago, when we talked about second person and how second person requires buy-in. And games are often a second person medium, and, similarly, you have to get the player to buy-in to this is the situation I want to be in. These are the verbs that I want to be able to use to navigate that situation. Like, you may not like the… I love a narrative game. But where it feels like I don't have enough verbs to, like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Move this narrative forward. Whereas I'm like, oh, actually, for me, the listen, the experience, the watch it unravel is a verb that is one that works well for me. Which is why different people have different desires and loves of games. Like, some people like a puzzle game, like I do. Some people like a narrative, some people like I want to shoot the thing from a weird angle.

[DongWon] I mean, this is why tabletop can be so interesting too, because even in this case, buy-in is so important and difficult to get. So when you're trying to get someone to play a new game system they've never played before, just the lift of getting them to understand what the core metaphors and verbs of the game are can be three hours of sitting there and walking someone through the session or whatever it is. And so how you get that buy-in in terms of, like, what are the world building hooks, what are the character hooks, what's the setting hooks, to get them on board with the idea of these are interesting verbs I want to interact with. I think that can be such a challenge with really effective game writing.

[Dan] Yeah. Erin, I'm glad that you enjoy narrative games…

[Laughter]

[Erin] I'm buying them all.

 

[Dan] Because I'm with DongWon on this one. And I find that I don't like the way games tell stories often. Which is strange to me, and I'm trying to figure out why, and I don't know if I can articulate it. But, relating this back to writing, I… There's an interesting middle ground of control. And we talked about this a little bit. Whereas I'm going to just go and work in a burger restaurant, then I have control over what I'm doing. Maybe not as much, because I am an employee. Right? Where is if I'm going to read a book about that, I have no control whatsoever. And games exist in that very intriguing middle ground, where there's a lot of interaction, there's a lot of input from both sides. And that's… Writing for that is very different.

[Erin] Yeah. I was just thinking about, like, the competence thing as well. Like, we people love a competent character. If you want people to love your characters, one way to do it is to show them being really good at something. Because for some reason, we like it. We like feeling competent. And in a game, like in a burger… There's a game that I play on VR called Star Tenders, where you are tending bar for aliens. And the entire game is just like increasingly complex drink orders, that you have to try to make before your customers get mad…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And wander off in an alien type way. And so what I like about it is, like, you're not expected to master it the first time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's like learn… You get to learn a skill and then they add a little bit more. They had a slightly more complex thing, and all of a sudden, like, the verb that was hard for you in the beginning is one of a much larger sentence that you're able to manage. And that gives us a feeling of competence that really makes us feel like we are able to advance. But I think it's hard to do in prose. Like, you can show a character going through that journey, and have you really relate to that character, and therefore you go through that. But in games, because you're the one who has to make the physical motion, it often feels like in that physics simulation, like, you got a chance to level up.

[Howard] I had a friend tell me years ago. It was the very first of the Batman Arkham games. And he said, "Oh, my gosh, this game was so good." And he described this one scene that plays out. And he says, "And I was Batman. I got to be every bit… I got to do all of the Batman. I did all of the moves, I used all the tools, I used all the whatever." And I played that game and realized, I do not get to be Batman. I was not good enough. I did not learn fast enough. And I got tired and I moved away from it. And that's fine. You play a game for a little while, you decide it's not for you, you play something else. But the idea that the simulation of whatever can map out players differently, where a player gets to have an experience that they've been dreaming about their whole life and maybe didn't know it. My friend Joey, a Batman book would not have made him feel the same way that game made him feel.

[DongWon] Well, and I think that kind of ties into what makes Hades such a big success, is the way they tied narrative to failure. Right? When you fail, you get a little more piece of story, you get a little more piece of interaction. And then you repeat the loop. Right? Like, they were able to build the storytelling into the road like nature of the game. As you go back through it, you learn more about the world, you learn more about the characters, deepening your investment in the character and in their relationships when you do fail. So where something like the Rock City game kind of falls down is, if you fail at being Batman, now you just don't get to progress. You don't get more Batman because you were a bad Batman. If you fail at being [Zacharias], then you're… He's a failure. That's the whole point of the story. That is, you engaging with it and getting more of it as you build those skills and learn. Right? So, like, whether it's your aliens walking away from you in an alienating way because they're upset, or it's being spotted by the criminals because you're a bad Batman, like, the way in which we participate in the stories has to be fluid in that way, or has to be a rewarding experience in that way, or our buy-in starts to break down.

[Erin] I was laughing when you said that because I remembered the time I tried to play Grand Theft Auto, and there's a tutorial quest where you just get on a skateboard, and I don't drive…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And I'm not good at driving related tasks. I could not finish. Like, it's a thing that they mean for it to take three seconds…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And, like an hour and a half later, I was like, obviously, this game was not meant for me because I can't even get a car…

[Howard] I have decided that my… I should not be stealing automobiles.

[DongWon] I think that comes back to books in that way though, because not… Books unfold… Not all books are for everybody. Right? Like, what makes sense to you and what you have buy-in for and what is an engaging world building character narrative to you will be really different than the next reader. Right? In the same way, that a game about stealing cars is probably not for someone who has never driven a car before. Right? And I think that can be true in fiction as well. And understanding who your reader is is also really important there.

[Erin] All right. I'm going to interrogate you about narrative games and yellow boxes, but first, we're going to press pause.

 

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[Erin] And now we're back. And so… Un-pause.

[DongWon] How was that load screen for you?

[Erin] Hope you enjoyed it. So [garbled] interested in is I'm like people who don't like narrative games? I must find out why? As somebody who enjoys writing the narratives of games. And I think it's interesting, like, the wanting to tell a story versus how much gamers experience it is fascinating. If you write for games, you know that you're writing the item description that, like, 89 percent of people will just be like, nope. X out. It's like you're writing the dialogue that people are trying to skip in order to get to their next action. But I'm wondering, like, when you say I don't like narrative games, I'm wondering what makes something a narrative game? Is it just how obvious it is in its narrative? Is it an outside category? Like, what does that mean for you?

[Dan] Well, I don't think it comes down to the obvious nature of it, because I, for example, really don't like Hades because it is not presenting me with a story. I mean, that's not the only reason. But it's a story you have to discover. And that's a place where DongWon and I diverge, because I don't like that in games, I enjoy being told this is the story that we have to fulfill, go do it. Here's what this is about, go do it. And the idea that I have to just randomly discover what the story is by talking to people or by reading books that I find laying around the environment always just rubs me the wrong way.

[Howard] Sorry. I'm giggling over here. Railroad Tycoon, The Linear Narrative.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… No, I totally feel you here. One of the things that I love about games where a lot of the story is in front of you, but there's a lot of open space is that… And no, fair listeners, I'm not going to become a streamer of games… But I will often talk back to the characters on screen and say stuff that is just funny to me and is sort of in universe or not in universe, and I get joy out of that. Even though the story is maybe a little flat, I enjoy fluffing it up a little on my own.

[Erin] And thinking about this as a metaphor for writing, it's interesting, because it's, like, how strong… How, like, is the power of the narrative? Like, how much is the narrative saying, like, a story is happening here?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] How much is it making you discover it? Because there are prose pieces where the story is not, like, a very clear, like, plot point to plot point type of thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But it feels a little more like you're kind of wandering through and story is occurring. And it's interesting thinking about, like, how much are we guiding, how much are we controlling our readers? I mean, we're always controlling everything, but how much is that control felt by them versus is it just feels like they're having to put it together for themselves?

[DongWon] Well, I'm getting on my soapbox for a second here of my obsession with FromSoft games. Right? And so, these are the Dark Souls games, Blood-Borne, Elven Ring, and the reason I love these games so much is they're deeply authored experiences. Like, there's no question that there isn't a very specific point of view behind those blows and that they are creating an experience for the player that has thematics and characters and all the things we expect from story. But you're just getting that story in big cut scenes, where people are talking to each other and there's story being told to you. You're having to discover that story by doing things like reading the item descriptions, by piecing together, like, oh, I thought this boss. This boss was like… Said this one thing that's related to this other boss. Like, you're trying to, like, weave string theory together, the world building and the plot. And I recognize that it's not for everybody, and completely understand why. But what I love about it is I think it gets something… Or gets at something that's really true about all storytelling that we do, which is you have to make room for the audience. Right? And this is a thing I talk about a lot as I'm putting together an actual play show and things like that. One thing I talk about with my players and with the rest of my cast is we need to make room at the table for the audience. There is a fifth seat at the table here, and it's the audience who is here participating in this with us. And it's why I love actual play shows like Dimension 20 or [What's My Number?] or Friends at the Table, because they understand that I am also a participant in this story in an active way. Right? And I think that's true of a book, too. When you write a book, you're writing a book for someone. You have to understand that the reader is there picking it up and interacting with it. Now, their verb is limited to turn the page and continue reading. They have one verb, which is keep reading, don't keep reading. Right? How they feel about that, how they engage with it on a moment to moment basis can change and evolve. But the more you make space for them to make their own interpretations, to engage in a certain way, and to draw their own conclusions from stuff, I think that's where interaction with fiction can be so exciting and so deep and rich.

[Erin] It's funny, thinking about, like, the verbs of games, I'm reminded of… So I used to do writing for Zombies Run, which is a game with only the verb run.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, years and years and years of narrative, of, like, small scene of, like, people talking and then something has to happen at the end of the scene to force you to run. And to go to the next thing. Which is like… Was really interesting in figuring out what are the ways to continue to get audience buy-in. Because, if you think of tabletop games, some have extraordinarily complex mechanics that will take you…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] 10 years to figure out. Or, like that boardgame, where you're like, our first eight hour session…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Is going to be figuring out…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] How this boardgame works. And then, eventually, we'll become experts. But thinking about, do you need that level… Like, how much complexity is too much? Like… And that can be true in a game, but also in a narrative. How much just becomes distracting where it becomes about the experience of the narrative as opposed to the narrative itself.

[Howard] When we look at audience buy-in, it's useful to look at improvisational theater, where the audience is literally shouting suggestions at the stage. And if the audience is not engaged, the show falls flat pretty quickly. By the same token, comedy acts on stage in comedy clubs, the audience is buying in by laughing. They make noise. If the audience does not make noise, we say that the comedian is dying. Because that's what that experience is like. And if the audience is making noise, if there laughing all the way through, the comedian is killing. Why is it so violent? Probably because public speaking is the thing we're all scared of the most. And so we tie it to death this way. But the sense of audience buy-in is very, very visible in improvisational theater and in comedy clubs. And if you think about how important the audience participation is to the performers, and then look at what an audience means to you as a writer, that contrast might change the way you think about what you're writing.

 

[Dan] I've been sitting here trying to think about what narrative is in games I enjoy. And it comes back to a lesson that I have learned for my own writing, which is, how much do I love the characters? How much do I care about what happens to these characters? Because there are plenty of games, and I apologize for continuing to rip on Hades…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because it's a beloved game that everyone other than me adores.

[DongWon] You're alienating our whole audience.

[Dan] I know. I could not possibly have cared less about any of the characters in that, and so…

[DongWon] [gasp] Dash…

[Dan] I know. And so, playing the game didn't really hold a lot of appeal for me, after the basic gameplay loop, I figured out the narrative side of it didn't work for me. Whereas something like Cyberpunk 2077 and this… So much of this comes down to personal preference… Those characters I fell in love with. And I wanted to spend time with them. And so when I am doing my own writing, I… That's what I keep coming back to is the lesson I learned, which is, I'm asking my readers to spend however many hours it takes to read this book, to invite this character into their brain and spend time with them. It has to be somebody that they love and care about.

[DongWon] Well, it's so interesting, because I played Hades because I love the characters and I played a billion hours of Cyberpunk 2077… I really love that game, I play that game not for the characters but for the world. I find the characters… They're fine, I enjoy engaging with them a lot of time, but mostly, what I want to do is run around that city stealing and driving cars…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And…

[Erin] No!

[DongWon] Getting…

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] In fights with weird criminals. Like, that's the thing that I really… Like, mechanically and vibes-wise, being in that world… To me, Cyberpunk is a game that's all about vibes. Like, the aesthetics of it, the culture of it, all of that are things that I really, really enjoy, and so… I think it's, like, also [garbled] the lesson when I say make room for your audience in terms of crafting your narrative experience, whether that's a game or novel or short story or a film, it's… You also can't predict what part of your story that people are going to attach to. Right? I know people who play Hades and have never read a single piece of the text… They just like the combat. They enjoy the mechanical aspect of the combat. And I know people who have never played an action game in their life that somehow saw credits on Hades, the thing that I, who play a lot of action games, have never been able to do, because they just love the characters so much that they just kept playing this thing and learned a whole set of skills that they never had before in their entire life. And so, watching what your audience will connect to is something you can't necessarily predict. Right? And you can't control for that. You can have guesses, you can have focuses, but that's why you kind of gotta chase your own interests as much as anything else.

[Howard] I… Dan, I remember a comment you made on the Borderlands games years ago, which was, yeah, this is cute games, and one of them is really fun, the one where you run around shooting things and exploring the world. And then there's the game of comparing red arrows and green arrows on your gear, and I don't like that game at all.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] And…

[DongWon] 100 percent.

[Howard] And I love that principle, that there can be a thing that we just love that is inextricably fused to a thing we despise, and are we going to play anyway? Are we going to continue to consume or are we going to look for something that doesn't have the up down arrows game in it?

[DongWon] This is me and Destiny's death grip on my brain, but… Yeah.

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] I think one of the reasons I really love games and game writing is because there are all these different levers you can be pushing in any narrative.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You can be pushing the character lever, you can be pushing the world lever, you can be pushing the what are the actions lever, which is often a plot lever. But it's like in games, they're all sort of… They are more discrete. They feel more discrete from each other. Like, in a prose narrative, you can really weave in… Like, the world is happening, what the characters, with the action is all at once. But the way that games are designed, like, someone makes the world and then they sort of put characters in it who have their own set of actions. And they can't 100 percent control how you use those actions and that character to experience the world. And because of that, there are intersections that will happen that they will never be able to anticipate as public… Emergent gameplay is here. Somebody is having a gameplay experience you did not intend.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But they were able to find those connections in interesting different ways. And I think it's nice when we think about our stories to think about how are all the levers that we're pulling different? And, like, how… If we separate out the way that were talking about lenses, it's sort of a version of doing that, of thinking about what are all the different lenses, what are all the different levers, and how are we combining them in really interesting ways to make stories?

[DongWon] And also just letting… Learning to realize that you don't have full control over the audience experience. Right? And that they are going to bring their own lenses, they're going to bring their own verbs, the going to bring their own ways of interacting with the story to that experience. And once it's out of your hands, you don't get to tell people you're reading this wrong. Right? Or you can try. Sure. But, like, you're going to get…

[Howard] Feel free to say that. It's probably not going to work out the way…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And so I think one of the things that I found really exciting about this topic of gaming, not just because I clearly love games, as do we all, but because it is this thing that I think is really, really hard for people who create prose to wrap their heads around, is learning to… Not just, like, ease off of the control, but actively invite in the reader into making this experience with us. And I think learning how to do that is a thing that can really take your fiction from being exciting to truly connecting with a huge fan base.

[Erin] And with that, we're at the end of this game session. And we are going to move to the homework.

 

[Erin] And for the homework, I'm going to challenge you a little. There are probably folks who are listening to this who are like, I only… Last game I played was tag. But I would like you to think about… Take a project that you're working on and imagine that someone is making a game of it. And figure out what would that game be. What would be the actions that the characters would be doing? What would be the parts of the world that the game would be focused on? And just write out sort of, like, a here's the game of my amazing work of art. If you need help with this, you can look at things that are games that were made from things like Lord of the Rings game. Just read a description of it, see if anything comes to you. And then as you're writing that out, is there anything you've discovered about your story that was unexpected?

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-36-a-close-reading-on-tension-narrative-vs-contexutal 

 

Key points: Narrative tension is tension happening in the story, on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader brings to the story. How much do you assume your readers are bringing context with them? Language and dialect. Narrative structure, tension, all that is a pitcher, and the writer puts whatever they want in that. The audience brings you their glass, and you don't know what kind of glass they will bring. It may not match the drink, but they can still enjoy it. There's always context. Use the characters having memories to bring context onto the page. Characters always carry their context with them.

 

[Season 19, Episode 36]

 

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

 

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Season 19, Episode 36]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I'm obsessed with the topic that we're going to be talking about today...

[Laughter]

[Erin] Which is narrative and contextual tension. So, just to give a this is what I mean when I say that, to me, narrative tension is the tension that's actually happening in the story. It is when your characters are tense, when your... the setting is tense, anything that's actually happening on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. The example that I always use is if you write a story called Last Dinner in Pompeii, and it's just a normal story of people having dinner, we all know that Pompeii will be buried by ash the next day, so we will bring plenty of tension to the table, even if they're just talking about how next week they're going to go shopping. We're like, "Oh, you won't."

[Laughter]

[Erin] That brings [garbled]. That's contextual, but not narrative at all. I think this, Ring Shout, is a work that obviously lives in a place of contextual tension…

[DongWon] The context that I'm bringing to this is I've been so excited for this episode because I think three years ago on the Writing Excuses Cruise at like one in the morning, you explained this idea to me after a day of hanging out, and my jaw was on the floor. Because I'd never thought about it this way. It's such an important concept, and it is so useful. So, getting to finally talk about it on mic for the podcast is a resolution of the kind of tension for me. So.

[Erin] Love it.

[Mary Robinette] That's also one of the reasons that some works don't translate, because they bring a lot of contextual tension from their home locations that the audience in the new location doesn't have. It was one of the things that happen to me when I was reading Three Body Problem, that there was a lot of context that I was just missing. With Ring Shout, I had, because I am from the American South, there was a lot of contextual tension for me that was layered onto the book where I was anticipating things. I think that P. Djèlí Clark was using that very intentionally throughout the book.

 

[Erin] It's an interesting question, though, which is how much do you want to assume that your audience is bringing that context with them? I also… My family… I have family from the American South, family from slavery, family who experienced racism in the South. So, for me, I'm like, "Oh, this feels very tense on a lot of levels." But if you're from another country or you've never heard of the Klan, do you think that the story still works? Or do you think that there's something that is required in the context in order to make the tension happen?

[DongWon] I remember around the launch of the TV show Lovecraft Country, there was a lot of conversation. Because the opening scene of that show is an actual historical massacre of Black Americans in the American South. It's referenced also in Ring Shout. It's mentioned. I had never heard of this event. I didn't know about it. I also grew up part of it in the South. Racial politics is a personal interest, of things that I've read about and studied. But I just didn't know this particular event. So a lot of the press coverage was about what an incredible work it is, both that it's bringing in all this contextual elements, but also educating such a broad audience about it. Right? So I think it can do sort of both and it's one of the challenges of leaning on that contextual tension is you need to work with your audiences to some extent, but it's also not your responsibility to educate them about it in the moment. But if you sort of give them enough of the context clues to understand what kind of thing we're talking about and then they can go into doing the research about it on their own.

[Howard] It's worth pointing out here that the narrative versus contextual dichotomy is enormous. Absolutely enormous. I'm sure you've all had that experience where you're talking about a film with somebody and halfway through your like, "It's like we watched two different movies." It's because, yeah, about 80 percent of what you get out of a thing has to do with what you brought into the thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I mean, there are things that I'll watch where the lead actor or one of the actors whose prominently featured is someone I just no longer like because of a me too or whatever, and that is a new context that didn't exist when it was created, but it's a real thing. Planning for it is fantastically difficult. My counsel to writers is don't assume that everybody has the same context that you do. But on your first draft, trust your context and write the story that you want to write. Then you're going to have to work with your beta readers, with your editor, to see if those narrative…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Versus contextual bits are fighting.

[DongWon] Well, one of the things I like most about this was the confidence with which P. Djèlí Clark…

[Howard] Oh, my goodness, yes.

[DongWon] Approaches the historical context.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We're dropped into a situation, we're dropped into a scene. Nothing's explained to us, other than the fantastical elements. Those are explained to us. But the political historical context, we are assumed to either know it or pick it up from atmospheric clues around what's being discussed. I found that to be very powerful and very useful.

[Erin] I think that one of the reasons that that works so well is in that opening scene, you're dropped into that sort of primal life versus death tension. You get a group of people who obviously know each other, and are… We sympathize with, who are immediately trying to kill some horrific monster. So it tells you, okay, I understand what the stakes are. I understand who I'm rooting for, and who I'm not. Now, as I get more context, I can use that to build out the world. But I think it grabs you so immediately that you're not worried about the context, because you're like, oh, if there's a giant monster in front of you, you should probably hack it to death. I totally get that. Now that I'm in, now you can tell me about why it's important and what's going on around it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that that particular scene… That was the first scene where I had that layer of… That extra layer of tension. Because I was… What I was fully anticipating was going to happen is that they would defeat that monster, and then they would get… Have a bunch of angry white people running after them. That's not what happens in the book. What happens is worse and different. Maybe not worse. It's different. That's one of the things that I… When I say that I think that P. Djèlí Clark is doing it very intentionally. That a lot of what he's doing is setting up, here's this… Here's the context. Here's a thing that can go wrong. But I'm not going to do that one. I'm going to do a different one. That's… That, again, is that thing for me when you're playing with… When you're using historical work and you're playing with someone's knowledge of that time, where you can put some additional tension on the story by putting those two things in opposition, by moving directions you weren't necessarily expecting. But also, if you don't know that's a possibility, it still plays… Like, you don't need the contextual tension for it to be really terrifying.

[Howard] In the… In the previous episode, we talked about how this book uses a lot of horror techniques. But it's kind of a fantasy action adventure historical. That particular tool of setting up… Having our characters be aware of what could go wrong and prepare themselves as best they can for this worst-case scenario that they're imagining, and then discovering that the worst case scenario is actually 25 degrees to the left and is way worse. That's straight out of the horror playbook. So you are not wrong in feeling like this is a horror novel, because that's done so expertly and so often.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting, and one of the reasons this is such a great example of this is the contextual tension remains contextual. It doesn't really… It never fully finds its way into the narrative and into the in text tension. He kind of makes an agreement with us in that opening scene…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And kind of sticks to that boundary in a way that I think is very savvy, but still leverages the awfulness of the actual history to increase… To add extra weight to a lot of the character [garbled], to a lot of the characters decisions and to the emotional intensity that we feel throughout.

[Erin] Yeah. I will now pause because of the context that we are on a podcast and we need to take a break.

 

[Howard] I write best when I got music to isolate me and my personal acoustic space from the rest of the world. Music with no words in it works best for me, and one of my very favorite playlists is Random Friday, the 2011 album from Solar Fields. It's through composed, each track flowing both thematically and seamlessly into the next. So I never get distracted by a gap telling me I might need to restart the music. Solar Fields really leaned into this, because there's an eleventh track which is a 78 minute continuous mix of the first 10 tracks. Just in case your player of choice doesn't do gap lists gaplessly. But what does it sound like? Well, it's upbeat ambience and electronic and I listened to it while I wrote this.

 

[Erin] And we're back. I want to take this moment to talk a little bit about in detail, because we love to get into the text in these close readings, and talk about the use of language in this. Because I think that some of that what do you have from context and what do you have on the page is really evident in the way that the text uses Gullah. Now Gullah is a real language, and it's used here occasionally, mostly in the Nana Jean character uses it, and that's the way that she speaks, and if you have the context to be able to understand Gullah, you'll understand what she's saying more readily. But what I love is that she actually, in text, warns, very drastically, that bad things are coming. So it's an important narrative tension moment, but it still lives within the context of being in Gullah. If you give up and sort of don't read that part or skim past it, you could, theoretically, miss that moment of tension. What I think that Clark does so well here is that it's repeated. So she says, "Bad weather's coming," essentially, and then it comes in at the end of the chapter in italics. So it's like, did you miss all of this? Because the context held you back? I'm going to bring it back on the page in a narrative way so that there's no way you can miss that bad things are coming. The word bad is there, even if you don't understand anything else. I just really love that. So I wanted to throw it out…

[Mary Robinette] It is one of the things that I enjoyed so much about this book, and why I wanted to listen to it in audio, because in audio, you get all… Because that's not the only language that's showing up in there, that's not the only dialect. So you… Getting all of that interplay is so much fun. The other thing that it does, besides that is that it brings in the contextual thing about different class perceptions that people have. That frequently when people hear someone… People will think Gullah is a dialect as opposed to a language. They will hear it and think that the person in modern day is like low class, uneducated. Whereas Nana Jean is a very powerful woman. I love the fact that he is using that, he is subverting some of the expectations that we often have from modern day, some of the contextual expectations. He's subverting those in the narrative tension that he's using. I think it's so much fun.

[Howard] Even without the Gullah, the narrator speaks and often omits definite or indefinite articles or conjunctions of to be. We up on the tower. Or no… Yeah. We up on the tower, rather than we are up on the tower. It took me five or six pages to realize, oop, no, this is just the voice of my POV character, and I'm all in. Had I… I'm not sure if there was a context that was expected of me or if the narrative taught me that. But it was definitely there, and it was a little while before I stopped noticing it is a linguistic thing in the book.

[DongWon] Well, I think the language does a really good job, I mean, both in the use of Gullah, and the use of [garbled] dialect things, and then overall, the general use of a particular voice of the narrator. I think this is such an important thing when it comes to a lot of fiction of communicating who this book is for. Right? It's being written for a specific audience, while still being accessible to everybody. Right? Like most of us here are not of the culture that this was written in the perspective of, but I got a ton out of it. I had a great time reading it, and I learned a lot reading it and all of that. But the idea of it is written for an in community reader, that is still accessible from a broader perspective, I think is really powerful.

 

[Mary Robinette] There's an analogy that I use sometimes when I'm talking about this, which is that you can think of narrative structure, tension, all of this, you can think of it as a pitcher. You can put anything you want to in that. Then, your audience comes to you with their glass. You don't know what glass they're coming to you with. So if I am… Say, if I've got a fine Pinot Noir in a beautiful crystal whatever, and I pour it into a Riedel glass, a Riedel wineglass which is the glass that it's intended for, it's like,, this is a perfect match. But if you come to me with a red Solo cup, you're still going to enjoy the wine, just maybe not the way I intended it. On the other hand, if that pitcher is filled with hot apple cider and you come to me with a wineglass, it's going to shatter. So, one of the things that… When you're talking about this in audience, writing it for a specific audience, you're writing it knowing some of the context they're going to bring to it, knowing that that's who you want to write it for, and that… Everybody else can enjoy it, but that's not the intended audience.

[Erin] Yet, sometimes…

[Howard] If I'm pouring whiskey and you're coming to me with a sippy cup…

[Mary Robinette] If you're pouring whiskey, I'm…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You're coming to me with a sippy cup and a baby bottle? No! Stop that right now!

[Mary Robinette] No. That was when my parents actually dealt with…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Colds with me. But anyway…

[Laughter]

[Erin] I was going to say, also, sometimes you gotta shatter people's glasses.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Sometimes, that's okay. I think that's one of the things that I love about what publishing I think is doing these days, though probably not as much as it could be, is letting people tell a story…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Where they don't have to have the right context.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Because the narrative tension is strong enough in this piece that if you have no idea what's going on, it is still a story of people killing monsters that are horrible and have…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Mouth eyes and just things that are not going to work for you. Like, no one's going to be like, oh, yeah, love those mouth eyes.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So even if you don't understand what is happening and the context, you'll still get a great read out of it. I think that what has happened in the past is that sometimes people will see the context and shy away from it, and not see what's going on in the narrative beneath it, or how the two intersect. So that if you have both, I think you get the perfect glass...

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] For the perfect drink. But, if not, you still enjoy it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. With me, I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to go need to get an insulated thermos...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When I'm reading this right now.

 

[DongWon] To slip into the publishing conversation a little bit, one of my very favorite reads in the last several years is Torrey Peters Detransition Baby which is a novel about the trans experience. A very complicated aspect of the trans experience. But when Torrey Peters had that book published, she was very insistent to her publishers that it not be pitched and marketed as a quote unquote trans book or even a queer book, but as an upmarket women's fiction book. At every point, she was very insistent that, nope, you market this how you would market any book for the broadest female audience you would normally publish for in terms of, like, contemporary fiction. I think that was an incredibly effective way to get a book that was very much written for a specific in community audience… So much of that book was for me and other folks like me who live in New York and are trans and are queer and all of that, and that was a very powerful, but it was read and was so accessible to such a broad audience that I think it really reached hundreds of thousands of people.

[Mary Robinette] I think the same thing is very clearly true with Ring Shout when you look at the fact that in the year that it came out, it was nominated for all the big awards. It won the British Fantasy, it won the Locus Award, it won the Nebula Award. So this is a book that was written for a specific audience, but clearly resonates…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of its use of all sorts of narrative devices with a much larger audience. So…

[DongWon] I think we did a great job of packaging it to make it clear what the book is, but then it didn't feel tracked in a particular subcategory or only for a certain readership, which [garbled]

[Howard] Now when we talk about narrative versus contextual as a source of tension, there's a part of me that can't help but think that the greatest experience of that tension is on the part of the publisher, who's like, "Boy. I hope we split the difference between the narrative and the contextual correctly in how we positioned this book, because what shelf does it go on? Does it go in sci-fi/fantasy, does it go in horror, does it… Where does it go?" Maybe that's a little too meta-. But…

[DongWon] No. It's…

[Howard] I can't not think that.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I will say that I think for our listeners, who are like, "I'm not planning to write in a fraught historical era." There are still things to take away from it, even… Because there's always context.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Readers always bring context, even if it is the smallest. Even if it is I'm reading a romance, and I expect the characters to end up together, even though it hasn't happened on the page yet, this is the type of experience that I'm bringing to the table. If it's the pattern recognition that you, DongWon, that you were talking about in a previous episode, where it's like, okay, things are happening and I know this tends to end this creepy way, so that's what I think is going to happen next. So, thinking a lot about what is your audience bringing to the table at that moment, both in terms of their life experiences and their belief about narrative, what are they used to, what are the patterns that you think they've walked through, so you can figure out how do I want to either stay with that and reinforce it, or how do I want to subvert it? When do I want to use it for good or ill? But if you're not thinking about it at all, then you can't be intentional about it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think it's something that we often forget, because we bring our own context as writers, and we sometimes forget that readers will come from a completely different place.

[DongWon] I think this taps into Mary Robinette's metaphor in a certain way of you don't know what cup your audience is bringing to this particular fountain. Right? It… You can't control your reader. You have to make space for them in certain ways, but also be really true and honest to the story that you're trying to tell and what you're trying to accomplish with it. One thing that is very interesting about this book is it is in part about arts in the audience and reception of that art and the impact that art can have on how people think and behave in the world. Right? Because Birth of a Nation is such an important piece of how this story is told, and it's about how you can use art as propaganda to manipulate people in really extreme ways. So, I think it's really interesting that as we are talking about the contextual history of this story and the way that creates tension, it is itself engaging… I said earlier it doesn't really engage with like the contextual tension. It does in this one specific way, which is what was the role of that film in American history, what were the consequences of it, and it… Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] To that point, because that's so important, not only is that a contextual thing, that's something that is brought into the narrative of the tension. In order to make sure that the audience has the right context to understand this, we get a lot of information about Birth of a Nation and how it's being used, both for the magical purposes of the book, but also the historical context of it. There is a… That's, I think, an important thing for you to understand and also that if you are… If you want the book that you are writing to survive outside of the context, even just to survive down history, two… Then you have to… You have to make sure that it's on the page.

[Erin] A great example of this is… I don't know exactly where it is in the text, but I think there is a reference where it says, "1919 was a bad year…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] "For all of us." For me, I know that that was in the red summer era of Klan rides and horrible numbers of lynchings in the South. But the fact that they all agreed, and then I think everybody had like a slight him bit of memory about why it was bad or what had happened brought it on the page in a way that.. I brought a lot more context to it probably as somebody who knows a lot about that era, but there was enough there that you understood that they all had this common experience in a little bit about what it was. It was on the page, but also, I was able to bring what was off the page onto it.

[Mary Robinette] I will also say that if you're writing secondary world fantasy, this is a tool that you can use, because your characters will have context that the readers will never have because they're living in a fantasy world. So this kind of tool is something that you can use to give context to something without having to have like, "And now, I shall tell you about the battle of the five red armies…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "I'm going to pause this tavern brawl so that we all…" It's like you don't have to do that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You can just have these moments where the characters are all living memories and bringing it onto the page that way.

[DongWon] I think that's also why there is so many prologues in secondary world fantasy and epic fantasy in particular is they're trying to give you context so that you can have some of that contextual tension as you roll into the thing itself, but also, again, think about genre expectations. We read Lord of the Rings, so somebody's going on a journey. We're going to have some context and some expectations about what that means.

[Erin] I also think, and then we will give you homework and wrap up for the week. But I think it's also important that characters carry their context with them.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I think that when you do historical, it's easier to see how that has happened, because we understand how it happened in history. But one thing that I do not like is when you have a prologue that will give you all the context, but it doesn't feel like it actually like it's being carried. If there was a war of the five red armies, and, like, everyone involved was part of it, how does that war shape them? How does it change the way they see things? When do they recognize somebody from one of the other armies and it changes the way that they deal with that character? So, thinking of the context that your own characters are bringing with them is a great way to add more tension to the page.

 

[Erin] With that, I have your homework, which is to take a scene that you're working on, one that has tension or could use more of it, and put a piece of information at the start that is only meant for the reader. Some piece of context. Could be historical, could be that you know that this is going to end in the death of a character. Anything that is extra context. Then think about revising the scene, believing that the reader has that information. How does it change the way that you actually write the scene and deliver the tension within that context?

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/02/16-18-poetry-and-the-fantastic/

 

Key points (and angles?):  If poetry breaks language into meaning, then fantasy breaks reality into truths. Take reality, and tip it on its side, so you can see the interconnective tissue. Puppetry, science fiction and fantasy, and poetry all do these. Consider the aesthetic, what things look like or what language is used, the mechanical, the structure and plot, or the personal, the idiosyncratic choices of a person, their narrative and message. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 18]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetry and the Fantastic.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Amal] And we're all fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is the final episode in our eight part poetry master class with Amal. She's going to bring us around to a coda, I believe.

[Amal] Yes. So, throughout the series, we have talked about ways to approach poetry, to make it less scary. We talked about differences between poetry and prose. We've talked about strategies and approaches for writing poetry, appreciating poetry, structuring poetry, and some of the failure modes that can come from those things. But what I'd really like to talk to you… Talk about, rather, in this last episode is just how inseparable to me poetry and the genre in which I love writing, science fiction and fantasy, are. I want to talk about the fantastic more broadly, to incorporate multiple elements and facets of our genre. But I also just want to say that these things are not separate in my head. They are so often absolutely married to each other. I wanted to just kind of dive into the why's and wherefore's of that a little bit. So there is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I often refer to. The quote specifically is that discussing poetry, the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. So, I like to take that quote and break it, essentially. Do unto it, as T. S. Eliott says, the poet does in general. I like to say, to recall it as that poetry breaks or dislocates if necessary language into its meaning. I think about this a lot, because of the way that I was raised with poetry. I… So, my family is from Lebanon and Syria. I was born in Canada, but my parents were born in Lebanon. When… I lived in Lebanon for a little bit when I was little for two years when I was seven. That was where I first wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem at the age of seven when we were living in Beirut. When I did that, my parents were very moved and they told me that I was part of a sort of lineage of writing poetry, essentially. That my grandfather, my father's father, had been a celebrated poet and that poetry was part of my inheritance, essentially, and that they were very happy to see me writing poetry. I cannot stress enough how, like, the poem that I wrote when I was seven, was not a work of staggering genius.

[Laughter]

[Amal] But it was a poem, and it was recognizable as such. I absolutely still remember it. It was… It involved like a lot of playing with language, with unfamiliar bits of it, and it was also addressed to the moon. My grandfather's poetry was political, was revolutionary, was part of this kind of lineage of speaking truth to power and being a voice for the voiceless and stuff like that. My address to the moon was not that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But it was, nevertheless, something that showed my parents that I wanted to use language in the ways that he did as something transformative, as something that made the world different than it was otherwise.

 

[Howard] My father had memorized a lot of poems, and would storytell with them. One of the ones that he told a lot, because us kids ask for it a lot, was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Which I love. I love it because my dad… I can hear my dad saying it. My dad, when he read the poem, relied heavily on the rhyme and meter, he leaned way into it as he read it. My freshman year in college, one of my professors on an outing recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and was much more… Conversational is the wrong word, but more natural dialogue-y with the way things flowed. I remember the first couple of stanzas thinking, "Wait. Did he… Are those the right words? No, I've heard this enough, that those are the right words." Then, the whole rest of the poem, as I listened, I think poetry itself became unlocked for me. Because I realized, "Oh. The meter and the rhyme aren't the point. The story isn't necessarily the point." It's sort of this whole thing, and the poem has a life outside of what Robert Service gave it. The poem has a life that is experienced differently depending on the listener and depending on the person who says it out loud. Okay, this was 17-year-old, or maybe I was 18 at that time… 18-year-old Howard having what at that time passed for an epiphany.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I still love that poem, and I still like sometimes reading it and hearing the different voices in my head as I scan through it.

[Amal] Do you feel like one of them has like superseded the other in your head, or that your own reading voice has sort of introduced a different natural cadence into it?

[Howard] My voice dominates all of those at this point. Because my dad passed away when I was 20, and the reading I heard from Prof. Lyons was when I was 18. I'm now 53. So the voice that's in my head at this point is my own. But I cherish… This… I think this comes back to poetry as meme. I cherish this memetic series of events because there's a whole bunch of information compressed into that poem that Robert Service didn't put in there.

[Amal] Hah! That's absolutely true. This is the way that... I feel like a lot of us talk about novels in this way, too, that you read a different novel when you come to it at a different age, or that you might have one version of this novel in your head that gains or loses elements as you grow up, and then revisit it as a different person, essentially. To me, there's a lot of fantasy in that as well. There's a lot of… Even though this is obviously a very natural and observed progress of mortality, the idea of departure and return, moving through time in these ways, or, like the kind of time travel that feels inherent in [garbled] to something that you first experienced at a different age. All of that, to me, partakes of these relationships, of this kind of sense of the fantastic. There is this beautiful, beautiful essay by Sophia Samatar called On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer. I like all of Samatar's work. I return to her work on a bimonthly basis, basically. I just reread her essays all the time, because I always… They always speak to me in a way that I feel like I need at a given moment. What she does in this essay is she talks about how, for her, fantasy resides in language. That when she was a child… I'll say like… So the 13 words in question are

 

There was a library, and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.

 

These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast…

 

And so on. So she draws these comparisons between like… So, this was a fantasy novel. So she tried to then go and find other fantasy novels that would make her feel the way that this made her feel. It became very hit or miss. She would get that feeling from some books, but not from others. She came to realize that the thing that catalyzed this very specific feeling in her of wonder and awe and marvel was more to do with the language that was being used than the plots or characters or tropes in a given story that might market it as fantasy. So she found herself finding that experience of fantasy in books that were not marketed or labeled as such. That that spirit of wonder and stuff like that she could find in lots of different places. I feel that way about fantasy, because it brings me back to this idea about what poetry does to language. So if poetry breaks language into meaning, I feel like fantasy breaks reality into truths. That what poetry does to language, fantasy does to reality. That the experience that we get from it as writers of genre fiction in so many different ways is that we are always figuring out ways to break and hack reality into a specific experience for our readers, right? And that poetry is doing that too, but at the level of language in a way that you can foreground or background as much as you like. But I also want to say that literature has been poetry for a lot longer than it has been not poetry. That we have… The novel is actually a very recent technology in terms of literature. Poetry is ancient. Similarly, fantasy is ancient. We have had domestic realism for a lot less time than we have had fantasy and the fantastic in our literature. I want to just give people this similarity because I want people who love reading science fiction and fantasy to look at poetry as as much theirs to play with, to read, to be moved and transformed by as the stunning books that they read when they were 12.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… You've given me a thought that I want to dive into, but first, let us pause for the book of the week, which is Monster Portrait.

[Amal] Yes. So, Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar, whom I adore. It's by Sophia Samatar and her brother, Del Samatar. Del Samatar is an artist. So the book, Monster Portrait, is a very slender book of fictionalized autobiography, where Sophia Samatar is responding to these illustrations, these images that Del has made with snapshots that involve interrogations of what is a monster, like, thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and when those things are valued and when they are not valued. Thinking of those in relation to race, to borders, to belonging. It's just an absolutely luminous… I know luminous is like a massive cliché in terms of talking about [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Amal] I review books for a living, I am too keenly aware of this, but genuinely, reading this book gives me an experience of light that I just don't know how to talk about otherwise. It's deeply beautiful. I just cannot recommend it enough. If you wanted to read a book that kind of could be a bridge to you between prose and poetry, I cannot recommend this one enough for doing exactly that thing.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that sounds amazing. So, that was Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar and Del Samatar.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing that was running through my head as you were talking. There's a thing that longtime listeners will have heard me say before that one of the things that drew me to puppetry is the same thing that drew me to SF and fantasy, which is that it takes reality and it tips it to the side, so that you can see the interconnective tissue. As you were talking, I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's what poetry does, too."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the other thing that went through my head as you were talking was about why a person picks a particular form. There's this other idea that I often talk about, usually when I'm trying to explain to people what voice means. It was in puppetry, we have these three ideas. There's the aesthetics, the mechanical, and the personal. The aesthetic is what something looks like. The mechanical is literally like what kind of puppet are you using. The personal is all of the idiosyncratic choices that you, as a person, make. The example that I use is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. But what occurred to me as you were talking is that I can take that kind of model and think of it as the kind of thing that drives you as a writer. The story you were telling with Sophia that it was the language that called to her, it's like, "Oh, that she is drawn to aesthetic." Whereas I am… There are a lot of people who are drawn to the plot, the structural mechanics of a story. Then, other people are drawn to the kind of the personal story, the personal narrative, the message, so to speak, that's within it. That kind of knowing which thing drives you as a writer also tells you where your defaults are and where your weaknesses are.

[Amal] Yes. I completely agree with that. That's so helpful.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "Oh. That is part of why…" Like, Pat Rothfuss talks about the fact that he needs to get the next word right before he can move on. I've always been like, "What's the point of him polishing words if you're not going to use them?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, if I'm going to [garbled delete them?] later.

[Howard] How do I know if I'm going to use them if they're not polished?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wait. Yeah. This is exactly that thing.

[Howard] That's the dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So it strikes me as a… That, for listeners who are not naturally language driven, that one of the really arguably most powerful reasons to dive into this is because it gives you a different way to approach story. It gives you a different understanding of the ways we communicate. It basically tips your entire narrative form on its side to allow you to see the interconnected tissue.

[Amal] I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way of approaching that. I completely agree. I'm reminded… Gosh, who was saying this? Mmm… I'm not going to get this right. I think that Vonda Lee at some point was talking about… Possibly had an article on Tor.com or something that was about exactly this kind of thing, about how writing outside of your comfort zone being to learn… Actually, I'm not… I could be totally wrong, that it wasn't Vonda Lee, either. But mostly what I'm remembering is an article on figuring out where your facility is so that you can figure out in reverse, essentially, where your lack of facility is so that you can work on those things. I love that thought of approaching… Like, the thing that interconnected tissue and stuff. Because I think, too, of how many fantasy novels can… Like, are maybe not thought of as ones that are poetry forward and stuff, but, to me, absolutely are, because… I'm thinking of something like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Where, like it's written… It's not written in a way that is difficult to get into and stuff. It's very clear. But it's also very stylized. It's also very… And poetry is like a thematic plot-based concern. In the book, you need to know poetry in order to be able to read bureaucratic documents that end up on your desk as an ambassador and stuff like that. The crux of the novel, the climax of it, is the writing of a poem. Which is something that is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Like, this is where you absolutely do not want to miss the mark with a piece of rhyme that is not landing in a way that… Your whole plot depends on whether or not this is a good poem.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Amal] And she absolutely nails it. Like, I think that the phrase "I am a spear in the hands of the Sun," is like the last line of this, and on the back of that line, they build a revolution and it's this whole enormous thing… Sorry, spoilers for a book that came out two years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But, hey, it's just absolutely wonderful, and poetry is part of the texture of that book. But I… Like, I don't know if Arkady would talk about herself as having written it poetically, or of [garbled]. But, nevertheless, there's this sensibility, I guess, to that style, to that aesthetic, that is truly wonderful to me.

[Mary Robinette] This has been fantastic. We are, I'm afraid, at the time which we need to wrap things up with our time with poetry. Do you…

[Howard] I would love… Dan, you remember that thing that I read from Robert Service at the very beginning to you? The…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels like closure. I'm just going to go.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have no idea what you're talking about. So you say that thing.

[Amal] Do you want to do it after the homework or before the homework?

[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?

[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] No. We did not do… Okay. Do the homework.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Dan] Someone was looking up a poem instead of paying attention.

[Chuckles]

 

[Amal] So, as the… As sad as I am to leave things here, I… We have come to the homework part. Talking about novels and about prose and poetry, and to bring this all full-circle, the homework I want to leave you with is I want you to find a favorite line from a novel or a short story, one that moves you really, really deeply, one that you kind of keep in your head every now and then. I want you to take that line and use it as the epigraph for a poem. So, essentially, if you see a poem and there's like a single line in italics at the start, before the poem actually starts, that's what I mean. I want you to use that line from a novel or a short story, and I want you to write a poem following it, I want you to write a poem sparked by it. A kind of poetic tribute to whatever that line did to you.

 

[Howard] The reason I brought this up is that it feels like a poet's version of "you're out of excuses, now go write." It's from Robert Service.

 

Lone amid the café’s cheer,

Sad of heart am I to-night;

Dolefully I drink my beer,

But no single line I write.

There’s the wretched rent to pay,

Yet I glower at pen and ink:

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,

It is later than you think!

 

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's lovely. Also, so painful and so true. I'm… As we send folks away, I'm going to also share my father's favorite poem by Ogden Nash. Further Reflections on Parsley.

 

Parsley is gharsley.

 

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Dan, do you want to share a poem, too?

[Dan] That poem reminds me of the time that someone auditioned for our high school musical by singing Minimum-Wage by They Might Be Giants.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The only words in the song are minimum-wage. He just shouted it and left the room. It was great.

[Amal] Beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] That's the only thing you want to share before we wrap?

[Dan] Yes. I am going to share a poem with you. This is one of my all-time favorites. By Brian Turner, who was a medic in Afghanistan and wrote a lot of poetry, and then came home and he was, for a while, the poet laureate of the US. His most famous poem is called Here, Bullet.

 

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

[Whoof]

here is where the world ends, every time.

 

[Amal] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with all of that, my dear listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/18/13-7-what-writers-get-wrong-with-lou-perry/

 

Key points: What do writers get wrong about the law? Objection! Sustained! No basis? Actually, objection, leading the witness is okay, BUT you have to be leading the witness, on direct examination, not cross-examination. You are allowed to lead opposing witnesses, even be argumentative with them. Judges don't usually do off-the-cuff rulings. Note that sometimes you have to make a choice between the narrative and accuracy. But the middle ground might work, with the real thing between scenes or offscreen. Legal actions take time. Other pet peeves? Fiery closing arguments. Don't imitate Law & Order. Slow, boring, meticulous does the job. Small town lawyers are likely to be general practitioners, while big city firms are more likely to have specialists. Cross-examination of a dishonest witness might make a good piece of courtroom drama to put in a story. The best way to learn about courtrooms is to go to the courthouse and watch a trial. 

 

[Brandon] Excellent. We're out of time, but you did have some homework for us.

[Lou] I did. It's going to be very unpopular.

[Laughter. Good.]

[Lou] I was thinking about this. I'm going to suggest that everybody go out and pick a Supreme Court opinion, preferably where Justice Scalia is dissenting. Read it. Read the opinion, that's likely written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then read Justice Scalia's dissent. Try to keep an open mind about what he's saying and why he's saying it. Also pay attention to the law that's at issue. I think you'll find that you can see where he's coming from and you'll see where Ginsburg is coming from. And you can see the fundamental problem with the law as written.

[Brandon] Excellent. Wow.

[Mary] Cool.

[Brandon] Well, thank you so much, Lou, for being on the podcast with us. Thank you to our audience.

[Clapping]

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