Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

Sep. 27th, 2025 12:13 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders
 
 
Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...
 
[Season 20, Episode 38]
 
[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.
 
[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 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.
 
[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.
[Charlie Jane] Hi.
[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.
[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.
[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]
[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.
[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.
[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?
[Charlie Jane] Sure.
[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.
[DongWon] Right.
[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness  in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]
[laughter]
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?
 
[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Charlie Jane] Sorry.
[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.
[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.
 
[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?
[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…
[DongWon] Right.
[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.
[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.
 
[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.
[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.
[Charlie Jane] Yay.
[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.
[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.
[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.
 
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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff  I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.
[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah.
[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.
[Charlie Jane] Oh.
[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…
[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…
[Charlie Jane] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]
[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.
[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.
[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.
[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah.
[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.
[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?
[Charlie Jane] I mean…
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.
[DongWon] I love that.
[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.15: Third Person Omniscient

Apr. 17th, 2025 06:50 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 20.15: Third Person Omniscient 
 
 
Key Points: Third Person Omniscient. Where no character can go? Deploy it carefully. Dealing with complex dynamics. Narrators. Prologues. Omniscient can have a voice. Be careful of headhopping, make sure your reader knows whose head they are about to get. Use your turn signals! Beware the paralysis of choice.
 
[Season 20, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Third person omniscient.
[Mary Robinette] She's Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] They're DongWon Song.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] He's Dan.
[Erin] She's Erin.
[Howard] I'm confused.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] We are continuing our section talking about proximity. We're talking about how close the perspective is to the characters of your story. We are finally to my favorite of these, which is third person omniscient. I love omniscient because I feel like it gives the author so many tools to play with as they're telling the story that they want to tell. I think there's been a real drive in the past few decades of getting closer and closer and closer to the character, getting that perspective really locked into the character's emotions and interiority. There's been a real drive towards first person. I was talking last time about there's sort of a default toward close limited. But I do love it when we get to step back, zoom out, see what everythings happening in the room, find out what's happening next door, what are the neighbors having for dinner, which Joe down the street thinking, what's the gas station attendant thinking. Like, being able to get the broadest perspective of what everyone is experiencing in the moment, to me, can sometimes be such a rich and filling and exciting narrative experience.
[Howard] One of my favorite examples of third person omniscient as a tool that is doing a thing that no other POV/proximity tool could do is the very short chapter in Act III of Tom Clancy's, I think it's The Sum of All Fears. Where a nuclear device is detonated in a football stadium. The chapter is called Three Shakes. We step into omniscient and we describe the quantum effects, the particle effects, the EMP effects. Because part of what happens is the blast hits, electromagnetic blast hits the TV antennas, satellite antennas from trucks, and results in shorting a satellite out in orbit. He describes all of the electronics of that happening, and, you know what, there isn't a single character on scene for whose point of view that works. Because they're all dead.
[DongWon] That's the thing is you can do so many things within omniscient that you can't do if you're limiting yourself to a character who's in the scene. You can get into the subatomics. Right? You can get into spaces where no people are, or get into the heads of people that your protagonist doesn't have access to, like the villain characters, like side characters. But, because of the free range you have, I also think that third person omniscient is the most difficult of these three sort of basic…
[Mary Robinette] Yes…
 
[DongWon] Ones we're talking about. Like, first person, third limited, those and third omniscient are, like, the three most common that you see. I do think third omniscient is one to be deployed very carefully. So, for you guys, what are the pitfalls? Like, when have you tried this and how has it worked out for you?
[Mary Robinette] For me, I'm not actually sure that I've tried to write anything in omniscient.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's pretty rare.
[Mary Robinette] For me, I haven't had a story yet where I felt like I needed that extra distance. I think about novels like John Scalzi's Collapsing Empire, when we're looking at a more contemporary example of this. Or Dune. Where it's trying to look at these very, very broad things. But then I'm also thinking about, like, Liza Palmer's Family Reservations, which is, again, a more contemporary example. It just came out last year. Of third person omniscient. What all of these are doing, for me, is that they're dealing with big complex inter-dynamics where you're jumping… And I just haven't written that kind of story yet where I'm dealing with that sort of complex relationship dynamics, whether it's empire spanning or family spanning. So, yeah, I haven't… I don't think I've used omniscient yet.
[Howard] Back in 2008, during the very first season of Writing Excuses, there was an episode which was particularly memorable for me, because it's one in which we were talking about these tools, and I knew what exactly zero of the terms meant.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That was a good time that was very much Howard gets to be the every person character who is educated at a much faster rate than any of the listeners could hope to be educated. But it's the point at which I learned that the POV that I was usually writing in for Schlock Mercenary is what we call third person cinematic. Because we're not looking inside people's heads, and we're not following a character around so much as we are following a camera. But the existence of the narrator, who would often express an opinion or state a fact or there would be footnotes meant that I was doing third person cinematic with dips into and out of omniscient. In 2008, I was doing, I think, a pretty good job of writing and illustrating Schlock Mercenary. But once I had names for these tools, once I knew what I was doing, I… It's not that I knew what I was doing. Once I knew the names for what I was doing, I was able to start figuring out what I was doing and how to switch. I guess I wrote third person omniscient for close to 20 years on and off. Recently, I sat down and tried to play with it as a tool, and I'm realizing, "Hum. This is not as easy as it was when I was drawing pictures."
[Laughter]
[Dan] I think I've only written omniscient once. It was in what was essentially a prologue. The third Zero G book, the plot hinges on a bunch of nine-year-olds, because it's middle grade, understanding how extremely fast travel works. Because we already learned in book 1 that it took almost 100 years of travel for the spaceship to get from Earth to this other planet. Then I needed them to understand that another ship left later but got there first. So the prologue is essentially, kind of like Howard was saying with the Tom Clancy stuff, it's a scientific explanation of how the speed of light works and how extremely fast travel works. There is no perspective, there is no character that we're getting that from. But it had to be there. Now, you asked about what are the pitfalls of this. One of the major pitfalls of this was trying to write this without it sounding didactic. Trying to write this in a way that sounded like it was part of the book. Every writing group that I ran this through, which I guess was only two, but to writing groups completely rejected it at first. Because, like you said, third person limited was and is kind of a default for a lot of people. So getting this scene that's not let me give you a textbook first, that's aimed at nine-year-olds to explain what…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] FTL is really kind of didn't set right with them. I had to fine tune it a lot before readers were able to kind of accept that it should exist.
[Erin] So, I was… When you initially asked the question, I was, like, I've never done that. Then I realized I did it a ton.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Recently.
[Yup]
[Erin] So I wrote a series of posts… This is an interesting sort of… To give a little context. So, for Pathfinder, for Paizo, for the Pathfinder setting, I wrote a series of short fiction pieces about the deaths of various gods. They were setting up for an actual God dying in their worlds. So I got to write a bunch of what if stories of, like, what if this other God died, what if this third God died. All of them are as if it was like a seer saw the future and was like… So it's like an omniscient unnamed seer is, like, here's what happens when the God of farming dies. So for each one, I wrote, like, about the specific death and then the implications for the world. So I was going to, like, what actually happens in the death scene and then looking at this other character's affected this way and it makes all the crops die and this other thing happens. So it was a bunch of very small things for different characters and it was all omniscient. But what it makes me think of is two things. One is, like, I was thinking about this earlier with that Tom Clancy example, is that a lot of times, omniscient is the perspective of the world. The reason, like, that it can be used… There are many reasons to use it, but I love it when it feels like this is the world telling a story, and the world is bigger than the people in it. So one person cannot contain the world, it's only by looking at multiple people in the spaces between people that you can really understand what the world is doing. I think one of the first times I remember seeing it is in The Wheel of Time book openings…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Where it's always that section that's like…
[Mary Robinette] The Wheel Turns.
[Erin] The wheel turns, and a whole bunch of people, like, here's this farmer and his affected, and here's this whatever…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And they're affected, to give you a here's the state of the world as of… We've been following these characters that shape the world, but to remind you, here's how the world is affected and here's how ordinary citizens are seeing their lives change as a result of everything that's happening. Then… But how to, like, then make it interesting is something I thought about is for each God, like, they have a specific domain, and I actually tried to let that change the rhythm and style of what I was doing. When I talked about the God of hunts being hunted, I went for shorter, more like reporting on…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, this is happening, that is happening. The way you would in a hunt or a fight scene almost, but, like the world is fighting. When it was the goddess of beauty, I went for longer sentences that had, like, a longer cadence, like the soft feel of beauty. So that way, the world changes.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And the world's perspective changes, and it changes the way that I was able to use omniscient in those places.
 
[DongWon] I do think that's, like, one of the pitfalls, is that people think that just because you zoomed out, you lose the voiciness. It can still be as voicy in omniscient as you can be in close limited. I want to talk more about that and the use cases for it. But before then, listeners around the world looked at their podcast apps and realized it was about time for a break.
 
[DongWon] Okay. So we've been talking a little bit about the cases where we've tried to use omniscient in the past. For me, I think these are often the very cinematic moments like Howard was talking about in terms of, like… I think of, like, disaster movies where, like, you suddenly see the asteroids falling from a dozen perspectives of people who are about to die in a variety of ways…
[Aeeeee]
[DongWon] That you have met for five seconds. Right? When it comes to these scenes, we talked a little bit about head hopping in the third person limited episode. But what are the things that you find yourself needing to do when you reach for omniscient to keep it from being unmoored, keeping it from being overwhelming, whether to you or to the reader?
[Mary Robinette] So, I can really only speak about it from a reader's perspective at this point.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But I love reading omniscient. What I find when I'm reading omniscient is that I'm given direction about where I'm headed. So that I don't just arrive in a character's head. There is narration that precedes it that that then drops me into the characters head. So the narrator, the author, is directing my attention so I'm already focused on them, and then I get their thoughts. So it's like… It is that zooming in, and then zooming back out again, without that sign posting, that's where I think we get to the flaw of head hopping, which is, I suddenly have someone's thought and I don't know who it belongs to. I thought I was with this person, but now I'm over here and I didn't see it coming. That's, for me, where it falls apart when I'm reading it in student work. But when I'm reading, like, Jane Austen… She's extremely good at directing my attention. Some of my favorite works are also things where sometimes there's not a character on stage. Douglas Adams does a really great job of this with Hitchhiker's Guide. It's like this is where we're headed right now. Now we're going to spend a little bit of time in this person's head, and then we're going to come back and talk about Babel fish.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Humor is one of the places we see omniscient the most.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Actually. Because Pratchett uses third person…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[DongWon] Omniscient all the time. Where you kind of need to step back and point out the grand irony of whatever's happening here. So, I mean, it makes sense if you were using it for Schlock, both because it was comic, but also it's very much the humorist's voice is that omniscient voice.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I often think of it as, like, being in a car with somebody and they don't signal when they change lanes.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You can get away with that…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Once or twice, but if you're constantly going, someone's going to be like, are you okay? Do I need to take the wheel from you? But, like, a good driver, even if it's just for a moment, even if it's… Maybe it's sometimes it's a really, really explicit signal. They actually, like, put on the signal light. Sometimes it's the way they look over…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] If you see them and you're in the car, you're like, oh, okay, I understand what you were doing there. So I think it's figuring out how are you signaling to the reader that the changes happening, so that if you do change without a signal, there's a reason for it. Like, oh, we were about to hit a boulder. Then it makes sense to them for the re… Like, the reasons that you were doing it.
[Howard] There's an argument to be made, yes, for creating without deliberation or conscious access to the tools you're using. But that is not the way I prefer to make art. I always like to deliberately deploy the tools. If I'm going to signal a turn with just my head, I'm going to know that I'm doing that before actually doing. For the record, though, I always use my turn signals.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I don't just use my head because I don't want to be hit by another car. And I always…
[DongWon] [garbled] sticking your head out the window of a car…
[Laughter]
[garbled] [Who drives that way?]
[Mary Robinette] We've got somebody… Someone that we know in Chicago, my husband was like [garbled] with Chicago drivers that they don't use their turn signals? This person replied, "I ain't giving nothing away for free."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But I do feel like sometimes we see that with writers, that they'll think…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, the reader has to work for it. I… That they won't give information because they feel like somehow it cheapens the experience, which I do not understand.
[Howard] Not a fan. Not a fan.
[Erin] I think it's the same reason that sometimes people feel like everything that happens in the story has to be a surprise.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, holding back the twist is where the power is. Because I think it's like once readers realize that, like, I've done something really clever or I surprised them, they will value it more. But in truth, a lot of times, the twist you can see coming… It's the car wreck in slow motion, so to speak…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is actually really compelling, because it's like you know it's there and yet you… They don't avoid it, and it really draws the eye in a way that I think people don't realize sometimes.
[Dan] Yeah. That calls to mind what's actually one of my very favorite uses of third person omniscient, which… There's a scene in The Lions of Al-Ressan by Guy Gabrielle Kay, where a huge disaster has just happened, a character has just died. But we don't know which one. We know that there were three main characters present, and some horrible thing happened. I can't remember what the horrible thing was. But before he tells us who died, he goes and checks in with every single other character in the story. All of the side characters, some random people, and is very slowly kind of circling in. I do believe that he uses linebreaks every time that he jumps ahead. Which is…
[Mary Robinette] I do… No… Because… He may not. Carry on.
[Howard] Yeah. But it felt like he did because of how clear it was.
[Dan] Yeah. He made it very clear every time we came into a new perspective. So whether or not it looks like limited, he was very clearly doing omniscient thing of just making sure that we got this character's reaction to the big disaster, and then move on to the next one. Part of the effect of clearly sign posting which head we're in is that we are... in our own heads, we're mentally checking off, okay, this person's safe. Okay, this person's safe. Then, by the time we finally get into that… We get the perspective of the two or three characters that were actually present and we learn who died, it's devastating.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, he's very good at using that. There's a… In, I think it's Tigana, he has the scene where we go… Someone dies with an arrow… From an arrow. We see the scene, and then he effortlessly takes us back in time to someone who had been… To how the shot was fired and who it was with… Who fired and how it happened. That's, I think, one of the other things that you can do with omniscient is… We've been talking about moving from person to person, but I think you can also move us around in time in ways that are significantly easier than when you're trying to do third… Where you have, like, okay, here's a line break, and there's a header. It's like seven months previously.
[DongWon] I mean, that's what's so exciting about omniscient is the range of possibilities is just vast. Right? Because you can… I've seen people just like dip back into we're going to talk about the creation of the universe for a second now. You know what I mean? Like, that can be such an exciting narrative move because it allows you to build momentum, allows you to set things up, it allows you to put things in context in all kinds of fun ways.
[Howard] One of my favorite bits of my own work is the beginning of book 20, which is called Time for a Brief History, which is a play on the Steven Hawking… I'm going to read it very briefly.
 
A little under 14 billion years ago, there was nothing. That early nothing is surprisingly difficult to draw. Not drawing anything is easy. But these blank panels upon which the lazy, lazy artist hasn't expended any effort still occupies space and still experience time. The nothing at the beginning of the universe did neither of those things. In point of fact, it only did what it was. Nothing. Until suddenly it didn't.
 
It was so much fun to write that, and it's an omniscient voice. But it's an omniscient voice that has voice. It has an opinion.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] It sets a tone for the book. It sets the tone for the story. And it tells you what you're headed for.
[Mary Robinette] It also has a very clear relationship with the reader, which is, I think, one of the other things that omniscient can do that you get in first person.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But omniscient can reference the fact that it is a story in ways that third person limited fundamentally… You can… Technically, I do this at the beginning of Shades of Milk and Honey. Because I start with this voice-driven opening. Since we're quoting work…
 
The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbors in every respect.
 
It's like this is this very, very distant thing.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] Then I come into one character, which is the Honorable Sir Charles Ellsworth. But then the rest of the series is Jane. It's the only spot that I pull way back like that. I use that a little bit at the beginning of the others, because I'm trying to do the Austenian nod. But I never do the omniscient thing that Austen does. But it is that… Is offering the reader that, hello, here's our relationship.
[Erin] The thing that keeps coming into my mind as I'm listening to all this is this phrase, like, even God has intentions. In some ways, God has to have more. So one of the things you hear when people are inventing things are that constraint actually helps creativity.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because you can't do everything. So it helps you to like focus in on the things you can do. I think that gets back to what you're saying about why omniscient can be so tricky is you can do anything. So how do you know what you want to do? So I think one of the things if you're writing omniscient is to think about what is the intention of what you're doing? As all… If you're reading your lovely works, like, you had a really… You both had really clear and very different intentions in mind, and the circling in of the people that died… Like, there's a very clear intention there of what that omniscient is on the page to convey to the reader.
[Mary Robinette] That makes me realize that I think that part of the reason I've never written omniscient for anything besides the, like, barest touch of it at the beginning of a book is the prowess of choice. There's so many choices that, like, I don't even know… I also have not had a work that needed it. But I've been sitting here as we've been podcasting, thinking maybe I should try omniscient, and the thought of trying it fills me with such existential dread…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Because there are so many more choices…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That are available to you that you now have to make.
[Howard] Yeah. That's what I'm struggling with in the omniscient work in progress right now.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Howard] I identified it almost immediately. I was like, oh. Oh, this is paralysis of choice. Okay. Well, I choose to come back to this later.
[Chuckles]
 
[DongWon] Well, as the omniscient narrator of this particular episode, I… Unfortunately, we are out of time, and I'm going to take us to our homework. So, what I would like you to do is to describe a street scene. I want to have you describe a scene where your main character is walking down a street and I want you to move us through that scene of the character moving through this street seen through the perspective of 5 to 6 bystanders observing this happening. Focus on sensory details. What is everybody seeing? And how can you use that to say, oh, the smell of this, the sound of that, the look of that, is establishing where your main character is in the scene, and be clear about whose perspective are we seeing this from?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator

Jun. 20th, 2023 07:30 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator
 
 
Key Points: Different audio formats use narrators differently. Narrator, telling, and no narrator, showing, changes the pacing. Immersion versus distance! Create space for the audience to imagine. Keep in mind what you can let the audience imagine, and what you need to specify to fit your story. Do think about narrator or not as craft, but also as a business decision.
 
[Season 18, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] To Narrator or Not to Narrator.
[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.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about narrators today. We had a moment in the last episode where I said that Forgotten doesn't have a narrator, and Mary Robinette said yes it does. We're going to talk a little bit about that difference. There are a lot of audio things, as audio becomes a much bigger part of the market, people are starting to play with the form a little, we're starting to see full cast audio a lot more than we used to, we're starting to see a lot of different things. So there are full audio dramas, radio dramas, and then there are dramatized audiobooks, and they use narrators differently.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So when you're thinking about an audiobook, an audiobook is something that was written for prose, for print, not necessarily prose but written for print, and then is read aloud. A dramatized book is something that, or a full cast… Let me step first… The full cast, where you have multiple voices, instead of a single narrator. Then you have dramatized audio which is usually full cast and then sound effects. Then you move over to radio plays, which come from the stage side into the audio realm. So in those cases, you are dispensing with all of the basic conventions that come out of novels, short stories, and you're starting with more stage and cinema conventions and moving I. There's some overlap in between. But those are… That's kind of your basic range.
[Dan] Yeah. These are not necessarily very clean-cut categories. There is a lot of play in between them. But, for example, if you go and listen to I Am Not a Serial Killer, that is a narrator reading the book. He will read everything, he will read the dialogue, he will read the narration. He will change his voice now and then when he's doing a different person's part. But it is one person reading it. Listen to Zero G, and it has full cast and sound effects, and it has a narrator to say the inner parts. To describe sometimes how the main character is feeling, what a location looks like. Which is similar to that audiobook, but changed a little bit. Then, something like Dark One: Forgotten, there is nobody just saying inner thoughts out loud, there is nobody describing the setting. It is all right there on the page, much more like a classic script would be for radio or TV.
[Erin] What's interesting with Dark One: Forgotten, though, is that because it is in the style of a podcast, the narrator… Like, the characters in the world are directly addressing the audience. There's a part where it's like, "Oh, I'm not going to put this part in," or "Let me let you know what I'm going to do right here," or "I'm interviewing this person," where there letting you know what's happening from moment to moment, almost like a narrator, but within the world. Which I find like a really interesting way of like mashing things up. One of the things that I do for Zombies Run is I've both written the script part where they're just like, "Runner! You need to go over here. Somebody's attacking you. A zombie's behind you." Which is, there's no narrator really, they're just talking to you like you're somebody that they're talking to over a headset. But I also write in-world radio for Zombies Run, where somebody is actually doing a radio show within the world, and similarly, they are addressing the audience, but it is a fake audience that we've fictionalized for the sake of the Zombies Run universe. It's fun. Each one is a slightly different technique.
 
[Dan] Yeah. That's so cool. So, one of the questions that I want to get to in this episode, and I'll just throw it at you, Erin, is what do those different styles do for you? Why would you choose one over the other, aside from the constraints of the medium that you're working in? When does having a narrator really help you, and when do you prefer to dispense with the narrator altogether?
[Erin] I can't remember if we said this in a podcast or just while talking, but at some point we were talking about showing versus telling and how that changes the pace. When you have a narrator, it's a more telling media. You're being told what's going on. So it is a little bit slightly different paced than when you're… Let me rephrase. When you're… When you have a narrator, it makes you feel, I think, more like you're listening to a story. So it feels like you're around a fireside, and, weirdly, unlike in prose, that actually slows down the pace, I believe. It feels like, okay, we're just gathered around and I'm going to tell you what I am doing. When you don't have a narrator, you're within the story yourself. You feel like you are a part of the story, I think, more. For that reason, it feels faster paced in the tension is higher.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think of it as immersion versus distance. So the more present a narrator is, usually the more distant you are, because you have someone who is describing the things to you, but you are not participating in the scene. Whereas when the action is happening around you, you are in fact participating in the scene, because you are at least directly hearing what is happening. So you are a direct witness in that case. So, in puppet theater, we use show, don't tell, for very different reasons, because you are literally doing a puppet show, not a puppet tell. There, what I'm thinking about, is that immersion. It's like, the example that I use is I could say, "There's a clock on the wall." Or, I could have someone say, "Oh, looks like it's 9:05 now." One of them has you deeper into the world. So, for me, I think about it in terms of immersion versus distance on whether or not I'm going to use an active narrator. The other thing is that sometimes that narrator is the most efficient way to change a scene.
[Dan] Yes. I really like that way of thinking about it, the immersion versus distance. I found several times adapting Zero G from the prose that I wrote into more of a script format that there were so many times when I was describing how Zero felt or what he was looking at and I realized, "Oh, I'm gonna have someone reading this. I can just make this dialogue instead." That happens so often. Really, that's what was going on. There were moments when it needed to be a narrator doing it, and there are moments when it felt so much better and so much more natural to have the character themselves say it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find when I'm writing for… Erin, I don't know if you find this too, but when I'm writing for… Knowing that there's going to be an actor on the other end, is that I can have my written dialogue be more ambiguous, because I can put a note to them and then trust them to do the thing. Like, having a character on the page say, "What!" Like, I can't do that without adding a lot of context around it, extreme numbers of punctuation marks, in order to get that "what!" As opposed to "what." Those are two different things. An actor, I can trust, usually, to do that. On the other hand, if there is a possible way to misinterpret a line, an actor will find it.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I think it was Margaret Dunlap, and I apologize if I've misremembered who it was. But she was telling me about a videogame that she had been writing dialogue for. For one particular dialogue tree, she had to come up with five or six options that were all different. Basically, she used the word what, then with some script notes to say, said in this tone of voice for all five.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Yeah. That was Margaret.
[Dan] That was Margaret. Which I thought was so brilliant.
[Howard] Got paid for writing the same words six times.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Amazing.
 
[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to point out is that just from our episode title, to narrator or not to narrator, you may be thinking of white room stories, like They're Made of Meat is the classic example. Where there is no description, is just dialogue. We call it white room because you have no description of what's going on. All of your cues come from what is in the dialogue. If you take a white room story and move it into the audio realm, suddenly the fact that there are two different actors, two different voice actors doing the voices, gives you more information. If you add sound design in the background, the sound of a café or the sound of science-fiction space, which shouldn't make any noise, but for some reason always does, you can create something that makes it no longer white room, but the energy… And, for me, as a writer of comedic pithy tight dialogue, the energy remains there. You don't need the dialogue tags that you often have to resort to to say who's speaking. So I love what an audio drama affords you, which is the ability to do that fast banter and keep all those pieces there so that the energy doesn't get slowed down by a narrator explaining to you what they're doing.
[Erin] I will say, on the other hand, the challenges that physical description when you don't have a narrator means that you need to be sometimes coming up with reasons that, in dialogue, your characters will be saying where they are when they're both there and they know that they're there.
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? Right. We all know we're in this room, but like, wow, this chair's comfortable. It's a little bit more of those like location aware…
[DongWon] Isn't this coffee shop so nice?
[Erin] Dialogue lines. Exactly. Like, "This coffee shop? I never liked that one." Whatever it is. Like… I think that that's really fun to figure out how to make it work. It's like the same challenge people have with info dumping in that you want to make it seem like really natural to the scene that your writing without fully disrupting what's happening between the characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about that more when we come back from the break.
 
[Mary Robinette] Everyone, we want to introduce you to our new producer, Emma Reynolds, and Emma is going to tell you about our thing of the week.
[Emma] The thing of the week is the Earbug Podcast Collective which is a weekly newsletter that is sent out. It is coordinated by one of my friends and mentors in the audio serial area whose amazing. But it is curated by a different person each week. It's just a great way to get your hands-on, or I suppose your ears-on all of the different audio content that is out there for inspiration for you.
 
[Dan] All right. So, we're back. I want to talk more about this white room concept. In particular, I… One thing I said at the beginning of this year, because I've been doing so much audio and now getting back into more traditional novels, is that I had initially kind of fallen off the wagon and forgotten how to write scene descriptions. So the first draft of the actual Dark One novel that I turned in was basically people talking to each other as if they were in an audio drama.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No one was moving around doing actions, there was no description in between the lines of dialogue to break up what was happening. There was very little scenic description of where they were. That's because my brain had gotten so embedded into this audio space, where that kind of stuff wasn't a part of the script. That really kind of hit home for me the differences that arise when you start breaking these formats, when you start jumping from one to another. Because there are things you can do in one that work really well, but don't work at all when you do them in a different format.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with is… That comes out of audio drama, is using this idea that Erin was talking about before hand, of the interaction with the world to describe what is going on through dialogue. So, in The Spare Man, I don't describe actually that much of what Gimlet, the little dog, does. Frequently, the way I am keeping her alive in the scene is through dialogue. That she's… Like… When someone is having a conversation, it's like, "Is this dog allowed to have people food?" That tells you everything that's going on. But part of what that does for me is that it creates space for the audience. I think any time that you have the narrator they're describing things in a linear way, that removes some of the audience space to imagine the world. One of the things that I think is fun is thinking about deliberately creating that space for the audience. When you're coming back to prose or when you're in the audio realm, is thinking where do I want to allow and encourage the audience to do some lift for me, because that is going to make the story more immediate for them, because it's going to be… They're going to be active participants in this story.
[DongWon] I really love that idea. Sort of pairing that with what Erin was talking about in terms of show, don't tell, one of the things about balancing the showing and the telling is about trust. Right? When you make space for the audience, what you're also doing is saying I'm trusting you to fill that space. I'm trusting you to meet me over there. Right? So making sure that that on-ramp is very easy for them, it's a very easy path for them to follow to meet you where you are, I think is really important and one of the key skills in that. So you can have that little moment of here's what Gimlet is doing and that's filled in, backfilled by us when we hear that, and we then fill in what the dog has been doing for the last like 30 seconds. It's such a delightful way for you as the creator to take a moment and say, "I see you, audience, and you are participating in this story too, and this is a thing we collaborate on." I think that's a beautiful thing that audio drama can do in a way that prose fiction can do, but it's not as natural of a fit. So I love hearing ways that you pull that in.
[Howard] There's a technical tool… Technical? A way of thinking about the absence of the narrator that I find it really useful. In the Dark One: Forgotten, when she says, "I'm recording this in my dorm room." We don't get much of a description, really, any description of the dorm room. It's assumed that all of us have in our head a picture of a dorm room. If, at any point in that story, there'd been action in the dorm room where Sophie and… The name of the main character is…
[Dan] Christina.
[Howard] Christina. Where Sophie and Christina decide to go out the back door… I've never been in a dorm that had a backdoor. But if that's a piece of blocking that you're planning on having in your story, you have to do a little more than just the shorthand when you give us that description. You have to do just a little bit more lifting so that the blocking that happens later works. I describe this as a technical tool. It's something that you have to keep in mind so that you know which pieces you can just let the audience imagine on their own and which pieces you have to specify.
[Dan] Yeah. I think it's important that we kind of draw a line on this. The title of this episode is To Narrator or Not to Narrator. I don't want you to think that that is… That that is a decision that has to be made from project to project. It can be made scene to scene, or even sentence to sentence. There are times within a completely normal traditional novel where you might decide to pull that narrator way back and let dialogue or action do the lifting rather than having the narrator. There are times even in an audio thing where you might want to have a narrator step in and do more.
[DongWon] One thing I do want to bring up, though. If you are making the decision of do I want to do this as a traditional prose project or single voice narrated audiobook versus a full cast production, from the business side, there's an important decision that you will be making there, which is that the right situation is very different for an audiobook versus a full cast production. When you start getting into the full production, you are now walking into dramatization territory, which is what film and TV producers will want if they're going to adapt your work. So, one thing to keep in mind is if somebody shows up and says, "We want to do a full cast production." That's a totally exciting cool thing to do. Be intentional about what you're doing and realizing that if you give up those rights, that may interfere with your ability to do a film or TV adaptation down the line. Now, I know, in a lot of cases, it still works, just doing the thing because the thing that's in front of you and it's exciting. But it's one of the things I want to make sure is clear as were talking about this, that these are different from audiobooks, not just in craft and practice, but in a business sense, you're making a different choice by participating in that or not. There's some blurry space in there. If you have like two or three narrators, I don't remember exactly the distinction, but there's sort of three categories in there. So there's some difference.
[Mary Robinette] It's…
[DongWon] You probably know this better than I do, actually.
[Mary Robinette] One of the big demarkers is whether or not you have changed it from the original form. So, you can have a full cast with almost… I'm not sure if there's a cap on the number of char… Of narrators that can be in there, as long as you don't change any of the words.
[DongWon] Okay.
[Dan] With Zero G, they did full cast audio, but we retained film rights. I don't know exactly how Sarah worked that out, but we worked that out.
[DongWon] It is possible to do it.
[Mary Robinette] You just have to…
 
[Howard] As an aside, this is one of those cases, fair listener, where having an agent…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Is very helpful. Because they can look up these exact questions for you so you don't have to.
[Dan] Solve the problems for you.
[DongWon] This is kind of an edge case. Right? You can tell from the way I'm talking about it I don't have this immediately to mind as… This is not something I've dealt with a bunch. It's a thing I've dealt with once or twice. So there's a conversation to be had in these gray areas. There's blurriness, there's ways to negotiate it.
[Mary Robinette] It's true, actually, that my definition on that may also be linked to whether or not it is narration versus acting.
[DongWon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] As far as the union is concerned.
[Dan] Yeah. That's a good [garbled distinction?]
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] Too.
[DongWon] Right. Then the union starts to come in, that's a whole nother set of questions that need to be answered as you do it. So, anyways…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Here's a few things that the decision of narrator or not to narrator is a craft one. It is also a business one. Make sure you're talking to your publishing team if you have one. Make sure you're being intentional about the choices that you're making, as you go into those choices.
[Erin] It can also be an experimental one. Which is to say that you can also just see what happens if you take something that you've written just as a regular narrator full prose, and what would happen if you took the narrator out or tried it in an audio format, and see what you learn. Because one thing that I think you learn a lot about in audio is which details you're going to want to have your narrator or your characters mention. Because, there, I think, is a limit, especially in a more fully acted production, to how much people want to listen to a narrator before they're like, "Get back to the drama."
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So you learn like maybe this longer passage that I might be able to put on the page is going to come off much differently, like, when I'm listening to it, especially if it's not in audiobook format listening, but more of a full cast.
[Dan] Yeah. One of the elements that gives me fits when I'm trying to write these pure audio dramas, for example, with the Moon Breaker videogame, is fight scenes. Doing those in something that has no narrator gets so hard. You can actually go and listen to the Moon Breaker episodes and see me doing these kinds of experiments that Erin's talking about, saying, "Well, what happens if I just do a straight fight scene and say, okay, Foley guy, lots of laser noises for like 20 seconds and then the story will keep going." Then other episodes are much more intentional, like, I'm going to block this entire thing out so that I know exactly what's happening, and the only things that are going to happen in the fight scene are ones that I think we can depict with clarity with pure audio and no narration. It is very hard to make a fight scene intelligible without a narrator describing what is happening and no visuals to let you see it.
[Howard] I'm just reminded of the time when Mike Magnola on a panel said, "Oh, yeah. I really trust this artist. In one of the scripts I said hell boy fights an army of skeletons for six pages."
[Laughter] [Oh, boy. Wow.]
[Erin] I think this comes back to why I think narrator or not is such a cool tool, because I was thinking about this fight scene. I'm like, if you want your audience member to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm in the middle of the battle, I don't know what is happening, attacks are coming from everywhere, then having no narrator is great because you're in that feeling of, like, I'm just hearing swords and screaming and dying. But if you want them to actually be able to figure out who stabbed who with the whatchamacallit, then maybe you need the narrator, because the point is for them to understand it, not to sort of just be absorbed by it.
[Dan] Yeah. Those are… That can become a really valuable tool if you think of it in those ways. Like, what am I gonna use this lack of narrator to produce a specific effect, rather than just, oh, boy, I don't have a narrator. This is going to suck.
[DongWon] You use that to great effect in Dark One: Forgotten. Right? So, at the end, when she is captured by the serial killer, we don't exactly know what happens to her. We know that she experiences some stuff that's pretty bad, and she has to go to the hospital afterwards. It's unclear what he has done to her, what injuries she has sustained. I think letting my brain fill that in is more horrifying then if you'd described, oh, he hit her. She fell down the stairs. Whatever it is. Right? It becomes a very upsetting sequence of events that was very tense and difficult to listen to, in a good way. I think by me having to fill in those details…
[Mary Robinette] Making space for the audience.
[Dan] I am very glad that it had that effect on you. When I wrote that scene, this was back when I was still on Twitter, and I got on and said, "I just wrote a scene so brutal, Brandon Sanderson will regret ever collaborating with me." It… We had to tone it down a little, but… Yeah. That…
[DongWon] That's how it came through. I was like, "I am in a horror movie right now." You know what I mean? But that's the intended effect, I think. That's what you were trying to produce. Forcing me to produce all the worst horror movies I've ever seen in my brain, I think, was a great shortcut for you to get the effect that you wanted.
[Erin] Almost makes you complicit in the violence itself.
[DongWon] Yes. Thanks for making me feel worse about it.
[Giggles]
[Howard] I think that Dan Wells being complicit is a note to end on. Almost.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, now it's time for your homework. I want you to do something which is actually the way I started writing prose. I want you to take something that you've already written and I want you to adapt it for audio. When I started writing, I tried going straight to script and it was a disaster. So I started writing a short story, and then converting it into audio. Because I wanted to write audio. You, my friends, are going to take something you've already written. As Erin suggested, you're going to be stripping out narration, you're going to be figuring out what sound effects are. Try to convert it for audio.
 
[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we explore writing as an act of hospitality and reader agency. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.45: Next Level Narration

Nov. 14th, 2018 10:52 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 13.45: Next Level Narration
 
 
Key points: Leveling UP your narrative. Get the standard narrator, a character much like yourself, with similar experiences, solid first. Then try things like unreliable narrators. Study writers who have done something similar before you experiment with narration and form. Try breaking the fourth wall, making your reader aware that they are reading something, suspicious of the person who is talking. With unreliable narrators, at some point, the story reveals that they are unreliable. Figure out how the character sees the world, what their defaults are, and how that affects what they tell the reader. Try multiple witnesses, narrators who have their own angle on what is happening. Older, younger, different life experience. Brains wired differently. Try to understand and represent their reactions. Make them rounded, with one aspect that is different. Use forums, YouTube, listening to people to help you. Be cautious of carrying defaults from one work to the next. 
 
( There are more words? )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Next Level Narration.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We are getting near the end of this year on character, and we wanted to spend… Oh, you're giving me the pouty lip…
[Amal] Sad face. I'm so sad.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I am. It's been so fun.
[Brandon] But we want to talk about kind of leveling up your narrative. When we were talking about this earlier, Mary said, "One of the things we want to focus on is you want to get really good at telling maybe a more standard narrative first." Standard's probably the wrong phrase for that.
[Mary] So, when you're writing as a narrator, one of the things we've talked about multiple seasons is that there is a lot of different techniques and skills. A lot of times, what you want to do is, you want to start and solidify a technique on kind of the easy setting. Which is, by writing a narrator who is very much like yourself, who's lived very similar experiences. Then there is the stuff that's harder. Some of those things are things like unreliable narrators. This is much harder to write than a narrator who is reliable.
[Brandon] Yeah. Let's talk about that. I want to point out before we do that, when we say on easy setting, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make a worse book. We talk about this a lot. Taking the thing that is in some ways… particularly with a writing technique, natural for you and comfortable for you. Starting with a first person or a third person limited, the kind of standard viewpoints, is a good place to begin before you try something with a really strange omniscient viewpoint. It's not that your book's going to be worse, it's just mastering a skill before you level it up. One of these things that you can try is, as Mary said, an unreliable narrator. Have any of you guys written an unreliable narrator before?
[Mary] Yes.
[Amal] Yes.
[Brandon] Let's talk about it. What did you do, how did you do it, what pitfalls were there, and what advantages were there?
[Maurice] Well. This next level writing is hard.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Really?
[Maurice] So, what happened? How did this come about? So, I love writing short stories. One of the main reasons I love writing short stories is I get to experiment with different forms. So I get… It's like failing in the privacy of your own home. So recently I've tried this unreliable narrator. I've only tried this… like within the last couple months has been me trying this. So the story's about this woman who's experienced some trauma, and it's kind of fractured her psyche. So she is trying to progress through her current day… I mean, trying to push through her day, while both simultaneously reliving the trauma and healing from it at the same time. So the story plays with time and how she's perceiving it and just events. So, like the events are happening out of order, but the order is happening in which she's experiencing her healing. So she's experiencing the story in the terms she needs to in order to be healed. It's… It was a tricky thing… And it's one of those things… I'd gone over… I'd been studying Kelly Link. I read like a lot of Kelly Link stories. Just to sort of… All right, it's time to level up, who do I need to read? So she was one of the people I was studying at the time to experiment with narration, experiment with form. That's why I just dove into it that way.
[Brandon] And it worked out?
[Maurice] So far, so good. I… My writers' group were a little mixed on it. Because they were just… One lady said, "This story is on the verge of making sense."
[Laughter]
[Maurice] Which has been my favorite criticism ever. But I know I'm one draft away from having something I think might be really special.
 
[Amal] I love that. So, the ways in which I've tended to write unreliable narrators is absolutely informed by the fact that I've been in academia for way too long. So I try to approach them from this idea of… Almost like breaking the fourth wall in theater, where you make your reader aware of the fact that they're reading something as opposed to… So that it rises to their minds like, "Where is this information coming from?" You want to make… Like I want them to eventually become suspicious of the person who's talking to them. In a couple of cases, I've… In which I've done it… in one of them, I wrote a story called The Lonely Sea in the Sky, which is about a planetary geologist who's been working on Triton, specifically looking at the diamond ocean, which, for real, exists on Neptune. There's like an ocean of diamond on Neptune. It's like diamond in a liquid state.
[Mary] I am totally googling this when we're out of the studio.
[Amal] It is so cool. It is so cool. Articles about this started coming out in 2000… Anyway, so I won't go there. Point is, so she has succumbed to this illness that is being… That is still being figured out. It's just being called Meisner Syndrome for want of… They don't know whether it's… Like, what the nature of this is. It's a set of symptoms that some people… A very, very, very small percentage of the population succumbs to, and it seems to have to do with interacting with the diamond ocean on Neptune material. She is being encouraged to write a journal about her experiences. But she is… She's arguing that she's not succumbing to this, when she clearly is succumbing to this. So you're having her… You're experiencing her stuff. My… The line that I was trying to walk here was that I want you to be sympathetic with this character… I want you to sympathize rather with this character. I want you to believe everything that she says, but I also want you to see how that is changing over time, and to walk that line of not distrusting her necessarily, but understanding that she is impaired where her own reality is concerned.
 
[Brandon] Right. I think that this is kind of vital to the idea behind an unreliable narrator, is that at some point, it's going to be a part of the story that they are unreliable. Though, in another way of talking about it, it feels like every character is going to be slightly unreliable. This is one of the reasons why we put things in a character voice is they're going to describe things in a specific way. You need to be able to get across to the reader that this is the way the character sees the world. That's going to make them attached to the character. That's what they're going to like about the character. In some cases, like when I've done it, I've been very kind of almost ham-fisted with the this character is funny because they just describe things the opposite of what you would expect this description to be. They will sometimes break the fourth wall and just be like, "Yeah, I'm not going to tell you about that story yet." And these sorts of things. Sometimes you do it very subtly, which is the character who over time, as you're writing the scenes, the reader starts to realize, "Oh, they see the world in a certain way, and there are just certain things they don't see as I would."
[Mary] That's one of the things when we were talking previously in an earlier episode about defaults, that your characters are going to have their own default settings. If you can figure out what these are... the thing about an unreliable narrator that can be frustrating for a reader is when the narrator is inconsistent in ways that break kind of that character's world. So when you can figure out what their defaults are, that's going to tell you the places that they're going to lie, the reasons that they're going to lie, the ways those lies are going to take shape. They're not even necessarily lies. They are ways that the character is reporting things that may be honest and true to them, but that are not representing the way another person would experience that.
[Maurice] So, a story I had a huge amount of fun writing. It was called At the Village Vanguard. It was for Mothership Zeta. It was the first of my Afro-future stories. So it was about this place nicknamed Blacktopia. Cause I'm subtle like that.
[Laughter]
[Mary] So they… Do they dare say, "By my blackness?"
[Laughter]
[Maurice] I missed out on that opportunity.
[Laughter]
[Mary] I just want you to add that to something in the future, please?
[Maurice] It's done. But the way I chose to tell the story, because it's kind of an origin story, but the way I chose the story… The way I chose to tell it was as an oral history. So I actually have… I believe I have seven narrators of this story. It's kind of…
[Wow]
[Maurice] Like… One of those… The reliability of eyewitness testimony, we have seven eyewitnesses who roughly tell… Can tell the same story. But they're all telling their version of the story. Determined by what they saw, or actually buy their own personal biases about what this story now means to them. So that was another way for me to just experiment with form and the whole unreliability of each individual storyteller. You have several witnesses, all who have different angles on it trying to tell one story.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Because didn't you just have a book come out?
[Maurice] I did. I did. It's The Usual Suspects. It's my first foray into middle grade detective novels. It's all about these middle school students who, whenever anything goes wrong in the middle school, they round up this group of middle school students and like, "We know one of y'all did it." That was actually the first… My first time… Speaking of interesting narrators, was using narrators who are much younger than I am. So, it is all told first person through the eyes and mentality of who is essentially on unreliable middle grader. That's almost redundant, but…
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Let's ask about that. How do you write from someone who's much younger or much older, has much more life experience than you have?
[Maurice] Well, in this case, at the time, I had two middle grade students. So, this is going to sound a little weird, but actually I record a lot. So, like, there's times when I will just randomly record like my kids' conversations, and… With the caveat that anything I hear, you can't be punished for. So there's always that that I throw out there. But I literally… I'm studying how they speak to one another, how they speak to their friends. So, like, I can like just really get into their headspace. Being a middle school teacher helps, because I just hear students speak all the time to one another and how they interact and everything like that. So I'm… That has helped me a lot in terms of staying in their heads and sticking with their mentalities and the way they see the world. But on the flipside though, like I said, this is a narrator who as I… I didn't even realize this when I was plotting out the character, but part of him being so intelligent, he has like a streak of paranoia to him. So now… So he's still making observations about the world, but you realize, "You know, this student's a little paranoid." Little things like that.
 
[Brandon] Well, that brings us into another topic I want to talk about. Writing people whose brains are wired differently than your own.
[Mary] Yeah. So, I just wound up doing that in the Lady Astronaut books. Elma is… Has anxiety. She specifically has social anxiety disorder. So she gets really… Like being the center of attention in a large group makes her really uncomfortable. I am clearly not wired that way. I love being in front of a large group. Hi, podcast listeners.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] But I do know what it is like to be anxious about something. I have had anxiety and panic attacks. The ones that I was having were because I had been sexually harassed by my boss for three years. So it's a totally different circumstance. But the physical symptoms are very similar. So what you… What I wound up doing was extrapolating from what I knew. I did a lot of reading about what the disorder was like, and then the symptoms that people were listing, I thought about the times that I had had those physical symptoms. Also, then, I had to think about ways in which… I had to make sure that I was being cognizant of the fact that her default setting about the way she would react to a crowd was different than mine. I would have to go and adjust that. But I also… I know what it is like to mask when you're afraid or upset about something. So again, that's one of the things that often goes with that disorder, is that often people will seem very calm. Really, super calm and chill, because they are masking so hard. So making sure that I was also representing that. That a lot of people around her didn't know that she suffered from this.
[Amal] I wrote a story called The Singing Fish for the… It's called The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. It was a story that I was solicited for at very, very short notice. It was one of those. It was a huge break for me. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer invited me to this, and I think I had something like two weeks in which to turn around a story. This was an ekphrastic collection, like they had a piece of art that they wanted me to write a story for that was appearing in this book. It was literally of like a fish standing on its tail and singing while a very puzzled man looks at it and stuff. So I ended up writing a story that was about critics and art. But… I can't remember now how this even came about. The… One of the characters in this story… It's basically a story that's a bit of a biography of a woman I made up who is an artist who drew this painting… Drew this painting? Drew this pencil and ink sketch.
[Mary] You do underdrawing before you paint.
[Amal] There you go. Yes. So I wanted to make a story about the artist who did this. I genuinely cannot remember… It was just… I fell down a wiki hole. Must've been what it was. I gave her Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Which is a thing where… I think people are not quite sure why it happens. I think there's… I think it might be a physiological thing that comes from having pressure on the brain, but your perceptions get fundamentally altered so that the shapes and sizes of things relative to each other shift drastically. So things that are… Things might seem very, very, very small or very, very, very big. All I had to go on was the Wikipedia description, because I was in a huge time crunch and I wanted to just turn this story in. I felt really uncomfortable about the fact that I was doing this. But for whatever reason that I cannot now remember, it still seemed like a good idea. Partly because I was fascinated by the fact that this existed. I'd never heard of it before. So I just… I tried very hard to imagine what it would be like, and ended up writing it into the story. But wrote it also from… What I tried to do to make up for the fact that I didn't actually know what this was like was to have it ironically be in first person… Be like have her write diary sections where it was her voice. So that I could at least have a whole rounded character who had a voice and this was just something that happened to her sometimes, that she experienced. To try and compensate for that lack of knowledge. As it turns out, one of my closest friends has Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
[Mary] Oh.
[Amal] Which I only learned years after having written this story. I like knuckle bitingly asked, "So what is it like, and what about this story?" Because he totally read the story. He was like, "No, no, you totally got it right. That's what it's like." Like, I can't recommend this…
[Mary] Whew.
[Laughter]
[Amal] As a method. But I think that it was partly just treating that difference as just one facet of the character that I imagined everything else about. Because I'd gotten the rest of that tissue there, it made it that much easier to imagine well, what would it be like if this were happening to me, given this description.
 
[Brandon] One of the tools I love is just going to forums. The Internet is wonderful for this, and see forums where people collectively together and gripe about their life. Those forums are like gold for a writer, because if people are sharing their gripes, you learn so much. Just being a fly on the wall and listening. How… What do you get frustrated when you are… You have this certain way of seeing the world and everybody else sees it differently from you, and they compl… You complain about what they don't see. Those things… When you guys are doing that on forums, know that you are helping us out as writers.
[Maurice] Well, there's another thing. Because when I was writing Buffalo Soldier, one of the early edit notes that I got back was, "Well, you have this child, he's neuro- atypical, but we'd like to hear more from that character." I was a little nervous because I was just like, "Well, how am I going to do that?" I'm obsessive about dialogue. So I was like, "Well, how am I going to get this dialogue right?" YouTube is an un… I mean, YouTube is like the writer's best friend. It gets underutilized as far as I'm concerned. Because I googled… Just randomly "conversation with autistic children." There are tons of videos of mothers who just upload conversations with their autistic children so they can show other mothers. Because everyone thinks that they're isolated and alone. This is a good way for people to just go, "Hey, you know what, we're all in the same boat. Here's what we're going through. What are you going through?" It was a good way to just observe conversations and study those conversations, so I could very much just get the conversations right.
 
[Mary] I'm going to throw in one cautionary thing, which is that once you figured out how a character is going to behave, it's very easy to take those characteristics and carry them forward to your next work as a default. So don't… Like if you got a character who has anxiety, say… I did. She was a mathematician. One of the ways she calm herself down was counting things. Specifically, she would do primes and she would do the numbers of pi. I was working on another story and my character was on the autism spectrum and also had problems with crowds, but very different reasons. Right? One of them is all about sensory input, the other is about attention. It's two different things. I looked at the story after I'd finished, and I'm like, "I have her counting things! This character would not do that." I have made that my default for how a character with anxiety behaves. So you do have to be aware of the defaults that you can… When you're going to this next level narration. It's like, "Oh, a character who lies behaves like this." Be aware of the defaults that you are carrying forward from your own stuff, in addition to the things that you've absorbed around you.
 
[Brandon] Now, you had also some homework for us?
[Mary] I do. So we're going to harken back to some homework that you have already done, which is in April, when in character voice, we had you do three different points of view. 80 years old, 12, and from a different country. At the time, we were having you think about character. So this time, you're going to do next level narration. Which is that each of these characters are experiencing the same scene differently. So this is the Rashomon effect, that some of them are telling you information that the others are not telling you because they're lying. So at this point, you're dealing with two different aspects of narration. One is that these characters are different from each other, so we need to be able to tell that. The other is with their default settings and what is important to them, some of them are lying. Figure out which pieces they're lying about and why.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint

Mar. 1st, 2017 10:24 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/26/12-9-qa-on-viewpoint/

Q&A Summary:
Q: Third person omniscient is generally the norm in most fantasy/sci-fi. Do you have any ideas, tips, tricks to make this voice more interesting or unusual?
A: Give the narrator a personality, characterization.
Q: How can you make [third person] limited more interesting?
A: Make the character sing. It's not the viewpoint, it's the character.
Q: It usually takes me a few drafts/revisions to really nail down a character's voice. Is this normal for most writers? Any tips on how to discover it in other ways?
A: If it's working for you, don't break it! Try writing a quick scene that is pivotal and important to your character. Sample scenes, monologues, conversation, job interviews. Don't be afraid to throwaway writing. Let the character talk so you can figure out who they are.
Q: What is the most effective way to portray an unreliable third limited viewpoint in which the reader can still know what is actually happening?
A: Why do you have an unreliable narrator? To fool the audience? Dramatic irony, where we know something the character does not? Establish that this is the character's personality, they think one thing, even though something else is really happening.
Q: How does one thoroughly immerse themselves in a setting/person? I know it's very subjective, but what are the most effective methods you have found in feeling, for example, when a pregnant woman, a pious man, or a lost child might feel? It's so far eludes me.
A: Meditation, guided imagery. Primary sources! Find forums where people are sharing trials and experiences, and get the things people gripe about right. Method acting for writers – feel it yourself, then write.
Q: How do you choose between first and third person? What's your process? When you're preparing a story, how do you make that final decision?
A: Is the story about plot or character? If it's about character, do it first person. Check your genre – adult romance usually is third, YA first person. How can you best express the characters? Try a writing sample, a quick scene or paragraph, to see which works best.
Q: How do you pick the right character for a viewpoint in a scene? How do you choose whose eyes you're going to see through?
A: Who is in the most pain? Who's most interesting? Who has the highest stakes, the most emotional response? Who's going to be doing the most, whose protagging the most? What do you like to write?
Q: I'm writing my first novel. How do I choose to do first person, third person, it's overwhelming. I could do omniscient, I could do non-omniscient, how do I make this decision?
A: Which POV makes the words flow for you? First novel, just write it. Spot check along the way, "Is this still working for me?" If so, keep going. If not, try a test scene in another perspective and see if that works better. What do you want to accomplish? Grand in scope, lots of different characters, third might work better. But first and foremost, finish the book.
Q: I have a problem with transitioning between voices. A.k.a. How do you know when to cut, how do you smoothly transition from one viewpoint character to another, how do you do a chapter break, do you sometimes not do a chapter break, how do you decide this?
A: End on a phrase that resonates with the reader, that's impactful, and makes them want to keep reading. Look at the first line of the next scene, make sure the reader knows whose head they're in as quickly as possible. Beware the garden path sentence, where the reader doesn't know whose head they are in until they turn the corner. End on a zinger, something awesome to say goodbye to that character for a while. Answer a question, raise a new question, resolve a package. Give emotional closure.
Q: My characters start to sound less distinct the further in my story I get. How do you keep this from happening?
A: Give each character a high concept that's evolving out of the consequences of previous acts, along with a dialogue tic that's a result of the consequences. Check prepositional phrases and three syllable words to see if your characters are all using the same ones. Visual and verbal tics work because they remind you, the writer, who the character is. Remember the character's passion.

( Wow, back and forth... )

[Brandon] I'm going to call it here. We have so many questions. I'm sorry we didn't get to them all. But, Piper has some homework for us.
[Piper] Oh, I do. My brain just died. I'm so sorry. So, my homework for you is to take dialogue, not narrative, dialogue, and take the characters who were involved in the dialogue… Probably works better with two or three, just a limited number of people in the dialogue, and swap them. So character A might say one thing, character B might say another. Now swap them, and how would character B say that first line, and how would character A respond?
[Brandon] Excellent. I really like that writing exercise. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens

Feb. 15th, 2017 11:14 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/12/12-7-description-through-the-third-person-lens/

Key Points: Learn to let the character's voice, thoughts, and feelings come through when describing, especially in third person. Combine characterization and description! Get specific with what the character notices and does. Pay attention to what they notice, and what they miss. Describe the small things, let the reader imagine the large things. Focus indicates thought -- what the character sees, what they hear. Exercise: try and include every sense in a scene. But don't spend too long! And beware going overboard on all the senses all the time -- no one licks a vase. Add your infodumps in third person to emotion, action, dialogue -- dribble them across a scene. Pick out the important information and avoid the irrelevant infodump. Losing viewpoint? Check the emotional investment in the scene. Make sure you have the right scene. What happens when the main character knows something, but doesn't let the reader know? Frustration! Use focus, something else compelling to keep the main character going, and sometimes, it's just background for the character, no matter how surprising it is for the reader. Or... give the reader the information! Often knowing the secret makes the action more compelling. Or make that other plan a contingency. Think surprising, yet inevitable.

( The third person thinker? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. Mary Anne, you were going to give us some homework?
[Mary Anne] Well, I was just going to say that I love Ursula Le Guin's book, Steering the Craft. It's a very short little how-to-write book. She's got like three chapters with exercises on various variations of third person that I find really helpful. I still… I assign it every semester and I do them again with my students every semester. I get something out of it every time.
[Brandon] Well, excellent. That is your homework. Go read some Ursula Le Guin. You will always find it time well spent, I have found. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.6: Variations on Third Person

Feb. 7th, 2017 12:58 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.6: Variations on Third Person

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/05/12-6-variations-on-third-person/

Key points: Omniscient: the narrator knows all, sees all, and tells all. Or, the bodyhopper! Beware headhopping confusion, though, and the accidental omniscient. Then there's third person cinematic, just the camera, folks. A good tool for establishing shots! Limited third person uses a single viewpoint character at a time. Very widely used, and lets you handle large casts and epic scope easily, while still knowing what is going on in the viewpoint character's head. Be careful to quickly show us whose head we are in! Why does sci-fi fantasy use this so heavily? History, it feels natural for storytelling, it makes infodumps easy. Maybe because of the roots in short fiction? Third person limited lets you have your background and know a character closely, too. Mostly, though, it's just background -- what you read is what you write!

( Then he read some more... )
[Brandon] Well, I think we're going to call it here. We're going to give you some homework. My homework for you this week is the same as last month's homework, except now with third person. I want you to take the same passage that you may have written in limited, and try the two different forms of omniscient. Try the one that there's like a narrator that's able to say, "What they didn't know…" and things like this, and try the one where you're just body hopping with every paragraph. Or take something you've written in omniscient, and try it in cinematic. Try it in limited. I want you to experiment with these tools and find out how they go. We will be back next week with the Chicago team where we'll be talking really about how to describe and do description through the lens of a third person narrator. We're really excited again to have you guys with us for season 12. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.1: Variations on First Person

Jan. 4th, 2017 11:27 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.1: Variations on First Person

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/01/01/12-1-variations-on-first-person/

Key points: First Person variations! (1) Epistolary, letters and journals, in-universe artifacts. (2) Reflective narrator, there I was, surrounded by... the storyteller over the fire. (3) First person immediate, I'm talking to you! Often present tense, lots of YA. Will I survive? Keep reading and find out! Think about the meta-element (how did we get this to read? Who is the narrator? Where is the line between the story universe and mehaving a book in my hands to read?), and the fourth wall, which might be where the shadows of the story are written?

( In the shadows behind the fire... )

[Brandon] Awesome. So, as I said, there's a lot of depth to exploring even within first person. I wanted to assign you some homework. Which is to take the same idea, a writing prompt you've had, and write a short narrative based on it in one of these three first person formats. Either epistolary, reflective narrator, or first person immediate. Then, I want you to try it in the other two. So that you can personally explore how these three different forms of first person are different tools that achieve different things. Just do a short narrative. Whatever it is. You could even take something you've already written in one and change it into the other two. But until you've tried all three, until you've tried doing a piece of them, I don't think it'll really pop out at you how this all works.

[Brandon] Now, we will be back next week with the Chicago team, where we'll be talking about how to specifically create a powerful first person voice. I wanted to give you a warning that the week after that, we're going to be doing a wildcard. The four of us will be back together and we'll be talking about Risk Assessment, which is the bonus story in the Schlock Mercenary volume Force Multiplication. So this is your spoiler warning. If you want to get that and read it before we talk, we'll be having Sandra Tayler on as a guest because she was the author of it. We will discuss in depth with no holds barred spoilers about that bonus story.

[Brandon] All right. Thank you guys so much. We are excited to have you in season 12 of Writing Excuses. This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses. Now go write.

[Mary] Writing Excuses is a Dragon Steel production, jointly hosted by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler. This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Writing Excuses 7.12: Writing the Omniscient Viewpoint

Mar. 21st, 2012 11:57 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.12: Writing the Omniscient Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/03/18/writing-excuses-7-12-writing-the-omniscient-viewpoint/

Key Points: Omniscient viewpoint, with a narrator who can see all the action and knows all the thoughts of the characters, is hard to get right, compared to limited and first-person. Readers don't expect it. Cinematic omniscient, or third person cinematic, uses a camera as a narrator. Another type is the storyteller, with someone telling you this story. This lets the narrator talk to the reader, while not necessarily letting the characters know. It's a good way to condense information. Another type is the occasional zoom-out, such as establishing shots. There is a distinction between narrators with a strong voice and neutral omniscient narrators. When writing omniscient, be careful of the temptation to indulge in world builders' infodumping. The main advantage of occasional zoom-outs is that you don't always have to have a character see everything. The final type of omniscient is pure omniscient, which may lead to head hopping if done wrong. It must be very clear who is thinking what, but this can be very strong. This kind of omniscient lets you dig deeply into several characters and cover a lot of information in a single scene.
( Ignore the man behind the curtains! )
[Brandon] Yeah. Give them writing prompts.
[Howard] Okay. I'm actually going to give two. Writing prompt number one. Stick a scene in between two third person limited scenes, where an omniscient narrator delivers information that isn't available to any of your POV characters. The second writing prompt is pull off this Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility thing. Have two characters carrying on a dialogue in which what is being communicated with the words is out of sync with what each of the characters is thinking.
[Brandon] Okay. Excellent. You are out of excuses. Thanks for listening. Now go write.
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