Writing Excuses 20.15: Third Person Omniscient

Apr. 17th, 2025 06:50 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
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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