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Writing Excuses 19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps 
 
 
Key Points: Life's speedbumps! Career, body, circumstances... Slow down, and rattle and shake over it? Rent a backhoe and scrape it off before driving? Break everything into smaller pieces and celebrate any progress. Sometimes you do it to yourself! Choose to move, and... disruptive, cascading issues. Depression and panic disorder? Brain shingles! In a grocery store without a cart, just picking up items and juggling! Strategies! Self-medicating with sugar? No, talk to everyone about it and talk about how to do something more healthy. Don't go too far with ergonomics, but if something is causing you pain, is there a quick and easy way to fix it? Identify obstacles. Beware, your brain confuses happy off-balance and frustrated or sad off-balance. Having trouble with decisions? Lists! Two hand choices. Eliminate repeated options that aren't working. Pie slices! How big is it, and how many do you want? Think of yourself! Move from triage dealing with fires to sustainable, balanced approaches. Replace "you can't have it all" with "you don't actually want it all!" Focus on what you want most, and ignore the rest. Be honest with people about what you need, and can do, before you hit a crisis. Count, and give yourself time before you answer. Say not to the projects that you don't want to do, because sometimes you'll have to say not to the ones you want to do. Give yourself a restorative.
 
[Season 19, Episode 52]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 52]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] As the year comes to a close, we've been talking about a lot of things, but one of the things we haven't really been talking about is kind of how you keep going when life has thrown you speedbumps. This can be a lot of different things. It can be a career speedbump, it can be your body, it can be circumstances around you. So we're all going to just kind of talk about some of the speedbumps that we've been encountering and some of the strategies that we've used to navigate around them.
[Howard] You know what, I… The speedbump metaphor I think may have been mine when we originally set this up, because as a younger, healthier man, speedbumps were things that I would just maybe slow down for a little and then just rattle and shake on my way over them. I'll just plow through it. I'll just muscle through this. I will just… I'll put in the extra hours. I'll put in the less sleep, whatever. Over the last couple of years, I've realized that that approach is no longer the option. The vehicle I am driving over the speedbumps is now a 72 station wagon…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That does not have… Well, 68 station wagon, if we're actually talking my model year, so it does have wood panels on the sides, with a bad suspension, and the back of the station wagon is full of poorly packed glassware.
[Laughter]
[Howard] If I decide to hit the speedbump at 30 miles an hour, I am going to break things, and it's a mess. So, my life over the last couple of years has been built around activities that look a lot like, metaphorically speaking, pulling up to the speedbump, stepping out of the car, renting somebody's backhoe, scraping the speedbump off the street, getting back in the car, and then driving forward. If it sounds like I move more slowly than I used to… Yes. Yes I do.
 
[Mary Robinette] I have been dealing with an emotional speedbump. Last year, 2023, is what my family has taken to calling the year of five deaths. Which… I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about that, because as you can tell, it's a little bit of a downer. But I kept… It was… My life is badly paced and badly plotted and maybe that… The author kept reaching for the same trick. It's like, come on. But we couldn't wait two months. My mom was one of the people who I lost last year. Each time, I kept thinking, okay, I just have to get through this, and then after that I'm going to be able… And there was never an after. So what I had to do was come up with ways to be able to keep moving while things were falling apart around me. I turned in Martian Contingency a week before mom died. I had to have my cat put down on my birthday. I mean, it was like… But it sucked. And I had deadlines. So it was… I… The renting of the backhoe, it's like that is a strategy to get around the thing. For me, because it mostly messed with my executive function, making decisions, any of that was just incredibly difficult. And I had competing priorities. I wound up having to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to make any progress at all, and learning to celebrate making any progress was hugely important. This year, which I thought, ha ha, has been a different set of things. We had an unexpected move this year because of different family health things. And the coping skills that I learned last year have been very, very useful with these speedbumps. It's been… Yeah. So, there you go. I could keep talking…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Howard] Breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces… Would you like to peer through the boxes of glassware…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] In the back of my station wagon?
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] It's funny, because speedbumps, in these cases that we're talking about so far, can be very hard things, very difficult things, and sometimes they can be something that you do to yourself. So, in my case, I made the bright choice to move across the country this year. I packed up my life in New York and I moved to Southern California. And it's been a really wonderful decision for me. It's been the right choice, and I'm really, really delighted by where my life is at in a lot of ways. But also, talk about a god damned speedbump.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It was so much more disruptive than I anticipated, and it definitely caused a cascade of issues in my life, some of them professional and some of them personal. There's a way in which all of this has been really joyful to do, but also, that doesn't mean it wasn't a speedbump. It doesn't mean that I didn't need to make space for myself, make space for the people around me, and adjust to certain realities of what it was going to be to go through that level of disruption. Right? So, how you plan for, and how you respond to speedbumps is, like, hugely important and I maybe learned a small lesson of I'm not in my twenties anymore, or even in my thirties anymore, and I need to maybe make more space for certain disruptions that I needed to even five years ago. So, it's been an interesting moment of reflection as I'm looking at building a new life here, building a new community here, things like that. But also, how to keep plates spinning, keep balls in the air, while doing multiple things at once.
 
[Dan] My major speedbump this year, and last year, has been a recent diagnosis of depression and panic disorder. Both of which recently upgraded… We'll use that word… To severe depression and severe panic disorder. Which is just delightful. That's… Like DongWon was saying about planning for disruptions, that's the reason you haven't really heard from me throughout the year. I was on a few episodes that we recorded very early on, but I did hit a point, actually and 22, where I realized that my choices were to either back away temporarily from this podcast or quit it all together. Which I did… Absolutely did not want to do. But that's the state that my brain was in and to some extent, continues to be in. I hope to be on, and will be on, many, many more episodes next year. But… Yeah. We call this the brain shingles. I got the brain shingles.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] [garbled]
[Howard] And it's not the good kind of shingles that keep rain off of things.
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Dan] No. Not at all.
 
[Erin] It's interesting, listening to all of this, because I feel like I… Knock on wood… I, in 2024, like, had not had as a huge, like, speedbump of that kind. Whether unanticipated, whether…
[DongWon] Self-Inflicted?
[Erin] Self-inflicted.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I… Like, so is somebody who does not drive…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I like to think about something that I do in my life where I create my own sort of speedbumps or cracks in the sidewalk to be tripped over. Like, somebody in a grocery store who doesn't get a cart and starts getting items off the shelf. Right?
[Laughter]
[Erin] It works a bit. Like, you're like, okay, I can hold this can, I can hold this soda, okay, what's… Okay, if I just rearrange this, I can put this thing on top. And you never know what will be the either item, obstacle in your path where it's a very small obstacle, but you're holding a lot of things, and it's a very delicate balance, and if something can throw it off, and now, all of a sudden, things are going everywhere and you're trying to hold on to everything and not drop any of the items and create a spill on aisle five.
[DongWon] I feel personally attacked and called out right now.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I don't think you even… [Garbled]
[Howard] It's not so much that you are your own worst enemy as it is that we are all our own that exact same worst enemy.
[Mary Robinette] Erin is, I will say, an extreme example of it.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Having been in a bar with her, watching her continuing to work…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] While on a cruise ship. I'm like, no, no. Erin has a bigger capacity for stacking things and believing that she can continue to carry them then I… Than anyone I've ever met.
[Erin] Yay?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, on the plus side, there are things that you can do to, like, learn yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I know this about myself. So, thinking about what are the strategies… Like, to figure out… Like, what are the things that we need to do? I know that we are coming up on a break, so maybe the time to talk about the strategies is on the other side of it? Question mark?
[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what I was thinking. So, let's take a quick break.
 
[DongWon] So, my thing this week is I want to talk about the movie Furiosa. Which I really love. I sort of feel like there aren't enough people talking about it. I feel like it didn't get quite the love that I hoped it would. Mad Max: Fury Road, one of my favorite films, I think we can all agree that it's an absolute masterpiece of action cinema, and finally, they released the follow-up to that which is actually a prequel, but tells the story of Furiosa's childhood and early life as she sort of becomes the imperator that we meet in Fury Road. One thing that's really interesting is this movie is structured so differently from Fury Road. I think a lot of people went into it with the expectation of getting that same hit, getting that same high, and instead, it's a slower, quieter, more traditional drama in certain ways as we watch this person grow up and develop into this… Into the sort of force of nature we meet in the future. And Chris Hemsworth is also in it, playing opposite Anya Taylor Joy. Chris Hemsworth plays the villain, a character named Dementus. It's some of the best performances I've ever seen from him, that he brings a weirdness and a humor to it, but also a deep unsettling menace by the end of it. So, I highly recommend Furiosa. Remind yourself that this isn't Fury Road, it's its own thing. Manage your expectations around that. But just some absolute killer action sequences that I really love, some great character work, and great performances. George Miller is like nobody else out there and anything he does, I will show up for.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] Strategies are one of the things that actually keep us going. I think all of us have strategies that are probably overlapping and some things that are wildly different. I would love to hear about some of the strategies that you've found that have kept you functional while you have been trying not to drop things in a grocery store.
[Laughter]
[Dan] One of the strategies that I learned accidentally was, the beginning of this year, I decided, as a New Year's resolution, that I was going to stop eating sugar. Because I was snacking on sugar constantly, especially at work. And the depression skyrocketed over the course of about two or three weeks. I realized that without knowing it, I had been self-medicating with sugar as a way of getting through the day. I'm still kind of sort of trying to do that, but sweeter. The lesson to learn from this, the way this turns from an accidental thing into an actual coping strategy, is, once I realized that that had become an important part of my process, then that became a thing to discuss more directly with my family, with my employer, with my psychiatrist, and say, well, this is what I have been doing. What can I do instead that is healthier than that? Well, what are ways that I can manage this depression without just sugaring up and muscling through it?
 
[Howard] Years ago, we, on this very podcast, we would joke about the… It may have been an April Fools episode… The excuses we make instead of writing. I think one of them was, oh, gosh, I sure need to vacuum my keyboard. I've looked at, this last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time rebuilding literally where my keyboard sits. Where my monitors sit. Where I sit. I didn't get very much writing or much work done, because I was spending so much time paying attention to a very small pain point. Oh, I have to reach for this thing, and I'm reaching further than I think I should. How do I fix that? I'm going to take the time right now to fix it. And I ended up building an entire 2C stand, two big… Three boom rig surrounding a zero gravity chair where I don't have to turn my head much, I don't have to stretch my arms much, but I can do everything I need to do from that chair. It took a long time to build, and the strategy really amounted to, Howard, if you don't make time to move that piece of speedbump now, then you're going to wear a hole in yourself reaching a little extra far or having to get up and do a thing. It's sort of like ergonomics, and I don't counsel everybody, yeah, look at your workspace and go fully ergonomic contextual inquiry. But, at the same time, if something is causing you a little bit of pain, there might be a very easy way to make it stop doing that so you can get more work done later.
 
[Mary Robinette] That's been one of the strategies that has worked well for me, is identifying the obstacle. What is the thing that is causing me problems? I also want to say that, while we're talking about speedbumps, I just want to quickly put a flag in this, that the speedbump can be a happy thing, as DongWon referred to. That sometimes, like, if you just won an award or had a short story accepted for the first time, that can become an obstacle, because your brain is very bad, it will just say, you're off-balance. But it cannot always tell the difference between happy off-balance and frustrated sad off-balance. So I identify obstacles, and one of the obstacles for me, the biggest one, was executive function. That I was just having a hard time making decisions and holding things in my brain. So because of that, I started doing lists. When the lists got to be too much, I backed off of that, and started doing something that I called two hand choice. Which is actually a trick that I learned from… Through animal stuff. When you've got a nonverbal animal, you can offer them two hands, each hand represents a choice. Do you want to go inside or do you want to go outside? I learned that with my mom during her last weeks, when she became nonverbal but still quite present. I could offer her a two hand choice and she could still respond, even when she got to the point where she was only looking at the thing. But if I offered her… Like, if I said, what do you want to wear and I showed her a closet full of things, she couldn't… She had no way of letting me know. But if I held up two things, she could let me know blue dress, then, just looking at the left-hand. With that, the other piece that I learned was that if she never chose the gray dress, I stopped offering it to her. So what I started doing with myself was when I came up on a thing and I'm… I was tempted into procrastinating or having difficulty making a decision, I'm like, which of those two choices has served me before? That would be the choice that I would go with, and I would stop offering myself the choice that wasn't serving me. That got me through some times where things were very hard.
 
[Erin] Yeah, I think… I love that. I think… I'm thinking about pie, all of a sudden, and…
[Dan] That happens to me a lot.
[Laughter] [Yeah]
[Erin] And it's always…
[Howard] The food or the infinitely repeating irrational number?
[Erin] Both. No, just kidding. The food. The food pie. Because I'm thinking…
[Howard] Now I'm sad.
[Erin] Sorry. I think about a lot as like… Thinking back to the past, like, what have you been able to handle also. So, what has served you, and also, like, where… What was the one slice of pie [committed?] Like, when the pie's delicious, you want to eat all the slices. Sometimes, it takes time to figure out. Like, okay, two, and I really wish I'd had more. Like, I actually did have enough room for a third piece of pie.
[Mary Robinette] The dessert pointer.
[Erin] But, like, 10, it turns out, was not good. Was not a good idea. So, somewhere between 10 and three is, like, the right thing. I do that with projects. It's, especially, when you repeat projects, I know, like, sort of how big a slice it is. Like, this thing, if I do this one thing, I'm only going to have room for one or two other things. When I'm teaching a college class, like, that is something that takes a lot of time to prep the lessons and talk to students. So, early on when I started teaching, I was like, oh, teaching. It'll just take a minute. Then, later, I learned, no. That's big. I can only do, like, maybe one or two side projects and teach and still get sleep and still…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Drink water and still work at other things that make me happy. I think… For me, that's a second lesson, which is, like, think of yourself. Like, you are an important part of the equation. If you are not here, you cannot carry the same… True story, you cannot eat the pie. So I think that it can be easy to neglect the you in the equation, and think, like, I will just outwork it, I will out do it, I will under sleep it, I will figure it out. But ultimately, like, when you take the time for yourself, I think it gives you the strength sometimes to be able to do more by taking a pause and putting yourself first. So when I bring work to a bar, while that sounds wild, part of that is me saying if I finish this amount of work, I really like socializing with my friends, and I'm going to get to do that after I finish this. As opposed to doing it in my room and then just working and working and working and never leaving the house.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So it's a way for me to keep myself in mind if only by moving my location.
 
[DongWon] I'm completely in agreement with everything you've just said, and I've been going through a similar process, probably starting in… I'm thinking of the last two years, as whenever I think of as the triage years. Like, starting in 2020, kind of up until sometime this year, has been a real era of, like, me realizing how overbalanced I was in terms of the worklife balance, and how much I needed to keep up with the current treadmill I put myself on. Right? So a lot of it was… That's why I've been closed to submissions for a long time and things like that, of figuring out, okay, how do I rebalance in some way that moves from this triage mode of taking care of what's on fire in front of me to being able to approach my life in a more sustainable and a more balanced way. Right? So the kind of thing which is a little similar to what you're talking about in terms of like now what slices of pie can I actually handle, and how do I make space for the things in my life that are restorative to me that aren't just work focused. Right? How do I have friends who aren't just publishing people, how do I have hobbies outside of the space that I work in, and how do I have other kinds of creative projects that sustain me? Right? So, balancing all of those things has been really important. And, maybe even more importantly than all of that, being patient with myself even as I know that this has been a multiple year process, and that I can say now, coming up on the end of this year, of, like, oh, I moved out of triage, I'm doing this. That's probably not true, there's probably still going to be moments when that comes up, where that may extend further. As I build towards sustainability, that's going to require all of these different kinds of shifts in myself and checking in with myself. How do I feel about this? How does my body feel when I'm working at this level? How, emotionally, in my balancing the needs of my clients versus my own needs versus the needs of the people I care about in my life? Right? So, juggling all of these things has required a lot of therapy, no small amount of medication, and a lot of just work on myself to figure out how to approach that in a healthier way.
 
[Howard] In many cases, for me, I think it comes down to the graduation from the early wisdom, which is you can't have it all, to the later wisdom of dude, you don't actually want it all.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] That second piece of wisdom is incredibly liberating. The realization that, hey, you know what, I… A lot of these things that I've been reaching for, if I stop reaching for them and just reach for the things that I want the very most, I will be happier. Because I didn't really want those things. Maybe other people told me I wanted those things. Maybe TV told me… I don't know what the psychology is behind it. I just know that by narrowing my focus a little bit and saying the thing that I want most is the thing that I'm going to keep in front of me, and the thing that I'm going to keep aiming myself at, and everything else, I'm going to let myself ignore if I need to.
[Erin] I think, as you do that… It can be really difficult.
[Howard] Yeah.
 
[Erin] Because I think we're taught that anything we let go of, A) will never come again, B) was the best thing ever, C) that our lives will never be the same without it. But I think a lot of times, like, once that decision moment is past, you move on with the life you have. That is something that's really important, and also, to remember that other people are often much kinder to you than you are to yourself. It can be hard to say, like, I need to step back from this, I can't do that. I think a lot of times you think people will judge you. But, people are kind of, like, if you tell people, hey, I need X. Like, 99 out of 100 times, they'll be like okay, great. Like, let me know what I can do to be a part of that. Let me know how I can help. The one out of 100 is somebody who you don't need in your life anyway.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think telling people that before you hit a crisis point also helps you not need more. Because you are in a healthier place. And it also places less emotional burden on them.
[Howard] The shopping cart teaches us that we are our own worst enemy.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Writing teaches us that we are our own worst critic.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned also over the past year because… That I've been applying from last year. My mom… Parkinson's slows the brain down. So it just takes longer to answer something. The temptation when you ask a question is to fill the gap, to feel that… We're so trained in conversation that there shouldn't be a silence or… So you want to help. What I realized was that I did ask mom a question, and I would have to count in order to give her time… In my head, count… To give her time to respond. I realized that I actually needed to do that with myself so that other people… My anticipation of what they wanted didn't fill the voids. So I set a rule for myself that I've been deploying for 2024 which has made things much healthier for me, that when an exciting opportunity comes up or when I'm getting… Actually, I set the… I do what Erin's talking about, is, I tell people what I need right at the beginning. I sit down to have a conversation with someone about, like, this new project, and it's very interesting, and I tell them at the front, I'm like, you're going to hear me talk about it in ways that make it sound like I want to get involved, and I do, in the moment, but I'm not allowed to give you an answer for 24 hours. Because if I do, my sense of FOMO, my sense of excitement, is going to override my sense of what I actually need. I have been doing that this year, and I have felt like, as were coming up on the end of the year, have felt much, much better.
[Erin] I would say, just the last thing on this, is like… It is, in project terms also, I have been shocked like that a lot of times, people would rather you be honest than it turn out you can't do it.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, people would rather you say…
[Mary Robinette] So true.
[Erin] Somebody comes to me, they're like, come on, write 10,000 words of this game. I'm like, actually, I think I've got like 1000 words in me. So many times, they will be like, okay, that's fine. We'll find somebody else...
[Howard] Half of them are bad words right now.
[Erin] For the other 9000. Then, like… Then the next year, they'll come back and be like, oh, can you do 1000 again? Or, hey, maybe you can do more? Versus if I tried to take the 10,000, it's 10 years late, and then they are feeling like they are in a worse situation. So if you can, always be honest. But, yeah, before a crisis point, and really knowing yourself is… You said something once a long time ago, I think it was Dan, at a… On a cruise. You said, say no to the projects that you don't want to do because at some point, you'll have to say no to the ones you want to do. I love that wisdom.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with that, let me take you to your homework. I want you to use this time, the end of the calendar year, the end of the season, to think about what would be the restorative for you. Don't think about what other people think are restorative. Like, if you don't like the beach, beaches are not restorative. Think about something that would be restorative for you. And then take a step to actually doing that. Yes, I am in fact giving you a writing excuses.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Now go rest.
 
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event
 
 
Key points: Event stories are driven by disruptions of the status quo, the normal. They tend towards externally driven conflicts. Begin with a disruption of the status quo, end either with a restoration of the old or a new status quo. Events happen! But mostly, sequences of breaking, over and over and over. Cascades following one decision. But not just big events, small disruptions too. Obstacles are when each action further disturbs the status quo. Complications are when one problem opens up a different problem. Focus on where the characters are expending effort, what are they trying to solve. External events can be overwhelming, how do you avoid that? First, every try-fail cycle does not need to be the same size, or have the same difficulty. So, control pacing by picking smaller events and consequences, and stacking them. Make a list of possible problems, and slowly escalate them. Consequences are what matters to the character. When you start a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of a story, you only have one. Gradually take away choices, close doors, until there is only one left. Make it a hard choice!
 
[Season 16, Episode 39]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive into Event.
[C.L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C.L.] I'm C.L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Dan] We are back with the fifth episode of our M.I.C.E. Quotient master class. So excited to have you all here for it. Today we're going to talk about the fourth and final element, event.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So event stories are driven by disruptions of normal. These are… Tend to be very externally driven conflicts. They began when a status quo is disrupted, and end when it is restored or there's a new status quo. So many things that we think of as plot are actually event. There's a tendency I've noticed among particularly science fiction and fantasy readers to think that the big actions that are happening are all of the plot, and they forget that all of the other pieces are also plot.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But event is all of the things that happen. But it's mostly about things breaking over and over and over again. It's that thing that happens in the real world where you're like, "I'm just…" And I should say, we are having our bathroom remodeled as we are recording this.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] The cascading effect of making one decision to change a status quo, which is, let's have a new bathroom, winds up impacting everything else. Because once you decide that you're going to peel up the floor, then you discover that since your grandfather built the house, that the floor beams are actually two by sixes instead of two by tens which is standard for a floor. So that then in turn breaks their ability to put in water lines and air conditioning because they have to fit them into smaller spaces. Also, then you have to have things reassembled. Then, when you're trying to record a podcast, there are contractors who are constantly coming in and interrupting. None of you have heard any of this because we have solved it by managing to record around things. But it is this cascading chain led from one decision to make one change in the status quo that is then breaking all the rest of my normal. Good times.
 
[Charlotte] Good times. I'm so glad that you said that, because I think certainly for me when I was starting out with event, I always thought of it is something massively big, explosions, a meteor coming, Independence Day type thing, but it can actually be something much, much smaller, like a bathroom or a tap on your sink breaking, something like this. Anything that disrupts the status quo, or your normal. Right?
[Mary Robinette] That is absolutely correct. So, again, as you say, this is… But a lot of times when we think about ramping up the tension in event stories, we think about needing to make things bigger and bigger and bigger. It's really just about this cascade of normal breaking, that you attempt to fix something and not only does it not work, but something else breaks next to it. So, again, in the obstacle versus complication thing, obstacles in this form are when each action causes the status quo to become more disturbed. So, again, in small frame world, if someone has a problem with their boss, that's an external problem. That's not the problems they have with themselves, that's an external problem. So they want to change that status quo. They go to HR to try to resolve it. That action then directly causes them to get fired. So that's an obstacle. It's where they tried to change something and a problem in the same thread line causes it to just go wrong. Complications are when a question opens up to a different problem. So someone has a problem with their boss. They go to HR. That, in turn, leads to them being held prisoner by terrorists. Who are the terrorists? Where did they come from? This is heading things in a completely different way. So these are… This is the kind of thing that you're looking for. I mean, you could make the argument in some cases that this is a continuation of a disruption of status quo. I am thinking of it is kicking off an inquiry thread about who are these people and the milieu of escaping a hostage situation.
 
[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say, event is the one that is the hardest for me to get my head around. Is that your experience as well? Is there something trickier about event, or am I just thinking about it wrong?
[Mary Robinette] I think that it is that… Because event is action driven, everything feels like it's an event. Stories are inherently about change. That's a thing that happens in stories. So when you're looking at… Let's say that you're doing a milieu story and your characters… Let's say your characters crash land on a planet. If they arrive on the planet, that is definitely a milieu story and the thing that they're trying to solve is getting off the planet. If they are explorers and they land under a controlled set up in the story begins after they have already arrived on the planet and they are attempting to… Their ship breaks. Okay, the ship breaking is, at this point, an event. Because it has disrupted their status quo. Because they're supposed to be there and they're supposed to be exploring. Whereas if they are crashing on the planet, if they are there unexpectedly, and trying to leave, their primary goal is to leave the planet and fixing the event of the problem with the ship is incidental to the primary thrust, which is getting off and surviving the planet. That's why it is… With this one, and with all of them, the question that you're looking at and the thing that is often the deciding factor isn't necessarily… I mean, a lot of it is where you start and stop. But a lot of it is what are they trying to solve. Where are they expending their effort? In a murder… If someone is murdered and you put the focus, the primary effort goes into trying to answer questions, that's an inquiry. If the primary focus goes into learning to live after this person has been murdered, and someone else's dealing with the question of who did it, there are detectives who are going off and solving things. But the focus of the story is on how does the widow survive, how does the widower learn to fold his own laundry… It's a little bit of gender stereotyping, and…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] We're just going to roll with it right now. My husband is actually the one who does laundry in our household. So… But this is… That's the… One of them, the focus is on trying to establish a new normal, and the other is on trying to answer a question. That tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle and where you're putting your emphasis.
[Dan] Okay. So, as with some of the other ones we've looked at, the value then of figuring out what kind of story, which of the four M.I.C.E. elements you're dealing with is that it helps you to focus your story and it helps you take it in the right direction, so that you're not spinning off like you said into story bloat and adding unnecessarily unnecessary elements because you know more exactly what your story is about.
[Mary Robinette] That is correct.
 
[Mary Robinette] Actually, I'm going to talk… Pause here to talk about our book of the week, because I think that's a good example of this, and the trickiness there. So I am the audiobook narrator for Seanan McGuire. Also, currently, as we are recording this, I am in the process of recording When Sorrows Come which is her new book. When you hear this, it will be out. It's book 15 in the October Daye series, so FYI. But the thing about these books is that they are a combination inquiry-event with character going on as well. But the thing about the inquiry… Toby is a detective, and there are things that she needs to answer. But really, when you're signing up for the books, what you're interested in is watching her kick some ass. So the primary driver in a lot… Is arguably that these are event books. Chaos just surrounds her, things are constantly going wrong. She's constantly getting stabbed, she's constantly needing to solve problems. There is much less emphasis put on the actual detecting. The detecting exists is a set up to give us all of the events that go wrong. Are we there and interested in it? Yes. Does it need to carry weight? Absolutely, because it's a novel, and it has multiple threads. But the driver for most of this is about this… These events, these things going wrong. There's also character stuff that's happening that is wonderful. There's… It's kind of a constant coming-of-age. But it is a coming-of-age that is always being kicked off by things going terribly, terribly wrong. And that affecting everything else in Toby's life. I like these books a lot. I enjoy narrating them. I… In every book, Seanan makes me cry while narrating.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, I highly recommend them. I get better as a narrator, FYI, over the course of 15 books. So don't judge me too harshly on the first books. But…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] But that was… The new one is When Sorrows Come. Correct?
[Mary Robinette] When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire. Yes. It…
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Is absolutely a… It is status quo disruptions, just constant status quo disruptions. Like, we're going to check this thing out. Then the process of checking this thing out causes someone to get killed. The process of checking out how they get killed causes someone else to get killed. This is not a spoiler if you ever read an October Daye novel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Charlotte] So, with an event story, if it's about action, external things happening, status quo's being disrupted, how do you keep that from becoming overwhelming? Like, something happens and then something else happens and then another thing happens and it's all related, it's all consequence and staying in the same M.I.C.E. element. I guess it's a question about pacing, really. Like, how to control that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, pacing… The… One of the things that I misunderstood what I was first learning to apply the M.I.C.E. elements to things is thinking that every try-fail cycle had to be the same size, and that they all had to be the same levels of difficulty. So, similarly, that I that all of the consequences had to ramp up at the same proportional level.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that you can do when you're trying to control pacing through the events that happen in the consequences of those events is to think about smaller consequences and stacking them. Sometimes what I will do is I will make a list of possible consequences, things that can go terribly wrong. Then I'll… This is in a… I should say, this is in a phase when I'm stuck and brainstorming. It is not the way I just… Normally I just write. But when I'm stuck and brainstorming, I'll list the consequences and then I'll rank them in kind of best case scenario to worst-case scenario.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Then remove the best case scenario and sort of dole out the worst-case scenarios in a slowly escalating piece of rolling disasters.
 
[Charlotte] Right. This is all…
[Mary Robinette] But, like pacing is… Go ahead.
[Charlotte] No, I was going to say, this is always in relation obviously to your character, because what is devastatingly awful to me might not be the same for my sister or my friend. So it's always with the character in mind, right, the list of consequences?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlotte] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Right, right. Exactly. Because you're thinking about the character's status quo being disrupted. Although… So it is their sense of normal and their place in the world. The world being disrupted, for instance, there are big disruptions like the horrible disruptions happening in Greece right now as we're recording this. Terrible, terrible fires. Those are not affecting me. So it is a disruption of the status quo, but it is not a disruption to my status quo. C?
[C.L.] There was something I wanted to add around pacing. One thing that really got my head around the concept of pacing was the idea that when you begin a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of the story, you have one. Pacing is all about taking choices away, gradually. Closing more doors until there is only one thing left to do.
[Dan] Oh, that's brilliant.
[Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here going, "Yeah. Yeah, because it really is…" It is about getting to… Trying to get them to a point where it's an impossible choice, it's a choice that is hard.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Speaking of things that are hard, should I give them homework?
[Yes]
[Dan] I think that's great.
[Mary Robinette] All right. Grab your fairytale. You are going to attempt to strip out everything except the event stuff. So with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the three bears come home, there is a home intruder in the bear's home. Furniture has been broken. They have to drive this little blonde girl out of their home. Their dinner has been eaten, they have to re-make dinner. Papa Bear has to repair furniture. Then, and only then, after they have restored their status quo, are they truly safe.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Or there's a home intruder and Papa Bear just kills her. Now they have to live with the consequences.
[Laughter]
[garbled… Porridge. What are you doing, Papa Bear? I'm retiring.]
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Okay. So I want to ask, and I know this is homework, but I want to dig into this for a second. Is there a way to cast Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an event story from Goldilocks' point of view without making it just a milieu story?
[Mary Robinette] So, it is about a disruption to the status quo. If we start…
[Dan] If we start the story when she's in the house and the bears show up?
[C.L.] I think in this case…
[Dan] I don't know.
[C.L.] Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as an event story, Goldilocks is the antagonist.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. The only… Like… I think if you… Huh. So, it is about a change in the status quo. If Goldilocks wants to make a change in the status quo, then she would need… What does she want to change? Goldilocks. Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch. You have to start it at a different point.
[Dan] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch and is trying to force her to take a nap. She doesn't want anything to do with that. So she is going to make a forcible break from her family and she's going to run away from home. It gets back into character again.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Wow. I'm not sure. I think there's got to be a way to make Goldilocks an event story.
[Dan] Well, rather than puzzle over it now, that'll be a bonus homework. If anyone comes up with a really good one, let us know.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] But, for now, you are out of excuses. Go write.
 
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 Writing Excuses 16.38: Deep Dive into Character
 
 
Key points: Character stories are driven by character's self-doubt, angst, internal conflicts. A problem with themselves. They begin with "Who am I?" and end with, "This is who I am." Often paired with an external catalyst to cause the moment of self-doubt. An exploration of self-discovery. Wanting to change, to be somebody different. Character stories do not require a deeply flawed character. Struggles with priorities, struggles with expectations. Obstacles are when each self-revelation opens up new problems with self-identity. Complications are when the self-revelation opens up different problems not related to identity. Coming-of-age stories are often character stories, trying on different identities, coupled with event stories, changes in the external status quo. In try-fail cycles in character stories, the character is either clinging to an old self-definition or trying on a new one, asking, "Is this who I am?" Many stories have an outer character frame, because it provides a satisfying emotional payoff at the end of the story. How do you avoid navel gazing? Multiple threads, stakes, or... make sure you externalize the internal changes!
 
[Season 16, Episode 38]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. Deep Dive into Character.
[C.L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C.L.] I'm C. L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Dan] We are continuing our really wonderful M. I. C. E. Quotient class taught by Mary Robinette Kowal. Thank you so much. And thank you to C. L. and Charlotte for being here. Today we get a talk about character in nice juicy details. So, take it away.
[Mary Robinette] All right. So. To recap, in the M. I. C. E. Quotient, character stories are basically stories that are driven by the characters' self-doubt. Angst. They are very much about internal conflicts. They are about a problem that the character has with themselves. They began when your character basically asks, "Who am I?" and they end when they say, "This is who I am." Most of the time, when you see a character story told in the wild, it is paired with something else, and there is a catalyst, an external catalyst, that causes that moment of self-doubt. That moment does… Can… Doesn't have to be a major driver of the story. So if your character is plagued with self-doubt because… It's like I thought that I was a charming philanthropist, and someone is like, "No, actually, I find you very much an asshole." They don't need to necessarily try to fix that person's opinion of them. But that can be the moment that causes them to have the self-doubt, and they're like, "Am I? Am I? I thought I was charming?" Then kicks off this exploration of self-discovery. It also can be something that they are trying to fix. So in a romance, that relationship that misin… That probably completely accurate impression is something that they would be trying to fix, because they wanted to have a relationship with the person. But they don't have to. So, in a classic one, it is just about the character being sad about who they are and wanting to be somebody different. I'm also going to say…
 
[Charlotte] So in my…
[Mary Robinette] Oh. Yes. Go, Charlotte.
[Charlotte] Sorry, Mary Robinette. I just completely spoke over you. But I think while it's true that an event can help kick off a character story, also, the reverse is true? So the novel that I'm currently grappling with, it's the character and their flaw who makes a mistake, and then that kicks off an event that upsets the status quo. So you can play around with which order these things happen in.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Absolutely. One of the challenges sometimes with this is that the urge when you're doing a character story is to make the character deeply flawed so that they can come to some magical realization and become a better person. The fact is you don't have to make someone deeply flawed to have a character story happen. It can be just two pieces of themselves warring about which… What they're going to prioritize. Do they prioritize work or family? This is a thing that we often have to struggle with. That is enough to be a character story.
[Dan] Yeah. A great example that came to mind is It's a Wonderful Life. Which is a character story about a really, really good person. Who, kind of his problem is he's got big ambitions and big dreams that he keeps giving up because he's too nice. He gives all his money and all his time to other people. That does eventually lead him to a suicide attempt, so there's definitely flaws at work. But in general, it's a character story about a very good person rather than about a very flawed one.
[Charlotte] I'm also thinking about the kind of character story where someone is trying really, really hard to be who they think they are supposed to be, and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with character flaws at all. That the process of their character story is to question all of these things that they are supposed to be, and discover who they actually are. So, in a way, it's actually a story about rebellion.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Which actually leads me to talk a little bit about the obstacles versus complications in this form. So, obstacles in… When you're looking at a character story, is that each self revelation, each time they discover something new, it opens up additional problems with their self identity. So if they're like, "Well, this is who I'm supposed to be, this is how everybody sees me." When they're going through that, and then they realize, "Oh, but this doesn't actually fit me." That shows them… This one piece of how everybody sees me doesn't fit me, and if I try to shift that, it shows this problem with this other piece of me. So you can have this cascading sense of problems with self identity. But complications are when self revelation opens up a different problem that is not related specifically to their identity. So this would be things like where… That… Imposter syndrome makes them decide that they aren't going to turn in… That they aren't going to turn in the manuscript, say. And they aren't going to communicate to their editor about this. I'm not speaking to anyone in our audience at all.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That's all being motivated by this sense of self, but what it kicks off is this whole cascade of event problems, where everything has to move around because the manuscript hasn't been turned in. It could eventually lead to a status quo change, where they are… They have to return the advance. To be clear, just for anyone who's afraid of this, it is totally okay to be late with your manuscript as long as you communicate clearly with your editor.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I say… And I am late with my manuscript.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] I have a question, but before we get to it, I'd love to hear about the book of the week. So, Charlotte, you're the one who has our book of the week this time.
[Charlotte] That's right. It's me on book of the week. So, my book of the week is Popisho. P. O. P. I. S. H. O. In the US, or This One Sky Day in the UK, by Leone Ross. It is full of amazing, magical characters. It's a super sensual novel. It conjures a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits. It just brims and blisters with life and love and grief and magic. The overarching, I guess, thread is character, because it's also a love story.
[Mary Robinette] I think I need to read this, a lot.
[Charlotte] You do. Everybody should read it. Popisho…
[Mary Robinette] Popisho or This One Sky Day.
[Charlotte] This one… That's it!
 
[Mary Robinette] Dan, what was your thing?
[Dan] Okay. So I am wondering about coming-of-age novels. Coming-of-age stories. Something like Little Women or Huckleberry Finn. Are those character stories?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] I'm asking mostly because I can't think of where else they fit.
[Mary Robinette] They are. I mean, so, coming-of-age often is coupled with event, because they are experiencing a change in external status quo. Not always. But frequently. But really, what it is is that the character is trying on different identities, a lot of times, as part of the coming-of-age. This is something that we all go through when we are teens, and sometimes it continues on. The thing to understand about character stories is the try-fail cycles. So in try-fail cycles, your character is basically clinging to their old self-definition or they are trying on a new one. It's basically, it's this… The idea is that we… Our self-definition is super precious to us, and shifting it is terrifying. Because it completely redefines who we are. So every time you have a try-fail cycles, what your character is doing is like, "Is this who I am?" is the question that they're asking. If they're trying to break out of a role, it's like it's someone that they don't want to be. If they're trying to take on a new role, this is… They're experimenting. So, "Is this who I am?" is the question that they're asking. When they fail, the answer is no, this is not who I am. That leads them to their next level, because they have to try something else at that point. So, that's… That is basically what's going on with the try-fail cycle. In the coming-of-age stories, it's… They're… They are doing two things, frequently, when it's a kid growing up. They are trying to cling to the safe things of childhood, and they're also trying to reach to the adulthood. So frequently what you've got is they're doing both. They are trying to cling to their old self-definition and they are trying to try on the new ones at the same time.
 
[Dan] Yeah. It occurs to me as well that character might be the most common. As we talk about nesting these things, character might be that the most common outer frame. You look at something like Shawshank Redemption, which is clearly a milieu story overall, but it doesn't really end until the character Red learns to hope again. Which is how we started the movie. There's this thin shell of character development around it. There's countless examples that we don't necessarily have to go through. But whatever story you're telling, there's this character frame around it, because that's kind of that really satisfying emotional button on the end of the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, as you were saying that, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. This is… Reluctant hero is the same…" That's the… Like, "Am I a hero? No." Then you get to the end of the story. "I am a hero."
[Dan] Yeah. I mean, not to do another Morgan Freeman one, but Seven does the same thing. It is obviously an inquiry story, through and through. But it begins with Morgan Freeman saying, "This is a horrible place and my life is awful and I gotta get out of here." It ends with him saying, "You know what? I can do a lot of good if I stick around here." Again, he has learned to hope, he has grown as a person. That is the shell around the inquiry story, is this character frame.
[C.L.] That is the most optimistic reading of the ending of Seven that I have…
[Laughter]
[C.L.] Ever heard in my life.
[Dan] Well, but it's true, though, because the inquiry story ends horribly, but the story itself ends with him kind of getting a little bit of hope. Yeah, it's… You gotta really dig through some mud to find any kind of optimism there, but it's there.
 
[Charlotte] It's there. Mary Robinette, and my other people in this podcast, question. Character story. How do you get it… How do you stop it from being navel gazey? How do you make it a driver, how do you keep it going? How do you make it exciting?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, this is… That's such a good question, because frequently people are just… They think, "Oh, if my character is dealing with this internal self-doubt, it's all my character just going, 'Oh, woe is me. Woe!'"
[Charlotte] Absolutely. A lot of describing of the thoughts and the feelings and the… There's no action.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So…
[C.L.] As… It's… I was going to say, like, the thing about all of these elements so far that I'm seeing, especially with character, is that it needs some juice.
[Charlotte] Yes.
[C.L.] Like, we're doing an escape from this place because… We are answering these questions because… We are examining ourselves and changing because…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. This is, again, why you almost never see them solo, because they can be super dull. You need the juice that another thread gives you. Or the stakes, what… Why does it matter to the character. The… For me, the thing that I think about is that while you have an internal conflict, you have to externalize it to make it visible. So, again, I come out of theater, and so what you're looking… One of the things that we say is, "Acting is reacting." That the character… It's not just the character sitting there and having feelings inside themselves, it is them reacting to their environment and moving through it and taking action. But the actions that you take and the reactions that you have change from person to person. What happens in a character story is that a character is becoming a different person as they go through the story. So the actions, the externalization of that change means that they are making different concrete choices in the physical world, based on the internal changes that are happening to them. So making… Figuring out why… What are the… What does the way their mind is built, what does that do to affect the way they move through the world? Then you make… You frequently windup presenting them with increments of the same choice and that they respond to that choice in slightly different ways each time they come upon it. It doesn't mean that it has to be exactly the same beats, but it's the same kind of thematic choice. Like, do I kick the puppy this time or do I not kick the puppy?
[Chuckles]
[Dan] The question we all must ask ourselves.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I may have just revealed too much about myself there.
 
[Dan] Awesome. So what homework do we have for character?
[Mary Robinette] Shockingly, we're taking our fairytale and we are converting it straight to being just a character story. So, in our story of Goldilocks, there are four different characters and I can decide to center that story on any one of them. So if I center it on Goldilocks, Goldilocks is tired of being treated like a child. So she is going to prove that she's not a child by going out and having adventures. Then realizes the adventures are too frightening for her, and that maybe she's better off being a little girl after all. Or, it can be Mama Bear desperately wants to be a great porridge artist. But no one appreciates her porridge. Her family doesn't. She's disconsolate. Her family takes her out to try to cheer her up. She attempts to pack a picnic to fit into the mold that they want her to fit into. She's just so unhappy making sandwiches. Sandwiches are for a different kind of bear. She returns home nearly broken and discovers that someone has eaten her porridge and loved it. She has found her audience. A little blonde girl. So you can do this in any way you want. Now, obviously, there is in my very dramatic Mama Bear telling, there is an event that happens in there that's the catalyst, which is someone comes and eats her porridge. But what we're looking at there is her attempting to fit herself into the mold that people are expecting her to be in, and her sadness that she is not appreciated for who she truly is. A great porridge artist. So…
[Dan] Well, now I want to read that version of the story.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] All right. So your job is to take whatever you're working on and try to strip it down to being just character. Good luck.
[Dan] Excellent. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 

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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/31/wx-14-13-obstacles-vs-complications/
 
Key points: obstacles versus complications. People, things, or circumstances that impede the progress of the character or the story. Obstacles can simply be overcome, but complications cause ramifications that make the story take a turn. In terms of MICE threads, obstacles keep you on the same path, but complications take you to another thread. Obstacles are linear, complications change the direction or goals. Obstacles often are within scenes, while complications strengthen act breaks and make the audience come back. A story that is all complications may be too twisty, while a story that is just obstacles may be too linear and frustratingly slow. Try mixing yes-but, no-and with complications and obstacles. A couple of major complications may be plenty.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 13.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Obstacles vs. Complications.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm in the way.
[Chuckles, laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So, I wanted to do this because a couple of times on Writing Excuses, you've heard me say, talking about obstacles versus complications and how I learned about it from Margaret Dunlap, and it occurred to me that we actually have Margaret here, so instead of having to listen to my fumbling attempt to distill this theory that she has come up with, we could just have her explain it to you. So, Margaret, tell us, please, about obstacles versus complications.
[Margaret] Okay. So, obstacles versus complications is, I think… I was trying to think back to the origin of this. For me, it goes back to learning how to write to act breaks. Because you… Classically, you write to the act break, you're going to stop, have commercials, and you want something that's going to drive the audience to come back. The problem of writing television today is the television audiences have watched hundreds of hours of television, and they kind of know how television works. So if you put in a classic kind of cliffhanger of like, "Oh, no. Is Mulder going to die?" on the X-Files, well, probably not. Most of your audience is pretty well aware that at the end of act one, it's likely Mulder's probably still going to be with us for the rest of this episode. So, TV writers had to get better at making stories twistier. So, obstacles versus complications, both of these are people, things, or circumstances that are somehow impeding the progress of the character or the story. The difference is, while an obstacle is something that your character can overcome and then keep moving, a complication is something that they have to deal with and then causes ramifications that causes the story to take a turn.
[Mary Robinette] If I can jump in here, one of the… Because we spent a delightful period of time talking about this, and for me, one of… It clarified something that I've talked to my students about, which is when I talk about the MICE quotient and talk about how you can have multiple threads and they can be braided together, I intellectually like… Not intellectually. I had an intuitive sense of what it meant, but I had a difficult time articulating it. So an obstacle keep you on the same path. It's like a straightahead thing. If you're on a milieu line, you stay on a milieu line. Whereas, a complication will kick you off over into a character line.
[Brandon] That is really fascinating.
[Mary Robinette] Isn't it!
[Brandon] Yeah. That's really helpful.
[Howard] Obstacle is the speedbump, complication is the detour sign which you're not actually sure which side road it's pointing to.
[Margaret] Right. Or the detour sign that someone has taken away, or… I have an example of if I am a renowned thief and I am trying to break into Mary's home, the locked door is an obstacle. The fact that Mary is home, and I thought that she wasn't, that is a complication. Potentially. If I knock her out because I am awesome, because I'm an internationally renowned thief, then she is effectively an obstacle. But if she provides information that the thing I have come to steal, I'm not stealing it back, I'm just stealing it, that creates a complication.
[Brandon] Yeah, this is really interesting, because a lot of plot formats, particularly some of the ones rooted in screenwriting, talk about this idea of at some point during the story, you're… The characters are going to realize their goals are larger or different than they wanted them to be. Knowing the difference between obstacle versus that complication that can open their eyes to a greater plot could be really helpful.
 
[Margaret] Yeah. It's also a way to take a story that has a very linear progression, and think about… Because often we know where we want a story to end. It's like, "All right. Well, the character starts and they had that way." If you think in terms of complications, maybe they start out going in this direction… Yeah, as you can tell from watching me moving my hands on the podcast…
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] They start moving to the right. A series of complications might bend them around 180° and get… Or, more likely, 90°, speaking narratively. We rarely have a character start out seeking the exact opposite of what they wind up getting. But those are the complications that can create those twists that aren't… A shocking twist that you'll never see coming. But just those little shifts in the narrative.
[Howard] There is a classic twist in the… Elementary, CBS's Sherlock Holmes thing, that I've described to my kids as the act two corpse. Which is the point at which we are moving along, and then someone is dead who we are not expecting to be dead. Maybe it's an obstacle, because we can no longer ask that person questions. But we discovered that it's more complex. What's fun is that even though my kids will now watch TV with me and lean forward and say, "Act two corpse? Is it… Yay! Act two corpse!" The episode still works, because we don't know what the complication is going… We don't know what's going to happen. We just know there's been a complication, and we are on board for where our heroes take it.
[Margaret] It's the murder mystery where your prime suspect is the second victim.
[Brandon] I've done that before. It's very handy.
[Margaret] And classic for a reason.
 
[Brandon] Let's break here for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] Great. So our book of the week is Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a fantastic book. On one level, you can read it as just monster hunters going after monsters. But it's so much more than that. So this is after the world has basically drowned under the big water. It's set on what used to be a Navajo reservation. It has been reborn as Dinetah. All of the gods and heroes of the land are kind of there again. So, like, there's Coyote. It's wonderful. It's relevant to this because it has a great series of obstacles in complications. There are obstacles that are just getting in the way of her tracking down the monster, and then there are complications which are completely affecting the way… A relationship with herself, her relationship with other people. It's wonderful, wonderful storytelling.
[Brandon] So tell us one more time.
[Mary Robinette] It is the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.
[Brandon] Excellent.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Since we are talking about obstacles in complications, one of the things that I wanted to also talk to our listeners about, we've talked a little bit about how to use them. I also want to talk about the dangers of them. Like the dangers of a story that is only complications.
[Margaret] Only complications. The danger of a story that is just piling complication on top of complication on top of complication is that it can be easy to lose track of the stakes. If we are constantly shifting what's going on, what are we after, how is it happening, it's tough for the audience to… It can be difficult for the audience to remain invested. Because it's who's on first. They're losing track of what is our ultimate goal, what are we actually pushing towards, are we making progress towards it, or do we keep just getting derailed into detours? It is possible to make a story too twisty.
[Mary Robinette] Is it possible to go the other direction, and just have just obstacles?
[Margaret] Yeah. I think the danger of a story that is only obstacles is that, one, it can feel like your character isn't getting anywhere because anytime they're building up a head of steam, they're hitting another wall. The other risk that we sort of talked about earlier is that the story can feel very linear. It's like I am headed to grandma's house. The road goes out. So I've got to get a boat. The boat blows over. It just keeps going. One thing to another thing to another thing, but we never shift years. You can do it. But there is a risk that it just feels like a straight shot down a hallway, and why is it taking you so long to walk?
[Brandon] I've worried about both of those things, with the yes-but, no-and methodology that we've talked about, that Mary introduced me to, which is great. I use it in my class for those discovery writers who don't know how to outline, and don't really want to outline. I say, here's a method. But I worry about if they do this the wrong way, you're going to end up with only complications, because it's so easy to say, yes, they do accomplish this, but weird wacky things happens that sends us off in another direction.
 
[Mary Robinette] So that brings up the question of progress in pacing. One of the things that I talk about sometimes with the yes-but, no-in is, since in Western storytelling, we have the rule of three. Which is three times are funny, third times a charm, three times are unlucky. We just… We're geared to think in terms of threes. That you can use that in hack with it. If you want something to feel easy, then you have it happen with less than three trial error cycles. If you want it to feel hard, then you do more than three try-fail cycles. So with a yes-but, it's like yes, but complication. Then with no-and, it's like no, and obstacle. To a certain degree. So you can… I feel like you can control pacing to a certain degree that way. How do you con… Do you use these as tools to control pacing?
[Margaret] Um…
[Mary Robinette] I mean, it's hard… It feels like it when you're talking about act breaks.
[Margaret] Yeah. I mean, it is a way to control pacing. I think when writing in television format, it's such a set structure. Even now, as we're seeing more TV being written without commercial breaks. If you're writing for a Netflix or one of the other premium services, you don't necessarily have commercials that are coming in between, but I like to try to write on that 4 to 5 act structure anyway, just because it ensures that things are happening. That you're not getting the episode that feels like, "Okay, this is just an installment, but nothing's really happening. It's a lot of kind of dithering around and nothing is really changing, nothing's really progressing." Having those sorts of stops along the wheel of setting up the problem of the week, making our first attempt at it, a big turn at the midpoint that shifts things around, having to recover and prepare for that, and our final confrontation act five, having that is a kind of baseline structure sets up that… One, the idea that we're accomplishing something in a single episode, even if it's a piece of a much larger story. But also, again with a television audience that watched a lot of television, there are certain rhythms that you get use to. You can shift those rhythms. I watched a lot of Law & Order in high school and college. Then I started watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I realized that I would start getting really antsy around the half-hour point in Homicide, because subliminally I was waiting for the cops to hand it over to the lawyers to handle the second half of the show.
[Mary Robinette] [Ooooo]
[Margaret] But Homicide is all cops. It took a while to get used to the different pacing and the different rhythm. But having that television falling into those… Saying familiar patterns feels like it's cliché, but just that sort of the storytelling rhythms that at a certain level feel comfortable that you can use or shift up in order to really unsettle your audience.
[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, I realized that when I earlier said yes, but complication, no, and obstacle, that made it sound like those are the pairings that you have to do. Which is not actually true at all. Yes his progress towards the goal, no is progress away from the goal. Then, complications and obstacles are additional tools that you can use in terms of shifting. I find that I am more likely to use obstacles as a… Within a, roughly put, within a scene, and then use the complications kind of as I approach a scene end.
[Margaret] I think, complications, you do have to be judicious with them, at least in terms of major complications. If you look at… If you look at the Leverage pilot, which I'm guessing many listeners and people here on this podcast are familiar with, you get a couple of really big complications in that, but only a couple. We've been hired to steal airplane plans. It turns out those airplane plans, we didn't steal them back from the person who stole them. We just stole them from the people that created them. Then they have obstacles in trying to get revenge from the person who set them up. With… There are some additional complications buried in there, but they aren't all necessarily… A complication doesn't have to be earthshaking. It can be you have to take your little sister with you on this heist job, and how are we going to handle that?
[Howard] The nice thing about the Leverage show format with regard to complications is that when the heist is one in which we are going to be shown, after the fact, that there was a piece they were actually prepared for this. The final complication looks to us like the nail in the coffin that, nope, they're not going to survive this twist. Oh, wait, this is the one they were ready for. That bit of formulaic TV writing… Yes, if formulaic, and yes, if you watch an entire… You binge watch Leverage, you can start to see the seams, but… It's beautiful. I love the way it's done.
[Margaret] I would just like to say, John, Howard said it was formulaic, I didn't.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. Let's… This has been really fascinating. It's really helped kind of frame this in my head. Something that… Like Mary said, I've always kind of known, but never been able to put words to.
 
[Brandon] You also have a piece of homework for us, right, Margaret?
[Margaret] What I'd like you to try to do is take a story, either something you've written or another story, and either find or insert an obstacle into it. Then, brainstorm what might happen if that obstacle were actually a complication. It's something that forces the narrative to take a turn. See what happens.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.5: Villain, Antagonist, Obstacle

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/04/13-5-villain-antagonist-obstacle/

Key points: Holding up a mirror to hero, protagonist, main character, we have villain, antagonist, obstacle. Something or someone in the way is an obstacle. Someone intentionally working against the protagonist achieving goals is an antagonist. Evil makes a villain! Villains, antagonists and obstructions are key to good stories. Conflicts make the story change, while obstacles are just in the way. You may decide which one to use based on where you want the story to focus -- obstacles make protagonists more proactive, while antagonists and villains often make them more reactive. Consider scale. Superpowers and minor issues don't play well together. Antagonists can allow you to explore different viewpoints around an issue, topic, or theme.

Thesis, antithesis... )

[Brandon] Mary, you had some homework for us.
[Mary] Yes. So. Last month, when we were talking about hero, protagonist, main character, we had you tell a story where you broke the hero, the protagonist and the main character apart and told it from different viewpoints. What we want you to do this time is to only have one main character, but they're facing three different types of problems. Same scene. One time, you're going to write it where they're just facing an obstacle or an obstruction. The next time you write it, reset everything to zero, and now they're facing an antagonist. Then you do it again, and they're facing a villain.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.18: The Hollywood Formula

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/02/writing-excuses-6-18-hollywood-formula/

Key points: The Hollywood formula starts with three characters: the protagonist, antagonist, and relationship or dynamic character. Protagonist must want something concrete, a definite achievable goal. Antagonist places obstacles in the path of the protagonist and is diametrically opposed to the protagonist. The antagonist is not necessarily a bad guy. Relationship character accompanies the protagonist on the journey, articulates the theme, and in the end reconciles the protagonist and antagonist. First act (30 pages) introduces the characters and what they want, poses the fateful decision, and closes. Second act (60 pages): transition from asking questions to answering questions, and ends with the low point. Third act (30 pages) is the final battle. End with the protagonist achieves his goal, defeats the antagonist, and reconciles with the relationship character. The closer all three events are to each other, the stronger the emotional impact.
now showing on the silver screen )
[Howard] Very cool. All right, well, we are pretty much all the way out of time. Who wants to throw a writing prompt?
[Mary] So, for your writing prompt, come up with a protagonist, an antagonist, and a relationship character. Then see what happens if you start spinning a story.
[Howard] Excellent. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[Edited 10/30/2013 to give the right name: Paolo Bacigalupi]
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 23: How to Write without Twists

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-23-how-to-write-without-twists/

Key points: Simple surprises and obstacles are not plot twists. Watching engaging characters overcome real problems is satisfying. Watching characters make progress is satisfying. Stories without twists often have strong setups with very clear conflicts and high stakes. Even stories with major plot twists often have straight-forward subplots.
The Peppermint Twist? )
[Brandon] Let's do a writing prompt before this spirals completely into insanity.
[Jordo] Is it going to be Jane Austen and Diehard?
[Brandon] No.
[Dan] No?
[Howard] It can't be Pride and Prejudice and zombies, either, because that's been done.
[Dan] It's going to be Sense and Sensibility and terrorists.
[Brandon] You have lots of excuses why you are not going to write, but we're going to pretend you don't. Thanks for listening. This has been Writing Excuses.

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