Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-38-an-interview-with-charlie-jane-anders

 

Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...

 

[Season 20, Episode 38]

 

[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 38]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

 

[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.

[Charlie Jane] Hi.

[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.

[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]

[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.

[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.

[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?

[Charlie Jane] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness  in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?

 

[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Charlie Jane] Sorry.

[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.

[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.

 

[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?

[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.

 

[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.

[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.

[Charlie Jane] Yay.

[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.

[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.

[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff  I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.

[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.

[Charlie Jane] Oh.

[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]

[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.

[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.

[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.

[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.

[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?

[Charlie Jane] I mean…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.