wetranscripts | Entries tagged with outline

Writing Excuses 20.19: Cooking as a Writing Metaphor

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-19-cooking-as-a-writing-metaphor

Key Points: Swapping ingredients is creative! Chefs learn from recipes, you can too! Mac & cheese and fanfic. Cooking at home does not mean you are a failed professional chef. Sustenance writing? Meal prepping and writing prep. Creme Brulé. Understand the technique behind the recipe. Things will go wrong. Joyful mistakes! Know what biscuits should be before you make one. Good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.

[Season 20, Episode 19]

[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 19]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Cooking as a Writing Metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Howard] Hey, you know what I love? I really love to make food for other people. Almost as much as I love eating. But I think all of us kind of love eating. I remember years and years and years ago, we were talking about creativity and how occasionally you'll talk to somone and they're like, "Oh, I'm not creative. I'm just... I can't create to save my life." "Do you cook?" "Well, yeah, of course I cook." "So, if you're cooking a thing and you don't have one of the ingredients you need, what do you do?" "Um, well, I go to the cupboard and I look at what's in the cupboard and I try and find something that'll substitute." "Aha! So what you're saying is you are creative, you just didn't know it yet." And this is one of the ways for me that cooking functions as a metaphor. At a very high level, it's an acid test for whether or not you really can be creative. At a much lower level, boy, there's a lot going on. There is so much going on. There is… I'm sure we are all familiar with the phrase necessity is the mother of invention. Recently, Sandra has had some dietary needs, some dietary requirements, and I've discovered that mayonnaise works instead of butter. How did I discover that? By doing all kinds of reading and research, and it's the same sort of thing that you do when you're writing. And so, in this episode, we're going to talk about cooking as a metaphor for us as writers for writing, and I think this is going to make all of us hungry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's true. One of the things that I want to say is that… You were saying everybody cooks. I'm like, actually, that's not true. There are a lot of people who don't cook. Or who think that they don't cook. But when we're talking about cooking, when we're talking about creativity, there's this whole range, like, if you have selected a frozen dinner and you stick it in the microwave, that is actually cooking. It doesn't mean always that you have to start from scratch. Like, sometimes you're cooking and you are cooking using somebody else's kitchen, sometimes you're cooking using somebody else's ingredients, sometimes you are like, I'm just not in the mood. And there's still ways to be creative within that. Anytime you're having to make a choice, the choice is the creativity.

[DongWon] Well, and… Like, in writing and in reading, there's so many valences we put on certain kinds of things. Like, we look at French cooking. Right? Michelin star French tradition cooking as like so worthy and valuable compared to other traditions. But, I've had as much enjoyment eating at a very fine dining restaurant as I have standing at a counter in a gas station eating a taco. And the way you enjoy things… And a box mac & cheese at the exact right moment is one of the finest pleasures in life. Right? So they're different kinds of writing and different kinds of creativity and art that fit different situations. That doesn't mean that the box mac & cheese is inherently worse or less valuable than the 300 dollar tasting menu. I am nourished at the end of both of those. I… Both in body and in spirit. Right? And, I think, think about what you're getting out of the things that you're making, rather than how the world would put a price tag on the thing that you're making.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. And also know that, like, there are… That those degrees of interest and degrees of skill, and that skills are things you can acquire. That the, for me, the thing at the core of this, when we're talking about cooking, is nourishing… Although there's some really good stuff that's not particularly nourishing, like, give me a delicious s'more. Like, if that's, like, a toasted marshmallow? Oh, my God.

[Howard] Burnt sugar and air.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So good.

[DongWon] There's a lot of different kinds of nourishing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? There's body, there's emotion, this spirit, there's all these different things. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is absolutely true. But if you're looking at something and thinking, oh, I can't do that because I don't have those skills. The top chefs did not have those skills either when they started.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] They learned them.

[DongWon] And you learn from recipes. Right? You learn from starting to read recipes from a book that explains the basics. For me, that was The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. I know a lot of people sort of of my generation learn to cook from that book where it just goes through, here's the core techniques, here's how to break down a chicken, here's how to heat up a pan, here's, like, all the very basic techniques that let you learn the different components of what a dish is, what a recipe is.

[Howard] It… I hadn't thought about this before, but boxed mac & cheese may be kind of like fanfic. In that you start with something where you know exactly what it's be… You've seen it a thousand times, you know exactly what's in it. But you make the boxed mac & cheese and then you reach for the Panko breadcrumbs and the bacon bits and you put them in on top and now you've done slash fic.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've done your own take on Kraft mac & cheese or whatever. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because at some point, at some point in your cooking journey, you realize, hey, you know what? I… What if I actually use real cheese instead of this powdered stuff, and a mixture of milk and butter? How do I get to that point? That might be interesting. I'm going to try that. As a writer, boy, what if I build my own fantasy universe instead of using Gray Hawk, instead of using Dungeons & Dragons?

[Dan] So, one of the things to remember about this is… Nobody looks at the home chef and says, "Aw, it's too bad you're a failed professional chef."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Haha!]

[Dan] Right? Like, just because you cook at home doesn't mean that you have professional aspirations, or that you need professional aspirations. And writing can be the same thing. It's something that we do because we love. Even if your goal is to eventually make money with it, you start because you love it. And it is a thing that brings you joy. And, so making sure that you know kind of what your goals are as a writer can help you deal with those thoughts of inadequacy or criticisms coming from outside. Somebody finds out that you're a writer, they'll immediately ask, "Oh, have you published anywhere? Have you sold anything?" Shut up. That's beside the point.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That might be our goal, but that's not why we're doing it.

[DongWon] Yeah. And one of the distinctions I think about when thinking about what the difference is between… Not the home chef and a professional chef, but what I think of as sustenance cooking versus cooking for joy. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The… I resent sustenance cooking. When I have to make myself lunch in the middle of a work day, or it's seven o'clock on a Wednesday night and I'm starving and I need to prepare what to eat, like… I'm furious at the idea that I need to, like, stop and cook.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? That's sustenance cooking. Versus cooking a meal with… For somebody you love or for yourself or whatever it is. And the difference, to me, is intention. Right? When you approach what you're doing with intention, that changes… That changes from the emergency I need to feed somebody box mac & cheese to the I'm going to build a sauce for this mac & cheese. I'm going to add the breadcrumbs. I'm going to do more with it. So, even if it is fanfic that you're doing, when you're approaching that fanfic with the kind of intention about what you're trying to accomplish and what effect you want to have on your audience, that, I think, is transformative and brings a different level into it.

[Howard] Okay. Pop quiz. What is sustenance writing? I'm going to say email.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I was going to…

[Howard] I'm going to say email.

[DongWon] I think journaling can be sustenance writing. I think email. But I do think there… There's a lot of kinds of writing… I think a lot of writing… The kind of writing you would do for fanfic, the kind of writing you do just as tests to see if something works. Right? I think there's a lot of times people are sitting down and forcing themselves to write. They're like, I have to get a thousand words out today. Right? Otherwise I can't call myself a writer if I'm not doing that. I think writing when it comes from obligation as opposed to a pull towards craft and attention… And that's not me saying that writing… That kind of sustenance writing isn't important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's hugely important and valuable. And learning how to do that's import… In the same way that me learning to feed myself, even though I resent it, is also important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but also, like, learning to feed yourself in ways that you don't resent…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Learning to do sustenance writing in ways that you don't resent. Like, I… One of the things that I often find is that I have something that's prepackaged, that's available. So, for my emails, I have templates, often. These are things that you can do. And also, for me, when I'm writing… Like, when I need to make progress on a project, sometimes I have to do sustenance writing on that, where it's like, I just have to make forward progress. And if I break it down into small chunks that… It's like meal prepping. Where I'm like, I know that tomorrow I'm going to be able to do actual, like, prose writing, but today I can do my meal prepping, I can set all of my ingredients up, I can make a bullet list of these of the things that I need to do. And often, when you do that prep… When you walk into the kitchen, it's like, oh! As a complete accident, we have… I've got… It turns out that I don't actually love shopping for groceries, and doing the menu planning. But I really enjoy cooking. My husband is often… He's doing some volunteer work that's 20 minutes away. And so he will let me know, I'm on my way home. And it's not a predictable time. So what I've been doing is, I've been doing all of the sous chef work, all of the prep work, and then I get that 20 minute notice, and I walk back into the kitchen and I cook. And I'm finding that that is actually starting to influence the way I'm writing, too. That I will do some prep work, and I'll take a little bit of a break, and then I'll come back and it's like, oh, look at this gift that I've given to my future self.

[DongWon] This is me spending a day and making stock…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Kimchee for the month. Whatever it is.

[Dan] Yeah. There's this… I love this idea, and it's reminding me of the cooking thing that I'm going to horribly mispronounce, because it's French. Maison plase? [Maison plais?] The idea there is that you prep all your ingredients in advance. That you pre-chopped everything, that you premeasured everything. So that when it's time to cook, you just have them close at hand. And I'm realizing as I listened to everyone talk, that that's how I use outlining. That if I have my outline, and I am an extensive outliner… I outline scene by scene. And so when it is time to write the next thing, I can open that outline and look at it and I know who's in this scene and what it is supposed to accomplish and what is supposed to happen and blah blah blah. Which is just like having everything pre-chopped and I can just pick it up and throw it in a pan.

[Mary Robinette] And it doesn't have to be outlining. You can also, if you're a discovery writer, you can also bank sensory details. So that you've got those ready at hand. So what does this room look like? I will often use C. L. Polk's five four three two one technique. Where I just write down, okay, what are the five things that are visible in this room? What are four things that I can hear? And I'll just go through those… All five senses so that they're banked, so when I sit down, I've already thought about that. Even if I'm doing some discovery writing.

[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. And after the break, I'm going to argue with someone who's been dead for 150 years.

[Howard] All right. In the nineteenth century, French chef Antonin Careme famously declared that there are five mother sauces. Espagnole, veloute, bechamel, tomate, and hollandaise. And I looked at those when I learned this and realized four of those are thickened with a roux, which is butter and flour. And one of them is a water and oil emulsion. Dude, there are only two mother sauces.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are only two, because four of them are exactly the same thing, all you're changing is the flavor. I bring this up because this only ever happens in cooking. I've never had writers argue about what kinds of forms there are for writing, or anything.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, you are not hanging out with the right writers. That's all I have to say. There are only three stories.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] It's only Man meets man, man… It's like…

[DongWon] There's only The Heroes Journey, there's only Save the Cat, there's only…

[Howard] Yes. The one I heard was there's only two stories. Somebody… Stranger comes to town and somebody goes on a trip. And I'm like, those of the same story, it's just the point of view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's only one story!

[Howard] The point here is that I love structure, I love formula. And the first thing that happens when I look at a formula or a structure is I begin asking it… I begin trying to break it. I wrap it around things it shouldn't be wrapped around, I play with taxonomy. I love this. Does it result in good cooking? Eh… Maybe. Sometimes. Does it result in good writing? It can. What are the things where you've done this? Where you've taken a form and you've said, well, this form is interesting, but it really doesn't mean what I think… What everybody says it means. I'm going to do something else with it.

[Mary Robinette] Um... [Kaily.]

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… I think that is the heart of this, is that we'll hear a writer say, "Oh, I don't want to do anything formulaic." And the difference between formula and formulaic is very interesting. So I tend to think of writing as recipes. And when I am doing recipes, I always wind up swapping something, because, you know what, I just want a little bit more of this, or a little bit more of that. And when I'm writing, also, it's like, the number of times that I have secretly done a retelling of something and I just haven't told anyone that it's a retelling… And I haven't asked… I've like filed the serial numbers off really hard. No one's noticed. No one's noticed, but I'm using somebody else's recipe. This is… Like… There are… You go to a restaurant and you order the cream Brulé, and there's a whole bunch of… Like, boy, that is a very simple dessert that you can really mess up. But that's something… That's a recipe that someone invented, and it has become a genre.

[Howard] Someone whose first question was, can I use this blowtorch in the kitchen?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] The answer is yes.

[Howard] Yes, you can.

[DongWon] [garbled] fire.

[Mary Robinette] I had a Parmesan cream Brulé with a spicy red pepper jelly on top of the Brulé part is an appetizer that was transcendent. And that was someone going what if… What if I take this well-known thing and swap some stuff out?

[DongWon] Because, I think, getting to sort of the core of what you're talking about, and the core of what Howard's talking about in terms of, like, yes, there are the mother sauces, yes, it's important… Blah blah blah blah blah. But what matters more is that there's technique behind each of the mother sauces. Right? And I've read so many cookbooks that have been completely transformative to my practice, that have been so useful. The one that I think made more of an impact than any other is a book called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. And Ratio, it's a very slim book, and it's just teaching you not to think in terms of recipe, but giving you the logic of why recipes are structured the way that they are. The ratios that go into thinking about food, into thinking about drink, and to thinking about… I mean, Samin Nograt's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is getting out this in a different way. Right? Those are the four elements of any dish. Salt, fat, acid, and heat. How are you applying them, that's going to make things delicious. Right? And so, think about ratio, think about elemental ingredients, and you'll see the logic behind the recipe. And then, any recipe you run into, you could figure it out. Right? Any book you want to write, if you understand the ratios, if you understand the core elements, you can write a mystery, you can write a space opera, you can write a romance, you can do whatever story you're trying to accomplish.

[Dan] I am trying to imagine… We're recording several episodes today. This one is coming before lunch.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And I am trying to imagine what this episode would be like if we recorded it after lunch. When we were full, and we didn't want to think about food anymore. We wouldn't get this enticing description of cream Brulé.

[DongWon] Dan, you're underestimating our ability to get hungry thinking about food.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And writing is a lot like that. And I think a lot of it, a lot of the time… Writer's block, for example, comes down to that same idea of I am full right now. There are words in my brain, I have already written some of them, and I'm just not feeling it anymore. And that's okay. Sometimes it is time to get up and take a walk and digest a little bit.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and…

[Dan] Because that is going to help you feel excited about writing again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and sometimes the reason that you are not interested in cooking or food is because you're ill. And you need to take time to rest. And it's okay. And we don't… We so often have that write every day. And it's like if you don't cook every day… No. You absolutely don't have to cook every day.

[DongWon] If you're feeling uninspired, go out to eat. Go to a nice restaurant. Go to a place you've never been before. Try a new cuisine. Try a new dish that you've never tried before. And that'll help inspire you. You've got to put in the tank to get stuff out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things I just want to quickly hop back to when we were talking about the salt, fat, acid, heat, is that this is something that I have been thinking about more and more over the last year is thinking about the why. So, like, I tend to sit down and talk to you about what a mystery structure is. But why does it work? When we talk about the long night of the soul, or in a heist structure, the false… The all is lost moment. But that's the plot twist where, oh, this was the secret plan all along. And I think it's because there's a contrast. And so when I see people who are playing with the recipe, and they swap an ingredient out, but they don't understand what that ingredient does. That's, I think, when you get the fiction that feels lifeless or formulaic. Because they aren't swapping it with intention, they're just swapping it to swap. They're just swapping it to do something different.

[Howard] That's… Gary Larson of The Far Side perfectly described that contrast element in cooking when the polar bears are sitting outside the igloo and one of them says, "Man, I love these things. Cold and crunchy on the outside, and soft and warm in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Anyway. But, yeah, that… If you don't know why these things are there, then when you make the substitution, it's a roll of the dice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] You're going to make the wrong sub.

[Dan] Okay. So this is bringing your metaphor back around to a place where the puppetry metaphor also got two. Which is the idea that execution is a vital part of this. That any recipe that you follow is going to be uniquely yours because you are the one who made it. Just like when we were talking about the mother sauces, and the idea that we joked that there's only one story. Something happens to a person. You could reduce all recipes down to somebody eat something. Like, when we get that granular with it, it's not helpful anymore. Whereas, you think about a hamburger, for example. That is a formula. That is a recipe. Although every hamburger that you've had is different from every other hamburger that you've had. You can get very creative with it, you can deconstruct it, you can add different elements to it. But ultimately, it is going to be uniquely yours if you are the one who made that hamburger. And I would rather eat your hamburger than a generic one somewhere else.

[Howard] I would rather eat your hamburger then let you eat it.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Well, when you talk about execution, one thing that comes to mind is I think a very important thing. I cook a lot. I feel like I'm a pretty good cook. I like to cook, I make good food, people enjoy it. The number of times something goes wrong in the kitchen while I'm making a meal… Making a meal I've made a million times before. Last time I roasted a chicken and a number of small things just went slightly off the rails. Right? I was like, oh, I don't have the soil. I was making the cocktails, I was like, oh, I don't have lines. You know what I mean? And it's just like things inevitably go wrong. In terms of it could be as dire as you burn yourself, you cut yourself. It could be as minor as this is the wrong kind of onion. Right? And how you respond to that, and how you move through that, I think, is what defines a great cook from somebody who's struggling. Right? And when I see people… I've been to people's houses and they're struggling with the food is not at the level that they wished it would be, it's because they don't know how to respond to a setback. They let the setback overwhelm them and don't understand how to improvise, how to move, how to replace, because they don't know the core elements that were talking about. They don't know the ratios, they don't know the broader elements. So the reason we're talking about all these things is when you're writing, something is going to go wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? You will get derailed in your process, a character arc is not going to work the way you want it to, an emotional beat's not going to land, an action scene won't land. How do you move past that? How do you fix that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, when I have that, I try to look for the opportunities, I try to look for… Going back to puppetry, there's a thing about the joyful mistake. Croissant… Some dude forgot to put butter in when he was making… It's like puff pastry exists because somebody was like, oh, no, I forgot to add butter at the right time, and had to fold it in later to compensate. And now we have this joyful, joyful thing. So when you… When something isn't working, you can step back to what was I aiming for, what were my goals, how do I accomplish that anyway? And then it winds up being a joyful mistake that brings… Because of your response to it, because you brought your own choices to it, you wind up with something that is different than everyone else is making.

[Howard] It was a chemist at 3M who was trying to come up with a new adhesive and came up with an adhesive that really only barely worked. And that's why we have Post-it notes. This is one of the reasons why writing is so much better than cooking. Your joyful mistake may not be right for this book. But you can put it in your trunk and it will literally keep for decades.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The puff pastry is not going to last that long.

[DongWon] It freezes pretty well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] One thing I want to tag onto this is to return to the cream Brulé for a moment. One of the best cream Brulé's I ever had was at a Japanese restaurant which did a black sesame cream Brulé. Incredibly delicious. Combining a traditional East Asian ingredient with French technique and style and riffing on this sort of thing. When you're cooking, you're going to be pulling from lots of different traditions. You're pulling a technique… I make a lot of Korean food. I frequently pull in what would be a French technique into making a Korean dish in terms of sautéing the onions a certain way before hand or whatever, whereas Korean cooks would just toss them in. Right? And it's not that one's better or worse, it's just I put a spin on it by combining these different traditions. But it's also very important to understand why a food… To understand what the dish you're trying to make tastes like for the people who originated it. Right? I lived in Portland, Oregon for a few years, and that is a town that loves to make a biscuit. I also feel like that is a town that learn to make a biscuit by calling a friend who visited the South once and they described it to them over the phone.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Some of the worst biscuits I've ever had in my life. They are…

[Mary Robinette] Listen…

[DongWon] Tough.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You and I, both Southerners… I also lived in Portland, Oregon, and every time that people would be like, you should go to this place, their biscuits, they're Southern biscuits. I'm like, these are not biscuits.

[DongWon] They are so committed to the worst biscuits I've ever had. But the thing is, what I feel in so many cases is, they haven't had enough of the original thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] They don't know what it's supposed to taste like, so they're trying to re-create it. And when it comes to tradition, and when it comes to writing, when you're pulling in elements from other cultures, when you're pulling in structure from another culture, there is an obligation, I think, you have to understand what the origin thing was. You're not trying to replicate it. But if you want to pull elements from it, you need to at least have a facility and be able to recognize what the thing was.

[Howard] What you're saying, if I can distill this all the way down to the roux, is good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I think that might be the point where we do the homework.

[Howard] All right. Listen, this whole episode has been about giving you a metaphor for helping you to understand the way you write. The tools that are in front of you. If we've done this correctly, every time you sit down to cook or to eat, part of your brain will also be writing. Because we are terrible people and we may have just done that to you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I'm going to double down on that. Make a list of your top three comfort foods. Top three. Then make a list of your top three comfort reads. These can be specific books, or they can be styles of books. Now, map them, one to one, on to each other. As logically, as rationally, as deliciously as possible.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.46: An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-46-an-interview-on-structure-with-n-k-jemisin

Key points: What was your process? I wrote an outline that laid out the three plot line structure, the opening with an overview of the world, and that there would be a cliffhanger ending. Then I write test chapters. It started to flow. But about halfway, I decided it was trash. Devi talked me down. Structure and process are intertwined. Deep and close reading. I wrote the majority of Essun first, then started working on the other two. I fixed a lot in revision. I seeded in a lot from the beginning, then took out a lot in revisions. Starting with too much is an easier edit. Epic fantasy wants certain things. What if we have a complex magic that is indistinguishable from technology? The restoration tradition in epic fantasy is a manifestation of privilege. I wanted to explore oppression. I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest.

[Season 19, Episode 46]

[Howard] I have three be a better writer tips. The first, write. The second, read. The third, get together with other writers. That third one can be tricky, but we've got you covered. At the Writing Excuses retreats, we offer classes, one-on-one sessions, and assorted activities to inspire, motivate, and recharge writers just like you. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats

[Season 19, Episode 46]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[DongWon] We are incredibly excited to have a guest with us today. As the title implies, we have interview… We are interviewing N. K. Jemisin as we are finishing our section talking about The Fifth Season. Nora is truly one of my favorite authors working in the genre today…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think an absolute powerhouse when it comes to sort of redefining what fantasy is right now. Not to overstate it right at the head into us. But, we are incredibly excited to have you here and to start diving into some of the topics we've been talking about when it comes to The Fifth Season. So, welcome.

[Nora] Thank you very much. I'm N. K. Jemisin. Welcome. Thank you for welcoming me to this podcast.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] You are also the sweetest person in the world [garbled for having?] said that. Thank you.

[DongWon] Very, very happy to, and I promise it's only true things. But… Let's dive right into it. So, as we've been talking about Fifth Season, we really focused on the structure of this book, with sort of the three point of views that you eventually realize is all one character, just split across time. I was always entranced by how this book is put together. It feels like an intricate puzzle box. Yet, as we were chatting before we headed into this recording, this episode, you mentioned that you don't do a lot of planning ahead of time. So, what does the process look like for you to put together this thing that, as a reader, feels quite complex? But to you, was an organic process?

[Nora] Um. There is some structure involved. I wrote an outline that sort of basically laid out the three plot line structure, the sort of opening, which would be sort of an overview of the world, just to kind of introduce people to the planet as a character. And that there would be a cliffhanger ending. That… All of that, I knew up front. My initial thought was that the story was going to be third person, very traditional telling, present tense… I mean, sorry, past tense, third person. Nothing sort of experimental or unusual there. But I always write test chapters. The test chapters, I will just simply start writing. Like, I'm spitballing and, I'm trying to see what voice feels best, what makes it flow, what makes it have the right energy. So I will try it over and over again, in some cases, from the different POVs, different tones, different voices. For some reason, I found myself drawn to this bizarre part third person, part second person, present tense-y… Almost… It increasingly felt like I was trying to write poetry. And I suck at poetry. So, I attempted multiple times to write poetry, only to realize I'm entirely too literal a person to do that. But here I am, I'm pulling the hollow man, even though I'm only E. E. Cummings, I'm like… All of a sudden, all of the poetry I've ever read in my life is starting to speak to me and wants me to acknowledge that flow, that energy. It was a truly instinctive… Like, this just feels right. So I started writing. It started to flow well. I was like, this is ins… This is bizarre. I've never really written anything this… Just experimental, I guess. For lack of a better description. I've never written anything this off the beaten trail. I don't know if it's right. But it feels right, so I'm going to keep going. Then, of course, I hit a point about like halfway through the book, where I suddenly decided that this is the worst thing I've ever written, I can't believe I've written this much, I need to stop right now. Devi Pillai, my then editor, editor at Orbit books, had already given me… Had already offered me a three book contract, and I had happily signed it and happily gotten the advance. At that point, I was like, this… I've never written anything like this, I can't keep doing this. This is going to make people think that I'm the worst writer in the world. So I called up Devi, I was like, I want to stop doing this book, I'm going to change this back to a single book contract. I think I was crying. Devi was like the editorial equivalent of hey, Nora. Have a Snickers. You always want to quit your novels when you haven't eaten. So… Basically, she told me to sit down and relax. So, around the same time, a bunch of friends of mine dragged me out for a intervention.

[Laughter]

[Nora] A very drunk intervention. Over mimosas, they were like, Nora, this may hurt. So…

[DongWon] Stop reading Modern Miss poets and get back to reading your poets. But…

[Laughter]

[Nora] Anyway. So we're segueing over from talking about structure. I'm sorry. But that was basically how I wrote it.

[Howard] Yeah, but see, that's… Structure and process are so intimately intertwined. I mean, when we talk about structure with each other, when we talk to writers about structure, it is in part of a… It is as part of a discussion on process. You have a structure that you are originally working with, and then you realize… You get to the middle of the book, as I think almost all of us do, and decide that we're wrong, we've always been wrong, we hate writing, and we're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is a structural moment. That is a moment where you go back and you look at what you're doing and you eat the Snickers and you have drinks with friends at the intervention, and then you go back, and, I assume, at some point realize…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness, the second person is actually teeing up a wonderful reveal. And… [Garbled] I don't know when that moment was…

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] But your reveal was brilliant.

[Nora] Well, the reveal… So I knew at the beginning that all three perspectives were the same person. That was a given. I knew that my primary perspective needed to be Essun. That Essun was the person whose story I was ultimately telling. They're all Essun, but that was…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] The focus that I wanted to keep. So I found myself seeding in hints into Essun's POV… I put hints into all three of them on purpose. Because I am an evil writer, and…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I cackle while I throw in little hints. I'm like Did you notice this one?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Nora] But, uh...

[DongWon] Going back in a reread, it is such a delight to pick out all those little moments of, like, oh, diabolical.

[Nora] Isn't it?

[DongWon] That she was giving us this… I remember noticing stuff in the introduction of Essun that, like, leads to that understanding later. I was just like God damn.

[Nora] Yeah. Yeah. Those are my favorite kinds of books to read. The books where, when you are really… Where you enjoy the first read through enough that you're willing to go back and reread it and catch all the little stuff. So that is… I don't expect anybody necessarily to pick up on it the first time around. But, deep and close reading are… Deep and close reading is something that I want readers to do with me. It is what I love to do myself with good writing. So I want to reward that with here's a blanket which she mentions in one chapter that you're not going to see again tell like six chapters later. But, little things like that. So, um… But, yeah. I knew from the very beginning that it was going to be all three people in the same perspective. I did write Essun's part first. Because I felt like I needed to know where she was going and where she was going to end up in order to write the other two. But then the other two, I kind of flipped back and forth between Damaya and… Oh, God. Wow.

[DongWon] Syonite.

[Nora] Syonite. Wow. Wow. Okay. Coffee… I don't have enough in me. Sorry.

[DongWon] Always. Yeah, I was really curious about the order in which this was written. Because part of me was like, did she write just sequentially, chapter 1, Chapter 2, chapter 3, altering the perspectives? But hearing that you wrote one of the POVs first, and that then enabled you to write the other two… Which makes sense. Because Essun is like the spine of the novel in some… So many ways. Her story's like carries us through as we start to understand the other perspectives and the history that she's had up until this point.

[Nora] Yeah, I wrote the majority of Essun first. Because I needed to have her lodged in my head. Then I started kind of working on the other two, and inserted some earlier chapters. But I reached a point where I was basically alternating between the POVs as I wrote. It just felt better that way. In fact, in some cases, I was deliberately… Like, when I was writing about Damaya, I would have just written a segment in which Essun went through some terrible hell, and I wanted to seed in a parallel to that that Damaya has to go through. Or that Syonite has to go through. I had to actually kind of stop that, because it was a little too obvious. In the revisions, I fixed it, I think. But…

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Nora] Yeah. But that is how it got written.

[DongWon] I mean, we spent a whole episode talking about parallelism in this book. Right? Your use of parallelism in the different character arcs, but also over time. Right? Starting with the child death and ending with a child death. Starting… You'll have one beat that then is replicated across all three stories at different points in time. Which, like, set up so many sort of like thematic resonances. It was almost like… Like the magic system, you were setting up these different resonances that were coming at us from different angles, which, like, built to something, but felt quite powerful. When you're setting up those parallels… I mean, you were saying that once you started alternating, you saw them coming in, and then you sort of shifted them around or cut back on them in edits. When you're seeding like, these clues, in as well that you kind of mentioned, was that planned at the beginning or did you find yourself layering that kind of stuff in later? Because I think… I love that we're talking about process so much, because I think these are the questions people have when they see something beautifully structured, they're like, how in hell do you do that? Because you can't think of all these things when you're outlining or when you're doing your first drafts sometimes.

[Nora] Right. Right. The majority of the parallels and the hints and things like that, I seeded in from the beginning. I took out a lot. I am not a subtle person. I am a… I am a person that throws bricks at the heads of my readers. I have to stop sometimes, because I need to be more subtle than I naturally am. So revisions are my favorite. Revisions are when I'm like, oh. Oh, that's way too… Let's turn that brushstroke into a dab. Let's turn that brick to the head into a pebble to the head. Or whatever. So I removed a lot of really obvious stuff. Honestly, it still felt too obvious to me. But then I ran it through some beta readers and that helped a lot. Because things that scream obviousness to me are far more subtle in other people's eyes, I think. So…

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like… I don't know if you've ever performed stage magic, but it's a little bit like being the magician and knowing which hand you palmed the coin into. Being able to see from your angle, yes, I have a fake fingertip on this finger. It's often very difficult to step out of that point of view… Like, man, everybody's going to see this. I can see it. It's obvious.

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] No. Nobody's going to see it. You're moving your hands fast, and you've written this well. I feel like there's an instinctive element here, that sometimes we have to go back and remember. When I wrote this the first time, my instinct was to do this. I've cleaned it up in revisions, and I haven't broken it. That's the thing I think we're always afraid of, is that we'll break something in revising.

[Nora] No, I have always loved revisions. Revisions are my favorite part of writing. Writing raw is actually my least favorite part. I am good at that part. Like, the flow… Once I really kind of get into the zone, I… If I'm listening to my characters the right way, then they are speaking and the story is writing itself. At least at a certain point. But there are two huge problems. One, I have a terrible memory. So I will write the same scenes, or the same kinds of scenes, beats, over and over and over again. Because I don't… especially when I'm on deadline, I don't have time to go back and reread the entire book, and I forget that I put in some particular beat, and then I do it again, and I do it again. So that sucks. Because each writing session is about anywhere from like 1500 to 3000 words a day, and by the time I get to the point where I am doing page 100, I will have forgotten what's on page 25. So that's one problem. But the other problem is that the urge to be subtle feels coy to me. I've always preferred just being straightforward. I've always preferred just saying what I mean. The problem is that it's a good idea to be subtle sometimes. It's a good idea to kind of let the story speak for itself, the action or the setting or whatever speak for itself. I've got to get myself out of the way of that. I have sort of a… I'm told that this is a typical neuro-diverse person behavior. I don't know if that's true. I'm still adjusting to realizing that I have been ADHD my whole life, and had no idea until relatively recently. Yet, when I look back, I'm like, "How did I not know?" So… Anyway.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] But, um… So I'm…

[DongWon] We've all been there.

[Nora] Yeah. So I'm told that is sort of common for folks with ADHD to just repeat themselves over and over again trying to be more clear each time in the hopes that they can get across what they're trying to say if they're just clear enough. If they just say it slowly or carefully enough. As a writer, I'm especially prone to that. Because I'm like if I just write it exactly the right way, they'll all get it, and it'll be obvious, and then I won't need to do it again. And, no, that's not how anybody works. So…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] That's not how I work. I don't even know why I expect that of other people. So I have to kind of get myself out of the way. I have to stop my urge to explain and explain and explain. That is what revisions let me fix.

[DongWon] That said, if you're going to err on the side, I think erring on being straightforward over being coy is so powerful. Right? There's so many times I read a book that is just with holding so much back that I'm like there's nothing keeping me here. You've kept so much back that I am just straight up bored. Right? So I think the instinct of just telling the reader stuff up front, I think, does so much to keep us engaged. And then, I love this idea that in edits, you're like, oh, I gotta pull back a little bit. I gotta hold a few things back, I'm telling them too much. Right? I think starting with too much and pulling back is always an easier edit than starting with… Like, underwriting is harder to edit for then overwriting. Right?

[Nora] [garbled]

[DongWon] Not to say that you're overwriting.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Yeah. I'm not sure. I've never underwritten. I've always overwritten.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] But the overwriting is a problem in and of itself, though.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Because past a certain point, I find underwriting coy. Overwriting is condescending. It is patronizing to your audience. It is assuming that your audience lacks the intelligence to figure out simple stuff.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] [garbled] subtle stuff. So… That's not what's in my head, but that's how it feels when it comes across. So I have to keep that in mind too.

[DongWon] It's all trust.

[Nora] So there is a sweet spot. Yeah. There is a sweet spot.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And there is a trust factor, and you have to remember that your trust factor changes as you proceed through the book.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] You start out at the very beginning, your audience does not necessarily trust you at all, especially when you're hitting them with second person and a bunch of other weirdness. Then, past a certain point, though, you can start to be very, very delicate with your brushstrokes. I tend to still slap on the paint. But I… Revisions are where I thin it all. To beat a metaphor to death.

[DongWon] Well.

[Laughter]

[Nora] I'm sorry.

[DongWon] No, you're doing it, that's great. Speaking of overwriting, we are running a little bit long here. So, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

[Nora] Sure.

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Nora] So, yeah. My thing of the week right now is the videogame Alan Wake II. I have gotten very into the Remedy connected universe, I think is what they're calling it. Alan Wake is the sequel to the game Alan Wake. It is companion to a game called Control which one lots of awards last year. Alan Wake II one lots of awards. These are writers games, I think. Because they are games that are heavy into sort of exploring the artistic mindset, among other things. But, also, the paranoia that revisions are to writers. Are you making the story better or are you dragging the story to hell? And is the story driving you to hell? So are you actually putting in… Breadcrumbing your ideas early or is an eldritch abomination slowly dragging your story into a terrible place? So, Alan Wake II is a game about a writer who is literally trapped in his own novel. There are other characters involved. There are other plot elements to it. But, as a writer, writing this… Playing this incredibly meta-fictional game, it has been absolutely fascinating for me to realize (A) how writing looks to other people. How writers look to other people. That's been a little actually intimidating. Because you realize Alan's coming across to pretty much everyone that meets him as just being absolutely bat shit. And there's something wrong with the guy and everybody can see it. I'm like, oh, is that how… Is that how we seem?

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Oh, good to know. But then you also see things like the author's characters getting revenge on him. [Garbled lot in common] But it's been a delight to play. And I'm actually super excited because next week sometime, the latest DLC, The Red Caps, drops. So I cannot wait for a chance to play that. So…

[DongWon] We've been talking about doing a bonus episode talking about Alan Wake and…

[Nora] Oh, really.

[DongWon] I think now we have to do that, and we have to have you back to do a deep dive with us.

[Nora] Sure. I would be… Absolutely.

[DongWon] On why this game is so brilliant. So. But thank you so much.

[Nora] Yeah. Absolutely.

[DongWon] Welcome back. So, so far we've done a wonderful dive into your process and how you think about the structure of these books, what that looks like as you develop it. I want to take a zoom out a little bit and take a little bit of a step back, because one thing I was thinking about is… This might be my publisher perspective coming in. Right? Of this book is very much marketed and sold as epic fantasy. Right? It's very much fitting in that category. One of the things that I think is so interesting about it is it feels very fresh and contemporary. It's not surprising to me that you were like thinking about modernists as you were writing. There's so much about it like the rupture of technology is sort of modernity coming into this book in a certain way. It feels very contemporary, it feels of non-genre fiction in terms of the structure. But when you look at all the elements, it's literally wizards going to a magical school with magic crystals and things like that. Right? Like, especially the first book has so many of the trappings of classic fantasy brought into it. So, epic fantasy can have a really rigid structural drive. Right? It wants third person omniscient. It wants prophecy. It wants multi POV, like all of this stuff. Were you actually thinking about the category as you were conceiving and drafting this novel, or were you just like I'm going to do my own thing? And did you feel a tension with that tradition at all?

[Nora] I definitely felt tension with the… I always feel tension with the epic fantasy tradition. I take very much to heart your statement that epic fantasy wants certain things. I find myself hearing those calls for certain things and saying, "No. Fuck you, epic fantasy. I'm not giving you what you want."

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I have spent probably the bulk of my career fighting with epic fantasy. Because I see such potential in that subgenre. It is… Like, why are we fixated on middle European epics, on that as epic? Why aren't we looking at Gilgamesh? Why aren't we writing about [San Diego?] Why aren't we writing about all these different cultural traditions instead of just a few? Why aren't we exploring science fictional landscapes? There's no reason why you can't have magic in space? And things like that. So I do not like the rigidity of any genre. I react badly when I'm told that the way to a particular kind of genre is only X, Y, Z. I'm like, well, what about X, Y, A? So that is how my head works. So, yes, I very much was like I'm going to put a lot of science fiction in this. Then, somewhere in… I think the two… This is a little spoiler. But, somewhere in the two, I gave a name to the force that is being used, and it is not orogeny, it is magic. And I'm just… I just did that to [garbled fool with the audience]

[chuckles]

[Nora] [garbled] because I am an evil writer as I said.

[DongWon] Because at that point, the book was becoming more science fictional, was becoming more science fiction in terms of its logics and technologies, and then that you're throwing out us, like, no. This is magic. It's such a lovely little tension there, yeah.

[Nora] Well, I mean, there's a particular thing that I was doing which is that… I believe it's Clarke's Law, is any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from science fiction… No. The other way around. Any…

[Howard] Any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Nora] Thank you.

[DongWon] There we go.

[Nora] The inverse of that, I think, is the Girl Genius law, which is the same thing. Any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from technology. And I really wanted to play with that. What if we have magic so complex, so structured, still incomprehensible, still at its core something that you cannot fully grasp or at least not easily, and not necessarily reproducible, not necessarily all of the things that are science. But what if it's magic, it looks and sounds and tastes like science. At what point do you start to treat it as a science? At what point is it just science, it's just got a weird name. I really just wanted to play with that. I did not want it to become a clear answer, I wanted it to be ambiguous to the end. Because… Again, this is a bit of a spoiler for later in the series, but the initial stage of the story, where you realize how structured orogeny is, much, much later in the story you find that another civilization went even further with the structure. They got into literally the ability to do some miraculous things with it. They scienced it to death and then drag the world with them. So I really just wanted to explore that aspect of it. It's magic, but can you science it too much? Is there a point where you have dragged it so far that it has a different core?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] It's different in its nature, ultimately.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Nora] Yeah. That was the idea.

[DongWon] Well, like, one thing I think about a lot is… I think about Tolkein a lot. I love those books, I love the story. It's very meaningful to me. But the thing that always strikes me when I go back to Tolkien is how mournful it is. It's very sad. Everyone's always just singing songs about how the world used to be better. Right? I think so much of epic fantasy derives from that origin point of this… What is ultimately a restoration fantasy. Right? It's we need to bring the old ways back…

[Nora] Right.

[DongWon] And the world was better before and we live in this fallen time. So, so much of what we think of as classic epic fantasy… Obviously there are departures, this is not the whole genre. But much of the core of the genre, much of its most successful elements tend to be this urge to bring something back that once was. Right?

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] If I'm… Had a couple cocktails and you catch me at the right moment in an expansive mode, what I will say is that I think the dominant mood of epic fantasy is nostalgia. Right? I think nostalgia is the thing that drives a lot of it. That is not The Fifth Season. Fifth Season explicitly starts with this statement of Fuck restoration.

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] Restoration doesn't work.

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] We can't do that. It starts with the breaking of the world. I mean, I just wandered off into a whole thesis statement about where fantasy is, but I'm curious, like, was that something that resonates with how you think about this book or were… Was that not even in your mind as you're trying to distinguish yourself from that tension between the what epic fantasy wants versus what you wanted to do?

[Nora] That is always a tension in my mind. I, like I said, one of the things that I… I have been fighting against that tradition within epic fantasy and other traditions within epic fantasy in my whole career. Epic fantasy has so much farther that it can go. And it is… The adherence of so many writers to that nostalgic theme limits it. I think that that's not necessarily a thing that they can help. I think that that is a manifestation of privilege. You want to get back to the world as it was if the world as it was is good for you. If the world as it was was a shithole, you have no need to go back to what used to be. You would not want to go back to what… In fact, you're going to fight the quote unquote heroes of the story, you're going to be an antihero and try and move on to something different, instead of returning to what was. So a lot of my fiction tends to explore these themes. Because some of it… It's pretty obvious, I think, in The Fifth Season that I'm channeling slavery. And I wanted to explore a lot of different kinds of oppression within it. I was exploring closetedness among queer people, I was exploring disabled people who had been treated as useless at varying points, I was exploring a lot of different stuff. I wanted to kind of teach one sort of unified theory of all these folks for whom the old world was bad, are going to see the potential in change. They may or may not pursue that potential. But they see it. And there's no reason for me to pretend that tension isn't there. So, yeah, in the case of… For example, in the case of Essun, I deliberately contrasted her against Alibaster. Alibaster is the reformist. Essun, for the bulk of the book, is the centrist. Who is the status quo defender, survivor, etc. one of these people… Both of them see the potential for change. One of them is just simply not willing to put in the effort that is necessary to make that happen and the stuff for it that would be necessary to make that happen. And the other is further along on his particular path towards reform, basically. I deliberately contrasted them, because I wanted to show… I don't believe that there is… I mentioned earlier that I think that that nostalgic exploration tends to be associated with privilege. For people who are coming from marginalized identities, there's different ways of reacting to that same thing. I don't believe that there's any one way of doing it in a privileged way, and I don't believe there's one way of doing… Of reacting to oppression as a marginalized person. But I wanted to show different perspectives on… Excuse me. If you are seeing the world as it is and you see that it could be better, what do you do? So, yeah, I guess it's the centrist versus the progressive, if you want to look at it that way.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's really interesting. I was just having a conversation with a cis white male author about epic fantasy. I kind of said something similar to what I said here about, like, me, even as a kid, reading epic fantasy, feeling a sense of golden nostalgia, of a thing I would never have access to. His response was initially [garbled] he didn't quite have that experience when he read it. He felt more of the potential of adventure. I was like, oh, is this just the experience of reading this while marginalized? Right? Like, as a person of color, as a queer person, of, like, oh. These adventures aren't for me. I will never get to be Taron. I will never get to be whoever a major epic fantasy hero is. It's really interesting… And I think part of why Fifth Season did speak to me so much was I was like, oh. This is from the perspective of deeply marginalized people who are being subjected to active, awful oppression. Right? It's why the scene of the Guardian breaking Damaya's hand will just, like, live in my brain forever in the worst and best ways. So… But I would love to shift away from sort of looking back a little bit at the traditions and talk about how you move forward. You've written a whole nother series since then, and… What lessons did you take away from the experience of writing these books. Obviously, they came out to great acclaim. You've won Hugos for every single entry in the series. What did you… How did this shift how you approach writing fantasy going forward and what… How you think about structure going forward? To return to the original topic, like, what were the lessons that you took away from this experience?

[Nora] Um.

[DongWon] That's a very easy to answer question.

[Ha ha ha ha]

[Nora] I think I have relaxed a little. I'm not as angry at the genre, because I said my piece. I… I… Like I said, I spent a long period of time kind of railing against the traditions of epic fantasy, frustrated by the potential that I saw that just seemed to be being squandered. I would read… I'm not going to name any particular books, but I would read an epic fantasy series and see how much more interesting it could have been if they'd decided not to restore the king to power. If they decided why don't we try democracy. I know that, like Game of Thrones, kind of went and nudged about ha, ha, ha, democracy? We're not going for that silly idea. Why would we try that? I know that there have been others engagements with that idea, and, epic fantasy as a general thing has mostly kind of laughed at the concept of applying all these modernists… All these modern ways of thinking to the story. But you aren't bound by the ways that medieval people actually thought. You are writing to a modern audience, you are a modern person yourself. You cannot think like a true medieval person. So why pretend? Why let your biases about the medieval era impact how you actually write about the medieval Europe versus how people in the medieval era might have themselves actually thought. There's a lot of potential within the genre, and I spent a long time just kind of pushing at it and trying to say, look, we can do more. We can go here, we can go there. Let's try it. Why isn't anybody else trying this? There were people… There are people who are. I don't want to pretend that I am the only writer that is doing something weird.

[DongWon] No. But I do think you kicked the door in. You know what I mean? Like, I think people were doing that, but I think you opened a door in a way… Forcefully in a way that made it easier for people to follow.

[Nora] Good.

[Howard] Using the door metaphor, when Tolkien published Lord of the Rings, he threw open a door into something that at the time was being called romantic fantasy or fantasy romance or something. They didn't even have a word for it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] He had a goal which was to create a sort of fictional mythos for Great Britain, and we all walked through that door.

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] We all walked through that door and ended up with that POV, ended up with that point of view, ended up with that perspective. And now when I think about worldbuilding, I have to kick myself a little bit and say, no. You're worldbuilding. You're building a secondary world thing. You do not have to adhere to the rules of feudalism or medievalism or Roman or bronzed technol… Just do what speculative fiction does best and speculate!

[Nora] That's… You raise a really good point. What Tolkien did, in creating that mythos, I think bunches of readers read the Lord of the Rings, saw what he did, and were to… And their take away was we can do medieval Europe better. Their take away was not we can do a mythos in whatever thing that we want to do. We can make up our own mythos in any direction that we want to spent. I think that there's a number of reasons why that sort of lockstep thinking kicked in. I mean, obviously, you wanted to make imitations for commercial reasons. Because when you look at Lord of the Rings, and you think, what makes it worthy of all this money and all these movies and all this other stuff, you're going to go for the most obvious imitations. I grew up in the eighties, where there were Tolkien imitators every fricking where…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] And literally called the genre or the subgenre of Tolkien clones.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And…

[DongWon] I grew up on those. They were candy to me. I loved them [garbled]

[Nora] They were candy to me. I was like 10 years old. Then I hit 15 and I was like I am so sick of medieval…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Europe once again. And I would have reached a point… I did reach a point where it was just sort of like, oh, my God. How many times can they do the same shift over and over and over again? And I think that that is probably what informs my writing…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] As an artist, is my 15-year-old, no, I am tired of this. So, yeah, I think that that's really what it kind of boils down to. But what Tolkien did was take something that he cared about…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And take it in and create a riff on it. I wanted to take something I cared about and riff on it. And I don't care about the same things that a British professor who's born in South Africa and went through World War I… One? Two?

[DongWon] Two.

[Howard] One.

[DongWon] One.

[Nora] One. I don't think about the same things, I don't have the same interests, I'm not going there. Among other things, what interested me was American history, Black history. I inserted a theme from an actual thing that happened, the Margaret Garner incident at the end of the book. You people have read the book, the first book, so Syonite killing her child at the end rather than letting her child return to slavery is based on a true event for those that did not know. Based on the actual real life of a woman named Margaret Garner who escaped slavery with her children. Something went wrong, slave catchers were closing in, she began to kill her children rather than let them go to… Go back into slavery. It was one of the incidents that galvanized the abolitionist movement, because people were beginning to… People were basically like slavery is so bad that a mother would kill her own children rather than let them suffer it. Because at the time, the marketing for slavery on the part of the slaveholders was, oh, it's fine. We treat them beautifully. Because they're an investment. We would never mistreat them. It doesn't make any sense for us to mistreat them… Didididi… All of that. So that was one of the prime… Not primary, but that was one of the thematic ways that people pushed back. I wanted to insert all of that. I wanted to riff on American history. We are a country with so many sins to our name. We are a country that cannot really function without putting someone in a position of suffering. I wanted to think more about that, basically.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] So I did the same thing that an old British guy did, but I did it from the perspective of a younger black woman. Black American.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, to me, it felt like his reference point was postwar Britain, and you moved the reference point to being 21st century America. Right?

[Nora] Yeah. Yeah.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about Fifth Season was, to me, it felt… When reading it, I felt so clearly to be to be… If not entirely about it, at least in conversation with the experience of being black in America. Right? But, nothing was mapping allegorically one-to-one. It wasn't like, oh. These are the black people, these are the white people, these are blah blah blah blah blah. It wasn't, like, mapping to specific things, but it all felt so densely and richly of the experience. Right? But a part I didn't know about the individual event that you mentioned that you were referring at the end, which is very powerful and very upsetting. But, yeah…

[Nora] What I wanted to explore was oppression. Not specifically…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Racism, not specifically sexism, not specifically… I was not exploring a specific oppression. I was not exploring a specific manifestation of oppression. I read about suffragism in the UK and Australia. I read about the aboriginal resistance to Australian colonization. I read about Mallory resistance. I mean, I was reading as much as I could about how people in the world pushed back against colonizers and what happens to societies that are colonized, and how it warps those societies, how it warps the people in them. And I wanted to explore the themes and not dry history. So that's why it doesn't map. I didn't want it to map.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] I didn't want it to be… This was not me trying to work through the specifics of my own life or the specifics of American history. This was me working through what is it to be oppressed. Period.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Um… And I tried to do it in a way that paid respect to all of the marginalized people whose histories and stories I read. I don't know that I succeeded.

[DongWon] I… From my experience, you did succeed very well. I found a lot to personally identify with from where I come from. For someone who is afraid of being too obvious or… Worried about a kind of didactivism, I think you succeeded in creating something very specific and very subtle and very universal all at the same time.

[Howard] I am fond of saying that there are books that are factual and there are books that are true. And you wrote a true book.

[Nora] Well, thank you. Wow.

[Howard] I come from… It's middle-aged white dude. I do not come from any of the marginalized spaces, and I read a true story about what it meant to be marginalized, what it meant to be oppressed, what it meant to try to reshape the world when a marginalized person finds themselves with the power to do some reshaping. It was a true story for me and I loved every minute of it. Except for the parts where I was mad at you, and crying.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Yes. Okay. Um… Yeah, okay, I mean I… Writers are evil.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Nora] I am an especially evil writer. I admit it. I accept it. This is a thing that I have learned to own about myself.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest. Like, I'm killing a character and I'm like people are going to hate this. Hehehehe.

[DongWon] Make them suffer.

[Nora] Yes… Your tears. I am sometimes like that. I try not to be like that, but… In real life, I am very much… I try very hard to be a nice person. I… Everybody's got their own inner bitchiness, of course, but… And sometimes outer. But I try to be a nice person. I am very much a people pleaser and so forth. But in my deepest soul, I am a sadist. [Garbled] writers are.

[DongWon] And we are deeply grateful for it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So… Nora, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was truly wonderful. It was a real delight to be able to dig into some of the thematic elements and structural elements of this book with you. Thank you for writing it.

[Nora] [garbled] I thought so too.

[DongWon] Thank you for joining us here.

[Howard] Do we have some homework?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Yes. In keeping with me being interested in video games lately, I've also been replaying Mass Effect, the Mass Effect series.

[DongWon] For your sins.

[Nora] Sorry?

[DongWon] For your sins.

[Nora] Always. So, what I would like to ask people to do is to imagine that they are in a game like Mass Effect where they are presented with three different attitude-oriented choices. Let's call them paragon, and the renegade, and neutral. So, take your current work in progress, take your protagonist to date, assuming that you have one, and flog them through those attitudinal flavored choices. What happens if you continue the story with your character having done the diplomatic and polite and nice thing? What happens if you have your character snap and just be super done with everything and say the stuff that they probably shouldn't say, but it's effective? What happens if your character tries to punt on either of these choices, when they really needed to be giving a more strong response? Just run it in your head and see how that affects your plot structure. I don't know if that…

[DongWon] That's fantastic. Thank you so much. That sounds like a really delightful exercise.

[Nora] Okay.

[DongWon] Nora, thank you so much again for joining us. We… It was such a delight to have you here.

[Nora] Thank you very much. It was a delight to be here.

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

[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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-06-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-length

Key Points: There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel. First, look at unfulfilled promises, or runaway atmosphere, and adjust those. What tells the story most effectively? Is the pacing off? Consider the master effect, what is the intended impact of the story, and do the separate elements support that? Often authors write their way into or out of a scene, and leave that extra text there. Cut it! NaNoWriMo, high-paced writing, may focus on whatever you're excited about, and leave out the parts that are harder for you to write. Take a look at filling those in! When layering, look for natural pause points. Watch for shorthand or compressed spots, which you can unpack to add emphasis or remove ambiguity. To add length, try sending them to new locations. To cut length, cut a character or a side quest. READ, review, do the easy fixes, audition (outline, then try changes on the outline), and do it! Adjust signposts and bridging material. Use narrative summary (aka summarize your darlings). Let things happen offstage, and have someone refer to it.

[Season 19, Episode 06]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Length.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[DongWon] With us this week, we have a special guest, which is executive editor at Tor Publishing group, Ali Fisher. Ali acquires and edits speculative fiction and non-fiction across young adult, middle grade, and adult categories, and is, as a bonus, a cast member of the podcast Rude Tales of Magic, which is a D&D flavored comedy podcast. But really Ali's here in her capacity as an editor, and has worked on a very wide range of incredibly successful titles in speculative fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Yeah, so welcome, Ali.

[Ali] Thank you. Hello, world. I am so excited to be on this podcast. Longtime listener, first time being on the podcast here. I've been listening to Writing Excuses since, I think, 2010.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Ali] Is that true? You've been doing this that long, correct?

[DongWon] I mean, next season will be year 20 soon, so, I don't remember what year we started, but… It's been a minute.

[Ali] Yeah. I… I've been listening to Writing Excuses longer than I've been in publishing. So, it's a real pleasure.

[Mary Robinette] This somehow delights me. And also makes me feel impossibly old.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] revision, which is also something that makes me feel impossibly old when I get into it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] We know that… We've timed this because we know that a lot of people have just finished NaNoWriMo, and you have written a novel and now you have to figure out what to do with it. So, that was why we invited Ali in, because as an editor, she has a certain understanding of what happens with novels. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is length. Because most of the projects coming out of NaNoWriMo are going to be too short. Having said that, every time I talk to someone about a novel, I always hear them say either, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too long." Or, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too short." I never hear anybody say, "But it's just right." There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel.

[DongWon] Exactly, exactly. Even when novels come to me as an agent or when it goes to the editor or the publishing house, I feel like that is one of the first things we're talking about, that's, like, where does this fit in terms of length. So, Ali, when a project comes across your desk, when I send you an email with the most brilliant thing…

[Ali] Uhuh.

[DongWon] Attached to it…

[Ali] Of course.

[DongWon] What is your immediate reaction when you start thinking, oh, I wish this was a little bit on the shorter side, I wish this was a little bit on the longer side. What are the questions that start coming to your mind to help you figure out how to answer that?

[Ali] Yeah. Absolutely. So, working in speculative fiction, often we're sort of… We see the higher range of word count on like different novels, novellas, or whatever, because there's a lot of additional writing that sometimes takes place in those books, especially at Tor, known for door stoppers.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] A wide range, though, really. So, depending on the age group it's for, there tend to be different sort of hopes and requests coming in from retailers for their shelves and what are their assumptions of those readers' reading lengthwise. Right? Middle grade being slightly shorter. YA has really run the gamut at this point, but… With adults attending to have potentially the longest word count that I've seen. Those are very broad generalizations, but it tends to be something that is absolutely always on the table in the conversation when books come in. But that word count conversation also tends to happen after an initial read and just sort of taking stock of… There were promises that were never… That I was excited to read about, we never saw them, or there was a lot of atmosphere here, but it felt a little exploratory to your process, and I actually think that it could feel bigger if there's less in there. So, stuff like that is a little bit more… A little less like let's chop this to a really specific length, and more of a what else… What's helpful in telling this story most effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I'm really glad you said that, because one of the things that I see a lot with early career writers is that they will have internalized these rigid ideas of how long a book needs to be. Sometimes they think that they have to cut 10% when they finish a book. I think they've picked that up from Steven King. But it's not just cutting. Like, shorter is not better, longer is not better, it's the why of it, for me. Like, why are you trying to cut or expand? That helps inform the places that you're doing it. For me, length, like description, that sort of thing, has a lot to do… Has a strong relationship to pacing.

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. I think sometimes when a book can feel too long, that is because the pacing is… It's too drawn out. It's not moving fast, I'm not getting pulled enough… Pulled through this as forcefully as I want to, to have like a really great reading experience. So, I think sometimes the idea is, okay, there's some fat, we can cut here. There's some extra elements that aren't quite landing with the reader for whatever reason, and if we remove those scenes, then maybe things will move on a little bit quicker. Then, sometimes, we make sure on the other side too of everything is always up to 11, it could be exhausting as a reading experience. We kind of need those breaks and those breathing points to kind of absorb character information or background information or worldbuilding, and kind of like really settle into the story in some ways. So, I think length and pacing often feel very connected.

[Ali] Definitely. It is very hard to know before you get to the stage where you have confirmed beta readers or an agent or an editor who will read your book and tell you about things like pacing and tell you their [garbled] responses to stuff like that. I'm going to bring in something from a book that I read once…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Excellent.

[Ali] Right off the bat here. There's a book called The Fiction Editor, The Novel, And the Novelist. It's very short, I think it's like 170 pages, by Thomas McCormack. I don't know much about Thomas, but he was an editor once upon a time, and he has a concept called the master effect. The concept was the master effect is the cerebral and emotional impact the author wants the book as a whole to have. It goes on to say it can be… It's sort of like it's propped up by observation and insight and emotion and experience. So, like what does this all lead to? I think, when you're looking at length, it can be helpful to look at the separate elements, as they like relate to what that big overall feeling is that you want. It can be sort of like interesting to see what inspires that feeling most, and what doesn't really add to it. Right? Especially if you're looking at like tension or something, you might find with an eye really clearly set on, "Oh, I want this to feel really tense," then you realize like, "Oh, this traveling isn't quite getting me there," or something.

[DongWon] It's sort of like… We were talking about word count expectations by category and genre, that the publisher wants. If it's an epic fantasy, you want it to be this length, whether that's like 100,000 or 120,000 words. If you wanted to hit with middle grade office, you want it on the shorter side. Whatever that specific range is. But those aren't… They are arbitrary and they can be very frustrating when you run into them in a rigid way. But the logic of it does come from somewhere, which is, when you're reading an epic fantasy, so much of what you want to be hearing… Experiencing is that expansiveness, is the breadth of scope and perspective, and to get a sense of the politics and the magic and those kinds of things. So you're expecting a slightly slower pace when you're coming into an epic fantasy than you would if you were coming into an adventure fantasy, which you want it to be moving a little bit at a brisker pace, getting from action scene to action scene, from tension to tension, a little bit quicker than you would when you're not having big feast scenes or big courtroom political scenes. Right? So I think a little bit of those length expectations really are driven by genre and category, because those connect to certain types of pacing and certain types of reading experiences. So if you're thinking about that, you call it the master effect? Is that what the term was?

[Ali] Yes. Yeah. Thomas called it.

[DongWon] When you're thinking about the effect that you want to have on your reader for your particular category, that's where length can really be part of the conversation coming into it.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that we're going to talk about in our next episode, where we're talking about intention. Edgar Allan Poe has a similar concept, which he calls the unity of effect, where you kind of think about what is the overall emotional goal that you're aiming for, and then everything that you put into the novel goes into that, and I think that length is one of those things that you're also manipulating as you're moving through. One of the other things that you said, Ali, at the beginning was talking about… Or maybe it was you, DongWon, talking about… Oh, I can see you've left some of your homework here. But there's another thing that I see authors do, and I've done myself a lot, which is that we don't really know where the scene is going so we write our way into it to discover it. But then all of that text is still there. So I frequently find that often the beginnings of scenes and sometimes the ends of scenes are places where the author is trying to figure out how do I get into this scene or how do I get back out of it. That you've done the thing that the scene required, and then you're kind of floundering, going like, eh, I don't… It needs a… I don't know, let's… Eh… Then there's just a lot of text where you were trying to figure out the perfect line, and then you don't cut any of it, because you don't know which pieces are actually supporting it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I think… I would love to dive into more about how you identify those and some techniques for cutting or adding, depending on where you need to do that. But let's take a quick break first, and we'll talk about the specific techniques when we come back.

[Ali] For my thing of the week, I wish I could pitch every book I've ever been able to work on. But, since it's 15 minutes long, and we're not that smart, I'm going to constrain myself to just the most recent publication that I had the genuine pleasure to acquire and edit. This is Infinity Alchemist by World Fantasy and National Book award winning author, Kacen Callender. Kacen is the author of Hurricane Child, King of the Dragonflies, Felix Ever after, Queen of the Conquered, and many more. Infinity Alchemist is their YA fantasy debut. It rules. It's basically dark academia burn the magic school down. In it, 3 young alchemists come together to find and then protect the rumored Book of Source before others use it for alchemist supremacy. Of course, these 3 heroes end up in a legendary love triangle, and please remember real love triangles connect on all 3 sides.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] [garbled] is clear, mostly trans, mostly POC, and polyamorous. The magic system is inspired by quantum physics, so it's very original, very cool, and available just now as of last week from Tor Teen.

[DongWon] As we come back from break, I would love to start digging into some of the techniques. So, say you… Coming out of NaNoWriMo, the expectation is you've written 50,000 words, and now you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, how do I make this a little bit longer?" How do I make this feel like a full novel that is ready for a fantasy reader, or ready for a YA reader, whoever it is you're trying to reach? So, how do you know where to add length? What are the points at which… How do you add to the volume of the text without slowing down your pacing too much, or disrupt or throwing off your plot structure or your character arcs or whatever it is?

[Ali] First of all, congratulations. Well done. I don't… Every time I hear about NaNoWriMo that sounds absolutely bonkers to me. That is extremely impressive. My understanding is writing at that sort of sprint pace, for a lot of people… Some people that is a very standard piece of writing, for a lot of people it is, like, pedal to the metal, tough situation. My guess is you gravitated towards like writing things you're most excited about, or, like writing towards characters if that was what you're most excited about or writing towards just the world if that was what you were most excited about, so it could well be that, like, there are full category elements that are somewhat missing, that just don't feel as instinctive or easy or smooth for you as a writer, to, like, write when you're in that zone, when you're in that kind of sprint zone. So there may be whole categories that have opportunities for lengthening.

[DongWon] That makes sense. So you're really looking at it overall and saying what are the things that I was drawn to when I was putting this together, but maybe not feeling the sort of holistic sense of I want to have this effect on my reader, here's the things I didn't put in there. I'm writing an epic fantasy and all I did was right cool battle scenes. Now I gotta go put back the court intrigue, now I have to put a romance in here, now I have to put in those character arcs that maybe aren't as fleshed out as they were when I was thinking about how to get enough words down on the page. Right? So I think that's a great place to start, I'm just feeling like where are the elements of this story that I want to be putting in that I wasn't thinking about in that moment.

[Ali] Yeah. Unless you're pitching [garbled] battle scenes, and then…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] It's just a collection of battle scenes, which sounds…

[Laughter]

[Ali] [garbled] and you should do that, but then you need 20 more battle scenes.

[DongWon] I would recommend Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes, which is basically just one battle over 3 days for the entire book. So…

[Ali] Awesome.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Ali] Very cool.

[Mary Robinette] So I… What I look for when I'm doing this… The kind of thing that you're talking about, the layering of… Layering in the romance element or sometimes you've written a scene and it's only dialogue and there could actually be some description… Maybe we'd like these people to be some place. So what I look for when I'm going to like layering description, for instance, is I look for natural pause points. Because when you… When you're spending words on a description, the reader has to slow down to read them. So every word you've got on the page is basically creating a pause in the readers head between one line of dialogue in the next. Which is why… Sometimes you've had the experience where you see a character answer a question and you don't remember the question that was asked. Because there's been a ton of description in between those 2 things. So I'll look for those natural pause points to put in descriptions, but also to unpack emotion. One of the other things that I find when I got a finished novel is that at the… Especially the last 3rd of the novel, I just want to be done with the novel. So I, like, shorthand every emotional experience my character is having. This is a place where you can add length by going back and unpacking the things. You don't want to unpack every emotion that the character has. You want to unpack the ones that are… Again, going with that unity of effect. So I think about it as places where I want to add emphasis or remove ambiguity, as some of the places that I'm looking at for unpacking the emotion. Is this an emotion that I want to add emphasis to, because it helps you understand the character better? Or, is this moment ambiguous? Can I give a little bit more here? Like, did I completely forget to give any physical sensation to my character experiencing an emotion?

[Ali] Totally. So, like what you're saying, it could be that at the beginning, you have a… When notable emotional experiences happen, you have the full range of… The emotion beforehand and the observation, and the tension, and then the emotion itself, and then the internal judgment on the emotion, and, like, go through the entire sort of the cycle of that. And watching then the reaction, or the dialogue that comes after it. By the end, it's like, "Uh, she was sad."

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Moving forward.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You've read my manuscript.

[Ali] Yeah, but it works at the time. So, like, just… That's also about balancing and finding that style… Style similarities across maybe when like different… Different days felt different levels of oh, no, I have to make up for 2 days now, or whatever, that you were getting through.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other hacks that I have for adding length is reverse engineering something that I do for short fiction where I need to compress. So, with short fiction, I try to have everything in a single location. With novels, sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I need to make this longer. Where can I send them that I haven't sent them before?" Because it will make the world feel richer. It's like, oh, reuse locations, but sometimes sending them someplace else gives me additional words that I have to write because I have to describe the new place. Again, it can make the world seem broader and richer and more interesting if I just change location of a scene.

[DongWon] Exactly. So, on the flipside of that, though, you've got something, it's a 200,000 word manuscript, you need it to be 110. Right? You need to cut a lot of it because it's simply too big for whatever reason. Either for the readership or even sometimes bumping up against physical limitations of publishing.

[Chuckles] [Yes]

[DongWon] It's hard to remember that we are making physical objects that we're shipping around.

[Yes]

[DongWon] And when you print more pages, it gets more expensive, and when it's heavier, it's more expensive. That can really affect things. So when, for whatever reason, your publisher is saying, "Hey. We would love this to be shorter." Or if your friends are saying that, or just your own instincts, where do you start to make those cuts? What are the things that are either easy things that you can start to look at? I mean, like, okay, across the board, I could start pulling out these scenes, or, what are the more difficult interwoven elements that you're starting to look at?

[Mary Robinette] As, apparently the only writer in the room…

[Laughter]

[Ali] But we have a lot to say.

[Mary Robinette] You have a lot to say. But I will…

[DongWon] We have a lot of opinions about how writers should do things.

[Ali] Yeah. Since you asked what's the hard part.

[Mary Robinette] You have opinions about what I should do, but I can tell you what's mechanically difficult and what's easier. The easiest way to reduce a bunch of length very fast is to cut a character or a side quest. That'll pull out a ton of length really fast. It can feel daunting when you are thinking about doing that because usually it's a… It's woven into the book all the way through. So I… What I will do is I will… I have an acronym that I use which is READ. I will review, do the easy fixes, audition, and then do it. So by audition, what I mean is that I will… If I have to do a really big at it like that, I'll reverse engineer my outline. Then I will experiment with pulling out those scenes just in outline form to see whether or not the basic flow is still there. Then, when I get into it and start the do it part of it, I put all of those into a scrap been, because I will almost certainly need pieces of them later. Then, largely what I'm doing is I'm having to adjust my signposts, which is the way I exit and enter scenes, and the material… The bridging material from getting from one thing to another. When I'm cutting things. Then, when I'm cutting characters, often it's, like, you just go in and you change the character names and then you have to tweak the dialogue to make it make sense for that character. But it's one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of length.

[Ali] I also think there's a… Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like, generally, out there, there's a bit of like a demonizing of narrative summary. It can really go a long way to… There are scenes that are fully dialogue, beat by beat, like this is happening, that can probably be brought down to a couple of sentences. That's like reducing your darlings, I guess. Or like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Summarizing your darlings.

[Ali] Summarizing your darlings. Exactly.

[DongWon] I think this is where show, don't tell can lead you astray. Right? It takes so many more words to show something than to tell sometimes. So, sometimes if you have this sense of I can summarize this, I don't need to walk through every part of this group figuring out what their plan is, or having this interaction or this conversation, you can condense that into a few sentences. You can condense that into a paragraph. Provided you're making that narration interesting and still connecting it to the character. I think there are ways that you can give us very large amounts of information very quickly. And then keep moving. That can really accelerate the read in the pace of the book in a lot of good ways.

[Garbled] [go ahead]

[Ali] I was just going to say I just love what you said about auditioning. Because I think it can be very daunting and emotionally taxing to cut things that you wrote and loved. I will say as an editor, I have recommended things and been very sad about them and felt like I genuinely know I'm going to miss this. But the audition process was such a smart move. Because then you can like be really honest about whether that's going to take something away that's genuinely precious to the book, or if it's like something that was very cool, but isn't needed.

[DongWon] Because sometimes you audition and find that, oh, that was loadbearing.

[Yeah]

[DongWon] This whole thing doesn't stand up without that element. So it's like, okay, we can't touch that one. What else can we do? Unlike renovating a house, you can actually pull those out and see what happens to the whole structure.

[Ali] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to pull out a loadbearing wall under any circumstances. Unless you're like, okay, I'm going to have to pull this out, but then a beam of steel…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So… But when you're pulling things out, I like what you said about the show, don't tell, and the narrative summary. But the other piece that I think a lot of people underestimate when they're thinking about length is how much can happen offstage. In the gap between scenes, in the gap between chapters. You can… I found that I can cut an entire scene and just have someone refer to it having happened. That the implication is sometimes enough, if the scene was not doing anything loadbearing, aside from like one thing, that often I can just say, "Oh, yes, I see that you got the diamonds," instead of actually showing them going into the store and buying the diamonds.

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Obviously. A thing that all of my characters do.

[Ali] So fancy.

[DongWon] I did not assume that they were buying the diamonds, when you set up that scene, but… Yeah. I mean, you can just tell us that anything happened.

[Mary Robinette] That's why you need the narrative summary.

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

[DongWon] Well, apropos, I suppose, for an episode about length, we're running a little bit on the long side here. So, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I want you to… This is a way to play with length. You're going to find 2 scenes that… Scenes that are right next to each other. What I want you to do is I want you to remove the scene break, and then write bridging text to connect the 2 of them. So that narrative summary about how they got from point A to point B. Then I want you to find a different scene that has that bridging text, and cut it into 2 different scenes. So that you are removing it and creating new signposts, new entry and exit points to get from those 2 scenes. I want you to try that. See what it does to length, see what it does to your perception of the pacing

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

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.01: Interview with Abraham Verghese

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-01-interview-with-abraham-verghese

Key Points: Verisimilitude, feeling of reality, and conveying medical information. Readers have seen it all, but you can tell them what's important. Revision, it's easier to take words out then add missing details. Beware circuitous information, make sure it serves a purpose. How did you organize time passing and generations? Well, really I didn't know before I started. I did use a spreadsheet, characters, etc. New chapters allow you to sail through time. Gardening, finding your way through a novel. We all know, "I'm just muddling through..."

[Season 19, Episode 01]

[Mary Robinette] This year, my family will be having our 67th annual Christmas Eve dinner. It's a menu passed down from my grandmother through my mom to me. The entire family shows up. I'm talking 4th cousins once removed. This is not an exaggeration. Which means that during the lead up, I don't have time to menu plan or cook anything else. That's when I turn to prepared meals like Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. Factor can help you eat well for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. It allows me to save time and not eat garbage, while tackling all my holiday to-do's. So if you want to cross meal prepping off your list this holiday season, consider Factor. You can skip the meal planning, grocery shopping, chopping, prepping, and cleaning up, and get Factor's fresh, never-frozen meals delivered to your door. They're ready in just 2 minutes, which my dad says is the appropriate amount of time to cook a meal. He has no idea. The point is, all you have to do is heat and enjoy. If you're trying to squeeze writing into the holiday press, it might be useful to know that Factor is not just for dinner. Count on extra convenience anytime of the day with an assortment of 55 plus add-ons to suit various preferences and tastes, so you can carve out some writing time in the morning by choosing quick breakfast items, lunch to go, grab and go snacks, or ready to eat coldpressed juices, shakes, and smoothies. So, head to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code wx50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.

[Season 19, Episode 01]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Interview with Abraham Verghese.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard

[Mary Robinette] We are joined today for our first episode of the new year with our special guest, Abraham Verghese. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Abraham] Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[Mary Robinette] I have been reading your novel, The Covenant of Water, and, of course, have read your bio. But I was wondering if you could just quickly introduce yourself to our listeners.

[Abraham] Sure. First of all, I should say that I wish you guys had been around when I was starting out writing. It would have been very helpful. I'm Abraham Verghese. I live in California. I'm the author of The Covenant of Water and 3 other books. One other novel, which was called Cutting for Stone. 2 works of nonfiction, My Own Country, and The Tennis Partner. My day job is I work as a physician at Stanford University. Yeah, that's me.

[Mary Robinette] That's amazing. I just want to say how much I really have been enjoying The Covenant of Water. There's such a richness to the language and verisimilitude. So what we're going to be talking about with you, which is something I'm very excited about, is how to kind of create that verisimilitude and also how to convey technical information like medical information in a way that is engaging to the reader. So, we often talk about this idea of verisimilitude, the feeling that something is real. When writing about medicine in particular, what have you found makes it feel real for the reader? Since you write both fiction and nonfiction, do you find that changes between the 2?

[Abraham] Well, I think when I'm describing something medical, there probably isn't a lot of difference between the way I might do it in fiction or nonfiction, other than the fact that I'm making things up in terms of outcomes and so on. But I think that, in a way, I think it's a challenge because in this day and age, most readers are also television viewers. So there's no part of the medical operation that's not familiar to them. This is not like writing in the days of Somerset Maughan when he wrote about traveling to far islands, it was exciting, because there was no other way readers could visualize those places. So you write about surgery and most viewers have seen surgery on YouTube or… So your challenge is to write about it in a way that's somehow fresh and different from what they think they know about it from having seen the operation or seen the procedure or seen whatever it is you're writing about. Part of that is, even though they may have seen something, they may not have realized what the crucial thing is in that inner scene or what the insider's view is on what really matters in all the different things that we're doing. So, I think… I'm hard-pressed to say more than that. I very often worry that I'm giving too much detail. Clearly, for some readers, it may well be too much detail. For that, I really rely on my editor who often will tell me it's not enough or rarely it's too much. So I think I have a… I'm very conscious of not taxing the reader with more than they need. I'm trying to keep it informative and entertaining. It's a fine balance.

[Howard] I find that when the time comes to rewrite, it is a lot easier to take words out than to put words back in. So, erring on the side of too much information means, oh, all I need to do is remove the wrong ones and I will be left with exactly what I need. Rather than needing to sit down and add a bunch of details that I didn't realize was missing.

[Erin] Yeah. I also love what you said about figuring out what matters, and that using that as a way to focus in. I'm curious, like, how do you decide in a certain scene, what is it that matters, like, to you, to the characters, to the readers, in order to focus in like that?

[Abraham] Well, I'm not sure that I have a blanket rule about that. But, for example, when I was describing a particularly hazardous labor scene in The Covenant of Water, I'm thinking a lot about the layperson involved in that, delivering that child, and what this must seem like to them. They obviously don't have the medical terms, so they're looking at it through a different lens than say I might look at the scene. Also, I'm trying to really understand what the patient might be going through. So, for example, in terms of the feeling of a woman giving birth, obviously, that's something that I can only imagine. I don't have personal experience of that. But I was able to talk to the women around me, but also to a gynecologist friend who was also a mother. There were something she talked about that I would never have found myself or by imagining the scene. She talked about the tremendous isolation, the moment that labor starts. Despite the fact that there's all these people around you, suddenly it's you against the world. Everybody else sort of disappears, your focus is so intense on yourself. So I'm not sure how to give you more specifics than that. But I think it's recognizing… I mean, it's rare that I'm describing something from the point of view of purely of a physician, but when I am, even then, if it's routine for the physician, I need to convey in that routine this, what are the things that this person is looking for, what is essential to this whole complicated act. That's often true in my medical practice, for example. People come with a lot of complex complaints. But there are also keywords they say, there are key things they say that are much more important than the things they don't say. Or other things they say. Sometimes it's what they don't say that matters. So certain words, certain acts are terribly important. I try to make sure I underline that for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I think that…

[Abraham] For example, chest pain is pretty common. But chest pain with any tinge of anxiety and sweating, say, that comes with the chest pain, just makes little alarm bells go off. Because this is probably a different kind of chest pain. So, just small… That may be not the best example that I… Just to give you a sense…

[Howard] Oh, no. That's a good example. I had chest pain, and then I had a dull ache spreading down my left arm. I decided this was… 99, this was, 25 years ago. Decided to go into the hospital and they said, "Well, good news. Yes, a lot of what you're experiencing is indigestion. Bad news. Your heart is doing a thing and we're not going to let you leave for 3 days." I learned all kinds of new words.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] My point of view from the beginning was, yeah, my chest hurts and my arm aches. At the end, I had all kinds of medical terminology and things that if I were being described in a book, that would be my character arc.

[Abraham] I think the other… That's well said. It's I think the other thing that I have to keep in mind is not to belabor the reader with medical information that's circuitous. It has to serve a purpose. I think readers are interested in technical details of the world that they don't know very well. So, whether it's Tom Clancy on submarines or, I don't know, Arthur Hailey on the working of an airport, I think we as readers have an inherent interest in the working of a locale and a profession that we don't have a great deal of familiarity with. So you want to provide them enough details to create verisimilitude that you mentioned, but not so many to sort of flash your knowledge. You don't want to just…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah

[Abraham] Pour out words to impress them. It's a fine line, and I think, as you said, the real art is in the revision, it's not really in the writing of the scene. It's in the many, many attempts at revision that hone it down.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm struck by as were talking is about the difference between insider knowledge and translating it for an audience. I find that often some of the things that are the most difficult for me to write are the things that I have a deep intimate knowledge of because I can't tell what I have to unpack for the reader. You're dealing with a couple of different knowledge bases in this book, both your medical knowledge but also the knowledge of this particular community. I can see the… My writer brain can see the places that you are translating for outsiders. Where you will use a word, and then you will say, and this is what this word means. But it's all very much, for me, seated in point of view, in the tactile details, the way the character is moving through the world. I think one of the questions that I have is, like, do you… I'm certain that the answer is going to be it depends, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you find that you just write it, and then rely on your editor to say, "Oh, you're going to need to unpack that for people," or do you have a sense of, oh, I should probably pause here to explain this before I carry on?

[Abraham] I think I have a pretty good sense. So I don't really rely on the editor to do the hard work for me. I really have to catch myself if I feel I've used the term that's very familiar to me, and may not be for the reader. On the other hand, you don't want to keep stopping to say, oh, that word means this. I will often use a big word or an unfamiliar word, and as a reader, I enjoy when I don't know the word, but the next sentence or the context makes it clear what this might be. For example, I love reading Horatio Hornblower's series on sailing, or the whole Audrey Martin… Help me out. The other big sailing series? Patrick O'Brien? Is that…

[Mary Robinette] Patrick O'Brien. Yeah.

[Abraham] So, I mean, I still don't know a lee shore from a not lee shore…

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] But it doesn't really matter. I certainly get the gist of it. I think that's what you're after, you're not for a complete explication, but enough so that the reader's not lost. By the way, I meet readers from time to time who tell me, "I have to skip over all the medical parts." I just have to bite my tongue when I hear that because…

[Laughter]

[Abraham] I don't want them to skip anything, but some people do for whatever reason.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of things we don't want to skip, we're going to pause right now. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we're going to talk more about how to make things feel real without overwhelming the reader.

[Abraham] Yeah, I've been drawn to this book that I read about, I don't know where, and I ordered. It's called How to Draw a Novel. The title alone is intriguing. It's by Martin Solares. He's a fairly well-known foreign writer. I don't think his work is as well known to us. But it literally has… It's a very erudite meditation on novels. But he uses graphics to sort of illustrate the course of particular novels. So you have a little figure comparing Moby Dick to Wuthering Heights. It's really quite entertaining. The figures are sparse, there's a lot of text in between. But the whole thing is a delight. So that's what I'm recommending and reading right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's How to Draw a Novel by Martin Solares.

[Abraham] Yes. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Sounds amazing.

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's dive back in. One of the other things that you do when you're… You're not only dealing with the technical information, but The Covenant of Water takes place over multiple generations of a family. One of the things that I find fascinating is how to convey time passing and how to show the connections between generations. When you were diving into this, did you have touch points in your head about, "Oh, if I mentioned this," or "I want to draw this piece of history out?"

[Abraham] No, not really. I mean, I knew… There are very few things I do about this novel before I started.

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] I'm embarrassed to say. I knew the geography. I think that's terribly important because setting this in the South India, in this community of Christians who believe their religion came when St. Thomas the apostle landed on the shores of Kerala, India, in 52 A.D. That was an important decision. Because the same story anywhere else, in Hoboken or somewhere, would be a very, very different story. I also knew that I wanted it to be multi generational. Mostly because, as someone who's practiced medicine for almost 40 years now, I really liked being able to see, in my early years, some entity for which we just have a label but no understanding, and then watch it evolve over decades to where the molecular basis was better understood, and then eventually completely understood, and then we have a diagnostic test, and then we have treatment. That sort of unfolding requires generations. So I knew that much. But I didn't really know much else. So I was sort of… As I was writing, I actually had a spreadsheet with the characters, when they were born, when they died. I had a parallel column with milestones from my grandparents and parents lives, just because they were sort of helpful touchstones in terms of helping me imagine that moment in time. Rather than saying, "Okay, World War I," you can say, "Well, the year my grandparents got married," or something like that. So then I had 1/3 column with milestones and world history that pertained to that region. For example, seminal events in the long, long journey towards emancipation from the British in India [garbled] about independence in Independence Day, August 15, there were many, many milestones, hundreds of years of them leading up to that. Of course, world events. And, yet another column for medical milestones. I had to keep in mind that my current medical knowledge is not the knowledge I should be using describing something. I had to stay true to the knowledge of that time. So, I suppose in that sense, I was very conscious of time and history. But I didn't really know until I was well into the writing how to weave all these elements together and when to switch scenes. One very useful thing that an editor told me many years ago was the great magical thing about a blank page or a white page or a new chapter is that you can skip over years, just by doing that.

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] You don't really need explanations. Which was a huge revelation to me at the time. I think it was with Cutting for Stone. So, make use of that. The white space allows you to just sail through time.

[Howard] As an aside, I think I deserve an award for not shouting, "Yes!" When you said spreadsheet. Because I have preached spreadsheets…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] A lot. I use them in exactly the same way. Columns for events, columns for character lives. I even have a column sometimes that describes what I'll call story beats. I want this story beat, needs to be dark night of the soul. Or, this needs to be a moment where I tell the reader that this is a character they can trust. For this is a character they can't trust. Very explicit notes to be, so that when I sit down to write, I can write words that are better than that.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's going to be really comforting for our listeners… A couple of us, like, I'm an outliner, usually. It's I know that a lot of listeners are people who garden, who find their way through the novel. I think it will be very comforting for them to hear, "Oh, yeah, I didn't… I sat down and I kind of found my way through the novel." Especially if they pick up the novel and read it, which, it feels so cohesive after it's all done.

[Erin] I was going to say, I wonder a little bit, like, how do you… If you are gardening, if you are finding your way through, but also you have this structure, these columns that like sort of form a trellis, let's say, in the garden, sort of, how do you ensure that you garden to it? How do you make sure that, like, your spreadsheet says X, but you're really feeling Y as you're writing. How do you reconcile between those differences to make sure that you're telling something that both works, and also works for you?

[Abraham] Yeah. I mean, first of all, I should say, the spreadsheet came much, much later. I'm almost embarrassed to confess this, but my books have taken a long time. The last novel I wrote, Carving for Stone, was 14 years before this one. I spent 8 years writing that novel. So with this novel, I really wanted to not spend 8 years, or 14 years. I wanted it to be a few years. So I really wish I could have plotted out the whole novel. In fact, on my right side is this whiteboard with a fairly extensive drawing of the entire novel. Which I know your listeners can't see, but you guys can. So I would plot out the entire novel, and I love to think visually. I draw things out, kind of cartoon fashion. Then I would start writing, only to find that the novel is wandering off in a completely different direction. So then I would photograph the whiteboard, and start all over again. So, to be quite honest, I started with a mood, I started with one character. That was a young bride on her wedding day in 1900. It's I vaguely knew that I wanted 3 generations. I knew where this was situated. But I really didn't know the central conflict of this novel. I didn't know very much of anything. I wish I wasn't that kind of a writer. I wish I knew everything that was going to happen. There are writers like that. I'm a friend of John Irving, who's been a mentor and a correspondent for many, many years. I'm amazed. He knows the first and last line of the novel before he starts, he knows the first and last line of every chapter. So when he begins, it's not that new things don't come up, but he really knows the entire story. He has said… He will say, "If you don't know what you're showing to the reader and what you're hiding and when you're going to reveal it, you're just making it up as you go along, Abraham. You're not a writer, you're just an ordinary liar."

[Laughter]

[Abraham] I think he's right.

[Mary Robinette] I hate to disagree with John Irving, but…

[Abraham] I was going to say that, at the end of my stumbling process of pushing this feeling long and many dead ends and many hundreds of pages in months and months in the wrong direction… Realizing that that's not the novel. There is a point where you finally arrive where… For me, it was almost halfway, two thirds into the novel where I could suddenly see everything. See exactly how it ended. Immediately, many extraneous but important characters and scenes fall away. You realize that they're not critical to this outcome. So I think we eventually all arrive at the same place as John does, but he spends many months in the planning before he embarks on it. So you could say that my writing for all those years was an inefficient way to come to that same point.

[Howard] It may be inefficient, but I would… I'll put a stake in the ground and say, "You're not just a writer, you're an extraordinary writer, and you're a really good liar."

[Laughter]

[Abraham] I'm happy to take that from you. I feel very blessed actually… When you write without any sense of how it's going to be received. So hearing things like this now our wonderful, but at the time, you're not sure. You just do your best.

[Mary Robinette] I think we all feel that sense of, "Oh, I'm just muddling through, and hopefully no one catches me." But since you are a man of science, I'm just going to remind you and our listeners that there's… In science, there's no such thing as a failed experiment. In writing, there's no such thing as a wasted word. You find the story often by discovering what the story is not.

[Abraham] Especially mysteries.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Nancy Kress, who is one of my favorite writers, said that her process is that she writes a draft of the story. She doesn't outline. She blunders her way through it. Then when she finishes, she knows what the story is about, and she tosses her first draft completely, and starts over from scratch, and this time she knows what the story is. So she doesn't extremely long, detailed outline.

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] I think, very much like you, I'm fascinated by process. In my library, such as it is, in my study, I have bookshelves very well organized, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, one whole shelf of marriage self-help, which didn't help, by the way. Then, I have a whole section on writing. Because I keep thinking there will be some book there that's going to give me the key to make the process more efficient. I finally gave up when I bought a book recently and they were quoting me. Here I was trying to find the key, and there quoting something I said. I think we just all have to muddle our way through it, and some of this is organic to the individual. You just can't adopt someone else's method and have it work for you. It doesn't always happen that way.

[Mary Robinette] That is so true. I think that's actually a great note focus to move to our homework. I think you've got some homework for us?

[Abraham] Yeah. I think, I was going to suggest something that I found useful is to either take something you've written that describes something, sort of passive, a landscape or a… Ideally, a landscape. But then write it in 3 different moods. Pretend that someone very precious to you has just died, and you're now gazing at this, and you describe the landscape without any reference to this event in your life. The 2nd time you write it, at a moment of great joy, whatever that is, the birth of your first child, and you're looking at the landscape. Again, no reference to what just happened to you. The 3rd time, imagine you're in a terrible rage, and you're describing this landscape. You can actually see this happening in the best of Dostoyevsky and some of the other writers, where the very landscape is affected by the mood of… That the narrator's carrying into that scene. It's quite beautiful. It's a good exercise to show us how even the most unrelated things to the emotion and the characters can still take on the hue of the prevailing emotion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's wonderful homework. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for joining us.

[Abraham] My pleasure. Thank you.

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

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff that we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-33-deep-dive-the-schlock-mercenary-finale

Key points: Schlock Mercenary, a daily webcomic from June 2000 to July 2020. Why a daily web comic? Because Howard imagined it as a newspaper comic. Buck Rogers and Bloom County! Big save the universe plots and characters that we love with their own arcs. How do you balance those? Like a bumblebee, keep flapping! The guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. Worldbuilding, character work, and the punchline. An outline to hit the ending? If you find yourself diverging, you may need to redo the outline. The drumbeat of the daily strip versus the graphic novel format. Humor and context.

[Season 18, Episode 33]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive Prep: The Schlock Mercenary Finale.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm on the spot for this episode. Also, I think, for the seven episodes that follow.

[Howard] We're going to talk about... We're going to talk about finishing big things. And building big things. And... Um... Oh, boy, Schlock Mercenary ran from June of 2000 to July of 2020. Daily webcomic. Wrapping it up was one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I feel like a discussion of how I did it and why I did the things that I did could lead us into all sorts of interesting and wonderful places with regards to the things that we've worked on, the things that you might be working on, things we love, things that maybe weren't done so well. There's so much to cover, so much to cover when we talk about wrapping up big things.

[DongWon] Before we dive into the end, I'd love to rewind a little bit and talk about the beginning. So, I think to understand how you wrap this up, I would love to understand first, why did you make it a daily web comic? Like, what were the things that drew you to that format? And, like, what was… What did that… How did that wire your brain in a certain way to think about how to structure things when you're putting content out on such a regular cadence?

[Howard] The enormous power of the default. When I began writing Schlock Mercenary, I imagined it as a newspaper comic. I submitted it to a couple of syndicates and was told in both cases, "This is not what we're looking for." I don't blame them. I'm actually quite happy that it didn't get picked up. But I… Up until that point, I really only imagined a comic strip as being a daily thing in newspaper format. I mean, the default was so powerful that I literally didn't imagine other things. Why does Schlock Mercenary look the way it does? Because in 2000, Howard really didn't know very much about what was possible with the web.

[DongWon] I mean, you were starting in an era when I think a lot of web comics were like that. Right? They were all coming out of this model of newspaper strips. They all were very episodic, very serialized. Then, over time, I think we saw a lot of these like daily gag comics suddenly start to develop meta-plot and structure and like these huge events that sort of overtaking them. Was that something you knew that you wanted to do when you started Schlock or were you starting with more of a gag of the week structure? And then, suddenly realized, oh, there's plot here. There's story here. There's worldbuilding in a bigger, more complex way.

[Howard] My two biggest influences going in on this were a great big book of collected Buck Rogers comics I had from the… I want to say 1940s. It might have been the 1930s. Newspaper comics. Where it was definitely long form, and there was some Monday reminder of what we were doing Saturday, cliffhanger. There was some of that going on. But I got the feeling that back then the newspapers just assumed, no, everybody's onboard. They're just picking up this paper and Buck Rogers is what they're reading. We own this audience. It was very streamlined storytelling. And Bloom County. Which did gag of the day sorts of things, but they would string together themes. There was one where, during the Iran-Contra scandal, the Oliver North stand in was an alien puppy dog that was just big eyes and cute and he's there on trial and no one can prosecute, no one can come down on him, because he's a cute puppy, look at him. Look, oh, look at what his antenna do. So we got a week of those gags, and then we move on. I thought, "Well, I could tell a longform story that does this thematic sort of thing on a weekly basis, and plot arcs will probably last about a month." I was wrong. Plot arcs, I found, lasted about a year to a year and a half. It wasn't until about two years in that I realized I had sort of the makings of a mega arc. I did not know where it was going to go. But I knew where it was going to start. It was going to start with some of the injustices that were created by monopolies and by top-heavy power structures and whatever else. Because those are great things to make fun of, but the more I made fun of them, the more I thought, "Man. I want to topple these. What happens if I topple all of them at once?"

[Mary Robinette] At what point in the process did you know the end that you were writing towards?

[Howard] That wasn't until around book 10. That wasn't until around book 10.

[Mary Robinette] For the listeners who have not experienced it, how many books are there?

[Howard] 20. Yeah, right about the time… Right around book 10, I thought, "Yeah. I could finish this in five more books."

[Ha ha ha!]

[Howard] I could wrap this up in five more books.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] And then I started noodling… I was just having so much fun with… I would

the thing and realize, "No, I haven't finished exploring this. There are more jokes to be told, there's more character development, there's… Oh. It's now been another 18 months. I'm on book 12 and I'm literally no closer to the conclusion I've envisioned than I was 18 months ago." But, yeah, right around book 10, I think it was book 3… The first book's called The Tub of Happiness. The second book, The Teraport Wars. Teraport wars is the one where we start seeing the grand Galactic whatever. Then, book 3 was Under New Management. Book 4, the Blackness Between was where I introduced dark matter as something that could have complex structures and life with desires that conflict with ours. Goals that bring us into conflict. Spoiler alert everyone. That's the piece right there which I think aired in 05, 06… That was the piece that ultimately needed to be resolved by book 20.

[Mary Robinette] Since you said the word spoiler, I do just want to let new listeners know that when we do these deep dives, that we go full spoiler. So we encourage you to read the material that has been linked to in the liner notes. Because later you're going to get all the spoilers.

[Howard] The good news is even if we spoil the big ending for you, there are so many beautiful moments… Yeah, I'm blowing my own horn here a little bit…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But as I read in preparation for this, I wrote this. Obviously, I know how it goes. I loved rereading it. I just had so much fun with the characters and with their individual plot resolutions. That was something that I learned fairly early on, which is, yeah, you can have a save the universe plot. But if we don't have characters that we love who have their own desires and their own plot arcs and their own disasters and their own recoveries from those disasters, the end of the universe doesn't really feel like it matters.

[Erin] You've mentioned a couple of elements, like the characters and all these things that go into it. How did you sort of decide in day-to-day when to devote time to the larger arc, when to devote time to an individual character moment or a great line? How did you balance that out over the course of one day going into the next?

[Howard] That. Feels. Like. The. That feels like the bumblebee and the laws of aerodynamics question. Because, very often I would stare at what was happening on the page and I would say I feel like I planned this. I feel like I did all of this on purpose. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Sandra is standing there next to me and saying, "Yeah. It's the bumblebee and the law of aerodynamics." Law of aerodynamics does not explain how a bumblebee flies. Bumblebee's job, keep flapping. So she would, right there, she said, "That's fine, honey. Keep flapping."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Since then, I have learned, one, the laws of turbulence in gases and liquids very nicely explain how a bumblebee stays aloft. It amounts to keep flapping. Two, I have become much more conversant with the sorts of tools I was unconsciously using. One of those tools was a prioritization of what is important… What is most important to have happen. For me, the most important, the guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. People have to be getting a reward for reading the strip today. So I would often begin with do I have a structure that is going to have a punchline at the end? There's a question that often gets asked, how do you know whose point of view to follow? The answer is I follow the character who is in the most pain. Because that's often going to be the most interesting. For me, it was, yeah, the character who's in the most pain is the most likely to be the one where there's going to be a good joke. But that's also… I'd rephrase the question. Who's going to be able to tell the best joke? We should pause for a thing of the week, and we'll come back in a moment.

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week, when we talk about very long-running series that have come to a conclusion, is a series of books by James S. A. Corey that is collectively known as The Expanse. Several of the books were adapted into a TV show as well. But the entire book series runs nine volumes, and wrapped up a couple years ago. It covers an enormous amount of territory, both in terms of story, character, and world. It starts very focused in our solar system, it's a big space opera. Then it continues to expand and grow in these leaps and starts that are endlessly fascinating and have endless complications with the characters. It jumps around in time as well as in space. I personally think that those two authors who cowrote the series stick the landing beautifully. It is worth going through the journey for all nine volumes that does a beautiful job of managing to balance the big ideas, the politics, and the individual character journeys. I adore these books. I'm very biased. I got the opportunity to work on the first couple of them. But watching where they ran with the thing from there all the way to the finish line was a thing of beauty, and I highly recommend everybody check out The Expanse books.

[Howard] I would like to return to the question Erin asked.

[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.

[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.

[DongWon] If you don't mind me jumping in. It's more of a compliment than a thought, actually. One of the things that I thought that you do beautifully in this is really balancing three different toolkits you're using. I could see how you do that in a daily way. Right? I was reading these as a big block, not as a daily strip, but you have… The three tools I'm seeing in your kit here is, one, you have the world building, which gives you all this like big ideas stuff. Right? Whether that's dark matter being sent in, whether that's a civilization structured around this idea, whether it's like these digital heavens spaces that people get teleported into. You have all these high concepts that are sort of driving the metanarrative that's thematic. Then you have deep character work and relationship work that is driving the minute to minute plot of the story that keeps things flowing in such interesting ways and interesting dynamics and people are making choices rooted in who they are. But then you have the third tool in your kit, and this is what a lot of people don't have, which is, as you were talking about, the need for the punchline. So, on a daily basis, you have a structure of we need to get to that joke. So you're able to rely on the motivation of the joke, the guiding rails that you're on because of the character work you've done, and then the overall target, which is these huge intellectual world building structures. I think those three things operating in sync, almost in tension with each other a little bit, just… I can see it like laser targeting you towards that finale that you're getting towards. It was really fun to watch that unfold.

[Howard] Thank you. That's… It took me a long time to figure out that was kind of how I was doing it. One of the things I found out… And this is returning to Erin's question of how did you select which pieces you were working on. I realized that the way I had been creating individual strips and individual story arcs was not going to work for creating the ending. I needed to outline my way all the way to the very end with some big structures so that I could start aiming things. Otherwise I was going to ramble. I mean, the ramble was fun. We'll talk a little bit about in a future episode about that. But…

[DongWon] When did you realize you needed to do those outlines?

[Howard] Putting a year on it, that would have been 2015, 2016. I knew that I needed it and I wanted each of the last books to be about a year of comics. So it was…

[DongWon] So you're like two or three volumes before…

[Howard] Late 2017 is when I'd… When I was committed… When I actually started the last of the three books. That was… The way I structured it was I wanted to treat the ending as a trilogy. I want the first book of the trilogy to set up the final conflict and to bring all of the characters and put them in good… Get all the pieces on the chessboard and end us in a way… End that book in a way that feels triumphant but also propagates a disaster into the next book. That structure served me really well. If I'd tried to do it in five books, if I'd tried to do it in one book, I don't think I could have pulled it off.

[Erin] I feel like I hear people a lot coming to this realization, who are writing longer works, where they're like, "I started out, and I was just doing a thing. Then, outlines came upon me, and it turned out I needed them." I'm curious, how did that change… Did it change your process at all? Did it make it easier? Was there anything that was more difficult once you realized that you had to do that for the ending?

[Howard] For my own part, and I begin with that phrase because I don't want to force discovery writers into the same path that I was in. For my own fart…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fart.

[That's it for… Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you were talking about the gaseous nature…

[Howard] For my own part, I felt very… It felt very precarious to me. I was very worried that by outlining these things, I was going to break a portion of my process and wasn't going to be able to follow through. Fortunately, I was, at the time, hanging out with some really strong writers of outline and fiction in short form and longform and whatever else. I count their friendship and their examples and their instruction is critical pieces of getting me passed the fear of the precarious and into the understanding of Howard, you've got the toolbox. You've figured out that it's turbulence that makes the bumblebee fly. Now flap that direction, and it's going to work.

[DongWon] How much did you stick to the outline?

[Howard] The bigger part… The biggest part of the outline, I stuck to it. Five nines as accuracy. I know this book will feature this cast, this book will feature that cast, last book will have people split up and they come back together. So, at that level, yeah, very, very accurately. At a lower level, there was a place in the second book where I realized I had diverged wildly from what I'd originally imagined, but I really loved where it was going. So I sat down and re-outlined things and was pleased by with what… Where that went.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've definitely done that too. I'm partway through a book and I'm like, "Oh. I'm going to do a different thing than I'd outlined." One of the things that I was struck by was the difference between the way it reads when you're reading it as a single strip versus the way you're reading it on… When you're reading it in graphic novel format. I wond… I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, about the way you think about it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for us now, the way you're thinking about…

[Howard] Sure. It's… The way I think about it is it was a horrible, horrible compromise. I worry still about people who read it in the longform. That's because the pacing of reading one strip a week… The pacing of panel panel panel punchline panel is very, very… It's like a drumbeat. When you read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it's the cognitive equivalent of just a constant pounding that I'll admit was not necessarily pleasant for me. But the pacing here is weird. I keep pausing for punchlines. Why am I doing that? Oh, because that's how this was constructed. That's just what it is.

[Mary Robinette] So what's interesting for me is I have a different experience. So when I read it… When I'm clicking through and read it strip, strip, strip, I get the beat, beat, punchline, beat, beat, punchline. But when I'm reading it as a full-page, as a graphic novel, the size of the jokes vary, and the other thing that happens is that I start to have… I start to carry context with me across the things. One of the things, like, that is so difficult about humor is that so much of it is contextually based. When you're writing something where you need to land a punchline, you've only got the context for those two or three previous panels. But when you're doing it longform, a lot of the… You're able to have a lot of the jokes that are landing for me bigger, because I'm carrying context through the whole thing, than when I'm doing it in an individual beat. For me, that was an instructive thing when I'm going back to my own stuff, which is in a completely different form that I can… To think about the way context is carrying across and having the jokes that are… Where the context only needs to be like one line before, but then also the ones where there's like a page off, that you've been setting up for pages and pages.

[Howard] Yeah. That was always difficult for me because, I knew, on any given day, the way the Schlock Mercenary website was built is when you arrive at the website, the most current strip is there. So I always wanted the most current strip to give you enough context that when you got to the last panel, there was a reward. Maybe you didn't need the whole joke, but you needed some of it. But if you went back and read more, then obviously there would be more.

[DongWon] Well, that's what I really love about using humor in this way, in the rhythm of that humor being at the end of every strip. Then you have the longer Sunday strips or whatever it is. But that rhythm… Because humor is fundamentally… Or not maybe fundamentally, but often about changing the context of information you have. Right? You're given information, the punchline is the abrupt recontextualization of the information you have to see it from another angle. Which, when you're trying to get your readers to absorb an enormous amount of complex worldbuilding it's such a useful tool. So the end of every four or five panels, I was getting not just the information that was given to me in a complex way, but then you would have an opportunity to tell me, "Here's the important thing you need to take away from this." It was like gathering the executive summary at the end of every strip in the form of a punchline, which really helped me absorb all the stuff that I was looking at. Because it's quite dense. Right? But it's... 20 volumes of complex military science fiction worldbuilding means there's a lot of information that you need to be having in your brain as context for why is this character making this choice, why is this civilization invading X, Y, Z. So the humor and that rhythm of the daily joke, I think, was an enormously beneficial tool for you in being able to deliver that in a way that if you had just done a straight graphic novel may have been incredibly dense, like Alan Moore style, like what am I looking at at this point? So I think that structure actually was… Ended up being a really beautiful tool in your kit

[Howard] Well, thank you. I… I'm admittedly self-conscious about it. The very first Schlock Mercenary book, Tub of Happiness, the only reason it got printed was that Sandra said, "Honey, people want to give us money for it. We can just put it in print." I'm like, "I can't even look at those strips and lay them out. They're so awful. I want to redraw them." She said, "Then don't look at them. I will lay out the book and we will sell it. Because I would like to eat." So there is a huge measure in my heart, there's this huge measure of it is what it is. Compromises were made. Which of the words between Schlock and Mercenary says that I won't sell out my art in order to feed my family?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Howard, if you didn't grow between volume 1 and volume 20, I think I'd be more concerned than you looking back at volume 1 and being concerned.

[Howard] Yeah. But, yeah, I love the perspectives that y'all are bringing to how you're reading it. One of the things that we're going to cover in a later episode is writing endings and how, from about book 10, I was laying the groundwork for what I knew was going to be the resolution to the conflict. I kept that piece. But I ended up being wrong about what the real satisfying piece of the resolution was. That, to me, feels like a great place to end the episode.

[Mary Robinette] Maybe we should actually do homework before we end.

[Howard] You know what? Let's do some homework about ending things. You may have seen on YouTube there's a little series called How It Should Have Ended. Where they take a movie and then they give you an ending that actually makes more sense. The one that leaps to mind immediately is using the eagles to fly the ring to Mordor. Take a thing that you love. Something that you've really enjoyed. Try to write a new ending for it. Something maybe that makes more sense to you, or that maybe it fits your head canon better, or you would just be happier with. But outline a new ending for somebody else's thing that you love.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.41: Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/09/17-41-picture-books-are-books-too-with-special-guest-seth-fishman/

Key points: Picture books are short! 500 words or less. Write a whole draft in one sitting. Submit with illustrations or not? If you have a really good artist, yes. It builds enthusiasm. Expect to go back and forth with the illustrator. Start with an outline and then make the words pretty. Page turns and spreads are important. Let the illustrator bring visual language and ideas to the project, too.

[Season 17, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we have our special guest.

[Seth] Hi. I'm Seth Fishman. I am the author of seven picture books, some nonfiction and some fiction. And I am excited to be here.

[Mary Robinette] I am very happy that you're here with us.

[Mary Robinette] So, a couple of us on the podcast have written picture books or are in the process or have experimented with them. But you have gone… You've written a lot more than that. I also know that you write longform as well. What are some of the things that you think about when you are approaching a picture book?

[Seth] Well, that's a great question. I think a lot of people think that picture books are harder than they are. I don't think you hear that kind of sort of note very often. I think picture books are easier simply because of their length. I mean, I think of Nanowrimo, we could write 100 picture books in that period of time with that many words, with that much word count, probably way less. It doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be the best. But what I love about picture books and the differences is that you can write the whole draft in one sitting. If you're in a good mood. That is something that allows you to throw things out much more, to experience and experiment much more. In fact, that has actually messed up my writing longform because I get so impatient now when I sit and start writing. The first bump I hit, I'm like, "Um. Ah. You need to take a break."

[Chuckles]

[Seth] So it's a much different experience.

[Mary Robinette] I also know that you do… That you've done like nonfiction picture books, which require a ridiculous amount of research. Is that still writing a book in one go?

[Seth] Yeah, that's a different good question. You do, you can still get them rolled in there. My first book, A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars, or my first picture book, rather. I had the whole arc of the story came to me as soon as I had the title. I just asked the question, how many stars are there, and the answer was so beautiful, and I was thinking about my son. I was able to sort of have the outline… Basically the outline was the book. Then you just make the story prettier. Right? The words prettier. So that did work out. But then I had to go backwards and do the science behind it. The three others I did? That was much harder. But by then I had the rhythm of what I wanted to do. Because it was a series. When you write a certain set of series, and people are expecting a certain thing, you'll find, especially in picture books, there's a lot of very familiar tropes. Once you find your own rhythm, it's… It just sort of is about matching that. So I knew what I had to do in the beginning, the middle, and the end. But I didn't know what the special talents of the sperm whale was, which is that it can deflate its lungs to go really, really deep. You learn that stuff, ocean books, etc. so it's… Yeah.

[Howard] So, seven picture books. How many of these have you personally illustrated? How did finding illustrators work? Because that's… In our experience with Sandra and I and our picture books, that's a horse of several different colors.

[Seth] Yeah, that's a really great question. This is where I have to reveal for those that don't know that I am also a literary agent. So I do have some privilege, I suppose is the term, in that I know a lot of illustrators. I get this question quite a bit is should I submit with illustrations or should I not. My belief is quite firmly that you should, but only if (a) the artist is really good, and (b) there's a value add of the artist. That is not an easy thing to find. Certainly not to just hire someone, pay them money to be able to do. So the bonus that I had is that my first illustrator, Isabelle Greenberg, oddly… Well, she lives in the UK and she was my former client. Her primary agent in the UK went to [Double you me?]. They don't like American agents to not be at [Double you me?] as well. So I couldn't work with her. I said, "Okay. Well, when you come back to me, I'm excited about it, because they don't know how to do graphic novels. But until then, what about we work on this project together?" So I knew her, she was a best-selling graphic novelist. She had never done a picture book though, and I had her. The reason why I want that to happen… I believe it to happen is the best, is because when you submit a book with both together and there is a value add, some people will pass on the art and some people will pass on the writing. But when they see them both together, like them both, the enthusiasm is much greater than it would be for just the script. That said, traditionally, you still… Most people submit just the writing and then the agent takes you on and can either pair up with you, you can have… I had a stable of authors that I can pair with clients of mine or you can have the publishers do that. That is… There are some real advantages to that. You could have…

[Brandon] That's how we did it.

[Seth] Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.

[Brandon] Is I submitted a text, said, "Hey, do you guys want this book?" We took it out on submission. We ended up at a publisher. Then counted on them… Because I wanted to learn this process. Right? I had never done a picture book. They came to me with eight illustrators that they wanted to ask. They hadn't asked them yet. They said, "Which of these fits best for you?" I picked one that I knew and was quite a big fan of. They approached this individual, which I can't announce yet, who said, "Yes." But it was kind of fun for me because each of these illustrators would have interpreted the story differently. It really helped me kind of get a feel for how do I want this story interpreted before we even went to the illustrators.

[Seth] Have you been able to interact with that illustrator?

[Brandon] Yep. Yes. So the illustrator sent sketches, and we went back and forth on some ideas for the sketches which are changing the story in interesting ways. Now they're working on going beyond that.

[Seth] Can I follow-up? Sorry, really quickly. Have you been emailing directly with that illustrator?

[Brandon] Ooo. No, I have not. I'm aware that this is going to be something we need to push for. It's no… So I don't know what everybody else's experience has been, but art directors at publishers tend to be very protective of their artists. They do not want some author coming in and ham-fistedly saying, "B...b...b...b..b..." We've had to work overtime at my other publishers to get them used to the idea that it's okay for Brandon to talk to the illustrator. Yeah.

[Howard] When Sandra wrote her Hold Onto Your Horses picture book, we submitted it and there wasn't a whole lot of interest. We decided to self publish, because we were already set up for that because of Schlock Mercenary. But we knew that I was the wrong artist. Absolutely the wrong artist. We auditioned artists. There were many, many, many very talented artists who submitted things and they knew how a horse looked. But the artist we chose drew pictures that told us how a horse felt. It's difficult to describe how wonderful that is. But when you land on the right artist, suddenly you become very protective of them. You want that relationship to just last forever because it's so beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was an art major in college and technically could do my own illustrations. I've been an art director and would not illustrate my own books. Because it's a specific and special skill set. For people who don't know, Seth is also my agent. So when we sent it out, we did not send it out with an artist attached.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to go ahead and pause us for our book of the week. Which is Seth's.

[Seth] Yes. Hello. The book of the week is my forthcoming book, Bad Drawer. That actually is based on the accumulation of me sort of being jealous of the writer illustrators, which sort of bypasses that problem and allows you to do so many cool other things. So I pitched this book where there was a young kid whose… Who has an idea and is not a great drawer. You can argue about what's good or bad, but the idea is that they can't get across what's in their mind on the page. But some of their friends can do this and this and this and this, and they can work together to help illustrate that project. But I was supposed to illustrate it, and my illustrations really bad. They did pay me for it, and then they said, "Well, you're not…"

[Laughter]

[Seth] "You're actually so bad that we're going to hire someone to draw badly for you." I was actually quite devastated to be quite honest. But I did demand to have two trees in the final spread. So that's a pretty fun bonus. So I illustrated two trees in there. Ah...

[Laughter]

[Seth] But there's a lot of great illustrators like Tillie Walden's in there, Armand Baltazar, Anna Bond, Jessica Hische, there's six illustrators that are in there with me so it's really fun.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Thank you. I am excited about this book personally.

[Mary Robinette] But I'm also wanting to know, since we… I am the only person on the podcast without children. When you are the reader for a picture book, what are some of the things that make you pick it up and go, "Ah, this book. This book is good."

[Brandon] I let my kids do it. Just turn them loose and say, "What do you want?" Now, they're very cover and title influenced, as one might imagine. But I've noticed that the ones my kids like the most are the ones that their teachers have read to them. Which is very common for that age group. We'll go to the store and they'll be like, "This one! I love this one." I'm like, "How do you know this one?" "We read it in school." "And this one! I love this one." They read it in school. But I let them steer. I'm curious what they're interested in.

[Dan] The thing that makes me love a picture book goes back to what Seth said in the beginning, that you start with an outline and then your job is just to make it pretty. Make the words just really pretty. So, for me, it is clever turns of phrase. Often that comes in the form of some kind of repetitive structure. But just poetic simplicity of language. I have never written a line as good as "Good night, nobody. Good night, mush." From Good Night Moon. That's a perfect line. I love reading that book to my kids because I get to that point and I'm like, "Oh, this is my favorite line." So something like that just impresses me with the economy and beauty of the language itself.

[Brandon] One thing we should talk about, since it is a writing podcast, is picture books have a very different format from writing others. This is one of the things I had to beef up on before I wrote it, because a lot of picture books are 40 pages. There are some formats that are a little shorter, a little longer. But basically, when you're writing a picture book, unlike when I'm writing most of my other things, you are considering each page turn. That's a vital bit of important narrative that you're using, and you're considering are they spreads or are they not. Where are the words going? Howard's smiling because, yeah, this is…

[Howard] I was just going to ask, when I've written things for comics, I wrote a short story for David Kellett's Drive comic. Story's called History and Haberdashery. I had to ask him several times to make absolutely clear I knew the answer what page does this begin on, what page does this end on. I need to know where the spreads are and I need to know where the page turns are. Because in comics, you write to the page turn. In many cases, the person writing the script for the comic is doing preliminary art direction, where they are describing where the reveal is, so on and so forth. My question is how much of what I already know about writing graphic novels, writing comics, how much of that applies to writing picture books?

[Seth] That's a great question. I think it does quite a bit. I would actually venture to say that most picture books are 32 pages.

[Brandon] They really are.

[Seth] Some play to 40.

[Brandon] Yeah. I squeezed to 40 because I'm an epic fantasy writer.

[Laughter]

[Seth] Right. So they're 32. Then they're actually 28, because there are a number of other pages. You have your copyright page and whatnot. If you are an author illustrator, you can, like Mo Williams with Pigeons Drive the Bus, it actually starts in the endpapers. He sort of starts creating the story early. It's sort of cheating. But being able to look at the dummy of a book is incredibly important. I think you should just type into Google, "picture book dummy," and you'll be able to see the 32 pages spread in there, and you'll be able to write literally onto that. It's so curious to see how you'd be able to do that if you're just a normal fiction writer, how that affects you. But to be a comic book writer, the stage directions is helpful. Obviously you want your artist to experience it the way that they want, right? But there's some things that you have to say because it's part of the plot or a move you really needed to get across. I think it's incredibly important to do that. It seems like a translation is really good.

[Seth] Mary Robinette, I was very curious, though, because you write SF and then you wrote an SF picture book and the interplay with the artist was a little bit different. I was very fascinated watching not back and forth. Your notes were different. I was curious to know how you were feeling when you were seeing these notes pop up in terms of both the art, but then also the science behind what you were doing.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So one of the things that I have kind of as a brand at this point is that my stuff will be accurate. Picture books are supposed to be beautiful and stylized. So what I wanted was instead of stylizing off of an imaginary rocket, I wanted her to stylize off of an actual rocket. So I would send over notes like "Here are some rocket ships to look at." On the moon, the initial… The roughs that I got back were wooden crates. I'm like, "Well, this is what things would actually be packed in." She had a picture for pouring water, and I sent over juice packs. It was really great. But I didn't have a direct back and forth with my illustrator. But my editor was so good at passing that information on, and having the conversations with the illustrator. But then the illustrator also came back with ideas. Like, there's a pair of red buttons that float through in every single thing. We… Things don't just float float on the moon. There is gravity. But we had the conversation of "Well, it would probably way about as much as a feather, so it is realistic to assume that it might be kicked up at any given moment." She had this idea that these buttons would float all the way through and then be incorporated into the final image as kind of this beautiful emotional touchstone that was not at all anywhere in my ideas. So it was… I subscribe to the Jim Henson model of success which is that you hire someone who is better than you and let them do their job. That, for me, is a prime example of the visual language that she could bring to it. I brought the science. Like, okay, this is what an actual rocket looks like. I think she did just like a wonderful job with that.

[Howard] In late 2017, I got to illustrate a Munchkin deck for Steve Jackson Games for Munchkin Starfinder. One of the most challenging things was coming up with a syntax for taking the Paizo Starfinder spaceships on model and caricaturing a spaceship on a card so it looks silly. I know how to caricature a person because I know what pieces get exaggerated and what pieces get shrunk. But what are those pieces on a spaceship? The answer is I couldn't actually tell you without going back and looking at the cards and remembering what I did.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this has been a lovely conversation. I would love to give our listeners some homework.

[Seth] Yes. Well, because picture books are sort of so new to a number of the listeners, this is a little double part homework. First is to go to your local bookstore and just explore the picture book section. See how they are stacked, how they are promoted, and how it's different from a section you normally hang out in. Then, second of all, I encourage you to try and write one. 500 words or less. It's very simple. See how it feels. Try not to do rhyme. That's the other part of it. Just try that in the SF or the fantasy category. There's not enough of them. I would highly encourage writing that to fill that space.

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.38: Oh No I Lost The Thread

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/18/17-38-oh-no-i-lost-the-thread/

Key Points: After a break? Try rereading the last writing session. Do minor edits. Then see if you can pick it up again. Play with the characters again a bit, just free writing to get to know them again. Understand that you are a different writer now. Pick up a different thread. Take it apart and use it for parts. When you know a break is coming, or someone interrupts you, drop yourself some breadcrumbs to help you when you come back. Remember, there's always another thread.

[Season 17, Episode 38]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Oh No I Lost The Thread.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Marshall] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I pitched this topic because I lost the thread. Prior to Gen Con Indy, I was 90 miles an hour making my way through the manuscript of a murder mystery… Cozy murder mystery comedy novella. Then I had to stop because I went to a convention. Then I came home from the convention and had injured my hand, and I had to copyedit, so there's a bunch of other things. It's now been almost… At this point, it's been almost 5 weeks, and I have lost the thread. I… What do you do? What… How do you even…?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Right.

[Howard] What is the process?

[Mary Robinette] So when Howard pitched this, we were all like, "Ooh. Yeah. Me too." So I have… I've got a couple of thoughts on this. There's a number of different reasons that you will lose the thread. Sometimes it's because you took a planned break, sometimes it was a forced stop. So what I find is that it helps me to come back and kind of… Usually I'll start with the lowest possible buy-in, which is that I'll just reread what I wrote in the last writing session, which is a trick that I learned from Dan Wells. Then do minor edits on that, just to kind of exercise some muscles. Then I'll start writing again. If it hasn't been a long break or if it's a shorter work, that's usually enough. But, oh my goodness, the days when that does not work are months long.

[Howard] The days when that does not work are months long is hurtful and I feel seen. Marshall?

[Laughter]

[Marshall] No, so, it's funny that we've started this topic. I have been forced to take a break from my current work in progress because I decided to go to grad school. So I started grad school. I'm going… So I'd put my novel down. Now I'm working on a brand-new novel. I've outlined it. Everything is great. That other novel is still sitting in the back of my head, and I real… I cannot go back to it. It's going to be over… Well over a year before I can even think about going back to it. So I appreciate this conversation. I don't know what the heck I'm going to do when I go back to this other project. But somebody that I… Someone else in my writing community suggested playing with the characters again a bit. Like, doing some free writing around just getting to know them again. I think that's what I'm going to have to do. Because after a year or more of taking a break from this book, and writing a whole nother book in between, I'm going to have to do something.

[Howard] Chelsea?

[Chelsea] That's absolutely solid. I'm having kind of the same thing. I have been attempting to write a book for literally a couple of years, and what keeps happening is, I keep not being able to work on it for months and months and months at a time. I got frustrated with this way back in May, and it was the same ideas. Like, I have to like get into this, I have to write some no pressure stuff, I'm going to explore the characters. What I'm going to do is I'm going to write about their lives the day before the first page of the story. Honestly what happened is that because I had spent so much time with the characters, what I wrote as kind of like a nothing burger writing exercise is now actually the opening of my story, because it's way better than what I had before. One of the things that I have to accept is that I have this huge chunk of text that I wrote when I was a different writer who wasn't as skilled as I am now. I have to go back and fix it, and I don't want to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's really hitting it on the head for me, is that one of the things that I have realized when I take a really long break is that I'm a different person than when I wrote it. So kind of a novel called The Dragon Question, and for long listeners, longtime listeners, you've heard me talk about this before. This is The Dragonriders of… Alfred Hitchcock does The Dragonriders of Pern. Well, I wrote like three quarters of the novel and then had to put it down for years while I wrote the Lady Astronaut books. Then had a break and went back to it. I'm like, "What is even this novel?" There's two things. One is my skills are better, and the other is I'm fundamentally different… Interested in different things than I was when I wrote it. I'm not the same person. So there's stuff in there that just… Like, some of the questions that I was noodling on, some of the stuff like that, those aren't things that are interesting to me anymore. So it makes it… Part of what makes it hard to pick up is the thread is… It's not a thread I'm interested in tugging on. I want to pick up a different thread that's attached to the same tapestry.

[Howard] So maybe, and this is going to be a really stupid idea, the way to tackle this is to do your nothing burger writing epi… Writing exercise where you write about the Mary Robinette Kowal who is interested in writing that book.

[Chuckles]

[Oh]

[Mary Robinette] But that's only like if I want to go backwards.

[Howard] I get… I totally get what you're saying, and I only suggested it because if someone had offered you money for Alfred Hitchcock does Dragonriders, then, hey, we fall back on craft and we learn to write the things that don't interest us as much anymore.

[Mary Robinette] I did finish the novel and if someone would like to offer me money for it, that would be delightful.

[Chelsea] You heard it here first.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sweet. Hey, Marshall, do you have a book of the week for us?

[Marshall] I do. So I read a book a couple of weeks ago. I'm actually going to work with this author in my grad school program, which I'm really excited about. His name is Ayize Jama-Everett and the book is The Liminal People. It's the first… I haven't read the whole trilogy yet, I've read the first book. I don't want to give too much away. But, essentially, the main character has a power to heal himself and others. He's working for basically a crime Lord, and his ex calls him asking for help. He ends up having to help her daughter, who also has powers. It's kind of got touches of The Matrix, a little bit of X-Men, a little bit. Some people have power, some people don't. But I don't want to give away the plot. But it is absolutely phenomenal. It is fast-paced. It took me like… I think I read it in two days. So definitely pick up The Liminal People.

[Howard] Awesome. Thank you.

[Howard] I want to pose a question for this august body. What are the times when you've tried to pick up the thread and failed the worst? Do you have an example of that? Because our listeners learn from our failures.

[Chelsea] I had this idea. I wanted to write a book, and I had the idea and I wrote like enough to basically get away with a proposal. To have a book accepted with an outline and some sample pages written. Where I had a art historian specialist looking at a work of art that basically to her trained eye was the work of a particular artist in her history. But there was one problem. The actual materials that were used were… They were too modern. They had actually been developed after this person had died. It led them into a mystery. That was like really cool. I had written like the best fight scene I had ever written is in this. I put it aside, and I came back, and I had to go back and say, "I'm sorry. I can't write this. I can't. I can't. It's no good. It's not a good story. I'm sorry, I have to do something else."

[Mary Robinette] So, mine. I'm… Mine is a story that I kept picking up and putting down. Every time I pick it up and put it down, my idea of what the story is changes. I'll put it… It is such a mess that… It's like five different stories that have the same characters in it. And sometimes different characters. Because I've changed my mind about who's in the story and I've changed my mind about where the setting is. I've just kept writing it as if I've fixed the things. But I haven't fixed any of them.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's so bad. But I really… There are pieces of it that I really like, and I want it to work, and I'm stubborn, so I keep picking it back up and I'm like, "Surely. Surely, I will be able." I have an outline for it. It doesn't help. It doesn't help at all.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Every time I pick it up, I'm like, "Oh, no. This is bad." I write a new outline for it, and just keep writing with the new outline. But this is… I'm really tempted to… You know what, I think I may… I will have to look at it, but I may… I might share it in the liner notes, because it is just… It is very instructive in like what is even happening here.

[Howard] In the 1980s, there was a jigsaw puzzle… A line of jigsaw puzzles. I don't remember which one it was. But all of their 500 piece puzzles in this little series used the exact same cut template for the pieces. Which meant you could shuffle the puzzles together and have Mary Robinette's novel.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes. I mean, it's a short story. A novella, maybe, by now. I don't even know.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's… Yeah. No, it's terrible. It's really bad.

[Howard] So it's a 100 piece puzzle, not 500.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a 100. Maybe 25 pieces. I don't even know. It's…

[Howard] Marshall?

[Marshall] So, I guess for me, it's a little bit different. I wrote a novel… Fantasy novel, years and years ago. Even printed it out and everything. I was very happy with it. It's horrible. But the upside to it is now that I've been tinkering in other genres and stuff like that, in grad school and in my writing community, I actually took part of that world… Because, like Mary Robinette was saying earlier, there's something about my level of writing then in my level of writing now. Right? So I've actually taken part of that, basically a character and a concept from that, and turned it into a short story for the end of my last semester that I was in. Now this semester, I get to turn it into a novelette. So I've picked up the thread, but it wasn't… It's not that novel. It's a different thing. I'm sorry, Mary Robinette, for your thing…

[Howard] Okay. Your solution is a really, really good one. I want to come back… I hope I typed this correctly. I took notes. Your pull quote. "I was very proud of it. It's horrible."

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] Yeah, that's accurate.

[Howard] Because… Raising my hand now… I think we all feel seen by this.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] So proud of something we've done, then we realize, "Oh, that really wasn't very good." But the recognition when you go back to pick up the thread and you recognize, "Oh. This isn't good enough. There are two or three pieces in here that are good, but everything that connects them is garbage, so I will take this apart and use it for parts."

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Yup.

[Howard] You just need to… A character, a fight scene, whatever.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have definitely done that. So one of the things that I do want to give people, if you have a planned break coming up, so, like, you know that the thing is… You know that you're going to have to set it down, like, say, you're getting ready to go to World Con or something like that. You know you're going to have to set it down for a little bit. Or if someone just comes into the room while your writing and interrupts you. Because we've also all had that, where you're in the flow and someone breaks your concentration and you come back and you're like, "Oh, I knew exactly where this scene was going and now I no longer do." One of the things that all do is that I will drop breadcrumbs to myself. So, like, I'll just be like, "Alma and Nathaniel canoodling, sexy fun times, interrupted, lights up." I'll come back and, like, when I look at it again, I may or may not remember what exactly those things were. But it gives my brain kind of a Rorschach where it can interpret it based on where I am now and it's got enough connection to what was happening before that I can use it going forward.

[Howard] Okay, so last question. It's not really a question, but it is an ask. We have listeners right now listening to this episode this very moment who have lost the thread. Do you have encouraging words for them? After the encouraging words, maybe we'll do homework.

[Mary Robinette] You're not alone.

[Marshall] There's more threads.

[Howard] Here's what I'll offer. I'm so sorry. I know this hurts. It happens to the best of us. Or so I've been told. I'm not actually among the best of us.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah. This is an unfortunate and really annoying part of being a writer. The good thing, and I will say this, the good thing is that it feels like in that moment that you've lost something deeply, deeply precious. But there's always another thread, there's always another story. So, just because you've lost that one, usually it's because you are in fact ready to move on. So it's not always a terrible thing when it happens. It just feels bad.

[Marshall] I like that. There's always another thread.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The brain has a terrible UI.

[Chelsea] I am a knitter and I have dropped a work in progress and come back to it and said, "Now, what was I thinking? No, I can't do this." It doesn't matter, the yarn is still good. I can unravel it, [garbled I can put it in a hank], I can wash all the wrinkles out of it, I can rewind it into a ball, and I can knit it again. That's why I love being a knitter.

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Chelsea] This is a metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Those words are not wasted words. You're a better writer now because you… Because of the words. Right. So…

[Howard] Okay. Homework, Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Homework. So, you've lost the thread. You need to start writing again. Before you look at the manuscript, I want you to write down, to the best of your knowledge and your thinking of where you are right now, to the best of your knowledge, what you think the thread is. Like, what you think the book is about, what you think was supposed to happen next, kind of anything… Just brain dump. This can be a sentence, this can be a paragraph, it can be… However long it is. But just what you think is supposed to happen. What you think that thread is. Then I want you to actually reread the thing. Write down what the thread in the old manuscript was. What that old thread was. Then I want you to reconcile the two. Because you are not the same writer you were when you set it down. You are more skilled, you are in a different place, you have different concerns. Reconcile those two things. Then see if there is a new thread that you can write forward with.

[Howard] That is a beautiful assignment that I hate because I did not want to admit that I'm a different person than I was just six weeks ago.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I mean it could be six hours. It could be… Yeah. Hey. Fair listener, we're all very sad that you've lost the thread. We've all been there. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. There's always more thread.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.16: Miscellaneous Structures

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/17/17-16-miscellaneous-structures/

Key Points: What other types of structures can you use? The choices are nearly infinite. Stories told backwards. Vignettes, letters, guidebooks, almanacs. It's easy to get trapped into using the same structure again and again, but take time to explore others. The structures we use to create something and the structures that we use to consume something may be different, and creators need to be aware of both. Structures aren't necessarily exclusive, you can use them to complement each other. How do you decide what to do? What's fun and exciting! Consider the outlining technique "10-year-old boy excitedly tells you about his favorite movie."

[Season 17, Episode 16]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Miscellaneous Structures.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We've spent the last seven episodes talking about different kinds of structures. We've been taking a very different tack on it than we often do on this show, and it's been wonderful. But there are so many other types of structures we haven't talked about yet. Peng, what have we missed so far?

[Peng] Oh, well, I mean, I guess the choices are nearly infinite. There are just so many fun things you can do with your work. You can… For example, we haven't talked about stories told backwards.

[Mary Robinette] Momento.

[Peng] Or… Yeah. Well, wait. Is Momento the end or the middle? Right?

[Mary Robinette] I thought it was told backwards. Anyway.

[Dan] Totally told backwards except for the end.

[Peng] You know what. We should talk about that when after this, because that's a great example…

[Chuckles]

[Peng] But… Yeah, so we've got stories told backwards, we've got stories told all as vignettes, or stories told entirely as letters or guidebooks or almanacs. So, I mean, I guess the lesson is just that the possibilities are limitless, and it's just more about finding what works best for your story.

[Mary Robinette] To circle back to something that I talked about at the beginning, about how… That when you're copying the Masters, that you reach for a structure that you know works. What I'm personally hoping that we all take away from this is that there are a lot of structures out there, and that it's very easy to get trapped into doing the same kind of structure over and over again. So it's… I think it's worth exploring whether or not there are other things to play with.

[Howard] When I was a college student studying music, in my form and analysis class, we had a… We're analyzing this piece, and the professor, who was very.. I don't want to say combative, but he always wanted you to defend anything that you said. He asked, "How do we know that this is the beginning of the second movement?" Me, being glib and stupid and 21, said, "Because the double bar line right there indicates that it's…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He says, "Yeah, fine, that's how we see it reading the music. But how does the listener know that it's the beginning of the next movement?" I looked down at the double bar line, deeply repentant for having opened my mouth to begin with, and realized oh, wait, there's a key change and the very first note after that bar line is a note whose… Is now a B-flat instead of a B. I said, "Well, the key changed and this first note is a B-flat. I bet the listeners can hear that." And I was a hero for the day. The point here is that the structures that we use to create a thing are visible to us. The structures that we observe when we consume a thing are going to be different. You can't see the double bar, you can't see the accidental, all you can hear is the new note. That lesson, any time I'm deploying a structure, there are aspects of the structure that are there to help me write. There are also aspects of the structure that are there to help the reader consume what I've written. I need to be aware of both.

[Dan] That is a really wonderful thing to bring up here, because it does come full circle back to our very first episode of this class, where we talked about things like Encanto which are using an unfamiliar structure and which some members of the audience felt was strange and unfamiliar. There's absolutely ways to introduce new ideas in a way that the audience knows what to expect and doesn't go into it saying, "Oh, okay. Disney movie. I know exactly how this one's going to end." No you don't, because it's different. I also want to point out that a lot of the structures, I think all of the structures we're talking about, aren't necessarily exclusive to each other. Or to other things. You can tell a story that is entirely done in vignettes and also follows three acts and also follows Save the Cat. Like, these are all things that can complement each other. You don't have to pick just one and then throw everything else away.

[Peng] Yeah. I think that's a really good way to put this, that all of the structural techniques that we've talked about in these episodes, they're really… That's what they are, they are techniques that can be used within these larger kind of overarching frameworks. So, even if you're building your story based on Save the Cat, the overarching framework of Save the Cat, you can have multiple perspectives alternating back and forth or you can have multiple timelines or you could also have footnotes. So you don't have to limit yourself, yeah, to just one of these. You can have… I mean, I guess you could even try to have all of them. Should that be our homework?

[Laughter]

[Dan] Use every structure at the same time. We didn't think that the shuffling story would break your brain. This one will definitely break your brain.

[Peng] Yeah, yeah.

[Dan] Completely. Now… This… I do want to get into the question of… Since we're talking about choosing which structures to use, how do you choose? How do you decide? Maybe you start with the idea of, well, I'm going to tell a frame story. Or I'm going to tell an epistolary story. Or maybe that comes to you later. So, Howard, we've been talking quite a bit about your in-world books for Schlock Mercenary. The 70 Maxims and the RPG are both written as in-world artifacts that are telling their own story on top of what's on the page. At what point did you decide with either or both of those, okay, this is the weird structure I'm going to overlay and this is why I'm going to do it?

[Howard] Um… I… Honestly, Alan Barr and I had been trying to get the right hook for the Schlock Mercenary role-playing game for almost a year and a half. Then, at LTUE, a local sci-fi-fantasy convention, which is actually happening right now while we're recording, and I'm not there. Big sniffle. We are at LTUE, in the hotel having breakfast, and I had this wacky idea. I say, "So, hey, Alan. What if the book, the RPG book is an in-world artifact?" His eyes lit up, and he's like, "Oh, my gosh. That's the best thing ever." I'm like, "Well, it's not original. Monster Nomicon and Privateer Press, they did that." He goes, "Oh, I know it's not original, I don't care about that. What I care about is that this sounds like fun." So for us, the in-world artifact aspect of it was fun and got us excited. Then, any idea I had that deepened the in-world artifactness of the book was a thing that went into it in order to help sell that idea. As structural principles go, as scaffolding goes, the measuring stick of does this sound like fun for me to do? Does this sound like fun for people to read? Is a really good one that I come back to a lot. If I'm not excited about doing a thing in a certain way, no amount of money is going to…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Make me do it. No amount of money. Enough money, and I can start having fun again. But, yeah, I chose those models because they entertained me.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, I think… I mean, I'm glad you mentioned money because that's something that I talk about all the time when I teach classes is nobody gets into this business to get rich. Because that is not the natural outcome of anyone's writing process. We do this because it's fun and exciting to us. Ultimately, I think many if not most of the decisions we make with what we write and how we write it are, well, this sounds really exciting and this is a toy I want to play with.

[Dan] Let's pause here and do our book of the week.

[Howard] We've done this as a book of the week before. The 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, which has a wacky story structure to it because of the handwritten margin notes and whatnot. It's available at shop.schlockmercenary.com. Boy, if you want to look at something that is a weird story structure, we got you covered.

[Dan] Sounds awesome. I just finished writing something with a very weird story structure, but I can't pitch that to you all until October. So…

[Oh]

[Dan] You can look forward to that one.

[Peng] Good foreshadowing, though.

[Howard] Well, if we go back for some multiple timelines episode, can you do it then?

[Dan] Then I…

[Howard] I'm sorry, I said that wrong. Can we have done it then?

[Dan] Can we have already done it then? Yes. We will have already done it there.

[Dan] Okay. So, what I want to talk about now is let's get into some of these weird things. We talked about stories that are entirely composed of vignettes. Peng, give us an example of one of those, and why might that be a cool structure to use.

[Peng] Yeah. I think my favorite example of that is probably Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It's… I think it's Marco Polo talking to Kubla Khan. It's just a series of very, very short stories. They're just descriptions of every city that Marco Polo has visited in Kubla Khan's Empire. It's so… It's fascinating because there's really not much of a story in the traditional sense, because each one is just a really small self-contained description of a new place. But it's really interesting and frees us up to read, I think, because you can take it at your own pace. You probably could skip around if you wanted to. So it's more about just all of these stories and the beautiful places taken as a whole, rather than anything in particular that happens in each one. So it's got a very different affect on you then reading a traditional narrative. But that goes back to what we were saying about how sometimes we… you don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over. Sometimes you do want to write something different, or you want to read something different.

[Dan] Well, that's very cool.

[Howard] The outlining technique that I've fallen back on from time to time, which I call a 10-year-old boy excitedly tells you about his favorite movie…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Complete with lines like, "Oh, oh, oh. I forgot to tell you. The hero has a magic gun strapped to his ankle." Or something.

[Peng] Footnote.

[Howard] Yeah. Footnote. Whatever. But that outlining technique is itself a form of structure that comes back to the oral tradition. I mean, it sounds silly to say it, but 10-year-old boy tells you about his favorite movie is an oral tradition that we've probably all at some point taken part in. As a kid has tried to tell us about this thing that they love. The oral tradition of us sitting around the table telling stories to one another is itself a structure that you can use to tell of the things. The more familiar you are with story structures… And this was a big eye-opener for me, the better you become at sitting around the table with other people telling stories, because before you open your mouth, you're like, "Oh, I know where the beginning, the middle, and the end is. And the end of this story will adjust this conversation to a new topic. This conversation needs a new topic." So we're off to the races. Then you tell your story, with its beginning, its middle, and its end, and you steer the conversation to a new place. Storytelling is powerful stuff.

[Peng] It is. It is. I also think that that excited 10-year-old boy tells you a story might be a really good way, if you're unsure about what kind of a structure you want to use, to figure out the kind of structure that you might want to use for your story. Because if you are, if you pretend to be the excited 10-year-old boy telling yourself the story that you're about to write, and you can just listen to the excited 10-year-old boy as he… Whatever his oh, oh, oh's are. So if he keeps saying, "Oh, oh, oh," about this other character, or "Oh, oh, oh," but 10 years before this, this also happened, or "Oh, oh, oh," and he keeps returning to a thing that this story can be built around, you kind of can get a feel of maybe what I'm missing is a second or third character perspective, or maybe what I'm missing is this whole other alternate timeline it's going to happen in the past or the future, or maybe what I should be doing is structuring my story around this map or this timeline countdown or this artifact that's in the world. So I think figuring out what you're most passionate about in the story, and then asking yourself questions in that way to see what your story keeps asking you to explore further is a really good and natural way to figure out the kind of structure that would be best.

[Howard] It's also helpful to have a discussion of structure versus form. The three act versus the form of a cozy mystery. Yeah, cozy mystery can be told in three acts, or a cozy mystery can be told in kishotentetsu. Cozy mystery obviously could be written with seven points, or with 10-year-old boy or… Well, 10-year-old boy is unlikely…

[Laughter]

[Howard] To be super excited about the cozy mystery…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Unless it's set in space. But I don't want to give away what I'm working on next. The… But the point here is that as we look at the huge jumble that is story structures, I always try to resist the temptation to map one onto the other, and to say, "Oh, three act is just seven point story structure without extra information." Or "Hero's Journey is just way too much detail on a five act play." I resist doing that because all of these structures exist to help the brain of the creator and the brain of the consumer get from I don't have a story yet to I have reached the end.

[Dan] So, there is such a lot to think about here. I think that that is fascinating. I want everybody to try these out, and we've got homework that is going to help you with that. So, Peng, give us our final homework for this wonderful structure class.

[Howard] Break our brains!

[Peng] All right. Well. For your final homework, you are going to take the project that you're working on or an outline of the project you're working on and try to reframe it using one of the structures that we've talked about during this deep dive series. Maybe especially ones that you didn't try before. So, take your outline or take your project, reframe it with one of these techniques, and then consider how that changes your work. Ask yourself what aspects of the story does it heighten or what did it diminish, and you know not every structure is going to work for every story. But, by doing this really intentionally instead of just letting some kind of a structure fall into place naturally, seeing what it does for your draft and what aspects of these techniques you might want to keep moving forward, I think could be really helpful.

[Dan] Cool. Hey, Peng, thank you so much. These episodes have been wonderful. This whole class you put together for us has been great. Do you have any final words?

[Peng] I just want to also say thank you so much. I had such a great time this season.

[Dan] Cool. Well, thanks for joining us. We want you all to go out and buy Peng Shepherd's and try all of these techniques in your writing. So, anyway, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/20/17-8-the-alchemy-of-creativity/

Key Points: The Alchemy of Creativity, aka how do you translate from one medium to another and keep the original spark. How do you turn the movie in your head into compelling prose? How do you take a script you are handed and turn it into comics or storyboards? Movie in your head people, remember that prose needs room to breathe. Pay attention to the difference between ideas and execution. Sometimes you need to write down what the movie in your head shows you. How do you transform ideas into thing and keep the excitement? Rough draft! Use 10-year-old boy watches a movie outlining! Write the part that excites you. Dessert first writing! That's one way to capture the lightning in a bottle. Sometimes drafting is the slog, and revisions are where you put the lightning back in. Sometimes you may need to change the POV or tense to make something work. I.e., find the right framework so you can execute it. Make sure your bottle is shaped right to catch the lightning.

[Season 17, Episode 8]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Alchemy of Creativity.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[Howard] The Alchemy of Creativity. How do you translate things from one medium to another and keep the original spark? Meg, you pitched this to us. How do we do that? What are we even talking about? I'm confused.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Okay. So this isn't me saying, "How do you turn a book into a movie?" Because I'm sure we could talk circles around that for hours. But on a smaller scale, how do you turn the movie in your head into compelling prose? Or, how do you take a script you're handed and turn it into something like comics or storyboards? What are some of the things you have to personally consider when you're going from one form of a story into another?

[Kaela] Okay. So I am a very movie in my head person, which I think most people have… Recognize when they read Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls, because it's a very visual book. Now, one of the challenges that this gives me is that sometimes I get… What's the word? Micromanage-y about everything that's happening. Because in prose there needs to be room to breathe. You can just say someone crossed the room, you don't have to say exactly how. You try to deliver the exact experience that you're seeing in your head, it will overwhelm people and it will ruin the delivery. Because I'm like I want to tell you every little twitch of their facial expression, because I see it so clearly in my head. But doing that robs the reader of the opportunity both to see it in their own way and it over crowds… Like… It completely over crowds the delivery. So that's something I really have to watch. I have to pull myself back.

[Sandra] That's fascinating to me, because I do not have a movie in my head.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] I have a feel of the scene or an emotion of the character. So… Then there's also the sound of the words in the feel of the words in my head. So it's all about the words and the feel and the interaction of those things for me. So, right there, we've got a difference in alchemy and approaches which I love hearing about. Because until you said that, people talk about having movies in their head or how they read a book and see it in their heads, and I just don't. I don't see things. I don't visualize. But I feel it. I feel whether the words feel right, whether the character's emotion is correct on the page or whether my theme is being expressed.

[Megan] So you have to translate this more spacious emotion into words. How do you go about doing that?

[Sandra] This is where I wish I'd thought that through before…

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled One of my?] Favorite things about Writing Excuses is having an epiphany in front of the microphone and then not being able to follow up on it, because it's still an epiphany. I can't take this apart yet. Let me say this. Another way to articulate what we are talking about here is the difference between ideas and execution. It doesn't matter where I get my ideas. I'm full of ideas. I never run out of ideas. The movie in my head is always running and it has a soundtrack and it has a rumble track and it is always there. How do I execute on that huge library of interconnected and unrelated and sloppy information in order to create a thing that delivers an experience that some part of me will look at and say, "Ah, yes. That is the experience of that thing as extracted from the brain… That is the experience we meant to come across." That is where… What's the expression… That's why they pay me the big bucks.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't actually pay me the big bucks, but having a career as a creative lies not in having good ideas, but being able to do what Meg has called alchemy, [garbled] execution.

[Sandra] Yeah, that's… This is one of those places where you have to learn your own creative process. I really love that we have already two competing processes that are… Not competing but different to compare. Because I can't… My process is going to have to look different than Kaela's process is, because we're starting from different places and our brains just work differently. If I spend a lot of my craft learning time trying to see a movie in my head so that I can then follow Kaela's process, that is wasted effort. If I… I don't need to see a movie in my head, I can move with feelings and emotions.

[Megan] So, for work, I generally have to translate other people's words to visuals. I'm a storyboard artist for animation, which means that every six weeks somebody hands me a script and says, "Turn this into a movie." So I actually have a couple extra steps than most of my coworkers, because I read the script, watch a movie in my head, and I'll take out a pen or a pencil and a mark on the script itself where I'm imagining the camera is cutting. Then I have to write up detailed list of my shots. Like, okay, medium camera up close, foreground is this, background is this. Wide camera, these characters doing this. I'll pinpoint like emotional moments, and I'll star them, all this stuff. I have some friends who can read a script and instantly just board it finalize. They can just go immediately from one to the other. But it's, like, personally, I have to translate it into two or three different creative languages before I can get to my final set up, because it is a, for me, a process of turning a script into storyboards.

[Sandra] Yeah. On Twitter, just recently, I was reading a thread from Ursula Vernon talking about how she writes and how her writing process can't actually speed up anymore because she can't sleep often enough. Because she will, like, as she's falling asleep, the characters talk in her head and the story progresses. Then when she gets up in the morning, she just writes down the thing that her brain did while she was falling asleep. So there's no way for her to write any faster, because she can only sleep so much. That's fascinating to me because Howard does the same thing. He will fall asleep with character dialogue and things going in his head. I can't do that. I have to shut my brain off and turn off the stories in order to be able to fall asleep. Because if I let the stories run in my head, they will keep me awake. For… Hours! And hours, and hours. Then I will have anxiety and I will have to get up and write down the thing because I'm afraid I will lose it while I sleep.

[Howard] See, my method is more, look, characters, if you guys aren't going to tell me a nice story at bedtime, I'm just going to have anxiety instead because I'm going to spin on real stuff, and that's boring. So… Have some fun.

[Yeah. See, this is…]

[Howard] My brain is your playground. Go! Don't break anything.

[Sandra] This is actually a skill I would like to learn. You know what I was talking about… I don't need to see a mov… I don't need to learn how to see a movie in my head. But that one I would actually like to learn, because it sounds like a nicer way to fall asleep than me with my wrestling thoughts every night. So… Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Emptying the head is hard.

[Emptying is hard]

[Megan] So you've thought up a great moment for your story and you can feel the emotions all right, and you're so excited to do it. How do you transform ideas into thing while keeping what made you excited about it in the first place?

[Sandra] This is where rough draft is my friend. Just… Or… Oh, I know. Howard has this outlining method he calls 10-year-old boy watches the movie. Like, he literally writes down the idea as if a 10-year-old has seen this movie and is telling you about it. Okay, so then they were in a car chase, and then the train comes sideways out of nowhere. And then there's a helicopter… Oh, by the way, there was a helicopter way back in… Like, literally back and fill as we're telling the story. Just dump it. Then you can go clean it up. So there's this let the excitement just blah onto the page, and then you can engage your more critical brain at a later stage. Seems like one of the ways that people do that.

[Howard] We need to take a break for a thing of the week.

[Yes]

[Megan] Right. Thing of the week, this week, is a YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting. It is a series of video essays dissecting how different creatives bring their own vision to the big screen. Two of the videos I'd especially love to recommend is how Jackie Chan does comedy and how Edgar Wright edits for jokes. I don't think those are the actual titles of the episodes. Ah. Edgar Wright: How to Do Visual Comedy and Jackie Chan: How to Do Action Comedy. There you go. These are my two favs.

[Awesome]

[Howard] Cool. I haven't seen either of those, but they have comedy in them, so…

[Megan] You need to.

[Howard] It's possible they will be right up my alley.

[Kaela] I love Jackie Chan, so I know what I'm doing…

[Sandra] Yes. [Garbled I've got] plans for after we're done recording.

[Howard] So. But let's come back to those tools. You've got something you're excited about. What do you do to capture that excitement, that energy, that elemental spark in the medium in which you execute?

[Kaela] One thing I do is I just let myself go write that one. Like, I know I used to try and pull myself back because I was like, "Oh, I have this perfect scene idea in my head. I can feel it. I can see it. I live it." Then I was like, "Oh, but I'm not there in the story yet, I can't write it yet."

[Howard] Write the homework first.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I just let myself have dessert first. That's probably the best way of putting it. Dessert first writing. Where when I love it and I'm excited and I can feel it, I just dive in and I just full on draft it. Drafting is my favorite part of the writing process, anyway. So I'll just let myself go ham. I don't worry if I'm like, yes, I used three paragraphs to write something that should probably be one. Because I'll do that later. That's what revisions are for. I'll do that throughout the book. I jump around, and I go back and forth and up and down in order to get to all of those dessert places. Whenever I feel the excitement for it. It's all about the excitement, it's like… So I've captured that lightning in a bottle feeling.

[Howard] Meanwhile, the guy who's putting green vegetables on the buffet is like, "What?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "What! You gotta eat your greens."

[Kaela] I'm sitting down with seven different cakes. Hello!

[Howard] You've plowed through 11 bowls of pudding.

[Laughter]

[As many as four kids. That's terrible.]

[Laughter]

[Sandra] This is another interesting place where Kaela and I apparently are different, where… Because most of my aha moments, most of my lightning in a bottle moments, are actually in revisions. Drafting is kind of a slog for me. It is in the revisions that I catch the lightning and put it back. Like, I drafted, and all of the beauty leaked out in my drafting. Now it is just flat on the page. So in my revision, I go catch the lightning and put it back in. Howard and I used to, early on in the comic, I remember so many conversations with Howard where he would bring me comics and say, "Okay. I think this was funny when I wrote it, but now it is all drawn and I think the funny has leaked out." It's this thing that happens when we become overly familiar with the scene, we lose touch with the thing that is actually still there. We just have said the words so often it makes no sense to us anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] That is me and revisions.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Yeah. So I'm happy that for me, putting the lightning back in is a thing that happens for me in revisions, because it makes the revision process exciting and interesting. But… Again, different people, different approaches.

[Whoa!]

[Megan] And they all work.

[Sandra] They do. That's…

[Howard] Any other tools? Any other concrete bits? Crunchy stuff?

[Sandra] I'm trying to think… We were talking about influences in a prior episode and talking about going back to the well, going back to remember the thing when you feel like you have lost the track or lost the thread, stepping back and describing your thing to somebody new. Saying what is the thing, what was it that excited me about this story. And seeing that…

[Howard] Yeah, that was part of the process for my story An Honest Death in Shadows Beneath. Shadows Beneath is a compilation from Brandon and Mary Robinette and Dan and I of things that we workshop on the podcast several years ago. My story, there was this bit that really excited me and every time I sat down to write the story, that bit kept leaking out and I realized that the bit was only working if I told it in a different tense. If I changed the way, just the POV, and the narrative unfolded. I wanted to shoehorn it into the third person limited POV and it just didn't work until I pulled it forward into a more immediate tense. It's which is weird, but that was the way I'd originally, I guess, heard the idea in my head, and it wasn't until I came back to that that the story flowed cleanly.

[Kaela] That's a really good point about finding the right framework as well. It's not always just about executing something, but sometimes it's finding the right framework so that the execute… So that you can execute it at all. Like, there… Like Cece. I wrote two different books with Cece. Cece's idea of souls being on the outside of your body and how that would change your world. I wrote two different books about that, and it just didn't work for some reason. I was like, "Why? Why isn't it working?" But then I said it in a completely different place, I gave the main character really specific motivation of trying to save her sister. Then I decided, yeah, I'm going to do a Shonen anime tournament. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make this like a battle to the death Pokémon style, like somewhere between Pokémon and the Shonen battle. That actually created so many more… And first person instead of third person. Like, all of those things amalgamizing together into one thing ended up being the framework where that kind of a story could shine. Because it put into question… The stuff that we joke about with Pokémon is that like legal? You're making animals fight against each other? But in this world, it's criaturas and their people, which is what I wanted to explore about, like, how would it affect other people's souls, like, on an emotional theme level. That was the thing I was most interested in exploring. I didn't have a world previously or an emotionally intimate enough voice because it was third person. First person really brought that out, to give that the justice that I wanted to. The thing that made me want to write it.

[Sandra] Yep. If you want to catch lightning in a bottle, the bottle needs to be shaped right to catch the lightning.

[Kaela] Yay.

[Sandra] So if you can go back and remember what your lightning was, what the spark was that drew you to this story or this character or this location, and figure out, okay, what else do I need to change around the thing so that it can live here without being squelched.

[Howard] I'm now picturing 20,000 Writing Excuses listeners all out on assorted hilltops in thunderstorms…

[Laughter]

[Howard] With huge arrays of bottles holding them up saying, "This one's round, please?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "No? Here's a square one. Please?"

[Sandra] All we need is Robert De Niro as the pirate captain on an airship to go catch the lightning.

[Howard] Oh, my.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Sorry, guys.

[Howard] All right. That might be a good mental picture to wrap up on. Because his portrayal of that lightning pirate in Stardust brought me such joy.

[Sandra] Oh, so much joy.

[Howard] Such joy. Lightning in a bottle indeed.

[Howard] Okay. Do we have homework this week?

[Megan] We do have homework and it's practicing turning an idea from one form into another. This week, you're going to choose a theme from a movie you love and write it up in a novelization style.

[Howard] That is much better advice than standing on a hilltop during a thunderstorm with a collection of glassware around you.

[Safer]

[Howard] So… Fair listeners, thank you so much for joining us. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/22/16-34-novels-are-layer-cakes/

Key Points: A novel is like a layer cake? Well, layers of information. Revision helps! Also pre-work can help. Spontaneity is not creativity. Structure also helps. Make sure you are starting the story in the right place, but also make sure we have context. Use tiny flashbacks. Manipulate the POV. Use free indirect speech. Mostly, think about how you want to layer the information, what's important, what order to present it in, and how to slide it in there.

[Season 16, Episode 34]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Novels Are Layer Cakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] Okay. So, we're talking about novels as layer cakes. Which may initially sound a little confusing. But, this is one of the central metaphors I think about when I think about what makes a novel a novel that's distinct from a short story or a novella or a novelette. The thing about a novel is it requires more complexity, because you're sustaining a narrative over so long, there need to be so many more different aspects going. So you want layers to be present at almost every point. Especially in an opening scene. I'm not just talking about like two layers of a birthday cake. Ideally, you want like a Mille-Feuille, one of those crêpe cakes that's like layer after layer after layer…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] That gives you that kind of information density in that kind of character and world building and all those elements. We've talked about individual pieces of how to do that so far. But this is really how do you weave all of that into one coherent whole, while still maintaining the distinction of that lamination. We're turning into the great British Bake-Off here. I'm sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I've gotta tell y'a, when I think of layer cakes, I… Sandra makes cakes from time to time. You take the cake pan and you make a bunch of different layers. You saw the tops off of them to make them stack flat. Then I think of the episode of British baking show where they were trying to make dobos tortes with bazillions of little layers. I look at that and think, "No, I'm sorry. That has to be done by a machine and a computer. That is not possible for a human being to make that cake." I know there are many people who look at the way novels are constructed and to step back and see all of that layering and all of that construction and have that same reaction. "I'm sorry. That had to be done by a computer and a machine. No human being can hold all that in their head."

[Dongwon] Yeah. With… We were talking about tell don't show, we kind of touched on this a little bit, but I think this is a case where thinking about movies and TV and visual media is really useful to think about how to layer all this different kinds of information. You're absorbing worldbuilding, you're absorbing character, you're absorbing some of the thematic elements, right? If it… If a scene is lit in a menacing way, it's like, okay, we're in a thriller. If they're wearing Regency dresses, we know the time period and we know the class of the person we are looking at. If the background behind them is an office, then we know what kind of story we're in. So there's automatically many, many more layers in a single shot of film than there is in a book by… As a default. So what you need to think about is how do I start working all that other information that I would get if this were a movie into the text. You have a laser like control over the focus of the reader, so you can show us bit by bit. The downside is you have to do that deliberately. You can't just rely on us passively absorbing that information.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of this will come down to word choice, specificity, I mean, all of the different things that we've been talking about for the past several weeks. You're trying to manipulate all of those at the same time. It's what is the character noticing, what order do you feed that information to the reader, which pieces are you telling versus which pieces are you showing. Is this sentence a long sentence or a short sentence? What is my word choice here? Am I going to say, "Pulled out of a chair," or "jerked out of a chair"? Because those are two different things. This is… This is complicated. I will disagree slightly with Dongwon because this is also something that you do with short stories, and in many cases, it is more vital because you have less space. But I understand… But the layers of plot that you have to deal with in a short story are not as many as you have to deal with in a novel. This is, for me, one of the biggest differences and the thing to think about regardless in some ways if you are writing a short story or novel. That first page is framing the thing that you're getting into. In a short story, you're framing a small thing, and it's like, this is the emotional punch that you're going to get. But in a novel, you're framing something that has multiple different emotional punches that you're going to get. You're going to have multiple plot threads. How do you tell the reader, kind of, which of these is the thing that… Like, which one do you introduce as, "Here. This is the thing I'm drawing a line under. This is the story that you're going to be in on." Because you have to make that choice. Is this a coming-of-age? Yes. Is this also an epic adventure? Yes. Where do you start?

[Dongwon] Yeah. I'm going to say, actually, I'm in complete agreement with Mary Robinette. When I say that a short story has fewer layers, I purely mean in terms of character arcs and plot lines. When that information density, I don't care what you're writing, you're going to need to make sure each word, each sentence, is doing as much work as it can, while maintaining crystal clarity for the reader.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to emphasize the importance of revision.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] For this. Because, like Howard was talking about, if you're making a layer cake, most of the time you're making several different cakes in several different batches and then you're combining them together later on. I'm… I don't think that you have to do that with writing. I'm not going to say that you can't, because I'm sure that there are people who do. But what I do do is I will write out… The first draft is often just focused entirely on plot or on character. Then I have to go back through multiple revisions and say now I'm going to add in the other parts.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now I'm going to emphasize more of the description… Now I'm going to do another revision pass to really drill into internal monologue and emotion. It does take… You're going to have to get a lot of cake pans dirty by the end of this revision process.

[Dongwon] Your first draft is going to look more like Nailed It! than British Bake-Off, and that's okay.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Well, so… Continuing our cake metaphor. So, first of all, I do the same thing that Dan does. I do multiple passes. The second thing is, right now I am reading… And this is not our book of the week. I'm reading Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage, which is about making. In the entire time I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, dear Lord, this is about writing a novel… Or this is about writing." In the midst of it, he talks about making a cake, and that one of the things that, in general, you want to do while making is to set yourself up for success with your pre-work, and that chefs go in and they lay out all of… Here's the bowls that I'm going to need. Here are the ingredients that I'm going to need. They measure things. It feels like it's so much more work, but it in many ways will go faster. It can often feel like, "Oh! But my creativity!"

[Whem]

[Mary Robinette] But what we're talking about here is, with this idea of a layer cake, and especially when you're learning the tools, it's okay to learn, like, one tool at a time. When you… When we're talking about pre-work, that doesn't necessarily have to mean, oh, you're going to outline everything. Oh, you're going to do all your world building ahead of time. What we're talking about is the number of iterations it takes you to get to a product that you're happy with. So sometimes you have fewer drafts, because you've done a lot of pre-work. Sometimes you have multiple drafts, because that is the process that you particularly enjoy going through in order to get to that layer cake. You may only have one bowl in your kitchen. So you have to mix that bowl and then clean it, and then mix the next bowl and then clean it. You may have a ton of bowls, so you can lay it all out. Everybody's kitchen is different, everybody's brain is different. Every cake that you bake, every book that you write, every short story… All of these are different. But the point of it is to remember that there are layers, that there are multiple ingredients that you have to be managing.

[Howard] If there's one thing that has stuck with me after 20 years of Schlock Mercenary, from beginning to finally ending the whole thing, it's that I cannot afford to conflate spontaneity with creativity. Those are not the same thing. Spontaneity is fine, and it has its place. But creativity is never being throttled by me imposing a structure. It's being funneled, it's being channeled, it's being directed. It's… I love having a structure, and so the layering of things in a novel is incredibly helpful. The current work in progress… I had about a 4000 word scene which I couldn't make work all at once because the voice had to be consistent, but the voice is kind of tiring. It's that noir detective sort of lots of humorous metaphors, lots of weird extensions. Can't be maintained well by the reader. I realized that, "Oh, wait. This is… I wanted to use this to frame some of the other characters. What happens if I carve it into chunks?" What happens if I make separate cake pans and saw the tops off of it and then use… I call it a common tone modulation, where the theme of one scene kind of introduces the theme of the next one, even though something has changed. As I began assembling that, yeah, there's no spontaneity anymore, but the creative fire is raging, because now I can see how it needs to be built.

[Mary Robinette] Let's pause for our book of the week. When we come back, what I'd love for us to do is… We've talked now about the importance, and I'd love for us when we come back to talk about some of the hows, of how to do that. So, Dan, I think you have the book of the week this time.

[Dan] Yes. So, our book of the week is Legend by Marie Lu. Marie Lu is an absolutely incredible science fiction writer. This book is a kind of a YA dystopia. It's about 10-ish years old from back when YA dystopias were all the rage. This one has stood the time better than most, I think. It's called Legend, like I said. I wish I had the time to read you like the entire first page. But I'm just going to read you the first two sentences.

My mother thinks I'm dead. Obviously, I'm not dead, but it's safer for her to think so.

[Wow]

[Dan] That says… Tells you so much. It is asking you compelling questions. It's introducing elements of the character. It goes on in the next paragraph, if I had time to read that, just lays out incredible detail about the world that this takes place in. There is so much density of information, while also being incredibly compelling and readable. It's a wonderful book. It's called Legend by Marie Lu.

[Dongwon] So, as Mary Robinette mentioned, I do want to talk about some of the mechanics, about how you make this work. I think when I'm in writing workshops the thing that I see most commonly, like the feedback I'm giving like 60 or 70% of the time is I think you're starting the story in the wrong place. This kind of goes back to what we were saying about the earlier mistakes is often… Or the common mistakes is I often see that the story's starting too early. It's starting before interesting things are happening. Now the problem is if you jump into when interesting things are happening, we don't have context. Which leads to the common mistake of the gunfight problem where then you're like, "What's going on? Why do I care about all this?" The solution, for me, is that layer cake. Right? So you can start when things are kicking off, you can start in the heart of the inciting incident, and then you manipulate the timeline. You don't have to go straight A, B, C, D. You can start at C, and then tell us about A, right? You can layer in those tiny flashbacks. They don't have to be big scenes. They can be a sentence. It's like, "Oh. Yeah. When I woke up today, I wasn't expecting this." Right? You can layer those things in to give us the context of where this character comes from, what do they care about, and then introduce stakes that may not be immediate to this scene. Like, the stakes of the scene is I need to get out of this gunfight because my sister needs to go to school today. Right? I don't know what book I've just written here…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But it's something, right?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, that sounds like Jade City, actually.

[Dongwon] Kind of. Actually. Right? Like, if the character cares about something, then suddenly I, the reader, care about this gunfight. I think when you think about how do I change the timeline, I think you can get a lot more of that density in and start layering those elements in from sentence to sentence, from clause to clause, and really get all of that information into my brain much faster than if you did it sequentially.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other piece of that when you're dealing with that kind of thing, one of your best tools for stacking that information is the manipulation of POV. So, we have talked a lot about all of the things that make… In previous episodes, about all of the things that make a point of view. If you go back to the very first episode that I appear on, which is episode… What was it?

[Howard] Three, 14.

[Mary Robinette] Three, 14. Right. Because it's pi. In which I talk about puppetry and focus and breath and internal motivation and all of those things. All of those pieces are the things that make up POV. But the other piece of POV that you have to manipulate is the showing versus telling, the describing versus demonstrating. It's basically are you… You can pull back and go a little omniscient for a moment. You can go deep in. Those moments, those choices that you make, allow you to layer information in. Within that, one of my favorite tools is free indirect speech. Where you can have the narrator basically just say something to the reader, even if it's in third person. So, this example is from Wikipedia, which actually has a great explanation of what free indirect speech is. So, quoted or direct speech would be:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And what pleasure have I found since I came into this world," he asked.

Whereas free indirect speech is something more like:

"He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found since he came into this world?

So, that thought just goes straight into the text. You can do so much with that to layer in information. She picked up the knife. Her grandfather had given it to her. That's just like, "Ah, I picked up the knife. Ah, my grandfather gave this to me." That slows us down. It's popping in and out. So, these are the kinds of things that you can be thinking about and manipulating when you're playing with that opening.

[Dongwon] I'm going to give another very highfalutin literary example here, but if you ever have the chance, go take a look at Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. There's a very famous scene of Clarissa walking down a street. There's like somebody's doing sky writing and she uses that to slide from POV to POV to POV in this scene as you move through the crowd. You really jump… Like, someone will make eye contact, and then suddenly you'll be in that character's head. It's a master class in how you can use POV to build out a complete scene, and the balance between telling and showing. Of telling us a piece of information about another person, dropping into their mind to see how they see the world, and then sliding back out into someone else's POV. If you want to think about how powerful shifting that perspective can be in building out a narrative, both in terms of using free indirect speech in terms of subjective experience and seeing things from different angles in that Rashomon style, even that one scene, if you don't read the whole book, I think is an enormously instructive thing to take a look at.

[Mary Robinette] So, we are now at the point where we are at our final homework. Dongwon has this for us. But I'm actually going to tag on at the end of it with a trick. So this is going to be a tagteam homework, and he has no idea that I'm doing this. This is information that I probably should have layered in earlier.

[Dongwon] Well, I'm also calling an audible and I'm going to shift what the homework is. So we're going to see if our two plans line up right here.

[Mary Robinette] Okay, then.

[Dan] [Oooo]

[Dongwon] So, I think the thing I want you to do is actually to delete your entire first scene from your draft. I mean, save it somewhere else. Put it under a different name, don't throw out your draft. But I want you to start from word one for that first scene and rewrite it using all of the tools that we've talked about here. I want you to think about the exercises you've done up to this point rewriting that scene using all those different tools, characters' interiority, that sort of narrative description, describing the world building and setting. Then redo it and try and think about how am I go to layer all these techniques into a single whole? How do you make that cake feel more complete using these tools?

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. I am going to tag onto that, that once you've done that, but I want you to do is I want you to revise it. I want you to tighten it. The way I want you to do that is I want you to go through and highlight which things you really need the reader to know and make sure that they are in the right order. Then I'm going to see if you can fit them into a single paragraph. So what you're going to do is… This is an editing technique that I call one phrase per concept or one sentence per concept. So each concept, you're like, "Okay. They absolutely have to know that there are dragons and the dragons can talk. They absolutely have to know that this is 1950s. They absolutely have to know that I'm at a girls' boarding school." Okay, so that gives me four sentences. Then you get one more sentence for tone. Because tone is incredibly important. That is also a piece of information that the reader has. This is just an editing exercise. Then your final thing is probably going to be somewhere in between those two. But that is a way to start really, really thinking about which layer is important to you as you start your novel.

[Dongwon] I think these two homeworks dovetail beautifully. I think, by the time you're done with it, you'll have a killer first page that's going to work great for you.

[Mary Robinette] So, now you are really and truly out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/06/15-36-collaboration-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

Key Points: How do you do collaboration? Plot together. Outline. Outline, revise, split it up, revision again. Love your collaborator. Work times? Not really. Book, then screenplay, may make the story worse, or make it better. How can you encourage better? Check your ego. Collaboration takes time. Collaboration forces you to explain why things happen, and sometimes it helps.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 36.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Collaboration.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] Once again, we have Shannon and Dean Hale, our awesome friends.

[Shannon] Whoohoo!

[Dean] I'm Shannon.

[Shannon] Opening so much…

[Dean] I'm awesome.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys collaborate quite a bit.

[Dean] Yes, we do.

[Shannon] Some would say too much.

[Dean] Ooo. Two children too much.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] But which two?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, we have talked about collaboration before on the podcast, but whenever we get an opportunity to talk about collaborat… Talk with collaborators, we like to bring them on because it feels like everyone's collaboration style is so different from every other one. Basically, we just want to know how you guys collaborate. I guess I can kind of start you on the how did it begin? What were your first collaborations like, and how did it start?

[Shannon] Besides the children.

[Dean] Yes. The actual, like, literature… Like, books.

[Shannon] The very first one, I'd been publishing novels for a while…

[Dean] First Kiss Then Tell was probably the first one.

[Shannon] Oh, that's true. We did write… We wrote a short story about our first kiss in an anthology.

[Dean] Yeah, she was asked to do an… It was like a YA anthology about first kisses, all the different authors were asked to do it, and she wrote about our first kiss. Which I don't think was her first kiss, really.

[Shannon] Well, it was not my first kiss. But it was my first kiss with you.

[Dean] Right. Right, exactly. Then I read it, and wrote a rebuttal. They published that, too.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] They did. Then, our official first book was… I'd been writing novels, and I wanted to write a graphic novel. This was pretty early, most publishers were not doing graphic novels yet. But he was a lifelong comics reader, so I thought he would have a lot of insight into the medium. So we did a book called Rapunzel's Revenge that came out in 2008.

[Dean] Nominated for an Eisner.

[Shannon] So, but now…

[Dean] [for those inaudible]

[Shannon] We've done…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] 15+ together. Graphic novels, early chapter books, novels. We've done quite a lot.

[Dean] Everything except for one that I've written has been a collaboration with you.

[Shannon] Yes, you did that special picture book, all on your own.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Out-of-print.

[Shannon] So, how do we do it?

[Brandon] So, how do you do it?

[Dean] She does it.

[Shannon] So, at first it was really important that we identify who was the chief writer and who was…

[Dean] Who was…

[Shannon] The subcontractor.

[Dean] Exactly. Exactly.

[Shannon] But we had to establish who was in charge.

[Dean] The steward.

[Shannon] That was obviously me.

[Dean] Yes. That was how everything worked at home anyway.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] So we just fell right into it.

[Shannon] Yeah. But we've done it so much now that I think we've kind of ironed out the process. I would say the biggest thing that we do that is…

[Dean] Different from when you write alone.

[Shannon] Yeah, we plot together. This is… I mean when you… It's unusual to cowrite in novels, but it's like very common in screenwriting and in television, of course. So that kind of getting into a room with one other person or a few other people…

[Dean] And breaking the story.

[Shannon] And breaking the story is like really a healthy great way to work. I used to not like to outline, but when you collaborate, you have to outline, you have to outline completely.

[Dean] [after we made an error]

[Shannon] Or you have many errors. So we get together, we figure out the plot, we break it…

[Dean] We walk around the lake holding hands.

[Shannon] Like every time a commercial.

[Dean] Chatting plot.

[Shannon] It's beautiful.

[Dean] It is. I love this job.

[Shannon] Actually, it's really kind of a fun process.

[Dean] Yeah, it is.

[Shannon] We make sure we get good food, [pestering all of those]

[Dean] We're just banging ideas out. Ideas are the most fun part of it.

[Shannon] For us, we're not precious about ideas. So, for people who, like, ideas are the harder part, that might be harder. But for us, we have never-ending ideas. So it doesn't bother me if I throw out an idea, and he's like, "No."

[Dean] Bleah.

[Shannon] It's not like I don't have 12 more waiting.

[Dean] Right. It doesn't bother me because I only have three.

[Shannon] Right. Whatever. You're the idea engine. Then we outline, extensively. There are times, for example when we're doing a graphic novel, when our outline can actually be longer than…

[Dean] The script.

[Shannon] The final book. Then, we, after we've outlined and revised the outline over and over again, then we split it up.

[Dean] Yeah. There are certain pieces of the story that often call to one or the other of us. Or, if during the pitch process, I'm totally behind this idea…

[Shannon] This particular idea I'm excited about.

[Dean] I can visualize it more than…

[Shannon] Or if we have different characters. So, in our Squirrel Girl novels, there are different point of view characters, so I did all of Doreen's chapters. This is in the first draft. I wrote all of Doreen's chapters and all of Sephia's.

[Dean] I did the squirrels.

[Shannon] You did the squirrels and the villain. Then we both wanted to do Squirrel Girl chapters, so we split them. But then in revision, we just trade it back and forth, so… We're not precious about it. So… We can read and add and delete and add...

[Dean] We each take credit for the best… For the funniest parts.

[Shannon] We have no idea what… Who wrote what.

[Dean] Except I did the funniest parts.

[Shannon] No, but they were probably mine.

[Dean] Oh, okay.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Does that clarify everything?

[Brandon] Oh, yes.

[Mary Robinette] That's completely repeatable, too.

[Shannon] Everybody needs to take that model…

[Dan] Replicate it right across…

[Shannon] Take it home.

[Dean] It does help when you love your collaborator. I mean, when you know that whatever they're saying, how rude and insensitive and evil it sounds, you know at the end of the day that they love you.

[Shannon] I cowrote a screenplay with Jerusha Hess, and her process was any time I said anything she didn't like, she'd say, "That's stupid." It took me like a couple days to get into it, and then I was like telling her what an idiot she was in return, and it was lovely.

[Dean] Then, our next collaboration, I'd say something and she'd say, "That's stupid."

[Shannon] He's like, "Whoa!"

[Garbled]

[Brandon] So, let's talk about that. Keeping the relationship…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And the work relationship, like intertwining those, how have you made that work?

[Shannon] I don't think it's healthy for most people what we've done.

[Dean] Yeah. I don't know that it would work.

[Shannon] Honestly, the main question I get from most people is how are you guys so happily married?

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] We talk about…

[Dean] And you say, "Are we?"

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Well, I want to keep some mystery in there.

[Dean] Right. Exactly.

[Shannon] I think… I've also collaborated with LeUyen Pham, the illustrator. So, there… I've collaborated closely with three different people. It is different when it's your husband…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] And you live in the same house and you have relationship outside of work. I think we're just lucky.

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah.

[Shannon] We like and respect each other.

[Mary Robinette] Do you have… I mean, you talked about, like, go for a walk by the lake and… But do you have specific like work times and…

[Shannon] When the kids are at school.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I was wondering if you had separated work and family relationship a little bit… By time or if it's just like…

[Shannon] I mean, not really officially.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] Yeah. No. It just… Just because logistically it's easier when they're out of the house.

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true.

[Laughter]

[Dean] I mean, sometimes I try to… Like, when you're… Just this last week, you were on a heads down deadline.

[Shannon] I was working 10, 12 hours a day, which is really unusual for me.

[Dean] I'm trying to run interference with the kids, but… Oh, man.

[Shannon] He's really bad about running interference with the kids. Let's be honest. He's really good at ideas, but…

[Dean] I only practiced football one year.

[Shannon] They slip past him.

[Dean] Yes. Like, what, where… Hmmm? Then I found them in your office. "Mom!"

[Shannon] Weeping at my feet. I'm like…

[Mary Robinette] But you're so tall and they're so tiny.

[Dean] I know. It's hard. Slippery.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Which is Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dean] It is. You're right.

[Shannon] It is Kind of a Big Deal. I have a new YA novel. It is just bra… I haven't done one in years. It's just out. It's about a girl named Josie Pie. She wanted to be a Broadway star, dropped out of high school to pursue Broadway, and failed spectacularly. A year later, she's trying to figure out her life and she starts reading books and being pulled into them. Trying to figure out what's going on…

[Brandon] Like, magically pulled into them?

[Shannon] Like magically pulled into them. So she's trying to figure out how at the same time using this opportunity to, like, live out her truest fantasies.

[Brandon] Awesome. And this…

[Dan] Just to be clear, for listeners who didn't get it, the actual title is…

[Shannon] Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] And the release date is…

[Dean] Not sure.

[Brandon] Right around this time.

[Shannon] I have no idea. We are just… We're having so much fun with it, even now, because we're… We're recording this in advance. One of the books she gets pulled into is a comic book. Which we just are getting the pages of that right now. It's really fun.

[Dean] All the books… The fake books that you've made up for this are super funny. They're like examples of a genre.

[Shannon] Yeah. So she gets pulled into a tawdry romance, a historical romance, and…

[Dean] Post-apocalyptic horror.

[Shannon] Yeah. And a YA rom-com. A horror. She gets pulled into Anne of Green Gables, that's the only real book that I didn't make up. A fantasy. Anyway. A nonfiction book.

[Dean] I've read it, it's very good.

[Dan] Someone's going to read this, not realize that Anne of Green Gables is real…

[Dean] That's true.

[Dan] And encounter it like 10 years later…

[Shannon] I know. I thought of that.

[Dan] And it's going to freak them out. It's going to be awesome.

[Shannon] I wrote a book that was called The Goose Girl that's based on a Grimm Brothers fairytale.

[Mary Robinette] Which I love.

[Shannon] I would get letters from people saying, "I saw this story in a book at school. You didn't make it up. The Goose Girl's a real story."

[Dan] You cheated.

[Shannon] "This is plagiarism." I'm like, "Oh, no."

[Brandon] So, looking at some of the collaborations I've been involved in, a lot of mine lately have been I write a book and someone writes a screenplay of it, which is a collaboration, but a different style of collaboration.

[Shannon] Yeah. You're not in the same room.

[Brandon] I've noticed that sometimes this turns into a process that makes the story much worse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's just say that.

[Dan] None of his screenwriters listen to our show.

[Brandon] One time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled with him]

[Brandon] One time, I got back a screenplay, and every aspect of my story was better in a way that made me embarrassed.

[Oooo…]

[Brandon] At every turn, they took the better option that I hadn't considered, and just leveled up the entire story to an amount where I was really excited, but also kind of embarrassed. Right? It was like, "Oh, man. They just…"

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] So, I got to see it work, finally, right? Because that's what's supposed to happen in collaboration is that the things that you both bring to the table, you enhance each other's abilities, you make up for one another's maybe weaker areas in writing, you get something better than you could have done alone. This has happened to me in writing with Mary Robinette where we did a story together. But only once in screenplays. So I guess my question is how do you make sure it goes that direction instead of the other direction? Dan actually raised his hand on this one.

[Dan] Well, I was just going to say that you and I just did a convention last week, and we've collaborated on a novel. It's still unpublished, and we did a reading from it. Which was the first time that either of us had really heard it out loud. It was astonishing to me, first of all, how well it worked, but second, how I couldn't tell what was mine and what was yours.

[Brandon] Right. I…

[Shannon] I thought that's what…

[Brandon] You doing a reading of that chapter made me think, "That book's way better than I remember it being."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's gotta be Dan's influence. But I can't figure out what was Dan's influence. It made me really excited about… I have to dig into it and fix part of it, but… Yeah. So. Collaboration can be energizing and it can be exciting, and when I got the screenplay back, I'm like, "Wow." Again, how do we make sure that collaborations go that way?

[Shannon] You have to check your ego, first of all.

[Dean] That's true. Definitely.

[Shannon] You can't be remembering this was my piece and this was your piece and you can't touch my peace. I just don't think it works that way.

[Dean] Yeah. Well, you can't be precious about anything. Like, I'll think, "Oh, I've got this awesome idea, and I still believe it's awesome." But you're like, "It just doesn't fit for the story." I have to be like, "Yeah. All right."

[Shannon] He'll send me pages and then I will see the heart of what he's trying to go for and I will delete 75% of it…

[Dean] She's the screenwriter in this case.

[Shannon] And then add a few more sentences. He'll get it back and go, "This is exactly what I was trying to do."

[Dean] It's so awesome. I'll be like… I'll feel like it's my work, but suddenly, like, better.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's, I guess, what it is. But…

[Shannon] But I would say collaboration takes longer than doing it by yourself. So you don't… I think people often think, "Oh, there's two people, so you only have to work half the time." But it actually takes more work. So the benefit of it, as you were saying, Brandon, is that synergy that comes from two different people and you're wrestling out something together.

[Dean] You get more edit passes, because I go through and see what you've done, and then you go through and undo whatever I've done, and I go through and try to redo it.

[Shannon] I have a couple friends who collaborate and they said never they get to the point where they can't… They often agree, but if they each have an idea of what should happen and they can't agree, then they have committed to throw out both of those ideas and come up with a third option. But we actually don't really get there. We…

[Dean] No, I back off way too early.

[Shannon] We pitch to each other a lot, and, like, and really try to explain why we want to go that particular way. But often, in the process… What's great about collaboration, too, is that you're forced to explain…

[Dean] Why this is awesome.

[Shannon] This is what… Why this should happen, and sometimes when you're explaining, you realize…

[Dean] Ooooo...

[Shannon] Actually, it's not that great. But sometimes when you're explaining, you realize, "Oh, it is that great, and in fact…

[Dean] Even better…

[Shannon] Even talking about it is giving me more ideas about a way to expand it." So it is… It's a totally different kind of writing. I don't think it would… I actually really enjoy writing novels on my own, as well, so I don't think it's the only thing I need to do. But for certain books, I'm always like, "Oh, this would be better if I do it with Dean."

[Dean] Well, I love having an early reader. Like, sometimes when I feel like I can't… I feel like I don't know where to go, like what tack to take, I know that I can write for you. So I will insert a joke in there that I know is not going to be in the final one.

[Shannon] And I'm like, "Ha ha, that's funny."

[Dean] It's a gift for you.

[Shannon] Delete, delete, delete.

[Dean] I need to give you something to do.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time for this podcast. We want to thank Shannon and Dean who have been here to record some awesome episodes with us. We're going to leave with Dean giving us some homework.

[Dean] All right. So this is a thing that I do with my kids. I collaborate with my children, and with my wife. That was named Picture Word by one of my kids, I'm not sure which one. What we do is we just get a single piece of paper, and we fold it into four so that we've got four separate like pages. We sit down and we draw pictures on each page. We're telling a story. It's like a picture book or a graphic novel. But you only draw the pictures. Then you pass it to the next person. They, sight unseen, draw… Or write the words that are supposed to go with that picture. Or you flip it. Or you start down and you write… You write the title, The Egg. You don't put any pictures on the next page. The Egg had something in it. Then whoever it is, the kid who's next, draws the picture that is related to that. You end up getting a story that neither one of you really thought was going to happen.

[Brandon] That's awesome. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/16/15-33-the-long-dark-second-act-of-the-soul/

Key Points: How do you make the second act interesting? When you're stuck, make something happen. Also, admit that it is going to be rewritten. Think about the second act as the fun part, where trailer scenes come from. Play with things, build fun scenes. Connect the dots! Know what you have to do, and find the most exciting ways to do it. Treat your chapters and scenes like episodes, with plenty of escalating miniature arcs. Act one, introduce things, Act three, blow them up. Act two, make trailer moments, show us a new context. Fill the second act with try-fail cycles. Foreshadowing moments, little lessons and pieces of information building towards the resolution. Use the inherent tension of how. Make the problem larger, involve more characters, expand the scope. Try-fail cycles can give the reader some awesome, too! It's not just a hamster wheel, more of a winding path towards the climax. Character change. Don't worry too much about this during writing, but use it for outlining, revision, and when you get stuck. Get your Muppet chest buster.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Howard named this episode, if you couldn't tell.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Second acts. Let's talk about second acts. We got a lot of questions about how to make middles of your story interesting. One question is, "I'm pantsing my SF book and started with a vague wouldn't it be a cool idea to begin with and went from there. I quite like how the character's progressing, but I'm basically stuck in the second act."

[Howard] The best advice that I've got for pantsers. It's in two parts. The first part is, when you are stuck like this, make something happen. Blow something up, burn something down, a couple of people get in a fight, just make something happen. The second is admit to yourself that this is going to need to be rewritten. That you may need to chop off the front, you may need to rewrite the ending, you may need to prune bits out of the middle. But, for me, when I pantsed, getting unstuck was way more important than sitting down and outlining the end. On several occasions, that exercise of getting unstuck… I'm going to make something really exciting happened… Reinvigorated me and I realized, "Oh. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's what I wanted to do." And off I go. The thing, in about half the cases, didn't end up exploding. It did something else.

[Dan] So, one of the things that made me change the way I think about second acts was I was reading a screenwriting book. It was talking about the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. In talking about the second act, it said, "This is the fun part where most of the scenes in the trailer come from." I thought I've never thought of it that way. This is the part where the characters have entered a new situation or they've gained some new powers, they're doing something new and they're playing with all of those new things. So now I try to put that into my second acts, and say, this isn't just the part you slog through to get to the end. This is where you get to play with all your fun toys and build the fun scenes that are going to end up in the trailer.

[Victoria] I mean, the hard part is, right… The first act, you get to introduce all your toys. The third act, you get to make them blow up. You get to put them where they're going to land. In the second act, somehow, you have to get between those two points. I mean, I fully admit, I am not a pantser. But, even before my extreme outlining days, where I am now like finding so much joy in execution, I would try and give myself what I used to call the connect-the-dots theory. Which I would try and make between 3 to 6 points in my story. Even if I didn't know where the story was going or how I was going to get between those two points, even having three meant that I had something I was moving towards. I could say, "Okay, here I am in the story, and I have this one spot, one thing I know I want to have happen before the end, and I am moving toward it. What's something that could happen between here and there?" And I figure out another dot. Now I've got half the distance between. I go, "What's something that could happen?" You're essentially playing a choose your own adventure game. I had a friend who used to say, "How do you make it worse?" Basically, like, she wrote a zombie novel, and the zombies chased these two kids up the tree. There up the tree and it seems like it's pretty bad. The question is how do you make it worse. She set the tree on fire. Right? Like, it's that moment. Sometimes it's just finding ways to play, but I do think this is the hard part. It can't just be play, because you also need to progress the story. Nothing is more frustrating than when you get to a really interesting book that has an amazing first act, you get to the second act, and all of a sudden, they're in the fire swamp, right? They're just like wandering through it, without any real purpose except to kill time.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] And maybe gain assets and like toys and things that they're going to need to fight the final battles.

[Dan] So, let's look at Star Wars. I'm old enough that when I say Star Wars, I mean Episode IV. Okay? Act Two Is the Death Star. The things that have to happen narratively are we need to rescue the princess and we need to lose our mentor. Both of those are opportunities for big set pieces. We lose the mentor, and it's not just well, we're going to… They die in the fire swamp. It's a lightsaber battle. That's the only lightsaber battle we get in that movie. Rescuing the princess… There's this whole gun chase, and then they get thrown into a pit with a monster that tries to eat them, and then they drown and all these things. So, knowing what you have to do, and then finding the most exciting way of accomplishing that is kind of what the second act is for.

[Brandon] I think readers/viewers are really sensitive to the second act thing, without knowing it.

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] This is one of these things that, just by consuming media, you pick up on. I've noticed that a lot of the movies that people love and the sequels that people love are all ones that are surprisingly good in the second act. Right? Star Wars is a great example. But even when people say, what are the best sequels of all time? It's always the second movie that you expect to be bad because the first one was good, and we've been trained that the middle's the weakest. Yet, the best Star Wars movie, a lot of people say it's the second one. The best Godfather movie, The second one. The best Toy Story's movie is the second one. I think this is partially because people are expecting it to be bad, and it's good. Those expectations are then subverted. If you can do a good second act in your story, I think that that will just make the readers unconsciously say, "Wow, this is fantastic. I don't expect this to be the most exciting part, and it is."

[Victoria] I mean, this is one of the reasons we discussed in a previous episode that I was on where we disc… I discussed treating my chapters and scenes like episodes. I think it's in part to help me avoid the lull of the second act by creating miniature arcs within the story that bring their own satisfaction, and then stitch together into something. To me, a part of it, and we can talk about this more later, is I pretend there is no second act. I don't break it into three. I find that very, very stressful. I work forward from the beginning and backwards from the end, and I populate it with escalating arcs, because I think we put so much pressure on the second act that it becomes a place of dread. The middle of a book is already a place of dread because it's when you're most likely to quit writing it. It's when the shiny new idea sweeps in, it's when you're full of distraction, and you're beginning to get bored because everything's becoming familiar and you have to begin delivering on promises that you made in the first act. It's a very treacherous place to be. So I do think maybe also like take some of the pressure away of thinking of it as the 2A and 2B, of thinking of it as this central part of your narrative which has to hold the whole roof up. Start to look at those exciting episodes like in Star Wars where there are things that need to be accomplished and there's a very exciting way to do those things.

[Howard] Something you said earlier, Victoria, about the first act is where we're introducing all the things, and that's fine and that shiny. The last act is where we're blowing them up, or there blowing each other up. For me, if I don't break things into three acts, I will continue to introduce things through Act Two, and that breaks the story. Because it just… It bloats in bad ways. So it's useful for me to think about it as if we're describing the items in a room during Act One. Act Two, we change the lighting in the room, and now everything looks different. It's the same thing, we're just now seeing them all in a different light and were tripping over them. It's now whatever. Then, Act Three, the house is on fire. I don't know. It's a dumb metaphor.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The idea here is that the point at which you stop introducing things structurally kind of defines the second act. So that's a point for you to create these trailer moments, like Dan was saying.

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] By changing the lighting, by changing the environment, by changing the context. That'll make it a lot more exciting, I think, than just a fire swamp.

[Dan] One of the reasons I think people get intimidated by Act II is because Act I sets stuff up, Act 3 resolves it. What do I do… I'm treading water for half my book. So one of the things that I try to do is make sure the second act is filled with try-fail cycles. It's not that my characters know they have to wait to a certain point before they can end the story. They spend all of second act trying to end the story.

[Brandon] It should always be upping the stakes and escalating. Your sense of progress for that middle is that things are getting worse or the stakes are getting bigger and bigger.

[Victoria] I think of… So, obviously, we referenced the fire swamp. The Princess bride is one of my favorite examples of an archetypal narrative that follows this very, very well. You meet your players by the end of Act One, then spend Act Two with Wesley and the Princess trying to flee, being continuously failed, being abductive, being separated, trying to reassemble. We reassemble the teams by the end of Act Two, and then in Act Three, we have the fight in the war and the conclusion. It's a beautifully simple story. But it's a very satisfying story across all three acts. It starts… One of the other things that Act Two gets to do is introduce the foreshadowing moments, the little lessons and pieces of information that we're going to need in that resolution. So in a… I always say it's like it's getting all of your weapons together, it's gathering all of your forces. These are beautiful moments in Act Two, through that try-fail cycle, to achieve the motifs and the little things which are going to come back around in Act Three.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You actually, Dan, have a book you were talking about how great the second act is.

[Dan] Yeah. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which I talked about a while ago. Tiffany Aching is my favorite Terry Pratchett series by a mile. Wintersmith is an interesting one to bring up in a structural episode, because it has a very weird structure. But its second act is its strongest one by far. Its second act is basically Tiffany Aching is apprenticed to an older witch named Miss Treason. Miss Treason is very weird and she's very dark and she's very spooky. It's very slice of life-y. We know from the prologue that there's going to be this big evil problem with the Wintersmith. The third act, we deal with the Wintersmith. In the middle, it's just Tiffany learning how to be a witch. She will go through kind of the daily life and she will learn various lessons. It's so powerfully done because it is framed with her arriving there and it ends with Miss Treason… Spoiler warning… She dies. We get her funeral. We know she dies chapters before she does, because she's a witch, so she knows everything. But the way that it is built, I think really is a fantastic example of how to do a powerful second act.

[Brandon] So, let me ask about this. Along those second act ideas. I feel like it can get frustrating for a reader in that second act because it feels like you're going nowhere, as we've mentioned, but also the heroes, the protagonists, are often failing over and over again. How do you keep a sense of momentum when you're failing over and over again? The reader knows, in the back of their head, because they have the page count, that they can't succeed here. So, how do you work with that as authors?

[Victoria] I like to break it up. I like to break up the literal team. I often write ensemble casts. That's one of my favorite times, where they get separated and they're finding their way not only toward the goal but back towards each other. I like to put them in peril. I like it because you know, with so much of the book left, that they're going to find a way through that, that there's going to be things that happen. Then, the question becomes how. I think that there is an inherent tension in the how of something, in the understanding that there's a lot of book left, what feels like it might be a climactic moment is almost like a tease. Then it becomes a lot like, "How are they going to pull this off? How are they going to achieve this goal?" I think we can sometimes underestimate the inherent tension of how.

[Dan] One of… So the book and movie Crazy Rich Asians does something very cool in its second act. I think one of the ways to do what you're talking about is to expand the scope, use the second act to expand the scope of what we're looking. The problem itself gets larger or it starts to involve more characters. Crazy Rich Asians does this with the cousin Astrid. A lot of the plot focuses around the main character trying to fit in better with the very Asian sensibilities of the fiancé's family. She doesn't have any allies. So, second act throws Astrid at her, the cousin who A) becomes a powerful ally, but B) is rejecting a lot of the very Asian attitudes. Becomes much more independent and much more Western in the way that she views her own family. So it's exploring the same themes from a different direction and including more characters, but all in a way that eventually is going to give the main character the tools she needs in the third act.

[Howard] I think that the try-fail cycle model, Dan, that… Or… Yeah, Dan, it was you that had described the try-fail cycle, coupled with the idea of scenes from the trailers. Yes, the viewer… I remember my son, we were watching a movie and I asked him… I just turned to him and said, "You think their plan's going to work?" He was 10. He says, "If their plan works, we don't have a whole movie."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was so proud. I was so proud. I wept in that moment. It had nothing to do with the film. But the reader knows that the plan isn't going to succeed, because they can tell how far through the book we are. They can tell through the page count. So, the try-fail cycle has to give us… Has to give us one of these trailer moments. Has to give us some awesome. We should come out of it not with a sense of, "Oh, that didn't work," but with a sense of, "Hah! That went terribly, but now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Then we're cheering during the second act.

[Brandon] Well, I always also like the structure that in the second act, you try something, you succeed, and then you realize…

[Howard] You've made it worse.

[Brandon] You've made it worse. This happens in the story structure… What is it, the seven points, the nine points?

[Dan] Seven point.

[Brandon] The seven point, that Dan really likes. When I was reading about that once, there's this broadening of goals during the second act, where you realize the thing that you wanted, even if you achieve it, is not the thing you wanted all along. Suddenly, you realize, "Oh, by achieving this thing, we are in much bigger trouble." To reference Diehard again, "Oh, the FBI's here, everything's okay. Oh, crap, that was part of the plan." Those sorts of moments are really great.

[Victoria] Yeah. I agree. I think that it's also… When we talk about try-fail cycle, I think there's an erroneous visual that happens, of like a hamster wheel. That's not what it is at all, because when you get forward and you realize something's wrong, and when you fall backwards, you gain some advantage. There's always something happening, which is giving you kind of a winding path towards your climax.

[Dan] Well, I'm glad that you brought up the kind of the character change that can happen in the second act. Because sometimes that is I'm about to get what I want and realize that'll make everything worse. But just as often, it can be… The second act is where they change their attitude. They realize the goal they been pursuing is actually bad, and they decide to pursue a different one. That is going to change the focus of the rest of the story.

[Victoria] Can I say one last thing before we run out of time? I also just… I'm going to be the devil's advocate here of I don't think about these things when I'm writing.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Like we're articulating things in a way that I do not sit down and think, "Oh, I'm here in the second act, I better think about the way that my character is going to evolve." I think part of that is like, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, there is an intuitive level here. I think it can be really overwhelming when it becomes a codified level. Like, yes, these are things which you should be able to analyze, perhaps in the revision cycle or if you get stuck, but I think it's also okay if you're operating on a draft level in an intuitive way, and you don't feel like you're stopping and checking your map for these kinds of things every step.

[Brandon] That's really great to bring up. It can't be reinforced too much. The idea that a lot of what we do, we're doing by instinct. The more I've written, the more I am conscious of these things during outlining and revision. I still, when I'm actually writing, am not focused on this nearly as much as it might sound that we are. But when I wrote my early books, I wasn't focused on it at all. I was just learning how to write a story. Some of those books got published, and people loved them. Even though I wasn't as conscious about it. It's talking about it, it's teaching it really that forces you to analyze these things and look at what you're doing.

[Victoria] I just refer to it as developing an internal story monster, which is like a tiny Jim Henson-esque monster that lives in your chest and feeds on narrative. The more that you watch and the more that you read and the more that you write, the more you teach that internal demon figure what works and what doesn't, and the more…

[Howard] You've given me a Muppet chest buster.

[Victoria] Exactly. Exactly.

[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that visual. Thank you.

[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] I do. I just turn the page from it, which was a very silly… Ah, there it is. Pick your favorite book or movie, or favorite entertainment of whatever kind. Identify where the second act begins, where the second act ends. Then, with a notebook in hand, make a list of the things that you love about that second act. Now, if your favorite thing, the second act is your least favorite part about it, make a list of the things that allowed you to muscle through the second part in order to get to the ending that you love. But, this is homework that involves writing. Because you're going to take that list of the things that you love, and you're going to try to map that onto the second acts where you are stuck.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/19/15-29-barbie-pre-writing-with-janci-patterson-and-megan-walker/

Key points: Barbie Pre-Writing? Start with a rough outline, pick dolls for the characters, and role-play the story, beginning to end with dolls. Role-play, then take notes, then write. This really helps with characters, it gets you immersed in their heads. You'll get new scenes, characters will reveal things, and it's more natural and suits our characters. The dolls, or miniatures, act as a focal point for the characters. As for collaboration, we come up with ideas together, we text a lot, we use a notes file in OneNote, and we build a rough outline. Then we game it out, both the plotted scenes, and others that appear organically. Then we take notes, and decide what we really need to include, and who's going to write what. One big advantage to collaborative writing and role-play gaming is the synergy, the way it sparks the imagination.

[Transcriptionist Note: I have probably confused Janci and Megan at some points. My apologies for any mistakes.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 29.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have two special guest stars, Janci Patterson and Megan Walker.

[Megan] Hi.

[Janci] I am so excited we got to make Brandon say Barbie Pre-Writing.

[Megan] Yeah. This was a big moment in our lives.

[Brandon] Janci is a long-time friend of the podcast, and a long-time friend and colleague of ours. We are glad to have you back, and Megan, your first time.

[Megan] Yes, I am.

[Brandon] I want to start off by saying, "What the heck?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Dan told me the title of this, and said, "We're just going to call it this." What?

[Janci] So, we, for pre-writing… We are co-writers. We write romance and epic fantasy together. With our epic fantasy, we have a third co-writer, our friend Warren. Before we write the book, but after we have a rough idea of what the books are going to be about and who the characters are, we have entire rooms full of Barbie dioramas and we pick out dolls for the characters and then we role-play through the entire story, beginning to end, with the dolls. Sometimes, if it doesn't go the way we want, we do it again.

[Megan] And it's super fun.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do you film this?

[No]

[Janci] We don't want to watch or listen to ourselves. No.

[Brandon] Do you take notes? How do you…

[Janci] Afterwards, usually. Not after each individual scene, because we are so into the story, we just kind of keep going, keep going. But usually it… Like, either later that night, or like days later, we'll take notes of the main things we remember from the scene, how the flow of it went. That also keeps us from writing down each and every little individual thing that we said, because not all of that's going to be good in a book. You know…

[Megan] It's all improv, right.

[Janci] Sometimes a scene will go five hours, because we love it. That's going to be 10 pages in the book. So we don't need everything that we said. So, mostly, between the two of us, what we can remember…

[Megan] What we remember as being exceptionally good from that scene.

[Howard] I am remembering being a big brother, and what a horrible person I was, and how fortunate we all are that none of this was happening where I was nearby, because…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Brandon] I have so many questions. This is really cool.

[Janci] Awesome. That's what we're here for.

[Dan] This is super cool.

[Brandon] This is the best. So, what do you find this does for you? Like, what do you get? What is the… How is it different to pre-write this way?

[Janci] The thing that we get most is the characters. Because we… Essentially, we're sitting there, and… People who don't role-play, what it is is we sit there and one of us is one of the characters and one of us is the other. Megan takes all of the girls, I take all the guys, we write a lot of romance, so usually it's… Most of what we're doing. We sit there, and we set up the scenes, and then I will talk as if I am my character and she will talk as if she's her character, and we go and we just have a conversation. It gets you so deeply immersed in the character's head, because for a while, you are that person. We find all sorts of reactions that we wouldn't have necessarily thought of, like, intellectually, that are just a basic gut instinct.

[Megan] Yeah, like, leads to new scenes that, like, we'll do a scene, and then will realize, like, it went totally different than we anticipated it going, and, oh, no, now my character, she needs to go talk to her mom about this, where… Or she needs to go do this, and that wasn't something we anticipated. But when you're so firmly in the character's head, you know what they're wanting to do.

[Janci] It also gives us a lot of moments where it's like, "They just destroyed our entire plot, what are we going to do now?"

[Megan] That happens a lot.

[Janci] One of the things we hear a lot about our books is that we're so brave, that we let our characters just talk out things that would have been, in a normal romance novel, the whole conflict, and it's over in a couple of scenes. Then we have a different conflict. It's not because we're so brave, it's because our characters talked about…

[Megan] Our characters talked about, "What are we going to do now?"

[Janci] No, I want to tell him this thing that's supposed to be a secret.

[Howard] That's kind of what people are like when they're allowed to talk.

[Janci] Right. Right. Exactly. We find that's kind of what happens naturally, and yet, every time, we tend to have the tendency of plotting these things out, thinking that the characters will be able to hold this information back.

[Megan] Then they destroy our book.

[Janci] They destroy our book, almost every time.

[Megan] But we come up with a better one, because it's more natural and more like thorough…

[Janci] And suits our characters and…

[Howard] Okay. So I have to ask, could you do this without the dioramas? Could you do this without the dolls? Could you do this without either? I'm not asking because I think those are unnecessary. I want to know what those bring because that expands my business expense budget…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For Star Wars toys…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] By like a billion dollars.

[Janci] The dioramas and such add a lot to the budget. Yeah.

[Dan] One of the big things they bring is… I follow Janci on Facebook, because we've been friends forever. I love all the pictures. She's like, "We're plotting a new book. Here's some dude with a haircut and like…"

[Gasp]

[Dan] It's awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Janci] So, I've found that at least… I mean, the dioramas I feel like are the less necessary part of it. I mean, it's awesome to have it, and it adds a lot to a scene. But for me, I feel like… I personally have always felt like I needed the dolls to have almost this like focal point so it's slightly removed from me. I think it's potentially a self-consciousness thing, or potentially… I'm not sure exactly, but for some reason having the dolls… I use to actually do this with my friend Warren, the one who's working epic fantasy with us. We used to do this, when we were like teenagers, we would use miniatures from like D&D, that kind of thing. We didn't know how to play D&D, we didn't know anyone who play D&D, but we got the little miniatures and we essentially just played Barbies and created stories with them. But I've always just use something as like a focal point for this is my character.

[Brandon] This is so cool. It really is.

[Janci] It is so cool.

[Brandon] Let me ask you this. When you sit down to write, do you each write your… The character you are playing? Or do you not?

[Janci] Not necessarily.

[Megan] Not necessarily.

[Janci] We tend to divide it that way just because it's fun for us to write our own characters. But if it comes down to it and there's… We need to get the book done and there's stuff, one of us isn't going to be able to get to it, then we write each other's characters. That's no big deal.

[Megan] Yeah, we're able to do that.

[Brandon] Oh, okay.

[Megan] Because we also, one advantage too, you get to know the other person's characters as well...

[Janci] So well.

[Megan] When we talk about it so much in the scenes and everything.

[Janci] After the scenes, we'll sit down and be like, "This is what was going on in my character's head that they didn't say." So we both know all of the motivations that are happening, even if they didn't actually make it into the scene.

[Brandon] I've heard a lot of writers say that it's really handy to speak out loud your dialogue, or even get a table read, right, of a given scene, where everyone, you get several friends, you each take a character, you read them through. This goes even further than that.

[Janci] It does.

[Brandon] I can only imagine. I wish Mary Robinette were here, because…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Being a puppeteer, she would just love this idea, I'm sure.

[Howard] I actually have two questions. One of them is related to I wish Mary Robinette were here. That's that when you are holding the dolls and having them talk, are you moving the arms and posing them and…

[Janci] So, we mostly set them in the dioramas and let them be still. Then, if one of them is going to move, like, since we do a lot of romance, if one of them puts the arm around the other, we'll either say he does this, or we'll move the dolls and have them do that. But we don't, like, move them and articulate them.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Megan] Usually they just set there. Yeah.

[Howard] The second question com… Not completely unrelated. When you are writing, do you ever find yourself needing to go get the doll or look at the diorama as a mnemonic? Is there stuff that you don't remember until you went back and looked at…

[Dan] The visual aids.

[Janci] Not for me, usually. No, I think that… I think acting out the scenes actually, like, sticks them in my head better anyway, just as a visual thing, personally.

[Megan] When we say we take notes, sometimes it takes us an hour to take notes on a scene, because we're sitting there going, "Oh, and remember they said this. Oh, before that, she said that." Because it's so stuck in our heads.

[Janci] One thing that the dolls are really good for, though, is clothes. I'm personally terrible at describing clothes and books. But now I just describe what they were wearing.

[Laughter]

[Megan] You have all the outfits.

[Janci] It's amazing.

[Megan] So we have a vast wardrobe for them.

[Janci] Both in epic fantasy and contemporary. So…

[Brandon] Well, let's stop and talk about some of these books themselves for the books of the week. Tell us about some of the books you've done this with.

[Janci] Well, the first… I guess the one that… Contemporary romance series. The first one of that is called The Extra. This one is basically a girl, named Gabby, who lives in LA and her roommate is an actress on a soap opera set, and she ends up becoming, Gabby ends up becoming an extra on that soap opera set. Then, basically, the book is just… It's a fun rom com, basically. All the hijinks that take… That happened behind the scenes are just as crazy as the stuff that's on the soap opera itself. So that's a lot of fun. And a lot of fun to game out.

[Megan] You can get the first book for free on e-book retailers and the second book for free by joining our reader's list. So.

[Brandon] My wife has been consuming these voraciously.

[Yay!]

[Brandon] So she loves them.

[Oh, that makes me happy.]

[Howard] And those are by Janci Patterson, Megan Walker, and…

[Brandon] [garbled]

[No, just the two of us. Yeah.]

[Janci] So, the other series will be coming out next summer, so by the time this airs, they'll be coming out. They are under the pseudonym Cara Witter, since there's three of us. We're not putting three names on the book. But the first book is called Godfire. It's in epic fantasy about a girl whose father is a dictator, and she doesn't realize that he has used dark blood magic to make her. So she's not actually a person, she is his weapon. Those will also be available, the first book for free and then the second one for free with our reader's list everywhere.

[Brandon] Awesome. For those of our listeners who are interested in this, the business side of it, these two are very shrewd in the way they've been approaching this with, you hear, they are doing what, one book a month?

[Janci] In the first year.

[Brandon] For an entire year. You get the first one for free and the second one for the mailing list. It's just a really shrewd way to do the marketing, so… If you ever want to talk about marketing your books…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We don't have time on this podcast, but grab one of these two and chat with them.

[Brandon] I want to ask you right now about collaboration. Like, Janci, you used to write all your books by yourself. Then, I remember when you came to me and said, "I've discovered collaboration and I will never go back."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What… Tell me about your process, both of you, and why you like it so much?

[Megan] Oh, boy. Keep the faith.

[Janci] We start with the Barbies, so our process… I collaborate actually with several different people. All of those collaborations are awesome. The great thing about collaborations is you don't have to do all the sucky parts yourself. There's somebody else to bounce things off of and somebody else who's just as invested as you are, which is awesome. Our partnership, we pretty much all have our hands… Both have our hands in everything. We come up with the ideas together, we text… Our text chain is a million miles long, and we text like 100 times a day back and forth. I had an idea about this. I had an idea about that. Oh, that works with this. When we're smart, we move it into our notes file on OneNote that we can both see. When we're not, a year later we're like, "We had ideas." They're buried in our text chain. Then we get together and we talk through it, a rough outline.

[Megan] Then, usually after that point, we end up with… Once we have sort of the rough outline, again. Knowing that most likely our game is going to destroy it, and we're going to have to reconfigure things. We do end up like gaming out the scenes we have plotted, and then whatever scenes kind of come from, organically from, that. Then we take the notes and basically… Usually we go through the notes and kind of decide, like… We kind of turn off our gameplaying brains and turn on our writers brains and be like, "Okay, what aspects of this don't need to be in the book." Like, what…

[Janci] There are always great things that our gaming brain thought needed to be in the book, and sometimes we even put in a note, "This needs to go in the book." Then our outlining brains are like, "That needs to go in the book?"

[Megan] That was not good.

[Janci] No. So, yes. Then we do that. Then, we usually like split up the chapters that we're going to write, again, usually, by the characters that we are, but not always, depending on what other things we're working on.

[Brandon] So, the romances are mostly two viewpoint romances?

[Janci] Yeah. The first one isn't. But the ones thereafter have been. Yeah.

[Megan] It's not always split evenly, even in the book. So, sometimes one character has fewer chapters than the other.

[Brandon] Are these… I believe, where each book is a different character, set of characters, that are related tangentially to the first book?

[Janci] Right. We're actually doing both. Kind of a sequel for romance. We have… The first book is one character, the second book is her roommate. Then the third book is the main character's brother. But then we get to book 6… Somewhere around book 6, we go back to our main character. She has kind of a love story. She hasn't broken up with her boyfriend, they're together, but it's kind of a story about their relationship.

[Megan] Like… Yeah, what they're like now, a few years later, and what issues have come up in their relationship and stuff like that. So we go back and revisit some of the original characters and…

[Howard] But, by expanding the core POV cast, you've increased the range of business expense for Barbies.

[Laughter]

[Janci] That's always my goal. Get more Barbies.

[Howard] I'm sorry to keep coming back to that [garbled toys]

[Janci] Barbies, if you don't know, aren't cheap when they're collector Barbies.

[Dan] Yeah. But on this note, it's probably worth pointing out that there's a lot of ways to do this...

[Oh, yeah]

[Dan] Without the visual aids, or with different visual aids. A lot of authors use role-playing campaigns or games. There's actually a role-playing game called Microscope that is… It's not narrative, it's worldbuilding. You, as a role-playing group, come up with a world as part of playing the game. I talked to a handful of other authors that use that when they're starting a new series, and that helps do their worldbuilding for them. So, this kind of collaborative gaming process of outlining is pretty common. There's a lot of different flavors of it.

[Brandon] I actually know some people who are doing a triple-A videogame at one of the big studios that they have, part of their workday is a role-playing session in the world before they go to actually building it, because that's really expensive in video games, getting all the architecture done. They're role-playing it to find all of the problems with the worldbuilding…

[Mmmm]

[Brandon] That they think the players will eventually spot, and try to fix those before they sit down. They're doing it through a role-playing session.

[Howard] Because it's cheaper to play D&D than to work.

[Brandon] Yeah, it is.

[Laughter]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like…

[Dan] Unless you're the guy paying the checks.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like is a huge advantage to this, at least for me, because I've written books by myself before as well and had that experience, but there's just this synergy of not only writing collaboratively, I feel, but also in the gaming itself, that it just sparks the imagination. There someone else who I kind of like play off of, and it just, for me, it really helps.

[Janci] Especially with the comedy.

[Megan] Oh, the comedy. Yeah.

[Janci] With our… Even in our epic fantasy that is darker, we have some comedic elements, and when we… We know when we really have something when we do a scene and we're both in stitches and we can't finish the scene because we're laughing so hard, and then when we go to take the notes, we're remembering and we're laughing so hard…

[Megan] We start laughing.

[Janci] Again, and we stop taking the notes, and then when we outline it. We just find this so hilarious. Then we know that we've hit on something that's going to be really good.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Well, you now own what is probably the most distinctive title of a Writing Excuses episode ever.

[Yes!]

[Brandon] We are out of time. Do you guys have a writing prompt, maybe, you could give our audience?

[Janci] So, not that this counts as so much of a writing prompt, but this…

[Howard] Homework.

[Janci] Okay. It counts. But the suggestion is, if you're a writer, take a scene from your book or a scene you're wanting to write or something and get some toys and a friend and get like, Barbies or miniatures from a D&D or like your kid's old action figures. Your old He-Man action figures…

[Dan] My kid's? Can I just use my own?

[Janci] Whatever. You can use your own.

[Dan] Okay.

[Janci] Basically, find a friend who's willing to do this with you, and act out the scene.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] That is great.

[Dan] This is a great time to point out that Brandon and I are working on our second collaboration. We need to borrow Janci's Barbie collection at some point.

[Janci] You can come play in the Barbie room.

[Megan] Yeah, you're invited.

[Brandon] Thank you, audience, at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] Thank you, Janci and Megan, for being on the podcast. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go play with your Barbies.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.20: Mental Wellness and Writing

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/17/15-20-mental-wellness-and-writing/

Key Points: Mental wellness, a.k.a. self-care, not mental-health, writing with depression, and so forth. Physical and mental wellness go together. Remember it's work, no matter how much you enjoy it. When you set your own hours, you need to carve out time for other things. Set aside time for family and friends! Create, sustainable practices. How can you write with physical or mental ailments? Don't equate word count, quantity, with self worth. What is the smallest bite? Do 20 minute sprints. Crack the seal! Try different ways and accommodations to see what works for you. Listen to healthcare professionals and other people. Make yourself accountable to somebody else, and let them warn you when you are overdoing. How can you use writing as therapy? Write out your anger, then let it flutter away in the wind. When you are writing for your own mental health, you are writing so you can have written, not to be read. Outlining lets you write emotional beats that fit where you are when you are ready for them. Writing during bad times? Don't equate self-worth with word count. Sometimes you can't. Remember, writing is writing, thinking, deleting, walking, musing, and so many other things. Replenish the creative well. Try writing with pen and paper to get rid of the extra distractions. If you can't write, maybe you can plot, brainstorm, try variations on scenes.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 20.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Mental Wellness and Writing.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We're going to talk about mental wellness and how you apply it to your writing. We have a bunch of questions from listeners about this, but let's start off… Dan, you have something you want to…

[Dan] I just wanted to make sure that our listeners know upfront that we are talking about mental wellness, which is different from mental health. This is not… We've done episodes before about writing with depression and things like that. We'll probably touch on that a little bit, but more than anything else, this is an episode about self-care. About making sure that you can handle the process of writing, or using the process of writing to help with other things.

[Brandon] Okay. Well, let me ask then, what do you guys do in order to take care of yourself while writing?

[Victoria] It's interesting. For me, physical wellness and mental wellness go hand in hand. So, it's hard when I'm on the road most of the year, but I always try and carve out a good 30 minutes a day for either yoga or stretching or watching a really nice television show or putting on a facemask or like taking a long shower. Doing something, it doesn't have to be fancy, but something where the onus is off of me to have measurements of productivity and success. To have something that is pass-fail, right? And you can only pass. Because I feel like so often, especially those of us for whom writing is a part or a whole career, we put so much pressure on, and you can put so much pressure on if you're carving out time to write at 11 o'clock at night or 5 AM in the morning, to just almost consider everything a metric. That just leads to a lot of self-loathing, to a lot of you're not doing enough, you're not doing what you should be doing. So I think taking a chance to reset, to put away all of the metrics, and just take time and remember to human, in addition to… So that your self-worth doesn't become directly correlated with what you're making.

[Howard] I have so very, very many thoughts on this. Let me start by saying that I love my job. It's wonderful. I really do love it. It's fun. But if it's the only thing I do all day, I feel empty. So, if you're looking at a career in writing or in drawing comics or in whatever because you think that will be fun and you think you will be able to work much, much longer hours than you could work wherever you're working now? Be advised that that may be a false paradigm. It's gonna end up as work, no matter how much you enjoy it. I got to draw a munchkin deck a couple of years ago. It wasn't accelerated, fast-tracked project, and I worked… Literally, I'm not making these numbers up. I worked from 6 AM to midnight, every day for a month, except Sundays. My sleep schedule was such that that was actually survivable. Superpower. Only actually needed five and a half hours of sleep per night. It was wonderful. At the end of that month, I learned two things. One, I can do this. Two, I need to stop.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because I was empty and I was burnt out and I knew that I had reached a physical limitation that I did not want to push up against again any time soon forever.

[Victoria] You also bring up a point that I want to expand upon, which is this idea of the hours. There's this idea that when you set your own hours, you can do anything. The fact of the matter is that the freedom of writing and of creative professions where you get to set your hours is also the downside, because writing is a 365 days a year process, in that you can take a physical vacation I'm sure, but turning off, unplugging, these are things which are both very difficult and you end up feeling very guilty about that time that you take. So I think that the less structure you have in this job or in this hobby or in this aspiring profession or this actual like current profession, the more important it is to find ways to carve out time in which you affect those boundaries.

[Brandon] I'm very focused on time management. I'm a very structured person. We've talked about my spreadsheets and things like that. One of the problems I had with this early in my career is I know… I got married a year after I published my first book, right? After I sold my first book. Suddenly, having a wife and family meant that I was unaccustomed to taking my attention away from the stories. Because even though I wasn't writing, they were in the back of my head. I've heard lots of rider friends have this conflict with spouses and with family, that you're always too focused… You're not there with me when you're there with me. I had to learn, for me, what worked was to pick specific times. At 5:30, I can't write. It doesn't matter if my family's home or not, I have a requirement that 5:30 to 9:30 is not work time. I've got to be doing something else. By giving myself that kind of… I turn the clock off, and even training my brain to be like, "We're not going to focus on that. We're not going to think about that. We need these four hours to refresh, we need these four hours to spend with my family, with my kids," whatever it is, that was liberating to me. To train my… It was hard at first, but it was liberating to train myself to turn it off for four hours a day.

[Victoria] It's about creating sustainability. The fact is, you can do anything, as you were saying, Howard, for a short period of time, but most people don't want to have a single project. They want to have a long-standing career, and in order to have a long-standing career, you have to find a way to create healthy, sustainable practices.

[Howard] At the time of this recording, I'm feeling huge like despair-worthy amounts of stress, because there's a whole bunch of cartooning that needs to be done before Monday, and it's not done yet. Last night, one of the kids had a severe medical emotional stuff. I was told that I had to sit next to her on the couch and watch YouTube videos. In fact, I was told that I wasn't allowed to get up and run errands, because my part of the medical process was to be the service emotional comfort Dad or something. I look at that, and I recognize that for my own part, yeah, it was kind of a huge sacrifice to help this other human being instead of doing the thing that I wanted to do for me. But ultimately, those other human beings are more important to me than I am. If they are not happy, I really despair. Me not getting my work done? That makes me sad. But them being unhappy, that is huge. As Brandon said, being willing to carve out time, I have to do it. My schedule isn't as rigid. But when something happens, my moral compass says I will drop what I'm doing in order to be with them.

[Brandon] So, there's a question here about writing under the stresses of physical or mental ailments. How can you long-term do this? What measures and steps do you take?

[Victoria] Well, so I have chronic pain, but I'm going to talk less about that because I use physical activity to try and mitigate some of the effects of that. But I will talk about writing as somebody who has anxiety and depression, and are obviously hills and valleys that come with having anxiety and depression. Look, there are some times when you can't write. We'll talk at the end of this about some homework that might help with that during those times. But in the immediate, what I do is I, one, do not equate word count and worth. In the interest of that, I carve down my goals to the smallest possible metric. There are some days when that metric is can I open up the document and sit with my story and think about it for half an hour, because that is going to create… Keep the creative door propped open in my head. Because I think the more time you spend away from the project, the harder it is to come back. Some days that's can I write a couple sentences? Let's not look at this as 2000 words or a chapter. What is the smallest bite? So I am somebody who is extremely structured in my writing, but I also only write for 20 minutes at a time. I probably, even on my most productive days, write for three hours total. That's nine sprints. Really. So I don't think that it's time equals quality, but I do think that by cutting it down to 20 minutes, I can stare at a Word document for 20 minutes. I can think about a story for 20 minutes. Even on a bad day, I can spend 20 minutes not doing anything else. Neil Gaiman has a process where he says, "When I sit down to write, my two options are do nothing or write. It's simply about removing the other distractions. You can either write or do nothing. Those are your two options." For me, I want to make the smallest bite possible. Just the same way that I never sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a book." I don't even sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a chapter." I sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to spend some time in this scene, in this moment." There are some days when I make a paragraph out of that, and I'm so happy. Usually, if I can cracked the seal on the overwhelming feeling, the overwhelmedness of that day, I can get something down on paper. Getting something down, even a small quantity, is better than nothing, and will help me feel better and make things feel a little bit more manageable.

[Howard] I like the idea of cracking the seal, because it makes it sound like the doom of the world is going to spill forth…

[Victoria] It is.

[Howard] Once I've gotten it open.

[Brandon] Dan, I know you've had some chronic pain issues before. You had your tailbone. You were trying to record, while your tailbone was hurting. You also had carpal tunnel. How did you write during these times, with these chronic pains? What did you do?

[Dan] For me, those were chronic issues, but they were not long-term issues. They were a few months at a time. So, for me, it came down to being willing to change my routine. I am a creature of routine. I like to write in the same room every day during the same hours. So, forcing myself to say, "Well, actually, you know what, for the next year, I'm going to use a standing desk instead of a normal desk." Or "I'm going to try a different keyboard layout." I had one that was split up… I am using gestures that you can't see the thing because this is audio only. But trying to find different ways and different accommodations. But, at the core of it, it comes down to, am I willing to do this in a different way than I've ever done this before? Which is kind of how I do my whole career. That's why I jump genres. That's why I find new programs to be a part of. I'm always trying to find the new thing, because I don't know until I try if that's going to be a thing that works really well for me. Some of these accommodations that I have used in the past, like a standing desk, I keep coming back to over and over because I genuinely have come to love it.

[Howard] I'd like to go on record real quick to say there are healthcare professionals out there. Some of them may be related to you. They might be part of your circle of friends. People you can listen to who are going to tell you, "Oh, wow, that thing you're doing? Maybe don't do that." I've failed to listen in a couple of key places. I can't take much ibuprofen anymore because I took a whole bunch of it in order to be able to draw a lot, and now one or two of those will give me IBS in all the best let's not talk about this on air sorts of ways.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are things that you may be doing to push through and get it done that make you feel like a superhero that are actually not good for you. Being willing to listen to other people and step back into the mortal realm a little bit might be good.

[Dan] I recognize that not everybody is in a position to have someone else to listen to, but if you do, whether it's someone who lives in your home with you or just a friend that you can text, making yourself accountable to somebody else is a huge part of self-care. Because we can't always be the best judge of have I spent too much time on this? Am I fixating too much on this? Am I burning myself out on this? So having someone who can check in every now and then and say, "You know what, it's three in the afternoon and you haven't eaten anything today." "Okay, yes. Then I need to put this down and I need to go eat."

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Lab Girl.

[Victoria] Yeah. Lab Girl. It's interesting. It came out a couple years ago. It's by an author named Hope Jahren. J A H R E N. It is a book that is very hard for me to quantify. But it's something that I recommend to anybody who is… Once an exploration of mental wellness and mental health issues, especially, as they intersect with creativity and with writing and identity. Hope Jahren is a brilliant botanist and biologist who was sensibly is writing a memoir through an examination of her relationship with the natural world. Underneath that is an examination of her mental state as it shifts and she processes it through this motif. I found it at the time when I needed it. I think it is a beautiful book, regardless of when you find it. But I hope that it will just find some of your listeners at maybe the right time, and just make them see themselves a little bit and understand that you can find beauty and that you can have some really incredible experiences. And, that really, like, sometimes if you struggle with mental health, because that's something that I do struggle with, even though this is a self-care podcast, I think sometimes it can feel like a deteriorating condition, where you can feel like, especially if you're in one of the hills… Or one of the valleys, that you're never going to have a hill again. I think it can be really grounding, the same way that you need people in your life that can kind of call you back to yourself, it can be grounding to see yourself, especially your mental self, through other works as well. I found it just an incredibly powerful book.

[Brandon] So, that is Lab Girl?

[Victoria] Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren.

[Brandon] So, as we move into the last few minutes of this podcast, there's a question here about tips for writing as therapy. Including, how to draw on personal grievances in a tasteful way, and help you make both more powerful writing and work through, perhaps, some issues. Anyone done this? What are your thoughts on this?

[Howard] Let me begin by saying that there are… If you are furious, if there is rage, and you just want to get it out of your system and put it on the page, write it using a tool where it does not immediately go online.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Write it in a way where it is disconnected from the Internet. Maybe write it and print it and then delete the file. Because we say things when we are in these frames of mind that are valuable for us to have said. But their value decreases dramatically as they get read by other people. I can't remember what the story was that I was listening to… I think it actually might have been Amal El-Mohtar when she was doing her oracle of buses thing, and somebody was saying, "How do I make this one emotion I'm having go away?" She said, "You write down the full description of this emotion, and then put it on a piece of paper and then tear up the paper and let it flutter away into the wind," or something. It was a beautiful thing that she said, and I haven't done it justice. But there's this idea that when we are writing, we are writing so that we can be read. When you are writing for your own mental health, you're writing so that you can have written. Those are two different things.

[Victoria] I definitely use writing as a form of catharsis. I've done it since the very beginning, since far before I was published. It felt like… A lot of circuitous thinking, a lot of spiral thinking, and it can feel very tangled up in my mind, and I feel like focusing on a story and putting things into word can be a way for me to make straight lines out of a lot of the clutter in my head, to kind of channel my energy. But I also… I write as catharsis for very specific emotional beats. One of the reasons that I outline my stories so rigidly before I write them is so that I can write them out of order. So that I can pick the scenes perhaps that have emotional beats that I want to write that day. Some days you wake up and you want to write a murder. Some days you wake up and you want to write a love scene. Some days you wake up and you want to write… Or you're prepared to write some of those really difficult emotional scenes. Those very difficult emotional scenes, you're probably not prepared to write every day. So then rather than sit around and wait for the day that I'm ready to write the next scene, I basically have it prepped and have it blocked out in my story and then set it aside until I have a moment or a day in my life where I feel either very stable and thus ready to explore this darkness or feel very unstable and very ready to explore this darkness. But I definitely earmark different emotional beats that I know I can't write every day. I wait for something to happen or for some state to come along for me to be ready to do those moments justice.

[Brandon] Dan was smiling over there when you said…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Some days you don't want to write a murder…

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] Or whatever it was.

[Victoria] Some days you do want to write a murder.

[Dan] I don't know what that's like, to wake up and not want to write a murder.

[Victoria] I know.

[Brandon] Last question here. How do you manage to keep writing during bad times in your life?

[Victoria] You try. I mean, I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier about you don't equate self-worth with word count. I mean, like, you try. You try when it helps you. You understand that if for some reason you can't, or if the world just feels too big, it's okay to go into a creative fallow period. I've said online many times that writing is writing, but so is thinking. So is deleting. So is walking, and musing, and doing lots of things. So is reading. So is consuming. There are times when you just… You're not ready to put work out of yourself onto paper, but that's a really great time to take work in. That's a really good time to find shows or comics or movies or books and try and replenish that creative well for when you are feeling ready.

[Howard] I need to tear the question into a couple of different elements here. Bad times. That is such an enormous bucket. How do you keep writing during bad times? It is entirely possible that the very best thing for you during a particular bad time is to not write, is to not think about writing, and to do something completely different, and I can't answer how to categorize that. I just gotta come out and say that time might exist. Then there are bad times. I remember at one point my daughter talking about how she had a whole lot of trials and everything was really hard. What she was describing was I'm a teenager. I'm here to tell you that, yes, that is terrible and it is really hard. But when you are a teenager and you are experiencing that, many of the adults are looking at you and saying, "Oh, sweetie. I do not want to tell you about my 30s."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I do not want to tell you this. Because the lessons you are going to learn right now are going to allow you to function when you're in your 30s. It is possible that the bad times you are having are things that… The lesson that you learn from them is, oh, I need to change my schedule. I need to change my diet. I need to get some exercise. I need to do something in order to mitigate the bad time and carve out time to write. I don't know… To the person that is asking the question, I don't know what kind of a bad time you're having.

[Victoria] That's true.

[Howard] So I don't have the answer.

[Victoria] I also just want to say, last note, because I think this is getting into a question that we don't get to answer, really, is that often times we become very distractible especially in these days. Like, your computer is a great tool of distraction. Sometimes it can also feel like a very precious thing. You look at a Word document or a blank screen and it feels very official, because everything that you write becomes a typed thing. When I am feeling… Like, specifically susceptible to these moments, I switch to pen and paper. I scribble along the top of the page so it's already not blank anymore. I might just doodle or do something. I find that it helps me turn off some of those extra voices, some of those extra distractions. It's not to say that what I put down on paper will be great. Often times I don't use it. But it's a great thinking tool to re-open that door. Or maybe I'm not in a good enough place to write, but maybe I can plot. Maybe I can brainstorm. Maybe I can play a choose-your-own-adventure with those scenes, where I'm how can I make this scene worse or stronger?

[Howard] I would love to have a three hour session with me and Victoria and Dan and Brandon and half a dozen other people where we just talk about unlocking.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Howard] Because all of our strategies are going to be different, so my suggestion… I did unlocking session at WXR on the cruise ship. It was one of the most beautiful discussions we've had because we were able to look at this question and talk about our respective bad times and come up with strategies. It may be, listener, that the answer for you is to talk about it with someone.

[Brandon] All right. Victoria, you have some homework.

[Victoria] I do have a homework. I like this homework because it involves getting a piece of paper and some colored pencils. I feel like that just…

[Oooo]

[Victoria] it taps back into like that elementary school or that young, like, joy of, like, creating something. I want you to create a lifestyle tracker. This is a very simple grid where you essentially make like an x-axis and a y-axis and down one side you put different things. I want you to put at least three things which are craft oriented, reading, writing, planning or plotting. I want you to put three things which have nothing to do with your chosen craft. Is it eating healthy, is it taking a half an hour walk, is it stretching, is it self-care? Then, across the top, I want you to put the dates. You can start with a track that just goes for 30 days. I tend to get overwhelmed by that, so I do a 10 day tracker. The point of this tracker is I want you to track each of these things every single day and color in the squares if you do them. The reason is because when you get overwhelmed, it can be very easy to lose track of time. If you struggle with anxiety and depression, a day becomes a week becomes a month. Suddenly you haven't written in a month, and you don't understand why. I am very good about that thing of if I start something at the beginning of a month, and then I mess up on the third day of the month, I'm like, "Oh, well, try again next month." The goal with the lifestyle tracker is the most that you can lose is a single day. Every single day a fresh start. I find that even if you get to 4 PM and you think this day is lost, again, you're not losing a week. You're not losing a month, you're not losing a year. You've lost a few hours. Go and nail something else on the lifestyle list, if you feel like I can't make today, I bet you can do 30 minutes of self-care. I bet you can take a bath or put on a facemask or like, do something nice for yourself. Then color in that square and see every single day as a fresh start.

[Brandon] Awesome. So this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go take care of yourself.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/16/15-07-creating-chapters/

Key Points: How do you make chapters? Feeling! Some people create them, others chop things into chapters. Chapters have a beginning, middle, and an end, like a short story. Chapters have a miniature arc of action. Chapters are like episodes, climbing towards a finale. Chapters interlock, forming a part of a book. Take your outline, which describes scenes, and think about what scenes can be combined into a single chapter, thematically or emotionally. Pay attention to the page turn! The chapter break forces a new beginning. How do you begin and end chapters? Do you do cliffhangers or not? Chapter titles, first lines, first paragraphs may signal what a chapter is going to be about. The beginning of a chapter is like the first line of a book, a place to grab the reader and pull them into reading more. Use cliffhangers sparingly. Try to use cliffhangers with a promise of what you are going to get, rather than just question marks. Pay attention to genre, thrillers need tension. Make your chapters rewarding, but keep your readers wanting more, too.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Chapters.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are, again, taking questions that we have been given and creating episodes around them. This one is a common question we get asked, which is, how do you make chapters? How do you decide where to break your stories up, and how to divide them up? I get this a lot, like in Q&A sessions that I'll do and things like that. It's always kind of hard to answer, because it's not a thing I studied. It's not a thing I ever looked at in anyone else's books. It's just a thing that I just started doing, and it just felt natural. I talk to a lot of writers, and that's how it goes. Right?

[Victoria] Yeah, it's hard to sit here and think about what are the mechanics or what are the rules. I feel like we're going to be able to talk about a lot of our personal guiding principles, but not necessarily any codified guidelines for something like this.

[Dan] Yeah. Although the good news is, based on what we're saying, listeners, you can take away that, at the very least, this isn't something that matters is much as you think it does. Right? You can kind of fake your way through it until you get a feel for it, and it will turn out better than you expect it to.

[Howard] We had a difficult time naming this episode. I think… I just realized the disconnect for me is that I don't create chapters, I chop things into chapters. I had a thing that is… I have a thing that exists, and I am deciding where the breakpoints are. Rather than saying, "Wow, I need a chapter here." As we prepared for the recording sessions today, we have a craft services table with food for us. I got to unwrap a block of cheese. That block of cheese is probably way less interesting than the novel, but it needed to be cut into chapters, it needed to be cut into pieces so that Howard didn't just walk away with a fistful of cheese. That's the way I think about it. These are…

[Dan] I mean, he still did, but…

[Howard] Well, that's because cranberry wensleydale is crack.

[Brandon] See, it's interesting because I do create chapters. I'm not taking the whole and just chopping it up. When I'm creating an outline, one of the things I'm doing is I'm… I'm just getting it all on there. But when I sit down for the day's work, I say, "All right, what do I need to achieve today? How can I form a chapter out of that? How can I have a rising action, how can I have questions be answered, how can I actually create something that feels like it has a beginning, middle, and an end?" Basically, I'm going to create a short story set in the world that is a continuation of other short stories.

[Howard] So, your chapters take shape after the initial outlines. I don't want to suggest that I do chapters when the final prose is done. Yeah, I'm the same way. In that I outline, but I don't outline to the chapters. They take shape later.

[Victoria] I think I'm in Brandon's camp here in that I don't like thinking about how hard it is to write a book.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] A book is a very long, very daunting thing. What my plots do is essentially function like a series of escalating episodes. I treat each chapter as a short story, as a short story of kind of interlocking stories. Almost like a season of television than a movie. So when I'm approaching a chapter, whether it's a short chapter for middle grade or a longer chapter for a fantasy, I make sure that I have a miniature arc of action happening within that chapter. I want to fulfill certain promises. I want to not only move my characters from A to B physically and emotionally, but I almost wanted to feel like an exciting little episode that does something in the interest of climbing the steps toward my finale.

[Brandon] Yeah, the great thing about this also is once you learn this with chapters, like… I don't want to imply this isn't important to learn. That's not what I was meaning at the beginning, because I think it is. But it's something you can pick up on your own. The great thing is, once you start to learn it… People ask, "How do you create a thousand page fantasy novel? How do you create…" I've got Stormlight Archive which is two arcs of five in a 10 book series, and each… It gets, like, that is way easier than learning to create chapters, which you do over time, practicing, at least I did. Once I got able to interlock these scenes, basically episodes, I could be like, all right, these 10 episodes make a part of the book. Three of those make an entire novel. Three of those make a super arc through a series. Then you start to do this, and the chapter is where that all begins for me.

[Victoria] I do the same thing, I think. Shades of Magic is broken into something like 10 parts, each part has maybe 5 to 6 chapters in it. Each part is functioning as almost a season arc. The entire book is like a TV show. Each chapter within the arc is like an episode of the season. I know that I want to create a certain pace. But also, I do this from a complete self-preservation standpoint of I would get completely overwhelmed if I couldn't break it down into a substantial… Like substantially a smaller piece. On top of that, I like the satisfaction of a chapter that feels like we go through all of the emotional beats that I want you to. I wanted to feel… I have books where I have had a one-page chapter. I'm not saying you can't do that, to a different effect. But in something like… The longer the format, the more daunting it is, the more I recommend that writers begin to think of them as many, many bricks in a wall.

[Dan] When I started, my chapters were basically just how much can I write in one day. Which is why in Serial Killer, every chapter is about 2500 words. Because that's what I was doing back then. That's still my most successful book, so maybe that's a good way to do it. But, like, by the time I got to Makeover, which was like my 16th published book, I had… I'd become much more of an outliner. So when I create an outline, it's this big massive thing that tells me scene by scene everything that's going to happen. Then I will look at that and go, okay, which of these scenes need to be combined into a single chapter? Which is a little different than what you're talking about, at least narratively. Because there's not a single thread of storyline that goes from the beginning of this chapter to the end, because it will have two or three different scenes and possibly different viewpoints in it. But I try to do that in a way where they're all thematically linked together, or where there is an emotional through-line through it. So we're going to talk about this aspect of the story or the world or the technology or the magic. We're going to see one character deal with it, and then a different character deal with it in a different way. They will inform each other. That will form a chapter.

[Howard] Chapters and prose really are the one place where prose and comics share a structure, and that is the guarantee to page turn. With comics, you're always writing to the page turn. Because there is a visual reveal that is huge when you turn the page. With prose, you never think about that because you don't know where the pagination is going to be yet. With electronic publishing, you know even less. Except for the chapter break. You are… I have yet to read an e-book where I was forced to see the beginning of the next chapter while I could still see the end of the previous chapter. For me, that's huge. Because it means there is this psychological shift tween that thing I just read and not being able to read anything… I'm making the gesture, turning the page with my hands… And now there is all new information all at once. That is… I think that's important to think about, because even if they're just pushing a button to do it, you, the writer, now have a moment of physical puppetry control over the reader. You know they're doing anything. What can you do with words in order to make that more effective? I probably just made it a lot more difficult for everybody, didn't I?

[Dan] No. That's actually brilliant. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I can look back… Even that first one, at Serial Killer, and see places where I did that. Where, hey, you need to be… "I'll see you in the morning." Then the chapter break is, "By the time I got there, they were already dead." You can do tricks like that. That's… Now I'm going to have to think about that and try and do it on purpose.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, the book of the week is Docile by K. M. Sparza. It's a debut novel, coming out in April. It's a really, really fascinating examination of consent under capitalism. It is a slight near future alternate history in which our debt crisis has reached a point in which people are selling themselves into kind of an indentured servitude for a variety of functions. In order to forget this part of their lives when they do choose to sell it… In order to erase their family's debt, they take a drug called Dociline. It's about two young men in the story. One who has decided to sell his family's debt off, and with it, himself, and has decided to refuse Dociline because of what it did to his mother. The other one is the one who buys his contract and is the heir to the Dociline Empire. It is about an examination of consent, of really, really interesting gender and sexuality, a lot of fascinating themes, and also, just a delightful read.

[Brandon] Excellent. Docile by K. M. Sparza.

]Transcriptionist note; Google Books says Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.]

[Brandon] Coming back to this, let's talk about… One of the other questions asks about how we begin chapters. I want to talk both about beginnings and endings. Because, thinking about it, where I break a chapter is often based on where I began a chapter. Because chapters work very well for me if I have some sort of note I can hit again near the end to signal, hey, we've completed this arc, or a character's looking for something, the character finds something. It's this MICE quotient thing Mary Robinette likes to talk about, I'm using very instinctively in creating chapters. So, how do you begin and end chapters, and then, kind of a question of this, if you want to talk about… Sometimes you want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, sometimes you don't. What's the difference there?

[Victoria] Um… Go ahead.

[Dan] So, when I wrote Zero G and started my middle grade series, I wanted to give chapter titles. Because that's kind of a very good middle grade thing, I always loved chapter titles when I was a kid. That enabled me to set things up… This chapter is about X. Like, you know that right off the bat because there's a title that tells you. I realized, in the process of doing that, that that's kind of what I had previously been using first lines or first paragraphs to do. As a way of signaling a little more subtly this chapter is going to be about this character trying to do X. Some way of setting up, here's what you're in for, this is my promise, this is my establishing shot.

[Howard] Chapters, for me, are… The first line of a chapter is an opportunity for me to revisit the experience of the first line of the book, because often the first line of the book gets so much attention that, for me, anyway, the pros ins up far more refined. Not purple necessarily, but every word is exactly in place. I try to give that consideration to the beginnings of chapters because I see those as decision points for the reader. The… A lot of times, when I'm reading a book, I will turn the page to a chapter and realize, "Oh. Oh, this character. I'm not all this interested in this point of view." But, if there is some turn of phrase or some something right there at the beginning, to reward me for having turned the page… I'll muscle through it. But I'm a bad reader.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Don't write for me.

[Victoria] Yeah, because I write my chapters like short stories, I do put the same amount of emphasis into the beginning and end of each chapter as I would the beginning and end of the novel. I also really… I love it, like I come out of a poetry background, I love the challenge of trying to distill, not necessarily a premonition of what that chapter's going to be, but I write multiple perspectives. For me, that opening line of each chapter is a way to instantly ground you in the voice. Because I don't mark it. I don't start the chapter by telling you whose perspective it's in. So I'm relying on the moment of perception. I write it from third person, so it's just a close third. But the moment of perception at the beginning of the chapter can tell you so much about the person that you're following, about the things that they notice, not only what they're going to be going through in kind of a hinting way, but just where their emotions are at, where their mind is that, all those things. Then, yes, like Brandon, I am somebody who because I write them like short stories, and one of my favorite things in short stories is the full circle moment, I love finding a way to echo by the end of the chapter where we are at. Then, every now and then, I try really hard not to overuse the cliffhanger ending because I think it gets tired. I think you have to use it sparingly. I think there's a difference between having enough tension to make you turn the page and having a dum dum dum moment.

[Brandon] Right. I've… We've talked about this before on the podcast. I've… The further I've come in my career, the more I've disliked the cliffhanger that says, "And he went to open the door and…" dum dum dum. I've liked the cliffhanger that says, "And he opened the door and his ex-wife was there." Right? Like, the cliffhanger that promises you something rather what you're going to get rather than promising you a question mark. When you can make those work, I like them. I do like to use chapters occasionally to force the page turn. I think you do have to use those, particularly in epic fantasy, you have to use it wisely. The longer your book, the fewer of these, I think, you can actually use. Which is counterintuitive. But if it's a short book, it's… You feel less guilty making them read it all in one or two sittings. If it's a long book, that will get exhausting.

[Dan] Well, that's what I was going to say, too, is, in addition to book length, consider the book genre. Writing in thrillers, you want every chapter to end on something tense. Maybe a cliffhanger, maybe not, but if you ever get to a point of rest where your reader can say, "Oh, okay, everything's cool. No one's in danger right now, I can go to sleep." You're writing your thriller weirdly.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, I have a big fantasy series that I feel like behaves more in these epic ways, where you have to use them sparingly, where every chapter really functions like an episode. Then, I have a series wherein I wanted to feel like a comic book without pictures. In that case, it is the chop, chop, chop of the turn. It is treating every chapter like a moment. In that case, there is more grouping of chapters into a smaller arc. But it's about… You can use brevity to the same effect that you can use length. You can use any element, like we're obviously talking a lot about the opening line and the ending line, but every aspect of a chapter is the utility that you have, from the voice to the length to the paragraph formatting, everything that you choose to do. To how many scenes you want, whether you want to have scene breaks within the chapter or not. I think it's about setting rules and expectations for your reader. It's really weird if every chapter of your book is like 30 pages long, except for two, unless those two moments are affecting something that is extremely dramatic.

[Howard] Episode five of season two of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, one of my favorite episodes, and it structures for me, it outlines what I kind of feel like a perfect chapter is, because, all of the threads come together in this moment of triumph, and then we get a POV and realize, oh, wait, that wasn't all the threads. Oh, a bad thing happened. End of episode. Page turn. So it's enormously rewarding, and then there's this piece at the end. It's not that it's super short, there's this piece at the end which absolutely draws me further in. Yeah, my philosophy on chapters is that I want every one of them to be rewarding. I want people to be excited that they read that, but I want to leave them wanting more, so that the next chapter is something they'll turn to.

[Victoria] Well, I just want to say, I think rewarding is a key word here, because rewarding is different from dramatic. Right? Like, I think there's a cheat code sense that if you want the chapter to be the most exciting version of itself, for the most rewarding version of itself, you have to end in this like dum dum dum, whether implied dum dum dum or actual dum dum dum. Sometimes, the most rewarding thing that a chapter can do is give you the equivalent of a full meal, and then the promise of something new. I think it's about also… It's about balance. It's about varying it between those things.

[Dan] So, just last week, I read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is part of the Tiffany Aching series, one of my favorite ones. There was a chapter in there with a funeral. It ends with the funeral. There's no cliffhanger whatsoever. There's absolutely nothing to drive you forward. It is completely final. But. The way that the ending was written was so beautiful. It was this perfect capstone to the dead person's life, to the survivors moving on and still going forward, that I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. Because I'm like, "This is so beautiful. How can I not be reading this?"

[Brandon] Curiously, the Terry Pratchett young adult novels use chapters and his adult novels don't. There's no chapters, they just are scene, scene, scene, no numbers. I've always found that very interesting. Why he chose to do one way or another, I'm sure he answered at some point.

[Brandon] We are out of time for this episode. Although I have some homework for you. I would like you to take something you've written, and try moving the chapter breaks around. See how it feels to you to force yourself to end in the middle of what you thought was a scene. How to add more onto your chapter and end there. I bet you will find that you're doing this pretty naturally, that you're already creating these arcs. But maybe you'll learn something interesting about your writing and be a little more intentional about it. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/10/14/13-41-fixing-character-problems-part-ii/

Key points: Fixing broken characters, part II! When a story just stops, you may need to spend more time developing the characters before hand. When a story stops, check either the character building or the world building. Sometimes you may need to add another character to bring out another side of a character. Sometimes brokenness shows up when outlining. Without a sense of the character, you can't write (or outline) the scene. Look at the blanks, that may be where your story is. Put the plot aside, and focus on who the character is and why this is a problem. Sometimes, with a big cast and many storylines, you may need to map them out, and combine characters. Sometimes, just lean into the prose. Ignore the story issues, structure, character, or plot, and just lean into the prose. Sometimes you just unravel part of the story, then crotchet or knit it back together again.

( Here comes the words! )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fixing Character Problems, Part II.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] And we have broken characters. How do we fix'em?

[Eee!]

[Brandon] This is part II. We talked about this previously with the other podcasting team. I really want to get Amal and Maurice's thoughts on what they do when a character just isn't working. Have you ever had a character, when you get done with your piece, or even midway through it, that you know the character isn't working?

[Maurice] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Okay. Podcast over.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It's happened a couple of different ways. I remember early on I had a story, it was a young woman, and I was very much in her head, story's going along just fine, and then I killed off her husband. Then the story stopped. I'm just like, "Yeah, but what do you do next? What…" Nothing. Nothing came after that. That was like the first time when a… I started filing away the whole idea of, you know what, I have to spend more time developing these characters before hand, because… Like I said, this was early in my career, so I hadn't quite reached that whole let's spend weeks with the character and really get to know them, because I hadn't done all that work, that back work yet. I didn't realize that back work still needed to be done. That's actually become my big hint is the work isn't done because the story stops. So either I haven't done enough character building at that point, or I haven't done enough world building. Because sometimes the story stops because I haven't developed the character… The world as a character enough, and the story stops.

[Brandon] Okay. So with you, when the story stops… Is this most of the time, if you've got a problem, it's a need to go back and I have not spent enough time with the characters?

[Maurice] Yeah. Usually that's the case. But there was a time when it was pointed out to me that a character wasn't working for me. That was, ironically, with The Usual Suspects, my middle grade novel. The editor wrote back, and among the editor notes, they were like, "You do know that… I love your main character. But he always has a hard edge to him. He's always hard. That works when he's in the school situation, but he becomes almost one note because he's always doing that." So, her suggestion was, why don't you add another character to bring out his softer side? So I ended up…

[Mary] A foil? Ingenious.

[Maurice] Right. A foil.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] In this case, the foil was a little sister. Because he would act one way at school with his defenses up, but around his little sister, he can't help but lower his guards around her. That brought a whole new dimension to the character, and a whole new… Basically, a whole new arc to the story. I was just like… I was so pleased by the time it was done, going in and inserting those scenes of the two of them interacting. I was like, "All right, maybe editors aren't the enemy."

[Laughter]

[Amal] So, in my case, because I mostly write short fiction, I find that… The identifying the brokenness of a character almost always happens at the outlining stage. I say outlining, I don't act… I mean, my… The way that I tend to write is very slowly, but then my final draft… My first draft is usually very close to my final draft. So there's a lot of that time that spent kind of figuring out the story, before I start actually diving into prose. It's usually at that stage that I'll see a yeah, this character is just not… Like, I mean, if I don't have the sense of the character, I just can't write the scene. So it hasn't yet happened for me that I've written a whole draft of something and been like, "Mm, that character's actually not working. I need to do something." But the problems that I'll encounter as I'm trying to do it are usually dependent on whether or not the character has come out of the needs of the plot or whether the plot as come from the character, the idea of the character. So that a story I've mentioned before, Madeleine, where with the kind of like memory flashback hallucination thing, that was the idea that I wanted to play with. It actually came out with… I wanted to write… I thought to myself, I want to write a time travel story where the way that you time travel is through sense memory, is through like being triggered through your senses, and it's an involuntary thing, and you're literally traveling through time. It was as I was trying to work out the implications of what that meant, that I decided actually, I think what I want to do is tell a story more about someone experiencing this. So it's less a high concept thing, and more about the experience of memory. I had to sort of keep zooming in on that idea until I had a character, and even then, when I figured, okay, well, so this is the character, I know that her mother had Alzheimer's, but… But what else? Those blanks were where the story ended up living. The way that I ended up fixing that was basically just by… By putting the plot aside completely and thinking like, "Well, who is she? Why is it a problem that this is happening?" Like, all these other things came out. Like, she's really, really lonely in the wake of having tended to a parent in the last stages of a really terrible illness. She's… Her friends have more or less abandoned her, because they can't deal with how terrible that pain is… How sustained and terrible that pain is. Like, all of those things, they kind of just came together.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] So, I'm curious. You both talked about like the story stops, or looking for the story and kind of the space and putting the plot aside. Are there symptoms that tend to… That you've now learned that oh, when the story is breaking in this particular way, this is the kind of fix that I usually end up applying to it?

[Maurice] One of them, one of the fixes happened with my urban fantasy series, because again, I had that big sprawling cast, and again, part of the issue was I had all these different storylines I was trying to track. Then I didn't realize until actually I was starting to map some of them out, there was like, "Okay, some of these just stop and go nowhere." I would introduce something that I would never pick up ever again. So what I ended up doing was, and it helped… It actually solved another problem in the book, which was I had so many characters in the book that what I ended up doing was combining characters, which (a) cut down the sum of the characters and (b) it allowed for some character growth and whole arcs at that point.

[Amal] For me, what I've realized I do, to the point where now I design workshops around this, is that I feel like the break or the problem happens because I'm trying too hard in one direction. What I end up doing is leaning into the prose. Like, this is going to sound weird and super inside baseball-y, I guess, but what I end up doing is because I also write poetry and I tell all my students that I feel like there's a day brain and a night brain for poetry, which is a concept that I first heard articulated by my friend [garbled]. But, similarly to the way that when you sing, you use different parts of your brain than when you speak, so that if you have speech impediments with your speech, you might not have them if you sing, I find that if I'm really, really focused on a lot of prose… Like, a lot of story issue stuff, structure or character or plot, if I let myself just lean into the prose that I'm writing and let my poetry brain take over, then I can sometimes just jump over the skip in the record or the scratch in the record rather, and just move into something else and keep going. So that definitely happened in this story. And I… It's weird. I can't definitely remember what the line was. I just remember very, very clearly that there was a line where I was like, "I have no idea where I'm going with this," and I just tried to follow the poetry logic of the line. It took me somewhere unexpected, and into a different metaphor, and then suddenly everything just kind of fell into place for the character.

[Mary] I will let you guys know a thing, because I do… I didn't have that language for it, lean into the prose, but like you can spot this in my fiction. If you see my character doing an activity, thinking about what it is that they are… How am I going to solve this problem, and Jane is like working with glamour and how is she going to solve this relationship thing? And then she's like, "Aha!" And she puts the glamour down and goes away. That is me freewriting…

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] To try to figure out a plot problem with my character.

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] That I'm like I can't get her from this point to this point. I can't get her over this decision hump. What is the thing that she needs to do? I'll usually go back and trim that sucker down, and sometimes I'll pull it out altogether, but one of the things that I have found is that I do like lean into the prose, that I will freewrite as my character and I will give her an activity that she's doing while she's trying to figure it out.

[Brandon] This is really interesting to me. It's going to be a slight tangent, but it kind of plays into a theory I have, where… When I was younger and when I was becoming a writer, I always imagined writing as more of a craft. It's like you are building something brick by brick by brick and whatnot, and the more I've been a writer, the more I realize it's more a performance art.

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] You go over something over and over, at least for me, I'm a planner, over and over in my head. I practice it, I practice certain skills, and then I sit down, and it's like, "Blam." This thing happens, and then I'm left with this thing. Now I'm going to cultivate it, but the actual creating of the story, it's like doing a play where this is performance night. Then I get to go back and revise it. It's this really weird shift that's happened in my brain, the more I've become a writer, which is an odd shift for someone who is kind of an outliner, like me. That always kind of saw it brick by brick.

[Mary] I mean, this is a thing that I think I talked about in my very first episode with Writing Excuses, before I was a full-time cast member. That my training as a puppeteer was to break techniques apart so that when you got into the art of it, you worked thinking about the technique anymore, you could just do the performance. I think that that's a thing that early career writers, we're still thinking about all of the technique. So when you're trying to figure out a character problem, it's… Like a character problem can lie in so many different aspects of character. It can be a motivation issue, it can be a back story issue, it can be a goal issue, it can be the personality issue, that the character's personality doesn't fit with the thing you need them to do. Learning to identify where these problems lie is difficult. Once you figure that out, a lot of it does become very intuitive.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Book of the week is actually The Only Harmless Great Thing.

[Amal] Oh. Yes. Oh, my gosh, I love this so much. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a Tor.com novella by Brooke Bolander. It's amazing. It's about… Oh, it's about… Ostensibly, it's about the fact that during wartime on Coney Island, they started teaching elephants to use paintbrushes so that they could paint, I think, what was it, clocks with radium or something like that. So they basically offloaded the extremely dangerous and terrible task of interacting with radium onto elephants, because they could survive longer than the underprivileged women who had been doing it until that point. So it's about this woman who is teaching this elephant how to do this at first. But it's a narrative. It's also broken up by a kind of… It's an alternate future sort of where those events took place. So imagine an alternate future from that same actual real thing that happened, but it's intercut with elephant folklore, like folklore that elephants have with mythologies that elephants have, so it imagines that elephants have this storytelling tradition that reaches back to the mammoths, and that they have incorporated this incident into their own mythology. So it's this beautiful, beautiful defamiliarization of a bunch… It's doing so much stuff that I could go on and on about, but the thing that struck me was that because Tor.com also put out novellas about other megafauna and alternate histories, which are Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth and The Taste of Marrow. Those are like rollicking heist novels, novellas. So because Brooke Bolander's stuff that I've read up until this point has been very fast-paced, very… Like, just like… I think it's like… Whiskey is the way I talk about it, it's like knocking whiskey back, is like what Bolander's stuff…

[Mary] Why would you do that?

[Amal] I know. Well, when it's hard and you're angry and you want the burn, like there's… Right. So. But, so that's what I was expecting from this. I knew it would be difficult and full of unhappy things, but I still expected it to be what I think of as a Bolander story. Instead, it's slow. It's like… It's like sipping that whiskey. It's like a slow, long pour of something. The voices are so distinct and so sustained and it's just beautiful. Like the… Being in the mammoth space and that kind of like elephant mythology voice, just forces you to slow down, and really appreciate everything beautiful that's going on in the prose. It's absolutely wonderful. It comes… Yeah. It came out in January. So…

[Brandon] Awesome. So let me throw a question at you guys that I threw at the other podcasters, which is, is there a time where you pushed yourself on a character that maybe was giving you trouble, or that when you were outlining, you were like, "This is going to be a little bit tough," that was rewarding? That you're glad you did?

[Mm… Hum.]

[Amal] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] This is exactly how we all answered it.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I'm trying to think of an exclusively character instance. Because the one that I want to use is the character in The Truth about Owls, who is a girl named Annise. Anisa, rather. I made that mistake. Anyways, she… Like initially when I… This kind of plays into some of the things that we were talking about in other episodes. Initially, I was going to have her be Indian, and I had wanted the story to be about gender, and I was going to explore those things through the Blodeuwedd story, which is a Welsh story about a woman made of flowers who gets turned into an owl. I had like all these important structural things I wanted to do. Then I realized I couldn't do any of them, because I had no idea who this character was if she was Indian. Like, I had no access to the things that I wanted to talk about. I had like some thought processes for why I had wanted that, but it was insufficient. This discouraged me to the point where I just didn't want to write the story. I literally wrote to the editors and went, "You know what, I just don't think I can do this. I'm sorry. I'm going to back out early while it doesn't have a problem." The editors, Julia Rios in particular, went, "But, we really want a story from you. Can you not just tell this story, like through backgrounds that you're more familiar with?" I ended up making this character Middle Eastern instead. I ended up making her of Lebanese extraction, and everything fell into place. Every single thing that fell into place, I fought. Basically. Because I did not... I was like, "Okay. She's going to be… Her family is from Lebanon, but I really don't want to write a story about war, so I'm… I'm… No. I'm just not going to do that part." Then I realized that the time constraints that I had chosen set it squarely in the time when Lebanon was being bombarded by Israel in 2006. I was like, "Crap." Okay. So. Well, I'm going to put her in this other part of Lebanon, where she won't have experienced any of that, because most of the bombing was on Beirut. I put her in Rayak, which is my mom's village, which is a place that I spent time in. Then did a tiny bit of research and realized the only other airfield in Lebanon is in Rayak…

[Laughter]

[Amal] It also got bombed. I was like, "Oh, God. There's just no escaping this. I'm going to write this stupid war into this story, and I didn't want it to be about any of this." But as soon as I made those decisions, then the writing came out, and it all sort of happened. Every difficulty, everything that was like, "No, like I just, I didn't want to do this." As soon as I decided to like, "Fuck it. Fine, I will do it." It ended up working out.

[Maurice] So, I already talked a little bit about the process of writing a middle grade. That would have been one example. I can give two examples that all revolve around the same issue. The issue was agency. So one… I'll give one example where I fixed the problem in one example where it kind of slipped by all of us. Which was an interesting experience. So my… The story that I have with Uncanny Magazine, Ache of Home. I'd sent the story in, they loved the story. They were just like, "Yeah, but that ending. You know, your main character, she doesn't seem to have enough agency in solving the problem. Is there a way that…" We need to fix that, basically. So they gave me some notes. So it basically involved going back and… Actually, whenever I think about fixing character problems, I have this visual view, like when you're, I know, [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary] You're looking very frightened right now.

[Maurice] But, like you were crocheting the other day or something, and just the whole idea of just… You sat there, and you'd be like, "And now we're going to unravel."

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh. Yeah.

[Maurice] That's what the process was like. I was like, "Okay, now I'm going to unravel the last third of my story."

[Mary] I'm so glad that you said that, because that was… That's a thing that as an early career writer, when you're fixing character problems, one of the most liberating things for me was realizing that I could just pull a giant chunk of text out and write a different chunk of text and it cost nothing.

[Maurice] Not a thing.

[Mary] It's like the thing I enjoy personally about writing is writing, so… It was like… My husband said this. He was watching me pull a bunch of crochet out, and he's like, "But… But… You did all of that work." I'm like, "Yeah. But I get to crochet again."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Right.

[Mary] Like, I'm still getting to crochet.

[Maurice] Yep. So, when I unraveled, and then I got to re-knit it back together. The re-knitting, for me, it just looked like… In a lot of ways, it was just a matter of reordering and reprioritizing, just doing a series of just little shifts here and there. Ultimately, that's all it took, was just some little shifts here and there. I'm like, "The story was already there. I just had to bring it out a little bit more." Now, the one that slipped by a lot of us was with Buffalo Soldier of all things. It isn't a major critique or anything, it was just one review that said, "Loved Buffalo Soldier. Loved the world building. Loved all these aspects of it. It's just that the child that the main character's protecting has no agency, and is little more than a damsel in distress." That's one of those things that just kind of haunted me. Well, it's just like… Hum, that one slipped by me. I get where… Because the whole story started with the whole image of… My nephew's on the autism spectrum, and is like the worst hide-and-seek player ever. Because like we'll play in teams, and like me and him will go hide. Like, as soon as someone goes, "Hey! Where's Orion?" He doesn't want you to be worried about him, so he'll jump out of the bushes. "Here I am!" You are awful at this game.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the whole premise of this story revolved around the idea of like trying to play… It was basically a chase novel with a child whose like, "Hey. You know what, why are we hiding?" But it was one of those things where it was like, Mm... He doesn't… While he drives the story, I missed the fact that he doesn't really have a lot of agency in the story. So it's one of those things where it's like lesson learned. I will keep that in mind for… If I come back to write more of this, that problem will be fixed.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to stop us here. This has been really good. I'm glad that we did this, this kind of one-two punch on this topic. I have some homework for you guys. It actually relates to some things Maurice and Amal were talking about. I'm… I find that often the way to fix a character problem is to add or subtract a character. So I want you to take one of your characters from a story you've written, and I want you to split them into two people. See what happens with those two people interact. Then, in another story, I want you to try combining, for a scene, two characters that have been the same person… Or two different people for a while, combine them into one and see how that scene plays out with a character combined, with two characters combined. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.30: Tools for Writers

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/07/23/12-30-tools-for-writers/

Key Points: Consider your tools and how they support your process and creativity. Scrivener supports component-based authoring. Other people prefer a key to screen word processor that is bare bones. Index cards, a pen, and Post-it notes. Write or Die for word sprints. Word 2010 and the document map. Wikidpad and other wikis, for encyclopedia or book bibles. Aeon Timeline for dates and times, or an Excel spreadsheet? Excel for outlining -- columns for character, subplot, mystery, then shuffle rows to organize. Spreadsheets for story beats. The browser for research! Asana for time management.

( Handbrains and index cards... )

[Howard] Who's got our homework?
[Brandon] I do. It's very easy. You're just going to try one of these programs, these different methods. It doesn't even have to be a program, you could try the index card thing if you've never done that. I want this year, this season of Writing Excuses to get you to try to shake up your structure, your planning, your organization, a little bit to see if there are tools that will help you be more creative. This is a perfect example of something that might help you be more creative. Give it a try. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: quirk

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/06/25/12-26-qa-on-outlining-and-discovery-writing/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you outline a scene? Not an entire book. Do you outline scenes?
A: Yes. Index cards: what's happening, what's the joke, what am I moving forward, who are the characters. One line: Awesome hanky-panky hwere while car explodes. If the way it happens is important during outlining, yes. How does it work, what are the beats. My outline is a list of bullet points to accomplish a goal. When I sit down to write a scene, I will write down a sequence of events.
Q: When outlining, how do you know when to stop adding to the outline?
A: When I start adding dialogue, it's time to write the story. When I have the emotional beats to earn a climactic moment.
Q: How much do you have to know about your characters/world before you begin writing?
A: Nothing. Nada. (Implied: you discover that through the writing!)
Q: What do you do to diagnose and fix a structural problem when you have a finished, mostly discovery written draft?
A: Reverse outline. Talk to alpha, beta readers, and analyze the problems they had. Sit down with the scripts and index cards, and push it around. One problem is bad, but two problems may solve each other, if you look at it right.
Q: I taught myself to outline like Dan did, but sometimes I can't always get into an outline like I should be able to. How did you address this, Dan?
A: Change formulas (outlining systems) and see if that helps.
Q: So far I've written five novels. The preparation/outlining process for each has been different by virtue of the story's needs. As pros, do you still deal with this frustration or have you worked out a system that consistently works for you?
A: It's different every time. We aren't chainsaw sculptors making grizzly bears, sometimes we make cabinets and coffee tables. Every book is like a first kiss with a different person. My process has stabilized over the years, but different genres have different processes. Find out what constraints your process has, where the borders are, and then adjust within those borders and constraints.
Q: What are some major indicators that a piece needs more structure?
A: If you find yourself going off track every time you start a new scene or chapter, you may need more structure. Learn the difference between a story and a bunch of stuff that happens. If you've just got a bunch of stuff, your characters aren't growing, you probably need more structure. Stuck, bored, don't want to sit down and write? You may have a broken structure that needs fixing.

( Questions, answers, and MORE! )

[Brandon] All right. So we're going to go to our homework. I have written on my guide for this episode…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Simply the words "Dan does something wacky weird." Because he promised us.
[Dan] Okay. So here we go. We're playing around with outlines. This is what you're going to do. We're going to force you to think outside the box. You're going to find another writer, or someone who wants to do this with you. Each of you are going to come up with just a quick outline for a story. Point by point, however many points you want. Six or seven. Then, you're going to cut… Print them out, cut them into strips, and then hand the other person the pile of strips. They know the beats of the story, but they don't know what order they go in. Then you have to reorder them, turn that into a cohesive story, and write it.
[Brandon] That's awesome. I love that.
[Piper] That sounds super fun.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's our I Ching episode.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Ooo, don't remind me of that one.
[Howard] Okay.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/06/11/12-24-creating-great-outlines/

Key points: This episode is about outlines to help you write, not sales tools. People like structure, it is comforting. Mix a familiar structure with a bit of strange, and you can relish the oddity. First, the Kevin J. Anderson: pitch, expand to 5 pages, 20 pages, and keep blowing. Thumbnail sketch, synopsis (internal beats), scenes. This approach keeps you focused on what this novel is about. It also gives you room to be creative and get the discovery writing out as you expand. Beware, too much interesting stuff in the outline can make writing the novel boring. Don't try to include everything, just the key details. The Wesley Chu: outline 30%, write a bit, outline more, write more. The structuralist: seven point, three act, Hero's Journey, etc. Create your beats and build the outline. Also good for diagnostics -- what's wrong with this story? The George R. R. Martin: use historical incidents. Often used in science fiction and fantasy, based on a historical record taken fantastical. The Sanderson: build your outline backward. Start with a great ending, then look at what promises lead to that. How do you justify awesome things? Prequels, interstitial tales. The strength of an outline is that restrictions breed creativity. Structural requirements can push you in directions you might not have gone otherwise.

( Details, details, who has the details... )

[Brandon] All right. Well, we are out of time. We are going to go ahead and have Mary give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. Okay. So we've talked about a bunch of different outline structures. What I want you to do is I want you to take the list of events in whatever it is that you're thinking about writing. I want you to take a list of structures. So, seven point plot structure, The Hero's Journey, all of these different things. Heist! List out the scene types. Then slot the scenes from your event list into the scene type list for each of these different structures. See which of these kind of fits organically with your story, and which one kind of makes you excited, and what opportunities they allow.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/10/writing-excuses-7-24-project-in-depth-way-of-kings/

Overview: Summary of Way of Kings. Three prologues? Shallan? Setting? Dalinar? Outlining, plotting, and writing? Revision? Ending? Naming? Kaladin?

( Whew! All the news that's fit to print? )
[Howard] Writing prompt time, folks. Take a page from Brandon. Literally, page 320... No. Take a page from Brandon. Take a character of yours who you think maybe is not working the way you want them to. Split that character into a character and a foil.
[Brandon] Ah. Nice. Very nice.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brandon] All right. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: JIT again?

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

July 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.19: Cooking as a Writing Metaphor
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.46: An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.01: Interview with Abraham Verghese
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.41: Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.38: Oh No I Lost The Thread
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.16: Miscellaneous Structures
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.20: Mental Wellness and Writing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.30: Tools for Writers
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with outline

Writing Excuses 20.19: Cooking as a Writing Metaphor

Writing Excuses 19.46: An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin

Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length

Writing Excuses 19.01: Interview with Abraham Verghese

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

Writing Excuses 17.41: Picture Books are Books, Too, with Special Guest Seth Fishman

Writing Excuses 17.38: Oh No I Lost The Thread

Writing Excuses 17.16: Miscellaneous Structures

Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity

Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker

Writing Excuses 15.20: Mental Wellness and Writing

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

Writing Excuses 12.30: Tools for Writers

Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing

Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

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