wetranscripts | Entries tagged with pace

Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-41-a-close-reading-on-structure-an-overview-and-why-fifth-season

Key Points: Structure and The Fifth Season. Spoilers galore! Structurally audacious. Structure. Start with divisions, what are the parts? POVs. Inversion. Parallelism. Sequence or order. Perspective. Tradition and innovation. Structure is usually pacing, order of information, scene and sequel. POV character is the one in the most pain. POV character is the one who can best tell the joke. Second person. Structure as tension, voice, who's narrating. Character as structure. "And you would not exist." Surprising, yet inevitable. Table of contents and chapter titles.

[Season 19, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] Hi, friends. I want to tell you about this very cool special edition of one of our close read books for this season. It's the Orbit Gold Edition of The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemison. This is so beautiful. The set includes, get this, an exclusive box illustrated by Justin Cherry nephelomancer, a signed copy of The Fifth Season, fabric bound hardcover editions of the trilogy, gilded silver edges, color endpaper art, oh, my God. Brand-new foil stamped covers, a ribbon bookmark, and an exclusive bonus scene from The Fifth Season. The bonus scene… I wants it. Just preorder before November nineteenth to get 20 percent off and you can lock in your signed copy, again, I say, your signed copy of The Fifth Season. Visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order.

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

[Season 19, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, 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 Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be reading and talking about The Fifth Season. I need to let you know that we are going to be spoiling this up and down and sideways. You need to have read this book before you go into it, unless you're okay with spoilers, in which case, fair game. Have fun. But this is your warning. All of the spoilers, all of the time, as we go through.

[DongWon] Yeah. Because it's structure, we really can't talk about this book without getting into a lot of the nitty-gritty of how things unfold.

[Howard] To be quite honest, to be quite frank about this, if you haven't read this book, the discussions that we are having about structure are not going to be as meaningful for you, and you are not going to learn the things that we believe you, as a writer, really want to learn.

[Mary Robinette] But, having said that, we also know that sometimes you can't wait to listen to something without having read the book. Hopefully, you'll still be able to get stuff from the larger conversation. But if you have plans on reading the book, just do it before you continue listening.

[DongWon] I will also encourage you to look up content warnings for this book. Because there is some pretty intense and dark stuff in there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, why did we pick this book? One of the reasons is that it is structurally audacious. When I finished reading this… I'm friends with the author, N. K. Jemison, and the first time I saw Nora after seeing this, I walked up and I said, "Nora. Just finished Fifth Season. So good. F U."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] "You have some nerve. Because now the rest of us have to live with this book being out in the world." So we wanted to talk about it, because it is breaking so many of the conventions, and it is structurally so solid, but it's not using an existing recipe.

[DongWon] Exactly. On top of that, it really is one of my favorite fantasies I've read in decades. I think, as an epic fantasy novel, it does such a good job of fulfilling so many things that we look for when we go to epic fantasy, in terms of big worlds, politics, multi perspectives, and exciting magic systems. Right? It's sort of really checks a lot of those boxes, but does something that feels very fresh and innovative with it to me.

[Erin] This is a great book.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] [laughter] We were like, let's figure it out. Because I think it's… One of the things that I really love about having conversations on this podcast and teaching in general is that sometimes you do want to figure out why did something work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The best way to do that is to dig into it. Because it's easy to put it away and be like, oh, that was so much fun. But, like, having a really good meal that you want to be able to replicate in some way, we want to figure out, what's the salt, fat, acid, heat, of this book.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, that's a great segue. I was going to ask you, when you think about structure, what are the things that you think about? Like, what are some of the things that we are going to be thinking about as we're talking about this book?

[Howard] I start with divisions, really. Where are the… What are the three parts? Or what are the five parts? That is… When I'm creating a thing, that's where I begin. Because that informs all of the decisions I make about the things that will be building those parts. This… For me, this book felt like it was built out of points of view. But, structurally, you could argue it's built out of time. Or it is built out of punctuated catastrophes. Or… There's any number of ways to think about carving it up.

[DongWon] Yeah. I… As a reader, and as an editor, I don't actually think about structure that often. It's a little bit of a thing that… I just don't pay that much attention to it. It's not something I'm particularly interested in poking at. Obviously, we do structural edits and move things around, but when I'm doing that, it's more about character arc, it's more about tension, it's more about all the other things we've talked about so far. So, I think Fifth Season really jumps out at me because it is one of the times when I'm actively thinking about structure, because it is not being applied in a passive way. It is being applied as an active engagement with the reader of how structure works in this book. The three different POVs, the reveal around what is going on with those POVs, the inversion from the beginning to the end, all the narrative rhyming and parallelism that happens throughout the book. We're going to dig into all these topics in detail. But, for me, it's hard for me not to think about Fifth Season and think about the structure of the work almost as its own character. Almost as… It is the device through which we are understanding this world in a way that feels so radical compared to what we see in most fiction of A to B to C to D.

[Howard] You might think that you don't think about structure when you read or when you watch or whatever else. But I always come back to that moment when my 10-year-old and I were watching a movie, I think it was ParaNorman. I turned to him and said, "Do you think this plan's going to work?" He looked at me, he rolled his eyes, and looked at me. "Dad, if it works, we don't have a whole movie."

[Laughter]

[Howard] 10 years old.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] Already understood the meta. I think we all have that happening subconsciously.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] For me, and this is not some… This has nothing to do with this book. But to answer your question. I actually think that games and working on games has started to, like, really rewire the way that I think about story and structure as being sort of very divided from each other. Because the way that a lot of games work, you don't have as much control as you do in a book about the way that people take in story information. So you always have to be thinking, like, how do all of these different pieces of information, how do all of these different pieces of narrative, actually create forward motion. Even if people pick them up at different times, and in different ways. It's started to affect the way that I write stories, where I'm like, I want to write stories where you can read things out of order. That is where it does come back to this book, which is, I think a really great way of saying, you can play around with structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You can play around with order, and you can be really upfront with it. I think you said audacious, someone said audacious earlier. I think there's something really great about that. Because it gets you to challenge the way that we have been told that stories have to exist. In a world where… It's not just me, gaming and movies and television impact a lot of the way that we take in narrative. It's nice to see books playing with that as well. Just because it's in print, doesn't mean we can't have fun with the form.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think one of the things you said about the… Being able to… Writing in things that you were reading out of sequence. That that's one of the things that's interesting about Fifth Season, is that the timeline is not sequential. Structurally, the things that she's using that for… That controlling that order of information, that control of time, to play with things that we'll be talking about later with parallelism and inversion, but even on a very, hello, I'm an early career writer, thinking about the order of information that you portray to the reader, that is one of the basic elements of story structure that she plays with all the way through this.

[DongWon] It's interesting because time is one of the first clues of what's happening in the meta-narrative.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] The timeline is one of the first… Howard, you and I were talking about this off mic, but realizing that the world is not ending in these other storylines, that humans still exist in these other storylines, is the thing that starts to clue us into, wait, something else exciting is happening here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of timelines, I believe that it is time for us to take a small break.

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. Head to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Rest in Pieces, which is a short game about being roommates with the Grim Reaper. It uses, instead of dice, a Jengo tower which you'll see in other games like Dread, but in this case, half of the blocks are painted black and half of them are painted white. So, as you go through the game, you have to do something, you will pull a block, and if the tower falls, something terrible happens. But in this case, whether you're going to act in a selfish way or a selfish way determines what color block you have to pull. That is a very compelling dynamic that changes the way that you play the game, the decisions that you make. It's a really wonderful idea. The game is a lot of fun, and has a lot of cute art in it as well. Once again, that game is called Rest in Pieces.

[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back into this, one of the other things that I am interested in hearing you all talk about is some of… To foreshadow, some of the things that we'll be talking about later. We're going to be touching on things like… Topics that we'll be hitting are whose perspective is it anyway, parallelism and inversion, and tradition and innovation. So, I just want to give our readers a prologue…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Of why we think it's important to talk about these things. Because these are not structural elements that most people talk about.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Most of the time, when people talk about structure, they're talking about pacing. They're talking about the order of information that I brought up before. They're talking about scene and sequel. We're not going to be talking about any of that. So why is it important to be thinking about the things that we're going to be talking about with structure? What can… Like, give us a little [garbled taste]

[Howard] You want teasers?

[Mary Robinette] I want teasers.

[DongWon] I think, for me… I mean, this connects to what Erin was saying earlier, and the idea that the structure of this book is audacious. This might just come from my perspective of reading so many books and seeing so many things at various stages of their drafting, but any time… I want people to be more playful with structure. But I would love these people to understand that you can play with time, you can play with perspective, you can play with the sequencing of things to get across your core thematic elements more than you are getting across your plot beats. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] So much of structure as it's currently taught, whether that's like Save the Cat or something like that, is… Or Hero's Journey, is so much about how do you get across clearly the A to B to C to D. To me, that can sometimes feel very flat or not in service of the actual goal of your story. Right? So if you step back a moment and think about what story am I trying to tell here, and what the best way is to tell that, because this is what I'm writing about, this is why this story's important to me. We're going to be talking to N. K. Jemison at the end of this cycle, and one of the things I'm so excited to hear from her is that she write this out of order or did she write this in order and reassemble it into the form that we see now. I suspect she wrote it out of order, but I'm kind of curious at what point in the process it occurred to her to use this structure.

[Erin] Also, for perspective, I think it's a little bit about challenging some of the assumptions of structure. So I think a lot of times, we think of perspective, POV, as like a decision that you make at the beginning, and you go, okay, I'm going to do this POV, and now I'm going to write the story, and, like, it's a thing that, like, it cannot change. But, like, you made the decision. It's like… I'm like I must stay in this perspective because I told myself I have to. Or because that's the way I think books are written, or it's the way that the books that I've read have been. What I like about this is it shows that even the things we think of as assumptions or as early decisions can be tools that we decide to wield intentionally…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In the story in ways that are not the ways that necessarily the books we're used to have wielded them. Plus, I feel like this it is, to be honest, a story where if you don't speak about perspective on some level…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You're doing a disservice to, like, one of the major tools that is used within the book.

[Howard] Way back in Writing Excuses Season One, I figured out… And just so we're clear, Writing Excuses Season One is the story of Howard figuring out what it is he's actually doing…

[Snort laughter]

[Howard] Up until that time, I did not know what POV meant. I did not… Yeah, I did not know that I was writing social sat… I did not know anything. I was so much more not that smart than I am now. The point though is that I did know that the story was being told based on a principle that is sometimes articulated as your POV character should be the one who is in the most pain. Mine was the POV character or the camera angle should be who is in the best position to tell a joke about what's going on right now. Okay. That principle right there, that POV principle right there, for me, dictated mountains of structure. Because I had to move things around in order for it to make sense of the camera to be pointed at this person so I can tell… So I can deliver this joke. So when we talk about perspective as a structural tool, it's absolutely a structural tool because if the perspective is important, it is going to be dictating all of the structural elements that go into justifying it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that… Beginning our spoilers now. One of the things that happens in this, is that Nora breaks one of the rules, which is that second person is not the done thing. As you get through the story, you realize that it's not actually second person we're getting. That's a very structural decision about when to… Why to use that and when to use it. For me, one of the things that is interesting about it, and why I like using this book to talk about structure, is that the reason to not use second person is that it can be distancing. That is exactly what that character is going through is that distancing. There's also a transformation that happens through the book. So there are all of these different small structural tools that she's kind of taking and blowing up.

[DongWon] Yeah. We could have used this book to teach any of the segments…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That we've done this year. Right? What I found fascinating is that she somehow turns each of those elements into structure. The structure of the book is where the tension lies, the voice is tied to structure, in the ways that you're talking about, about the switches to second person, who's narrating it. Character is structure, because the parallels of the three versions of the same character across this book. It's just endlessly fascinating to me to see the ways in which structure is such the centerpiece that holds up all the other parts of this book in a way that is more visible and more active than we see in other fiction.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's one of the things that you as a listener can think about with your own book, if you been thinking about, oh, I have to use the Save the Cat structure. Why? That particular one. I often think about story structure as a recipe. That you can have a recipe, and you can make a really good recipe. But if you say, okay, according to this, every recipe needs to have leavening, which is great if you're doing a cake…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But not so good for soup. And it's irrelevant for soup. Leavening is completely irrelevant. So what's fun for me with this one is that I feel like I'm watching an improvisational cook go into the kitchen. Or, I feel like I'm watching someone doing molecular gastronomy, where there like, okay, this looks like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but actually…

[DongWon] It is ham and cheese. [Garbled]

[Howard] I… There is a line in… I think it's the prologue, I'm going to go ahead and read this real quick.

"The woman I mentioned, the one whose son is dead. She was not in Yumenes, thankfully, or this would be a very short tale. And you would not exist."

[Howard] That last bit, and you would not exist. Wait. Me, the reader? In my tied into this? Then we get to those chapters where the point of view is second person and you… Oh. Oh, that means… And then the you point of view would not exist, because… I still haven't decoded at this point in my reading, I still have not decoded what this means, but that is not a throwaway line. That is a hook upon which a whole bunch of structure is going to hang, and I love it.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you brought that one up, because I… In the reread of this, I hit that line, like, oh!

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I need to call Nora and yell at her again.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because she tells you upfront what she's doing.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, oh…

[Howard] And you would not exist. Really?

[DongWon] That was my reaction. In my head, so many of the reveals come so late, or, like… In my head, like, the second person was used so sparingly, and it's right there, in the prologue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's there from the jump. It is all throughout. And it's almost… The reveal is that she wasn't hiding anything from us.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It just took us a long time to understand.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It's the surprising yet inevitable. Where you look at it and say, "Well, obviously it was inevitable, but now I'm angry that you surprised me that way."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the other things that… Just when we're talking about it, one of the other tools that she uses is actually the titles of the chapters. When you look at the table of contents, the prologue, you are here. Chapter 1, you, at the end. Chapter 2, Damaya, in winters past. It's like, I'm telling you straight up front what's happening. Three, you're on your way. It is fascinating to me that this is also, because of the two interludes, arguably a classic three act structure, but it is profoundly not a three act structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because there are so many moving pieces that are happening simultaneously.

[DongWon] Again, she's using so many classic things like the chapter titles that we don't see anymore. It's a call back, it's a throwback to an older mode of storytelling, and yet it… The end result feels so contemporary and fresh.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that, let's go ahead and give you some homework. I actually want you to look at the table of contents… And for those of you who have read the book, this is specifically for you. Look at the table of contents, and without opening the book again, write down the one important thing you remember from that chapter. Then, through the course of the next several episodes, as we talk through things, refer back to that list and see what you need to add to it that is also important that you missed on the first reading.

[Mary Robinette] 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.

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Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-15-a-close-reading-on-voice-tying-it-all-together

Key points: Voice can be an active part of developing plots and character arcs. As the character changes, their voice changes. Characters learn. Allow yourself to love to write. When you can't write with joy, reach for craft. Use the tools in revision. Use pacing, punctuation, word choice, accent, sentence structure to make the character more them. Allow yourself to be yourself as you write, use the personal voice! Use the smiley face! When something is good in what you are reviewing or critiquing, put a smiley face by it. Look for the key phrase, the sentence or paragraph that really sounds like the character, and use that to ground yourself as you revise or write more. Take big swings! Push yourself, and aim at the home run. Watch for falling into the same rhythm, sentences, and repetition by accident. Try reading it aloud to catch this! Check the musicality of your text. Deconstruct what you're doing, just step back and look at what you are trying to accomplish and how you are doing it.

[Season 19, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

[Season 19, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Tying It All Together.

[Mary Robinette] 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 Howard.

[DongWon] So, this episode, we are reaching the end of our first sort of module, talking about This Is How You Lose the Time War. We want to focus a little bit on both recapping some of the stuff we've talked about, but also making sure it feels actionable for you, the audience, about how you can start to apply this to your own fiction. So one of the things I really wanted to focus on, I think we've hit a number of times over the past few episodes, is we can sometimes think about voice as a very passive element of your story. You decide the voice at the beginning, and then once you sort of finish your opening section, you're like, "That's the voice for my book." I hope you can see from the past few episodes as we looked at Red and Blue and the letters individually, how voice is an active participant in developing the plots, in developing the characters, and really carrying the reader through in a way, with much more clarity than if the voice hadn't evolved.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that is a factor that you will find in most fiction that you're going to be reading or writing, that… If you have a character arc, I should say. If you have a character arc, your character at the end is not the same person they were at the beginning. So it is natural that the voice of the character would evolve over the course of the story. But we often don't think about it. We just let it go for a ride. So, thinking about some of the tools that we've used here, the big one that I would say for adjusting things is the experiential nature of the character. Like, that they are seeing things differently at the end than they are at the beginning. So you're going to be using different language to highlight things, as one example.

[Erin] I think another thing is, building on that different language, is also that characters learn things. You know what I mean? There are things we always carry with us, like, if you were the child of fisherfolk, maybe you always use fish metaphors throughout the rest of your life. But if you suddenly learn magic, or you learn how to become an engineer, or you go to space, the type of language that you use will change. I think a lot of times, again, we will sometimes think, "Oh, I've set up the knowledge that my character has at the beginning of the story," and then that knowledge changes. But has the language changed with it? So you can sort of look at a paragraph from the beginning of something you're writing and something at the end and say, "Do these seem the same?" If they do, is that a choice that I've made, or is that something I've defaulted into?

[DongWon] Well, one great example of that is in the letters, they start referencing this thing that's like Mrs. Levitt's Guide, which is some kind of…

[Mary Robinette] Etiquette.

[DongWon] Etiquette manual. Thank you. That teaches them how to write letters. Red is using this actively, and we see Red discover postscripts and all kinds of different aspects of letter writing. But it's also a cue for the audience as well of showing how literally Red and Blue are teaching each other how to speak to each other. Right? We'll see poetry start to appear in Red's letters. We see this back-and-forth about different elements of letter writing, about postscripts and things like that. I think it's really reflecting what Erin is talking about, of how you can actively and deliberately have your characters learn how to speak and how to write in a way that shows their ongoing entanglement in the way that language changes.

[Howard] The tool that I would first recommend that you, fair listener, take from this whole close read. Allow yourself to love to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Let yourself love it. Lose yourself in it. In our previous episode, I used the word luxuriate, Erin used the word indulgence. Embrace those. Please. Luxuriate in it, indulge yourself in writing. And that joy will begin to lock in some of these tools for you. Because I'm watching Mary Robinette work from notes as she talks to us and lists these things that we can do deliberately, and I think I will never be able to do all of that deliberately. That's fine. I'm just going to have fun with it, and then remember those rules and rewrite deliberately.

[Mary Robinette] Well, so frequently the tools that I list are things that I used to punch up my fiction, that it's… Sometimes it's stuff that I do unconsciously, because I come out of theater. So, getting into a character voice and rhythm is something that I was trained to do and have internalized. But other times when I'm writing with depression, I cannot write with… Through the joy. I lean… I reach for the craft, and I'll let myself get something down that's messy, knowing that I can come back and I will look at it and say, "Okay. Pacing wise, where does this character pause? Is this a character that speaks in long fluid sentences? Or is this a character that speaks in short punctuated sentences?" I will go through and I will adjust my punctuation, I will think about the word choice, I frequently go back in even with something that I have written from a place of joy, will go back in and look at how I can dial up a character's particular accent. Like, what are the word choices and sentence structure that makes this character more specifically them? How do I remove the ambiguity, so none of the other characters on the page could have said that sentence?

[Erin] I think we do a lot of this subconsciously all the time. I think about being in a meeting, or even listening to this podcast. You'll be like, "Oh, yeah. That's such a so-and-so thing to say."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Or, like when somebody says to me, they're going to use a long metaphor and talk about their cat, because that's what they always do…

[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about Elsie recently?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Who is Elsie?

[Mary Robinette] Elsie is my cat, who uses buttons to talk. It's very much… Carry on.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That was absolutely… The cat who has no shame. I've been looking at pictures of my own cat all day. But I think that… Think about the things that you do. How do you recognize somebody else's voice? Then, what is it about it? Is it the lens… Is it the things that they reference? Is it a specific word that they always use? That is a thing that they always come back to? Then think about how can you create characters that have that same depth and richness?

[Mary Robinette] Also, think about who your character is addressing, because that is one of the things, again, that we do naturally that Erin was just talking about. So when your character is speaking to someone else, do they have the same rhythm every time? Or do they change it based on who they're talking to?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think one thing that comes through clearly in this is kind of going also to what Erin's saying that allow yourself to be yourself as you write. This is the 3rd part of voice that we didn't talk about, which I'm forgetting the exact term you used for it, but…

[Mary Robinette] Personal voice.

[DongWon] Personal voice. Right. Red and Blue sound very distinct because there written by different people. I get the distinct pleasure of being friends with these people, so I know how they talk. These are such heightened versions of how Max speaks and how Amal speaks. But their natural rhythms and their natural proclivities in how they talk, how they construct a metaphor, are coming through and they let that happen. Right? There was no hiding who they were. They were in fact amping that up, I think, to make that distinction very clearly felt the different sections. So, I think one other lesson you can take here in addition to let yourself have fun, write from a place of joy when you can, is also just because we're giving you all these tools to manipulate voice, to use it in different ways that are very deliberate, don't feel like what we're also saying is you have to hide who you are. The way you talk, the way you think, the way you speak. Sometimes, the most distinctive fiction is the one that feels like you are talking to the person who wrote it.

[Mary Robinette] The way I often describe this is you've spent your entire life honing your tastes as a reader, and you've got good taste. So trust your taste when you're writing.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I would say as both a reader and a listener. Because I think there are ways of writing, ways of speaking, that actually don't make it into fiction as often. So if you love the way that your auntie tells a story, you know, maybe there's a way to take that and put that on a page in a way that nobody else could because nobody else has your auntie. Well, except your relatives.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, just get that and put that on the page. Because it comes from you and your experience, it will feel real and it will feel valuable to the reader…

[Howard] Depending on the relatives, it might be a sister or a daughter.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] You are still right. None of them have your version of her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's the personal voice. So, the thing about this is that what we're trying to do here is to teach you the mechanical and the aesthetic voice and how to manipulate them. What we hope is that you can learn to inhabit your own personal voice. Because mechanical and aesthetic can be learned. Personal is all about just learning to trust yourself.

[Howard] I have a smiley face for you. After our break.

[DongWon] Hey, writers. Are you thinking about learning a new language? I think exploring the world, experiencing other cultures, and being able to communicate with people outside your everyday experience lets you create richer, better stories. A great way to do that is with Rosetta Stone, a trusted expert for over 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. They use an immersive technique which leads to fast language acquisition. It's an intuitive process that helps you learn to speak, listen, and, most of all, think in the language you're trying to learn. They also feature true accent speech recognition technology that gives you feedback on your pronunciation. It's like having a voice coach in your home. Learn at home or on the go with a desktop and mobile app that lets you download and act on lessons even when you're off-line. It's an amazing value. A lifetime membership gives you access to all 25 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and, of course, Korean. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. For a very limited time, Writing Excuses listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com/ today. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com/ today.

[Erin] This week I want to talk to you about Princess Weekes. She has some of my favorite YouTube video essays on the Internet right now. She has this way of bringing excellent story, culture, and media analysis that has helped me immensely in crafting my own work. She looks at popular or unpopular works of media, asks the right kinds of questions to get you thinking, and explains why it did or didn't have the impact it was looking for. Specifically, her video on why The Last Duel failed was an excellent critique of how you can look at a movement like Me, Too or see the problems in representation of women, and then try, but fail, at addressing the true reasons the movement happened. But you should really go watch all of her things. That's Princess Weekes on YouTube.

[Howard] One of my biggest fears when I pick up the long lists of tools and techniques is that it will suck the joy out of whatever it is that I've written, that it will become mechanical, that it will become cookie-cutter or recipe or whatever. My solution for this is the smiley face. In red pen, when I am reviewing my manuscript or when I'm critiquing someone else's, if there is something that sings to me, makes me laugh, it was a wonderful metaphor, whatever, I put a smiley face next to it. That means there may be other things you need to change in this document, but don't break this bit. Don't break this bit. I gotta tell you, the smiley face has been the most valuable critique mark that I write to myself, because it stands as a reminder.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Howard] Because when I go back over the text, I don't always remember how much I loved that the first time I wrote it or the first time I reread it.

[DongWon] It's such a huge mistake I see early career editors make. Right? When they're starting out and doing their first books that they're working on, they'll give feedback and the author will be like, "I thought I wrote a good book. What happened?" I'm like, "You did write a good book. This person just forgot to write down all the parts where they liked this." Right? They forgot to do what I think of as an alignment exercise of, like, first you tell the writer here's what I loved about this book, here's why it's important, here's why all these things are working. Now let's get on to some of the stuff that isn't working that will further highlight what does work. Right? So I think when it comes to voice, when you go through your manuscript, I think this is great advice from Howard, of learn to recognize what things do sound like you and you like that fact. Right? Lean into that going forward.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a more of this, please. This is something… I love calling it an alignment exercise. This is, again, trusting your own taste, trusting that personal voice. You… Books that you love, you're not the only person that loves that book. When you read it, you have an emotional response to it every time you read it. So when you're reading your own book and you have emotional responses, trust those emotional responses. Those are genuine things that you experience as a reader. If you like it, lean into it. It's like, "Oh, okay. I did that well." And when you're learning, you can use these tools to say, "Okay, what did I do well here? How can I do that intentionally, and heighten it later in other parts of the book, so that this thing that I love, I continue to be good at?"

[Erin] I also think with voice specifically, because it can be hard to really capture the voice of a character, at least it is for me, is sometimes I'll go through and find a sentence or a paragraph where I feel like, "This is the person." Like, I really got it here. Sometimes I'll have to write my way into it. Like, I'll start writing the story, it's not quite there, it's not quite there, and then I'm like, "This is the phrasing that this character would absolutely use 100% of the time." I will highlight that, and then when I go to either revise or write more, I will start by grounding myself in that sentence or paragraph and say, "Okay. This is what I'm trying to get to, this is the feeling. Now, can I carry it forward?"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] As someone who has built PCs, I love the word grounding myself…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because if I forget to ground myself, I'll destroy a $1500 video card…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Absentmindedly.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this… In audiobook narration, we call this thing that you're talking about, we have a word for it, it's called a key phrase. It's used to get yourself into the rhythms of the character, so that you remember what is your pacing for this, what is the accent of this character, what attitude do I have? I think that that's the thing that you're looking for when you're looking for this phrase, it's like… It embodies all of those things in a single moment.

[DongWon] Yeah. Kind of building off of this, the one thing that I also want people to remember when experimenting with voice, in addition to the other elements we've talked about, is don't be afraid to take a big swing. Don't be afraid to push yourself and reach for the tonality, the voice, the emotion that you're looking for, whether that is the blunt muscular brutalism of Red or the deep poetic organicness of Blue. These are huge swings in terms of voice. Right? There really aiming for the fences with how far they're pushing this, and I think that's part of the joy of the book and that's part of the playfulness of the book, is this sort of high wire formalist act that they're pulling off here. Then we see that again in the letters, the way they become so profoundly hugely romantic. That's… That is not a thing you see very often in text. I think one of the reasons people responded to it so well is both the humor, but also the "Oh, my God, these characters are so in love with each other," and feeling that in your body as you read it is really wonderful.

[Howard] Sports ball has the best metaphor here. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You take that big swing, and, speaking as someone who is at this moment remembering very vividly some of my young writer mistakes and fears, you will miss some of those pitches you swing at. The good news is that as a writer, you get to go back…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And rewrite. You get to put the novel in a trunk, or the story in a trunk, and come back to it 10 years later and say, "Oh. Now I have the skill set to finish this thing that I wanted to do," or, you come back 10 years later as Dr. Frankenstein, and this is more liked my approach, and say, "Oh, that corpse is only good for parts."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But I know which parts!

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. Not to stress everyone out, but from a publishing perspective, we're in an era where base hits aren't good enough. Right? You've gotta be swinging for the fences. It can be okay if you get on base, but that shouldn't be your target. Your target should be the home run. So I encourage you to do all these things that we're talking about in terms of finding a way to get to that joyful place that you're writing from, but also to make sure you're pushing yourself and reaching for the thing that is really distinctive, is really going to stand out, is really personal.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] As we're talking about this, I want to flag a thing that I see happen with early career writers with voice, that is an… Asking for a mistake, and I see it happen a lot, which is this idea we've been talking about pacing and finding the rhythm of the voice, is that you will have a character or the… Just the language of the text itself, where everything has the same rhythm, where all the sentences are the same length, and you have this accidental repetition that, again, can flatten something. All your paragraphs are the same length. In the real world, you have this variety of rhythm. Something that you can really see when you look at This Is How You Lose the Time War is how intentionally they're using when the character speaks in long sentences versus short sentences, when the switch happens, when the variety takes place. So look at your own work and think about if you've been thinking my prose falls flat, and your urge is to add more adjectives, take a look at it instead and see if it's something that you can fix with your punctuation. Fix by just breaking up how the sentences are structured.

[Howard] I am almost shocked and amazed, Mary Robinette, that you didn't tell us to try reading it out loud. Because often that is how I identify it, when I realize just in the pattern of my breathing, in the pattern of my nodding, of my body movements, I'm like, "Oh. This is all written to the beat of the song I was listening to…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "When I wrote it."

[DongWon] That's what I was going to say is…

[Howard] Oh, my.

[DongWon] I encourage people to think about the musicality of the text. Right? Think about the rhythm, the sound, all of those things. One way to switch stuff is to change the music you're listening to. If you write to music, whether it's wordless or with lyrics, find something with a different BPM. Find something with a different tonality. That can help you shift out of one rhythm. Or, even if you're not using that specifically, just think about it as a piece of music, of when do you want to change your time signature, when are you heading into the bridge, when are you heading into the verse. Right? Those are all things that will help you unlock those tools of rhythm, of sound and poetics, and of repetition, which is also a very common thing in music, of when are you coming back to the same beat, the same note.

[Erin] I also think it's just fun to sometimes deconstruct what you're doing. There's this song that I love called Title of the Song in which each ver… It's like declaration of my feelings for you, elaboration on those feelings. The ver… The actual versus are telling you what the song would be doing. Sometimes, when something feels off to me, I'll actually say like, "A long ass sentence that appears to be explaining the world. A really short quip." Like, I'll actually look…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At what my thing is… What my sentences are attempting to accomplish. If it's the same thing 8 times in a row, then it doesn't quite work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because, to think about musicality and karaoke, one of my favorite things, even the most amazing singer, if they just come out and belt, with no variety, they never make their voice softer, no matter how good the tone is, people will start to tune out, about 2 like sentences in. Because they'll be like, "Oh. Okay. That's what's happening here. Back to my conversation." The way you keep people in a song is the way you keep people in writing, by using variety so that not quite sure what's coming next and they feel like you're taking them on a journey that they want to go on with you.

[Howard] The song between the servants, This Is As Good As It Gets, in season 2 of Gallivant, the actress is trained as a Broadway singer, and they don't let her off the leash until the last 2 verses of that song, and she belts… I get chills every time I hear it, because I realize that was the message of this song. She is breaking free from a life of servitude and accepting that she is good enough to not have to eat olives off the floor. They communicate that with that note of… Just a couple notes. Oh, I get chills just thinking about it. So, yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Changing the rhythms. It's something that we're hardwired… We're hardwired to pay attention to repetition and then to also tune it out. The reasons are that if there's something that's a sameness, that's… If you think of us as humans as animals, that's not important information. You know what it is, you've identified it. So you're listening for the threat or the opportunity. The threat of the rhythm of someone stalking you. Or the drip drip of water that is a food source… A water source. So, again, like when you're placing those repetitions in your text, you want to be placing them in points where it's carrying information that the reader needs as opposed to just accidental repetition that the reader tunes out as unimportant. It's like, "Oh, yeah, it's all green. It's true, it's leaves."

[DongWon] Yeah. If you want an example of how pacing and repetition can really enhance your experience, I love Tina Turner's rendition of Proud Mary, which starts very slow and then gets incredibly fast and intense by the end of it. I think that sense of… That increasing excitement and thrill and danger, all those things are communicated in that song as it changes very differently tonally from the beginning to the end. So, I want all of you to sort of think about the musicality and think about that tonality. Think about rhythm and repetition, as I'm demonstrating right now. As you're like really digging into how to keep building the voice of your work.

[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.

[DongWon] Our homework for this week is I want you to write a short outline of your work in progress. This would be a new outline. I want you to instead of focusing on what are the plot beats for your characters or… You could even do this for a single character arc if you don't want to do it for the whole book. But instead of writing down what happens to the character, make notes about how the voice of that character will change with these events. Make a little bit of an outline so you have a sense of the arc as the character changes how they see the world, how they're going to talk about the world, and experience it.

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

[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.

[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get lit on the Inner Loop Radio.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.14: A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling Through Voice

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-14-a-close-reading-on-voice-epistolary-storytelling-through-voice

Key points: Epistles, letters, and voice. What do letters do for voice? 2 things at the same time, what you plan to say, and knowing that it is written for a specific audience, how you present it. 2nd person! Can we be luxuriant and indulgent without epistles? Yes, using pacing, accent, attitude, experience, and focus. Try free indirect speech. Epistles let you concentrate it. Playfulness or humor in the midst of serious situations, like gallows humor. Epistles have a performative aspect, with the character conscious that their words will be judged. The signoff yours. Repetition and resonance!

[Transcription note: I have tried to get the quotes from the book correct, however, I may have made mistakes. Please refer to the book if you want the exact wording or punctuation!]

[Season 19, Episode 14]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling through Voice.

[Mary Robinette] 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 Howard.

[Erin] At the very beginning of our journey in this book, I talked about how much I love the fact that it used epistolaries, that it uses letters. So we're going to really dive into how voice is working within the epistolaries in this particular episode. I actually want to start before we get into a specific reading that I'm going to ask DongWon to do, just to…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Just to hear him do it, is that I'm wondering sort of what is it… Why do we use epistolaries? What is it that letters actually do in voice? I'll say, for me, one of the things I like about using letters is that there are 2 sort of things going on at the same time. There's what you planned to say, and the fact that you know you're writing it to a specific audience, that your character is writing it to someone. So they expect it to be read. That changes the way that they actually present themselves in the things that they put on the page.

[Mary Robinette] I do agree because I think that one of the things that that illuminates is very clearly what the character thinks of the other character. Because of the way they frame things, the… All of the subtext that goes into that epistolary letter. It is also, I think, one of the things that is fun because there is the epistolary that is the letter, and then there's also things that are… Like news articles, and these are very different because they are written to a broad audience, whereas a letter is written, as you said, to one specific person. That is, I think, that's fun.

[DongWon] The letter epistolary, the thing I love really about it is I'm such a sucker for the 2nd person in a piece of fiction. I love the you address. It plays with your subjectivity as the reader in such an interesting way, because it forces you into the position of the person on the other end of this. Right? So, in this case, switching between Red and Blue, and using the 2nd person… I'm put in the position where I have to identify with the person receiving the letter in a way that I think is really fascinating to me, and I think really deepens the connection to character in this book. It's a really clever trick that I really love.

[Howard] How do I know what I think, until I see what I say? I have operated on that principle for decades.

[Screech]

[DongWon] I find these so delightful is the letters can be quite silly in a way that's really good. So. Anyways, Erin is torturing me by making me read this.

"My perfect Red. How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored? Perhaps you'll tell me once you finished with this strand?"

[DongWon] Just like these little references and jokes layered throughout… It is so delightful to me. Then, there's a later line in the same letter that… This taunting voice. Right?

"A suggestion of corruption in my command chain? A charming concern for my well-being? Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal? And then we'd be at each other's throats even more. Oh, Petal, you say that like it's a bad thing."

[DongWon] There's so much dialogue here, there's so much voice-iness here. The characters are coming through. It's such this crisp playful way as, like, Blue taunts Red through this whole letter. We're going to see such, like, different evolution in the tone of their letters to each other as we go. But these early ones are such a hook for the audience.

[Erin] Yeah. I think I've been thinking since we talked about it a few episodes ago, why I find these to be so dense in some ways. I think it's because I'm responding to the denseness of personal indulgence as opposed to the denseness of poetic prose.

[DongWon] Oh, I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? Because these are the moments in which I feel like I get the best sense of who they are, because of the way that they're trying to present themselves, as opposed to… Which is like the splash of color against this beautiful backdrop of poetry. Which I absolutely love.

[Howard] Indulgence is definitely the right word there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The luxuriating and indulgent… That I can feel… I can feel in reading these how much Max and Amal just love to write.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah. And love to write to each other. Right? These letters… They wrote these, this novella, sitting literally back-to-back, passing a laptop back and forth. So one would write the letter and hand it to the other. I think that's where that sense of playfulness comes from. You can feel the friendship in this, you can feel the taunting, back-and-forth, as they're both trying to show off for each other in a way that I think comes through.

[Howard] Oh, you're going to go Blue du ba de...

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, I got some draft punk on tap for you, baby.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] Hey, I've got some questions about how these epistolaries… Not just how they work, but how we can do the same sorts of things. Maybe even do the same sorts of things without being epistolary. But I think those questions have to wait until after the break.

[DongWon] Hey, writers. Are you thinking about learning a new language? I think exploring the world, experiencing other cultures, and being able to communicate with people outside your everyday experience lets you create richer, better stories. A great way to do that is with Rosetta Stone, a trusted expert for over 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. They use an immersive technique which leads to fast language acquisition. It's an intuitive process that helps you learn to speak, listen, and, most of all, think in the language you're trying to learn. They also feature true accent speech recognition technology that gives you feedback on your pronunciation. It's like having a voice coach in your home. Learn at home or on the go with a desktop and mobile app that lets you download and act on lessons even when you're off-line. It's an amazing value. A lifetime membership gives you access to all 25 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and, of course, Korean. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. For a very limited time, Writing Excuses listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com today. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com today.

[Erin] I'm excited to tell you about a song this week. It's a song Story2 by the group clipping. What I love about songs, just in general, is that they have to get put so much story into, like, a really small space. In this case, it's through a character study of a guy named Mike Winfield. I won't tell you much more, because it literally takes 3 minutes to actually listen to the song. But one thing that I want you to listen for, maybe the 2nd time around, or as your sort of enjoying it, is how he gets so much about who Mike Winfield is, where he's been, and the tension of the current moment, all at once. The 2nd thing to look for is something that clipping does that's amazing is they change the time signature of the song as it goes and tension is tightened, which is something that you may be able to use in changing the tempo of your prose. So, look at how they decide when to change that tempo and what you can learn from it by listening to Story2 by clipping.

[Howard] Let me start with this question. The luxuriance, the indulgence, the loving to write. Can we do this without resorting to epistolary? Are these tools available to us in other ways?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. They're still using the same tools that we've been talking about for voice all along. They're still using pacing, accent, attitude, experience. Focus, even. But what they're doing is that, in the epistolary, it gives you a little bit more freedom… Just a little bit… To have some of those repetitions, some of the more colloquial language. You can do that absolutely when you're not in epistolary form. That's where we… That's where that free indirect speech that we've been talking about comes back in. That some of the things that are very specifically their phrasing, if you took that, and you shifted it to 3rd person and you put it into the middle of a paragraph of action, just a sentence out of that, you would get that same sense of the character, but you would get it spread out through the book instead of in this compressed place of the epistolary where it's isolated in form.

[Erin] I also think being playful in the middle of ser… In, like, a serious situation is something that we can all use. I mean, you are the humor expert, so you know this sort of better than anyone, but, I think, that that's something to think about here is that just because a topic is serious or a theme is serious doesn't mean that there isn't room for play. That room gives us a breath. It's like gallows humor. Even in the worst of times, people often use humor to respond to it. There's an episode of Deep Space 9 that I love where all the people are gonna die, and how they respond to it shows you so much about their character. One person gets quiet. One person jokes. One person plans. That shows a lot in the way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, you can do that in voice. Somebody who starts making a list at the… Imminent death is coming, is going to feel different than somebody who jokes about the different ways they could die.

[DongWon] The thing I love about the humor here, though, is… When I encounter humor in fiction sometimes, it's very frustrating, because it undermines the emotional beats of the overall story. Here, the humor never contradicts the story, it never contradicts the character beats. It is so clearly a character masking an emotion or taunting somebody else or being playful. But it takes the world seriously, and it takes the stakes seriously, and finds a way to be funny in the middle of that. Right? So I think the overall impression when people talk about Time War, when they think about this book, is of this lush romanticism, of this like deep character work and poeticness. But the experience of reading it… I often find myself laughing out loud at different beats of the book. It's much funnier than I think people remember after they come back to it.

[Howard] As a humorist, that is what I reach for when I'm writing anything that is not… Would not be categorized as humor. During a critique group for one of the shorts that I published in Space Eldritch, a friend said, "The jokes that you put in this scene kind of undermines a whole lot of tension and horror that's been happening." My response was, "I know. I got too tense and scared, and so I just did it." The rest of the group was like, "So did we. Thank you." I was like, "Oh. Okay." So this is a… It's not to everybody's taste, but I reflexively use the tool correctly. That's one of the things that so cool about these kinds of tools is that sometimes if you are getting too tense, you are getting too emotional, you realize, "Oh, I need to… I need to turn a phrase in a way that makes me giggle."

[Mary Robinette] This is also that… That sense is also something that your character will be experiencing while they are writing the letter. So there is a performative aspect to an epistolary section, where the character is conscious of the fact that their words are going to be judged, so they are trying to present themselves in a certain way. When we look back at that first letter from Red…

"My cunning methods for spiriting her from your clutches. Engine trouble, a good spring day, a suspiciously effective and cheap remote access software suite her hospital purchased 2 years ago, which allows the good doctor to work from home."

[Mary Robinette] It's like I'm just going to show off just a little bit. You think you've got me? No, no, no. Look at how clever I am. I set this up 2 years before you even got here. That kind of performative nature, I think, and how am I going to be judged, is, again, a thing that you can bring outside of the epistles into the way your character's moving through the world. How are people going to judge me, by the actions that I take and the words that I say in the text of a letter, it becomes very, very clear.

[Erin] Yeah. I think it really also is a great way to show character development, because the way you move through the world changes, and therefore the type of performance. You get better at performing, maybe other people get better at judging, they become more familiar with you. I know we wanted to look also at some of the letters from the very end, because how does the relationship change? I know, Howard, you had some thoughts about how the…

[Howard] Oh, Lord.

[Erin] Even the signoff changes from the very beginning to the end…

[Howard] Yeah. There's a…

[Erin] Of the letters.

[Howard] There's a technique, that I need to give a name to so that I can just call it a thing, in which you define the terms for your reader and one of the terms that gets defined, through these epistolaries, is the signoff yours. This is from an epistle that Red's writing to Blue.

"I am yours in other ways as well. Yours as I watch the world for your signs [epithenic as a horospeck?]. Yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery. Yours as I review your words, by their sequence, their sounds,, smell, taste. Taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still. I suspect you will appreciate the token."

[Howard] Then Red closes the letter.

"Yours, Red."

[Howard] Every letter afterward is closed, whether from Red or Blue, with the word yours. Now we know what that word means to them. Because Blue would not write yours absentmindedly. Blue would write yours saying, "Yes. All of these definitions you gave me and more." So, by defining the terms here, Max and Amal have lent weight to the word so that one word can do a huge lift all the way through the rest of the book.

[DongWon] I really love about this technique is it lets them be more directly emotional from the perspective of the character then you would get in narration sometimes. Right? In narration, you sort of have to have a little bit of a step back. Being able to fully embody for pages at a time the deeply lovesick romantic characters that we're seeing can lead to a more direct address. In particular, there's one line it that I've seen quoted many times, but I'd love to reference it here just to show how far we've come from the playful tone of the early letters to now in these, like, deep professions of love.

[Mary Robinette] As I read this to you, I want you to think about 2 tools that we're talking about, repetition, and then there's also resonance. That's where you recognize that there's a link between something you've said before and something we're saying now. So this section has some lovely repetition in it.

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves, in skies, in my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets. I'll kill them all, and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands, it will be to you. But never again like this."

[DongWon] The thing I love about this passage… I mean, other than it's like heartbreakingly romantic and so beautifully written. But it's so clearly identifiable with Red. That Red's most romantic gesture is I will kill all the poets through all of time…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And replace them. Like, that's her solution to making sure Blue understands how much she loves her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It again resonates with that first moment when we met Red on the battlefield. The thing about this resonance is that it's one of the ways that you can allow the reader… That you can make space for the reader. That's something that is really important in stories, I think, because the reader inhabits half of the story. Like, the writer has the thing, and then we invite the reader to it. But you bring so much of yourself to it, your own experience. When you are imagining a voice, you are using your own experience to imagine that voice. So, having these resonant moments where you can insert yourself and you can feel that, where you're drawing the connections yourself, makes it stronger than the stories where everything is explained out completely. Those stories tend to get very flat.

[Erin] One other thing I love about this, and the mention of repetition and all that, is that one of the first things we see is the repetition, which we talked about in a previous episode. "She has won. Yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasn't she?" That is… Repetition can be both sure and unsure. Like, repetition's very interesting. Because sometimes you repeat something because you know it, and sometimes you repeat something because you wish you knew it. You want to convince yourself of it. Seeing Red move from this sort of trying to repeat the things I have been told and taught are important…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To something I am claiming as important for myself is just a great way to look at how the same tool can be used 2 different ways, and is also a great way to show movement in the character as a whole.

[DongWon] This goes back to the previous episode, but in the way that Blue communicates confidence and vulnerability in her voice, we're seeing that come out of Red now. Red is much more confident in this scene than she's ever been in the early scenes. But that confidence is coming through an incredible vulnerability. An incredible moment of stress and distress in this letter as she's communicating how much she loves Blue, but also knows that Blue is dying at her hand in these moments. Right? So, the incredible complexity of what's happening here, but we're seeing a Red that is so much more certain and aware of herself and what she wants and who she is then we've seen up until this point in the book.

[Mary Robinette] She's also doing a thing in this where she is using some of the cadence of Blue with the listing. "I'll write it in waves, in skies, and my heart." But doing it with Red, short, punctuated sentences. So it's this thing where she is both reflecting the person that she loves and also truly expressing herself.

[DongWon] She's learning how to write this way. Right?

[Howard] The line, "Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something," is… Ah… I get chills.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The confidence. The acceptance. The decision. And the… I'm in the chapter where Red is at a dead run trying to fix an unfixable problem.

[Erin] I think on that chill we will move to the homework for you. Which is to write a short note from one of your characters to another about something that's important to them. Then you're going… Make it short because you're going to have to do it a couple of times. Rewrite it as a text message. So you're going to change the format a little bit. How does that change the way that this note is happening? Then, right it is something that's going to be screened. Think about the ways somebody in prison might have their letter read by someone else who doesn't care about it before it gets to their intended target. So that changes a little bit of the context. Then, finally, right it as the final message they will ever get to send in their life. Which changes the stakes.

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

[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.11: A Close Reading on Voice -- An Overview and Why Time War

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-11-a-close-reading-on-voice-an-overview-and-why-time-war

Key Points: Voice in fiction. Voice, mechanical, aesthetic, and personal. Tools for voice on the page: pacing, accent, attitude, and experience. Pacing is cadence or rhythm, pauses, punctuation. Accent is word choice and sentence structure. Attitude is attitude. Experience is how the character views the world. Aiming to give you tools so that you say, "Oh, I can do that."

[Season 19, Episode 11]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice -- An Overview and Why We Chose Time War

[Mary Robinette] 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 Howard.

[DongWon] So, this episode is the first of our close reading series. I'm very excited to dig into this one. We've chosen for our first module here to focus on the aspect of voice in fiction. We thought what better book for that than Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar's This Is How You Lose The Time War. This was a novella that was published in 2015 that features two alternative voices from two different POVs and [garbled] as letters written between them. It won a bunch of awards. It's been very popular. I think the voice in this book is very distinct and very powerful and much of the charm of the book is in how these two different writers are approaching these characters and how the voice is carrying through.

[Howard] There's also the elephant in the room which is when I got this book out to reread it and showed it to my 22-year-old and told them, "I think you might like this book a lot," they said, "Yes. Bigolas Dickolas said the same thing."

[Ha]

[Howard] "I will get to it eventually." They will get to it eventually because I'm going to bring this copy back and shove it in front of them. Yes, this book got huge props… Was it 21, 22?

[DongWon] It was the… Oh my gosh… What, 23?

[Howard] I do not remember.

[DongWon] Summer 23.

[Mary Robinette] 23. Summer of 23.

[Howard] This is… I mean, we're recording this in fall of… Or in December of 23. So…

[DongWon] It was this summer.

[Howard] It was this year.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It won all of the awards when it came out, and then it was rediscovered by Bigolas Dickolas, and now is a phenomenon sweeping the globe.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] Part of the reason it's doing that is that the voice is so strong and so… It speaks to a lot of people. I think voice is the reason it does that.

[Mary Robinette] So, I want to just put something out, that is we're talking about voice, that the voice of this is one of the things that is so important. But voice is also one of those wiggly words that we use a lot. I find that it tends to mean 3 different things. There is the mechanical voice, which is, like, the style. First person, 3rd person, the mechanics of it. There is the aesthetic voice, what it sounds like. Then there's the personal voice, which is what the author brings to it. We are primarily going to be focusing on the aesthetic and mechanical voices when we're talking about this. In part because we don't know which parts which author wrote, so it's harder to pin down and say this is because of their life experience.

[DongWon] They have said who wrote which part.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, they have now?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] For a long time, they refused to.

[DongWon] Yeah. Oh, I'm pretty sure that's public. So I have the other elephant in the room is that I have a particularly inside perspective on this book, because the first 2 books we've chosen, I swear to God, I did not do this on purpose, I did not suggest these, are both books that I have worked on is a literary agent. So, Max and Amal are both my clients and I have worked on Time War since its inception. So I have a little bit of inside perspective and sometimes filtering out what is public and what is not is a trick for me.

[Howard] Drop the knowledge, DongWon.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] But I will very gladly give a few peeks behind the curtain when I can.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Double check them on that one.

[DongWon] I will.

[Mary Robinette] So, the… For me, one of the things that struck me immediately the first time I started reading this was that there was a poetic denseness to the language that you see less often in science fiction. It's… I can think of other examples, but the poetic denseness was one of the things that pulled me in, and also, slowed me down. Because I felt like I needed to savor the book as I was going through, that the language, the voice itself was as important as the plot. That it was inextricably tied together.

[Erin] Yeah. I think some of that is the form of the book itself. Because so much of it is epistolary, it's in letters, I think that there's a certain indulgence in some ways that, as readers, we give to a letter. We sort of assume that it will be like… That you're going to lean into maybe the poetry of things when you're writing a letter to another person and what… I think it was such a smart idea, because while in like non-letter prose, you might be like, oh, this is a lot, in a letter you're like, oh, no, this completely makes sense, because it's such an expression, such a personal expression, and therefore a way in which a voice can come out so cleanly and clearly.

[Mary Robinette] Interesting, because I actually have the opposite experience when reading, which is that the letters are the more straightforward prose than the 3rd person passages.

[Erin] Interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it interesting?

[Howard] An example. The piece… There are 2 pieces that hooked me on the first page. The first piece, 2nd line and beginning of the 3rd paragraph, "Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world. This was fun, she thinks."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. I'm on board.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm on board. Then, paragraph 4, this is where the prose gets dense and does a whole bunch of worldbuilding for us. "She holds a corpse that was once a man. Her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She let's go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronzed depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red." Okay. You've thrown a bunch of cool technical terms at me, and I'm like, "Oh, wow, future battlefield… Wait. Crude technology. Wait. What?"

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Now I have… That's the 2nd hook.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The first hook is, "[gasp] That was fun." The 2nd hook is how advanced is this? Please world build some more for me.

[Mary Robinette] Right. I think that that was part of what I'm thinking about… And we're going to dive into this way more in the next episode, when we're talking about… Like, we're going to do really close reading about Red's perspective, looking at these first pages. But, in general, one of the things that Amal and Max are trying to do in this book is describe this time war which is technology that we don't have and an understanding of time that we don't have. So they are using this metaphor poetic language to attempt to communicate something to us because we don't have the language for it. So that juxtaposition of those 2 things, of, like, this is a very highly technical thing I'm going to attempt to explain to you people who are locked into this single timeline… It makes things really juicy and lovely.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's one of the main reasons I wanted to pick this. I wanted to pick it both because I deeply love the voice of this book, I find it very affecting and very sort of pleasurable to engage with. But then, there are really almost 4 different voices in this book. Because you have the Red sections, you have the Blue sections, you have Red letters and Blue letters. Each of them has a distinctly different voice that is communicating different information and different worldbuilding as we go. So one of the reasons I wanted to examine this one is we get to sort of do that contrast between, okay, what's happening here versus what's happening here versus what's happening here. So it felt very useful as a teaching tool in addition to one that is just, oh, they are executing this at a very high level and is delightful to engage with.

[Howard] Yeah. Let me circle back on that teaching tool briefly. You can pick up to similar books by different authors…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And compare voices and ask yourself, why do these sound different? Why do these feel different? Why do these work differently? That's valuable. Having that experience in one book where the same narrative, a singular narrative is being run in multiple voices is utterly invaluable. There's… I cannot think of a better teaching tool for voice then reading and rereading and analyzing your own experience as you pick up the book again and again than this book.

[Erin] While this book is… Has a very sort of unique style, it's also something that you can do in books with multiple POVs. So if you wanted to take what we're doing in this close reading and apply it somewhere else, you could take a book that has a lot of different points of view and think about how is the voice being done differently by the author from one character to the next.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is just an extreme case, which I think is what makes it so useful. Right? Of having such distinctly different voices, and it's such a voice-y book. What I mean by that is there just leaning so much into that voice as a forward component of it. Which, in part, they get away with because it's a shorter book. Right? It doesn't overstay its welcome. This might be more difficult to do at great length. But, given the compactness of the book and how quick the experience of reading it is, you can really push pretty hard on the voice lever. Which they've done in this case.

[Howard] I have a question that I'm going to pose after our break.

[DongWon] I want to talk to y'all about Scavengers Reign. Which is one of the best things I saw in 2023. It's an animated series on Max that tells the story of a group of survivors crash landed on an alien planet after their colony ship malfunctions mid journey. What makes the show wonderful is its incredible art style, but also its approach to how they portray alien life and how humans interact with it. It's really deeply interested in systems and ecologies, and tells a really beautiful story about how humans interact with their environment and with each other. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

[Howard] The big question is if you are but one author, but one mortal author…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Trying to write multiple voices, as you said, a novel with multiple POVs. Can you do it this well?

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, one thing I want to point out as we go into this close reading series is we're picking these as examples we hope are instructive. We're not saying you have to do what these authors are doing or replicate these. We're picking examples that are really pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this particular severe. So, this is pushing the boundaries of voice. When we get to Memory Called Empire, that is pushing the boundaries of what you can do with worldbuilding. When we get to Fifth Season, that's going to be pushing the boundaries of what you can do with structure. I do not recommend trying to replicate these things. We're showing you big examples so you can take lessons from them and learn from them.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you a couple of words that we're going to be using as we're going through. As you probably know, I am an audiobook narrator, and when I'm trying to learn how to do character voice, when I'm teaching it, there's a couple of tools that we use that are very useful for doing voice on the page. So, pacing, accent, attitude, and what I call experience. So, pacing is kind of the cadence, the rhythm of the voice. Where they pause, whether they're doing long sentences or short sentences. Where they put the punctuation. That's something that you manipulate really by punctuation. It's replicating the way we pause in speech. Accent is all about word choice and sentence structure. It's not about pronunciation, which is what a lot of people focus on. So you'll hear us talking about the word choice and sentence structures that are specific to each character. Then, attitude is exactly what it sounds like. When you're talking to someone on the phone, and I know that a lot of people never do that anymore, but you can tell… Well, when you're listening to us, you can tell if we're smiling or not smiling. Mechanically, that's because the shape of our facial mask changes. But really it's that our attitude is driving the way that everything happens. On the page, you're manipulating that with word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation. Then, experience is about what… How the character views the world. So, specifically, when you're hearing us talk about Red and Blue, you're going to hear us talking about the use of botanical metaphors versus the use of mechanical metaphors, depending on which character we're talking about. That comes from their experience. So those are a couple of levers that you can push very consciously without having to, like, have this extensive acting career or, in Amal's case, Amal is a poet and is using a lot of additional tools. But these are 4 things that I find very useful.

[Howard] In… Oh, gosh, this would have been 40 years ago. I was reading the liner notes… Liner notes? Must have been, on a Billie Joel album. Billie Joel talked about getting his start. He said, "I listen to things on the radio and I told myself I can do that." That… I wanted to be a rock star for years. Then I got into cartooning and into writing because I looked at things and said I can do that. I look at Time War and think I can't do that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you are feeling the same thing, I just wanted to express some camaraderie, a little bit of commiseration, and a little bit of hopefulness, which is that as we go through these, we want to give you the tools so that on your 3rd or 4th reread of one of these close reads, you begin to tell yourself, "Oh. Oh, I can do that."

[Mary Robinette] It doesn't even have to be doing that entire… Like, you can't write Time War because that's where the personal voice comes in. Their own experience, the thing that drives them. But you can use the tools that they're using in Time War. That's the piece that we're hoping that you're going to get out of these really close readings, that here's this tool that you can use and apply to your own personal voice and your own experience, that that will come out on the page.

[DongWon] Well, one thing to keep in mind is also that this is 2 people. Right? This is a collaborative process. They're bringing double the firepower to this project, and anybody who's read Amal and Max's work individually knows that those are already some pretty heavy guns that they've got. So, there's something special that can happen in a collaboration where the sum is even greater than the individual parts. It's very hard to get to. I don't love a collaboration project, actually. It's one of the grand ironies of this book, is I tend to be fairly opposed to them because they're so difficult to do well. But in this case, those 2 came together in a way that their voices really braided together in this really powerful way that leads to the reading experience that we have in front of you.

[Mary Robinette] So, Erin, you tend to do fairly voice-y fiction also when you're writing. What are the things that you think about when you're looking at Time War in kind of relation to the way you approach your own work?

[Erin] I think, I like the way that you broke down sort of the different stuff, pacing… I'm going to forget them all now.

[Mary Robinette] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience.

[Erin] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience. I really wanted that to be like something I could say, like PAAE. That's not really…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

[Erin] It's okay. But I think that pacing, especially… Like, I love to look at the way in which other folks use punctuation. Because, like, really as writers, I find us to be a controlling lot.

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? We don't just want you to read it, we want you to read it how we would read it in our own homes. So thinking about, I wonder if this… If the way I'm reading this is the experience that they intended me to have. Why is… In the thing that Howard read earlier, okay, there are some shorter bits in there. There are things that are 2 word sentences. Why is this. Here, why not a dash? Why was this not a semicolon? Oh, it's because I need to stop all the way here. I like to really think about that because when I'm doing it, I know the effect that I'm going for. What I like to try to do is listen to somebody else and wonder about the effect that they are going for. It's sort of like the listening to the song on the radio and going I think this song is meant to make me sad. Why and how? Because if I'm writing a song that wants to make somebody sad, I should think about if I understand how they did it, then I can understand the way that maybe I could do it better.

[Mary Robinette] My… One of the arguments that I will occasionally have with copy editors who will never see the argument back, like, the book is never returned to the copy editor with my No!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I'll have things that are phrased like a question, but I do not have a question mark, because they are not said with a rising tone. Like, "What did you say." Like, what did you say… Like, there's a falling tone there. If you put a question mark, it's a very different, "What did you say?" That kind of thing. I see early career writers, and I know I did it myself, get hung up on the grammar and having something grammatically correct is not what you're trying to do when you write. Grammar is there for when you need to express clarity in some way. But most of the time, what you're looking for is just do these rhythms flow?

[Howard] I look at grammar as the rule set that we play by when things are complicated and we need to make sure that everything is working well. Breaking those rules is what we do when we need a new rule in order to communicate something different. So we will deliberately throw down a word like mis-underestimate which isn't a word, but which we can kind of tell what it means and away we go. The copy editor will say, "Hey, this isn't a word," and you say, "But it's my word for this book."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] One way to think about voice is that voice is about clarity for the reader. It's about clarifying the reader's experience of all the information you're trying to give them. Right? Because it is the vessel with which that's handed over. So, sometimes, the way you achieve that clarity is by breaking grammatical rules, by using a very complicated language, or inventing your own word sometimes. Because what you're trying to do is communicate what the emotional experience that you want the reader to have is. Right? So voice is your first interface with them. It's the first… It's why we're doing this as our first module, is voice is the first and the last thing that you will encounter while reading a book.

[Erin] Yeah. I also think… Something else that just occurred to me, a bit of a side note, is that the other thing that I really like to look at is that… Is… Once you create voice and people understand what that voice is, you have to keep doing the work, but in some ways, you've already established who this person is. The way that they talk, the way that they think, and it actually helps to put their voice in the mind of your reader.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, one of my favorite English sentences is, "I didn't say you got to keep the money." Because you can put the emphasis on every single word in that, like, I didn't say you got to keep the money. I didn't… Like, it's a different… It's a slightly different meaning. If you have the voice of the character established, they will emphasize, hopefully, the word that you would emphasize when you were writing it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is very similar to what happens in audio fiction. There are character voices that I cannot sustain for an entire thing. Like the [low shack] Luidaeg in the October Daye books. I'm talking like this. I can't do that for an entire page. So I hid it really hard at the beginning, and then I back off and use it for emphasis where I want to drive home this is the [low shack] Luidaeg speaking. I find the same with… When I'm writing, that I will use those embellishments, the… Sometimes it's just as simple as italics, but sometimes it's like the flourishing words at places where I want to remove ambiguity about who's speaking or what they mean or places where I want to add emphasis. It's like, no, this is seriously this person.

[DongWon] Well, one last thing I wanted to point out here is another reason I think this is a great book to use is so much of the character development and plot development is communicated through alterations in voice. The voice evolves over the course of the book, and as it does, we grow with the writer. Or the characters, and our understanding of the world that they live in also evolves. Right? So we get to sort of see how you can use voice as an active tool in your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think people think about it as kind of a passive set thing. Right? In the first paragraph, you set your voice, and then it's the same throughout. That, ideally, is not true. It grows and changes with you. I think this again is a pretty radical example of how you do that.

[Howard] Before we jump to our homework… Isn't that what we're getting ready to do next? Before… I would like to send us home with a passage that I think fits beautifully. "I am glad to know you love reading. Perhaps you should next write from a library. There's so much I want to recommend."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's perfect.

[DongWon] That is perfect. On that note, I have our homework for you this week. So. What I would like you to do is to take a sentence from a work you love that has a strong and clear voice. So think about what are some voice-y pieces that you've read that you really enjoy. Take that sentence and write a scene based on that as a prompt in the same tone and voice as the original. So, I'm not trying to get you to replicate the original scene, but take that… Take what you love about why it sounds the way it does, and try and extend that into your own fiction and make that voice a little bit your own.

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

[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk with your fellow writers.

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 18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-49-giving-your-story-a-voice

Key points: Voice? Mechanical, aesthetic, and personal voice. Mechanical, 1st person, 3rd person, YA, genre? Aesthetic, what does it sound like, rhythms? Personal, idiosyncrasies. The telegraph operator's fist. Develop your personal voice, learn to trust your own taste. What makes one voice sound different? Pacing, sentence structure and punctuation. Accent, sentence structure and word choice. Attitude? Are you smiling, mad, or what? Character background. Accents? Go to original sources. Get an author/editor from that community to translate into dialect. Be wary of dialects. Remember that voice is not static. A hack - re-key a page of an author with a strong aesthetic voice before writing your own story to get their rhythm. Soundtracks may also help you get the right feel.

[Season 18, Episode 49]

[DongWon] Hello writers. Whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, editing your newest project, or just desperately trying to keep up with your TBR pile, it's hard to find the time to plan and cook healthy and nutritious meals to keep you energized on these jam-packed days. So, I'm here to tell you about Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. They can help you fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with one less excuse to keep you from writing. This November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-packed deliveries right to your door. Ready in just two minutes, no prep and no mess. 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 18, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Giving Your Story a Voice.

[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 Howard.

[Erin] And we're back to the deep dives. We hope you had an amazing NaNoWriMo, that you one, if you even wrote one word, you're a writer in my eyes. But…

[Mary Robinette] Same.

[Erin] I hope you had a great, great time. Now we're going to come back. I think this is actually a really great time to come back to the deep dives, because we're going to be talking a little more about sort of craft on the page level. Before we left, we were talking big worldbuilding things. Now we're going to be getting into the nitty-gritty, starting with voice. The reason I picked this topic is because I have been accused, in addition to being accused of writing horror…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I have also been accused of writing voice-y stories. Which I actually do agree with. And that the stories that I write have sort of strong character voices driving them. So I wanted to talk about what voice even means. I feel like it's one of these words that gets thrown around a lot, and, like, people say it and everyone nods, and then you go away and you're like, "Did I mean what they meant?" So I'm kind of curious, when we talk about a voice on the page, what does that mean to you all? Like, what is that… What is the absence of that?

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… I, likewise, have strong feelings about voice…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And the fact that we use it so indiscriminately. But I think that we use it to mean three different things. Surprising no one, I'm going to use puppetry as an example. So, I think that voice means… That there are three things that we're talking about, the mechanical voice, the aesthetic voice, and the personal voice. So when you think about puppetry, mechanical… You say, what is the style of puppet, mechanical style is, is it a marionette, is it a hand puppet, what is it? With voice on the page, is it first-person, is it third person, are you writing for YA, like, what are the mechanics of that voice? The aesthetic is what does it… What does the puppet look like? Does it look like a Muppet, like a handcarved puppet from Appalachia? Voice on the page is what does it sound like? What are the rhythms of the voice, what are the… Does it sound like Jane Austen, does it sound like someone from the Bayou, does it sound transparent? Which basically just is a… Means fashionable. Because Jane Austen was writing transparent prose in her day, and the people writing transparent prose these days are people who are…

[DongWon] Just means mainstream.

[Mary Robinette] Mainstream. Yeah. Then you have the personal voice, which is the thing that you… Idiosyncrasies that you yourself bring to it. So when you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. Like when with Kermit the frog, when Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over, people freaked out. Because Kermit just looked like a different character. So I think what happens with when we're talking to writers, is that that all of the personal experience that you've got, all of your taste, is going to affect the way you're writing. What I see happen to a lot of early writers is that they fall in love with another writer and they try to match their aesthetic, not understanding that the aesthetic for that writer arises from their personal voice. So they will actually overwrite their own personal voice in trying to chase an aesthetic. Which isn't to say that you can't like do a pastiche that isn't… That also reflects your personal voice. But I think that you're not approaching them consciously to some degree, or if you're not aware of the differences, that it can be very easy to suppress what is important, why you yourself is the person who should be telling a story.

[Howard] Those first two, the mechanical and the aesthetic, are things that you can lean on craft and you can adjust. The third one is extremely difficult to adjust because that's the one that is the most embedded in who we are. In the age of telegraph and all through… All the way up through World War II, telegraph operators had what was called a fist. A recognizable… You could tell who the telegraph operator was just by the way they did the dots and dashes. That was something that code operators knew happened, and they would try to change it so that they couldn't be identified. They very rarely succeeded. I bring this up just because if someone tells you, "Oh, I can hear your voice," and you're uncomfortable with this… Get comfortable with it, because your voice is important, and changing it is hard.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think Howard's kind of hitting on something really important there. Which is… People ask me all the time what am I looking for in a project, what do I look for… When do I get excited about a submission, a query, whatever it is? For me, the thing I always say is I need to be able to read the thing that you're working on and see you in this. I want to know who the writer is. I want to feel like you are the only person who could tell this story in this way in this moment in time. That's not true for everybody. That is a very personal thing that I get most excited about. But I think Howard is absolutely right, that the first two things that Mary Robinette was laying out are craft things that you can adjust. Right? You can adjust sort of the mechanical thing to fit your audience. Right? Are you writing YA? Are you writing a mystery? Are you writing a thriller? These will require different kinds of beats and pacing and sentence structures, and also, the aesthetic voice is very much a personal thing, but you can shift that too. You can shift to certain dialects from story to story to story. You're often going to want to move that a little bit to match the setting, the type of story, whatever it is. The last one is the most interesting to me, and is the most [garbled setting] to me, because I think Howard's right that you can't change it. So what you need to do is change everything around it to reveal it in ways that are exciting to the reader. You… Bringing out what is important to you, what your point of view is, what your perspective is, into the fiction is the thing that almost, like, you're choosing how to reveal it and how to make it felt in the fiction. You're not trying to change who you are, you're trying to let me know who you are in a way that makes it legible to me and exciting to me and engaging to me, the reader.

[Erin] The funny thing is that I agree, but I disagree.

[Laughter]

[Erin] The reason that I slightly disagree is, for me, those last two things, the aesthetic voice and the personal voice, are a bit of a slider.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, when I write, I actually try very hard to get deep into the character voice, and you have less of a personal voice in the story, if that makes any sense. There are things that are… I think of them as like tells in a certain way, which are, like, I tend to like compound… Longer compound sentences, I love the word just which I probably shouldn't love as much as I do. But, that part of recognizing a story that's by me is in the subsuming of voice, of my voice inside the voice of the character.

[DongWon] But I think that's aesthetic voice. Right? In terms of the personal voice, I read all three of those stories and I say, "These are Erin Robert's stories because they are interested in certain topics. They have a certain perspective. The world is rendered in certain ways." Right? The connection between Sour Milk Girls and Snake Season… Aesthetically, they could not be more different. Right? Like, they're coming from different settings, different voices, different styles, different moods. But I look at both of these and like, "Oh, these are stories about people trying to survive in a world that is set against them. These are stories about empathizing with people who would be monstrous in other ways." That feels like something that you yourself are interested in. I know that's not how we normally think about voice, but it's so subtle and so woven through the story, that to me, I don't know where else to put it. Right? It could be themes, in some ways, but it's not that cold. It is more… It really is just kind of this metaphor of the telegraphers like fist and tapping things out. It's almost… It's an uncontrolled, unconscious thing in some ways that kind of can't be erased. In a way that's exciting and you lean into it in ways that make me like, "This is dope. I love this."

[Howard] Circling back to the I have been accused of being a horror writer, or accused of writing things that have…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… If it's good art, and you're accusing me of something, I want to be found guilty.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I want to be demonstrably guilty of this. If my voice is something that is unique and has value, but people tell me they can hear it in multiple stories, I need to be okay with that.

[Mary Robinette] This is the thing for me about the personal voice. You'll hear people say, "You need to develop your voice," or, "Don't worry about your voice, it will develop on its own," or whatever. I think that you do need to develop your personal voice. But what that means is learning to trust your own taste. That, for me, is that slider that you're talking about, Erin, is that you have learned to trust your own personal taste. So your personal voice then affects the aesthetics of everything that you choose.

[DongWon] I will also say your personal voice does change over time.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[DongWon] It's not a fixed point. As you read things, as you write things, as you live in the world, you change as a person, and that can be felt in your fiction too, in ways that I think are exciting. That's why I love watching a career develop. I love reading through an author's career, like, what were they writing when they were starting out, what were they writing later. William Gibson's one of my favorite writers, but William Gibson writing Neuromancer versus William Gibson writing the Millennium trilogy versus writing the Jackpot series, just three wildly different people. I can see the thread of that person growing over time, but it has been so thrilling to watch his thought and perspectives develop over the decades. When you get to see that in a writer, I think that's tremendously exciting.

[Erin] Yeah. Agreed.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] We are about to take a break. When we come back, I want to dive a little bit into the aesthetic voice, and actually how do you make stories sound different and bring the character to life through voice. We'll be right back.

[Mary Robinette] I have another short story. This is Exhalation by Ted Chang. I was just completely captivated by this short story. It is one of those that is all aliens all the time. Where he really trusts the reader. He starts, and he does not explain what's going on. You have to put the pieces together as he goes, and it's deeply compelling. How it unfolds, the things that you learn about it, the many layers of worldbuilding that you get in this very, very tight space. Exhalation by Ted Chang.

[Erin] We are back, and we are still in our own voices.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But what makes our voices different from each other? I'm curious, like, what makes one voice… Not sort of the personal kind of… The fist voice, but, like, the voice of one character sound different from another. Mechanically.

[Mary Robinette] There's so many different things that can do that. It really depends on what you're looking at. But, there are 4 basic things. There's… This comes from me being an audiobook narrator. So, voice, for me, like, for you, comes really naturally, and I had to reverse engineer what I was doing. When I was being trained to do voice work, you've got pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch is how high or low, you cannot represent that on the page. Placement is where it resonates, again, can't really represent that on the page aside from reporting. But, accent, attitude, and pacing, you can. So, pacing is all about the sentence structure and punctuation. Punctuation exists on the page, as if for me as a narrator, to record the breaths and pauses. That's where… That includes paragraph breaks, that includes italics, all of that is to describe the non-pronunciation parts of language. Then you've got… So you've got pacing, you've got accent. Accent is about sentence structure and word choice. Like, coming from the south, when I'm talking to you all, I will say you all, when I'm talking to my parents, I'll say y'all. I'm often throwing an extra just like weird flourishes to the language that it doesn't need, like, instead of "I'm going to the grocery store," "I'm going to go on over to the grocery store." What the extra words are doing, I have no idea. So you don't… This is not to say that you need to like put phonetic representations on the page. But, you do think about the sentence structure and word choice. Then, attitude, when you're talking to someone on the phone, you can tell whether or not they're smiling. You get the email that you're like, "Oo, they are really mad." That changes the way we approach language. So you can think about these things and adjust them in a very mechanical way, or you can just think about trying to replicate something that you're hearing.

[Howard] On one level further up from that… Fair listener, you probably absent the total differences between my voice and Mary Robinette's voice, Mary Robinette will lean into puppetry metaphor. I will lean into audio engineering and music metaphor. Because we have different backgrounds. That is an aspect of character voice that you should delight in. Knowing a character's back story and knowing that the way they were raised, the career that they followed, the parents they had, the culture they had, will affect the way they narrate their point of view to the reader.

[Erin] One thing… Getting back to accent specifically, which is a really interesting one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How do you make it work, and especially, you may be thinking I'm writing a secondary world where accents are completely different than the way that we think about them. I did a lot of thinking about this for Wolfy Things, which has, I would say, a flavor of Appalachian English to it. But I actually went and did a bunch of reading, I listen to recordings of folktales being told by some folks in the mountains.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I tried to figure out, and I think this is something, Mary Robinette, you said before, the difference between sort of the essence of what they were doing and how they were expressing it. I was, like, I'm not going to attempt to write in a full accent and actually like do exactly the way that they would do it. But as I was listening, I started saying, what are some commonalities that I'm hearing in the way… What are words that people are using, like y'all and ain't. Our sentences shorter or longer? Where are people putting the emphasis? Then said, "Well, I can take that and put it in my story." That way, it's not like I'm trying to, like, it can feel like a mockery I think when you try to exactly copy someone's accent from a group that you don't belong to, because there are rules going on beneath the surface that are hard to understand.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Dialect is superhard and dangerous. Yes.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So, with dialect, one of the things… Yes, I'm 100% with you on this. I did a thing with Of Noble Family, where it was set in Antigua and I wanted to represent the dialect and also knew that there was no possible way I could get it. Because it's… I'm not from there, there's so many layers of that. So I wrote it with the rhythms that were natural to me, and then I hired an Antiguan author and editor to translate it into the dialect. She would periodically be like, "What is this?" I'm like, "Well, uhm…" I would have to translate my dialect back into standard English so that… It was this whole fascinating process because their… Dialects are so widely varied. I think that one of the things that people will do is they often have a media representation of dialect in their brain. So I think what you're talking about is like going to listen to primary sources. So important.

[DongWon] Yup. I mean, southern accents on TV, you'll get for different regions in the same town that apparently… That supposedly, no one's left in their whole life. You're like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] "I don't know. This is a lot…"

[Mary Robinette] Uhm, no. That is actually… That is a thing that absolutely happens.

[DongWon] It can, but…

[Mary Robinette] No. Okay, I know what you're talking about.

[DongWon] You know what I mean, though?

[Mary Robinette] Sorry. My favorite thing that will happen to me as a narrator is that I will narrate a book, set… I just narrated House of Good Bones by Ursula Vernon, set in North Carolina, which is where I grew up. The number of reviews that say they should have gotten a real Southerner…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because they have a very specific idea of what a southern accent is.

[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, this might be opening a little bit of a can of worms, so I don't want to go too deep on this. But one of the reasons, just to make it very explicit, that you need to be careful of dialects is that when you come from a lot of populations, sometimes it's southern populations, but, for me, coming from a family of immigrants, accent, language choice, all of these things are tools that are used against us in very explicit ways. Right? The pronunciation of my name, the way my parents talk, certain things are… I was trained to speak in a very specific way, to not have an accent, and all of these things because my parents believed that it was very important for us to be able to fit into American society. I have complicated feelings about that at this point, but I understand where they were coming from, because they felt it was very difficult for them to have a place in the world, to get ahead in business, or things like that, talking the way they did. So, when you are thinking about wanting to represent a community, a particular people, on a page, I think there's a natural instinct to be like, "Oh, well, they sound like that, they should look like that on the page." But when you're not from that community, you… There are subtleties and nuances that you will stumble into by accident that will end up being very hurtful to people from that community. So that's just things you need to be aware of when you're looking at dialect. So, going back to the list of things that Mary Robinette had in terms of, like, those aspects of voice, there's a lot of things you can do with cadence and pacing and rhythm that will give a gesture towards it. It can be a very subtle thing that will make things feel very different on the page without flipping into caricature, without being in that Mickey Rooney breakfast at Tiffany's space that you don't want to end up in.

[Erin] We definitely don't want to end up there…

[Laughter]

[Erin] In that space.

[DongWon] I see it more often than you would think.

[Mary Robinette] Well. No.

[Erin] What you were saying about sort of how language changes and how accent changes made me think also that one of the things that I think is really fun to do with voice is that voice is not static.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? As you move through the world, my favorite, like, way to think about this example is, like, your boss says something really annoying or your coworker, and you're like, "Okay. My gosh, this is so… That so-and-so…" You're upset and you're talking about it with your coworker, then you clear your throat and go, "Per my last email…"

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? As you translate the way you're really thinking into the way that is appropriate…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Supposedly, or appropriate for that situation…

[Howard] Code switching.

[Erin] Code switching. That kind of code switching happens all the time. I think one thing that's interesting is when characters speak out loud versus what they are thinking…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, the thought voice, like, the voice of the perspective is usually consistent, but then you might have them speak one way in one conversation, and a different way in another. That shows, like, how familiar they are with that person, their comfort level… There's so much that you can do in that, that's a really fun thing in playing with voice.

[DongWon] You can do a lot with voice, especially if you're writing in close third. I think people think, it's like, oh, if you're in first person all the time, then you can do this. But if you're in close third, you can switch your narration to mirror the internal dialect or the voice of that character a little bit more closely. I mean, I wouldn't be extreme about it, but you maybe just nudge it a little bit in a direction to be like, oh, this person's hanging out with their friends. They're code switching a bit more to be like this. They're in a professional environment or they are at their job, they're going to code switch a little bit in this direction. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You can push voice in like… You have all these little meters and dials with voice that you can do so much with that can be really exciting and really enrich your text. That, to me, is when I start to see, "Oh, this is an author who's very confident, who's in control of the text." There walking me through their story in a very, like, deliberate way that I love to see.

[Mary Robinette] One of… I'm going to give you a hack that you can use that I've used for a couple of different stories to get a different aesthetic voice into your rhythm. Which is to take someone who has a very strong aesthetic, like, I've done this with Austen, I've done this with Richard Kipling. I re-key in a text of the page before I start… Sorry, a page of their text before I start writing my own thing to get that rhythm into my head and hands.

[Erin] I think there's also… This is why some people will have soundtracks that they write to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] If there's a specific feel that you're going for, a specific rhythm, and you put on that song that, like, get you into the beat and the feel of it. I think that can be a great way to, like, remind yourself what the aesthetic is and what you're going for. I'll also say, like, voice is tricky. I've said this before…

[DongWon] It's hard.

[Erin] For me, because I tend to really try to live very deeply in the voice. It takes a long time. For me, a lot of it's writing a paragraph, reading it out loud, and just thinking something about this does not sound right.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Let me try again, until it gets… Like, the mood or the feel that I think I'm going for. But once, for me, I've captured that in one paragraph, then I can go ahead and like replicate it in the next. I can do it again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I actually think that, as we're talking about these specific tools, is a perfect time to go to the homework.

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that you're going to listen to someone's voice. This can be a person in a coffee shop, someone on a podcast, anywhere that you are captured by someone's voice. Then, write a scene from your current work in progress, rewrite it trying to approximate the essence of that voice.

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

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-28-writing-conversational-dialogue

Key points: Dialogue, conversations between people. Dialogue that doesn't sound like real people talk versus verbatim transcripts? Middle ground, that isn't accurate, but feels accurate. Writers convey to a human brain that a dialogue is happening. Every line of dialogue does two jobs, the authorial intention, why the author needs that line, and the character reason, which depends on who the character is talking to. Real life, um, or bantery fun? In real life, interruptions follow the actual word, but for punch, in writing you often interrupt at the word. Think of written dialogue as compressed talk, with the small talk stripped out. Pacing, accent, and attitude. Much of conversation is nonverbal. Pause points and body language. The rules in dialogue are much less rigid. Natural dialogue changes over time.

[Season 18, Episode 28]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Conversational Dialogue.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Today we want to talk about dialogue. How to do conversations between people. One of the things that will pull me out of a story faster than almost anything else are conversations, dialogue, that don't sound like real people actually talk. The problem is if you actually do write down exactly how real people talk, it is often unreadable and also just as bad. So there's a wierd middle ground that isn't really accurate, but feels accurate. We're going to magically somehow tell you how to find it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] By way of metaphor, in my audio engineering class, they explained... They sat us in front of a pair of speakers and played music, and the right answer to, "What are you hearing?" Is, "Oh, I'm hearing a pair of paper cones move back and forth powered by magnets." As audio engineers, we were taught we're creating the illusion of these things by using other tools. As writers, you are using patterns of dots, whether it's ink on the page or pixels on the screen or whatever, to convey to the human brain that a dialogue is taking place. It is a magic trick. At some level, you gotta lie.

[DongWon] Well, it's funny. We're kind of performing a version of that magic trick right now. I mean, this podcast is intended to be very conversational and it sounds conversational. But this is also not how the five of us sound when we're sitting around the dinner table and chatting. There's all this crosstalk, over talk, interrupted thoughts, pauses. Those are things that we, as podcasters, are working to [garbled]

[Howard] Wait, hang on. Is Dan allowed to have French fries?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] No.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But we're ignoring that for the moment. I mean, exactly, that kind of interruption. Right? Like in… We do that a little bit here and there, but I think we're very deliberate about it. Unlike me, at the dinner table, I'm a huge interrupter, as everyone here has realized.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think those are kind of things to think about is how are you going to manufacture the illusion of a flowing conversation, rather than replicating the absolute chaos that is a real conversation between friends.

[Dan] When we were talking this morning, and planning out exactly how we were going to do these episodes over breakfast, we were talking about this episode specifically, and I suggested one angle on it, and Mary Robinette suggested something else. Then we had a brief exchange that was mostly, "Uh... Ch... Oh..." Like, and we knew, because we've known each other for like 13 years, exactly what we meant.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] That's how we decided the topic for this was like 13 bizarre syllables in a row…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That come to us, made perfect sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the challenges when you're writing is that every line of dialogue is doing two jobs on the page. There's the authorial intention, the reason that you, the author, need that line to be there. Then there's the reason that the character is saying that. The reason the character is saying that is going to change depending on who the character is talking to. So it's like I could not have that multisyllabic partial utterance conversation that I had with Dan, with the majority of the listeners, because we don't have any of that shared context.

[Howard] It actually… It wasn't polysyllabic, it was multi-gruntle.

[Mary Robinette] Multi-gruntle. Thank you.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Our multi-gruntle modality is one that is very specific. So when I'm trying to create dialogue for characters, I think about two areas of intention. What am I trying to accomplish on the page, like, what scenic lift is this doing? Then, the other is, why is the character saying this? What is my character's goal? What's the [garbled]? Again, that shifts for me, depending on who they're talking to. So if I swap characters out in a scene, my dialogue has to shift as well.

[Erin] I think one of the interesting things about that is that sometimes your authorial intention can be to replicate conversation as best you can on the page. Sometimes it's more stylized. Any sort of dialogue can have a range from being almost completely fidelity to the way that we speak, with um's and pauses where you're trying to show that this feels like real life too, like, very bantery where it's completely… No one actually speaks like that, but there is a fun in it. I think about Dawson's Creek when it came out a zillion years ago, and no teenager talks the way that they do, but there was a fun in hearing teens use this like very complicated language that they wouldn't in real life. So, sometimes your intention is also in showing something with the dialogue style, in addition to the dialogue itself.

[DongWon] Or, I think about Deadwood a lot, with this… Where most of the characters spoke in a very vernacular way. Then you have Ian McShane playing Al Swearengen who talks in these elaborate Shakespearean just foul mouth paragraphs, where he'll just be talking and talking and talking. But it's one of the most delightful things to witness, and all of the other characters seem to understand him, even though I, as the audience, I'm like I barely figured out what he was trying to say there, but…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It was delightful. So you can use that to great effect to communicate things about character in ways that play with what is naturalistic. But how the other characters listen and respond to that, I think, can also be very powerful.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to talk about one mechanic, just to start us off. As an example of something that I see people doing on the page, and it was something that I would do, is that you want the character to interrupt some other character. In real life, when we're speaking, that interruption comes several words after the word that causes the character to want to interrupt. Most of the time on the page, you do the interruption right at that word. So if you want the dialogue to see more natural, then you go ahead and you let the character carry a couple of words past that interrupting thing. If you really want to put a punch underneath that word for some reason, then you would have them interrupt right at that time. So, like, if I were saying, "Uh, we're going to be going downstairs," and someone interrupted me on the page, and the downstairs was the thing that I wanted to underline, it might be, "We're going to go downstairs." "Downstairs! How dare you say downstairs!"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Whereas in real life, I might say, "We're going to go downstairs to…" "Downstairs! How dare…" And it doesn't play the same. So you can think about that. Like, why are you doing that interruption and how are you playing with it?

[Howard] I like to think of conversational dialogue, conversational moments in books, as a compression algorithm. My favorite compression algorithm is the GIF, or jif, or we're not going to have that argument, where you pick key colors and you say this color for this many pixels, this color for this many pixels. When I had a breakup conversation with a girlfriend in high school, we talked for like three hours. When you read a breakup conversation in a romance novel, when you see one in a rom-com, it is not three hours. What got compressed? What were the key colors? How many pixels did they run for until the reader knew that that was the color that they needed. I don't know what the right compression algorithm is for everything, but I know that it has to be compressed. Because real conversations take a lot longer than they take in books.

[DongWon] There's the way that nobody says goodbye on the phone in a movie unless someone is about to die. Right? Like… Because otherwise, you don't need that note of we are concluding the conversation. All of the information has been communicated, we're moving on from here.

[Mary Robinette] This is, I think, as a side note, one of the reasons that so many people in fandom have difficulty with dialogue is because they have… In real life, is because they have learned it from film, television, and books where all of the small talk has been stripped out.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Intriguing]

[Howard] Also, so many things in romance and rom-com and drama, people will say such cruel things without any sort of warm up or even any sort of justification. Because, wow, that's the punchy bit. I'm sorry, people, don't learn to talk by what you see on TV. Because those people aren't being nice to each other.

[DongWon] Well, it's also dialogue in fiction is designed to communicate the emotional state of a character. Right? You are very rawly and directly trying to get what the character's actually feeling across to the other character, but really to the audience so they understand what's happening in this conversation. When I am in conversation with somebody about how I am feeling about something, it is rare that I am directly stating it. Right? I'm talking about effects, I'm talking about consequences, I'm talking about all kinds of other things that are ways to get them to understand what my experience is. But coming out and saying it directly is actually not a very effective way to get them to understand what it is that you're experiencing.

[Erin] I'm thinking back to that idea of the compression algorithm. One of the things I like to do when thinking about dialogue is trying to read more uncompressed speaking. Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright, her style of doing plays is to actually go interview people and then turn it into a one woman show. She does some compression, because otherwise it would be endless, but her technique is trying to remain fairly faithful to the way that people talk. Like, so… Listening to her do her shows, I'm like, "Well, that's pretty true to what a mildly compressed speech is. Now what do I want to look at?" A Marvel movie might have like super compressed bantery stuff. Then, trying to figure out where do I want to fall in between. Repetition is a great example. When I listen to her work or other things that are more uncompressed, we repeat ourselves. When you broke up with your girlfriend for three hours, I'm going to guess you said the same thing 18 different ways. That's some of the stuff that happens in real life, but on the page, it gets repetitive in a bad way. Because you're not in the same moment. So you want to use… You can use repetition to make things feel more real, because that's what happens. We forget where we were, and then we come back to what we were talking about.

[Dan] Well, this goes back into some of our previous conversations about format and about different types of writing. There are things you can do, for example, in a script that don't work on the page because of all the extra um's and so things that we kind of add-in that sound very natural to us, but reading them become very onerous. Let's pause now and come back later.

[Howard] I did not know how much I needed Cunk On Earth until I watched the first episode of Cunk On Earth. This is a comedy documentary, faux documentary of human history presented by Philomena Cunk, who is a character played by the actress whose name I've now forgotten.

[Dan] Diane Morgan.

[Howard] Diane Morgan. Diane Morgan so brilliantly stays in the voice of Philomena Cunk. That's where half the comedy comes from. Her uncertainty when interviewing people, her… The self-consciousness coupled with the absolute certainty that she's right. "Oh, my mate so-and-so shared this with me on YouTube. No, really, the moon is a lie. I'll send you… You just need to see the video." I love Cunk On Earth. 30 minute episodes, which is the perfect length for this kind of comedy. Available right now on Netflix. If you've ever wanted to learn lots and lots of things about human history mostly correctly while laughing, Cunk On Earth.

[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back in, I want to talk about a couple of tools to make your character voices distinct. Because when you've got two characters speaking to each other, in an ideal world, they sound like different people. Coming out of narrating audiobooks, there are five things that make a character voice, roughly speaking. Three of which can be replicated on the page. I'll tell you the other two, because it'll annoy you that you don't know them. They are pitch and placement. But the three that can replicate on the page are pacing, accent, and attitude. So, pacing is something that you control with punctuation. It is someone speaking with very long, fluid sentences, or somebody who's talking with lots of parentheticals. I mean, sometimes they talk with parentheticals, but sometimes they don't. Like, that kind of thing. Accent is about your sentence structure. It's not about replicating someone's like phonetic distinctions on the page, it's that the sentence structure is going to vary based on where they're from. When I'm talking to my parents in Tennessee, I will… My pronunciation doesn't change that much. But I'll do things like, "I'm going to go on over to the store." I'm like I don't know what all of those extra…

[Dan] Syllables.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Mono-gruntal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know what all of those extra prepositions are actually doing. On over to? Like, what are we doing there? But that is, rhythmically, that is… That's built-in part of the accent. Then, attitude is about your word choice. So the words that you pick when you're mad at someone are very different than the words that you pick when you aren't mad at them. It's kind of an all of the above scenario, too. Like, if you take, "What did you say?" And you're mad at somebody, it's like, "The actual did you say?" That changes…

[Erin] Yeah. I love that where people come from impacting the way that they speak. One of my favorite things is that there are many languages where at the end of sentences, you basically say, "Are you with me?" Some sort of phrase, like, yeah, got it. It's like different languages have different words that go at the very end, but it's basically like, "Are you still with me as I am speaking?" If you have someone who comes from a culture like that, or you've invented a culture like that, you might have more check in words at the end of sentences, because that's part of their way of speaking. That will come through. I think something that's really important and interesting to consider is that none of us just speak in a vacuum. Everyone is… One of my sort of pet peeves is everyone has culture including you. So, as opposed to thinking of changes in language as something that just other people do, it's why do you speak the way that you do? Then think about for your characters, why do they speak the way that they do, and what are they conveying about themselves that they may not even realize through the way that they speak?

[DongWon] Love that. One of the things that I've been thinking about in the course of this conversation, I actually don't have a great answer for, but so much of conversation is nonverbal. It's facial expression, it's gestures, it's eye contact, it's all of these things. I think one of the struggles that we've all had living our lives mostly mediated by Zoom these past several years is these tools got much more difficult to apply. So when you're doing just verbal dialogue… So, like, in Dark One: Forgotten, we're not getting character gestures, body language, eye placement, all of that. All we're getting is what are they actually saying. So what are some of the tips and tricks to communicate the things that would otherwise be communicated by like a tag that's like, "He sighed, he shifted, he…" Whatever that happens to be. He broke eye contact in some way. Like…

[Mary Robinette] So… The thing is that we've actually been doing nonverbal dialogue… Dialogue decoupled from body language since the invention of the telephone. So we know how to do that. We're familiar with those patterns. What I find is that when you're trying to replicate that on the page, you want to look for the natural pause points. Because anytime you put in body language, that's going to slow things down. So instead of saying he paused, then you would say he scratched his ear. What I find is that… Again, the body language is, as you say, part of the communication. So, he looked away… Well, what did he look at? What is that actually conveying? I'm very bad in my books. My characters do a lot of sighing. I have to go back in and do a search and find/replace to swap that out for other pieces of body language. Because it becomes in-specific.

[Dan] So, if you want a really great example of how important all of these kind of nonverbal cues can be, get on… Jump on YouTube and go look up what I'm going to call the mother F-r conversation from an early episode of The Wire.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Which is two characters who are doing what is essentially like a…

[Mary Robinette] It's a crime scene.

[Dan] Crime scene investigation…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Trying to figure out how a woman died, where the bullet is, all these things. The only word that they say, over the course of about five minutes, is not one we can say on this show. But because of their attitude, because of their vocal inflection, because of the way that they look at each other, you know exactly what they're saying and exactly what they mean. It is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. Flipside of that, another one of my very favorite shows is Justified. One of the things I love about that is how distinct the dialogue is. So, yes, of course, it's a show and so they're doing some visual cues. But, going back to what Mary Robinette was talking about, how do you make all of your characters sound different, watch an episode of Justified. Pay attention to, for example, the way that they threaten each other. Wynn Duffy is kind of an outsider, he's not really a Southerner, he doesn't have that kind of slow laconic way of talking that so many of them do. He's very clinical. At one point, he says, "If I see you again, I'm going to get a blow torch and make you as small as I possibly can." Which is just very direct and to the point. When Raylan Givens, who's the main character, wants to threaten somebody, he says in this very slow way, he… Actually, to Wynn Duffy, he pulls a bullet out of his gun, drops it on his chest, and says, "Next one's coming faster." Which is such a beautiful way of encapsulating his personality, the way he solves problems, his absolute economy of words, but in a way that's completely different than Wynn Duffy's.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about threats in particular is that they often say more about the character who is making the threat than the character who is receiving the threat. Because most of the time when people are making threats, their actually signaling this is something that I would find upsetting. They are not necessarily signaling this is something that would be a problem for you.

[Erin] Thinking back to what we were saying about the difference between, like, when you're putting something on the page and dialogue and when it's spoken, I was thinking that sometimes it's… Think about this sentence. I don't know about that. Right? So I'm thinking if I don't know about that and I am saying it in a conversation with people who can see me, I might sort of pause, think, and then say, "I don't know about that." On the page, you might say like, "She furrowed her eyebrows," or something much better than that, but in…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In a dialogue, I'd be like, "I… Don't know about that." That's what I would do on the phone. Because what I'm doing is taking that space where you would see me do the furloughing and putting it in a vocal… Like, I'm doing it vocally, because you can't see me. That's what you do on the phone. So, something that's really interesting is just pay attention to the things we do when we're talking on the phone and figure out is there a good place to put those in text. When do you lower your tone and whisper? When do you get louder, when do you extend vowels and when do you get more clipped in the way that you speak, maybe because you're upset.

[Howard] This circles back to what I think is kind of a 101 level, but we should all be reminded of it, writing and editing rule as it might be for dialogue, which is that the rules for grammar and punctuation and spelling and whatever else for dialogue are much less rigid than for other things. Because we don't put commas where they necessarily are supposed to go when we're speaking. Play with that. There've been a lot of times when I've had to step something from a copy editor because my grammar has been egregious and I have to go back in and say, "No, that was meant to be egregious," because of the way this is supposed to read. But in checking what the copy editor has written, I am like, "Let me make sure that that reads correctly. I didn't accidentally spell a bad word, did I? No. Okay. We're cool."

[DongWon] One other thing I want to point out is that what feels like naturalistic dialogue also follows trends and evolves over time. What was naturalistic in the 1950s was the screwball comedy, which is incredibly fast-paced, had a very specific accent, and cadence. Then we entered the 70s, where there was this very like naturalistic like thing is how people really talk. As audio changes, as technology changes, as our expectations change… Right now, we're in the era of mumble core movies, where it's almost impossible to tell what anybody's saying because of the way the sound is mixed in the way dialogue is written right now. You find that in prose, too. In text, how people talk in different eras, different genres. What feels like natural language, natural conversation, those shift depending on what you're trying to inflect. So I think what really we're circling around in so many ways is conversational dialogue, natural dialogue, is highly stylized. It is approached to great effect through a real character, through a real tone, through a real genre and category, in all these really powerful ways.

[Erin] I think I love that. I love that I think it's both what you're trying to inflect and also what you're trying to reflect. Because not all folks talk the same. So I think one thing that's really exciting is to not feel like you need to force yourself into the way that the dialogue that you're used to reading or use to seeing is, if that's not the story that you're trying to tell. I really love the way that like, an author like Susan Palumbo, who's a short story writer, uses dialogue in a different way. She's from the Caribbean, and, like, there's a different style of writing that she's doing that is amazing and completely natural. But just natural to a different storytelling ethos than the one that we're use to, specifically, in the United States.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you some homework this week. What I want you to do, and it's a very simple exercise. I want you to take dialogue that you've already written and delete every third line. This is going to give these gaps in the conversation, that you are going to have to then bridge with the body language that you use and having the other characters make the deductive jump that we would make in natural conversation. It's not going to be a perfect thing that you need to do with everything that you write. But it's an exercise in making deliberate choices for what you're doing in your dialogue. Try deleting every third line of dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we discuss the different sounds of collaboration, and learn about two of our hosts experiences building worlds with Brandon Sanderson. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-25-to-narrator-or-not-to-narrator

Key Points: Different audio formats use narrators differently. Narrator, telling, and no narrator, showing, changes the pacing. Immersion versus distance! Create space for the audience to imagine. Keep in mind what you can let the audience imagine, and what you need to specify to fit your story. Do think about narrator or not as craft, but also as a business decision.

[Season 18, Episode 25]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] To Narrator or Not to Narrator.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We're going to talk about narrators today. We had a moment in the last episode where I said that Forgotten doesn't have a narrator, and Mary Robinette said yes it does. We're going to talk a little bit about that difference. There are a lot of audio things, as audio becomes a much bigger part of the market, people are starting to play with the form a little, we're starting to see full cast audio a lot more than we used to, we're starting to see a lot of different things. So there are full audio dramas, radio dramas, and then there are dramatized audiobooks, and they use narrators differently.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So when you're thinking about an audiobook, an audiobook is something that was written for prose, for print, not necessarily prose but written for print, and then is read aloud. A dramatized book is something that, or a full cast… Let me step first… The full cast, where you have multiple voices, instead of a single narrator. Then you have dramatized audio which is usually full cast and then sound effects. Then you move over to radio plays, which come from the stage side into the audio realm. So in those cases, you are dispensing with all of the basic conventions that come out of novels, short stories, and you're starting with more stage and cinema conventions and moving I. There's some overlap in between. But those are… That's kind of your basic range.

[Dan] Yeah. These are not necessarily very clean-cut categories. There is a lot of play in between them. But, for example, if you go and listen to I Am Not a Serial Killer, that is a narrator reading the book. He will read everything, he will read the dialogue, he will read the narration. He will change his voice now and then when he's doing a different person's part. But it is one person reading it. Listen to Zero G, and it has full cast and sound effects, and it has a narrator to say the inner parts. To describe sometimes how the main character is feeling, what a location looks like. Which is similar to that audiobook, but changed a little bit. Then, something like Dark One: Forgotten, there is nobody just saying inner thoughts out loud, there is nobody describing the setting. It is all right there on the page, much more like a classic script would be for radio or TV.

[Erin] What's interesting with Dark One: Forgotten, though, is that because it is in the style of a podcast, the narrator… Like, the characters in the world are directly addressing the audience. There's a part where it's like, "Oh, I'm not going to put this part in," or "Let me let you know what I'm going to do right here," or "I'm interviewing this person," where there letting you know what's happening from moment to moment, almost like a narrator, but within the world. Which I find like a really interesting way of like mashing things up. One of the things that I do for Zombies Run is I've both written the script part where they're just like, "Runner! You need to go over here. Somebody's attacking you. A zombie's behind you." Which is, there's no narrator really, they're just talking to you like you're somebody that they're talking to over a headset. But I also write in-world radio for Zombies Run, where somebody is actually doing a radio show within the world, and similarly, they are addressing the audience, but it is a fake audience that we've fictionalized for the sake of the Zombies Run universe. It's fun. Each one is a slightly different technique.

[Dan] Yeah. That's so cool. So, one of the questions that I want to get to in this episode, and I'll just throw it at you, Erin, is what do those different styles do for you? Why would you choose one over the other, aside from the constraints of the medium that you're working in? When does having a narrator really help you, and when do you prefer to dispense with the narrator altogether?

[Erin] I can't remember if we said this in a podcast or just while talking, but at some point we were talking about showing versus telling and how that changes the pace. When you have a narrator, it's a more telling media. You're being told what's going on. So it is a little bit slightly different paced than when you're… Let me rephrase. When you're… When you have a narrator, it makes you feel, I think, more like you're listening to a story. So it feels like you're around a fireside, and, weirdly, unlike in prose, that actually slows down the pace, I believe. It feels like, okay, we're just gathered around and I'm going to tell you what I am doing. When you don't have a narrator, you're within the story yourself. You feel like you are a part of the story, I think, more. For that reason, it feels faster paced in the tension is higher.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think of it as immersion versus distance. So the more present a narrator is, usually the more distant you are, because you have someone who is describing the things to you, but you are not participating in the scene. Whereas when the action is happening around you, you are in fact participating in the scene, because you are at least directly hearing what is happening. So you are a direct witness in that case. So, in puppet theater, we use show, don't tell, for very different reasons, because you are literally doing a puppet show, not a puppet tell. There, what I'm thinking about, is that immersion. It's like, the example that I use is I could say, "There's a clock on the wall." Or, I could have someone say, "Oh, looks like it's 9:05 now." One of them has you deeper into the world. So, for me, I think about it in terms of immersion versus distance on whether or not I'm going to use an active narrator. The other thing is that sometimes that narrator is the most efficient way to change a scene.

[Dan] Yes. I really like that way of thinking about it, the immersion versus distance. I found several times adapting Zero G from the prose that I wrote into more of a script format that there were so many times when I was describing how Zero felt or what he was looking at and I realized, "Oh, I'm gonna have someone reading this. I can just make this dialogue instead." That happens so often. Really, that's what was going on. There were moments when it needed to be a narrator doing it, and there are moments when it felt so much better and so much more natural to have the character themselves say it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find when I'm writing for… Erin, I don't know if you find this too, but when I'm writing for… Knowing that there's going to be an actor on the other end, is that I can have my written dialogue be more ambiguous, because I can put a note to them and then trust them to do the thing. Like, having a character on the page say, "What!" Like, I can't do that without adding a lot of context around it, extreme numbers of punctuation marks, in order to get that "what!" As opposed to "what." Those are two different things. An actor, I can trust, usually, to do that. On the other hand, if there is a possible way to misinterpret a line, an actor will find it.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I think it was Margaret Dunlap, and I apologize if I've misremembered who it was. But she was telling me about a videogame that she had been writing dialogue for. For one particular dialogue tree, she had to come up with five or six options that were all different. Basically, she used the word what, then with some script notes to say, said in this tone of voice for all five.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Yeah. That was Margaret.

[Dan] That was Margaret. Which I thought was so brilliant.

[Howard] Got paid for writing the same words six times.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] Amazing.

[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to point out is that just from our episode title, to narrator or not to narrator, you may be thinking of white room stories, like They're Made of Meat is the classic example. Where there is no description, is just dialogue. We call it white room because you have no description of what's going on. All of your cues come from what is in the dialogue. If you take a white room story and move it into the audio realm, suddenly the fact that there are two different actors, two different voice actors doing the voices, gives you more information. If you add sound design in the background, the sound of a café or the sound of science-fiction space, which shouldn't make any noise, but for some reason always does, you can create something that makes it no longer white room, but the energy… And, for me, as a writer of comedic pithy tight dialogue, the energy remains there. You don't need the dialogue tags that you often have to resort to to say who's speaking. So I love what an audio drama affords you, which is the ability to do that fast banter and keep all those pieces there so that the energy doesn't get slowed down by a narrator explaining to you what they're doing.

[Erin] I will say, on the other hand, the challenges that physical description when you don't have a narrator means that you need to be sometimes coming up with reasons that, in dialogue, your characters will be saying where they are when they're both there and they know that they're there.

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? Right. We all know we're in this room, but like, wow, this chair's comfortable. It's a little bit more of those like location aware…

[DongWon] Isn't this coffee shop so nice?

[Erin] Dialogue lines. Exactly. Like, "This coffee shop? I never liked that one." Whatever it is. Like… I think that that's really fun to figure out how to make it work. It's like the same challenge people have with info dumping in that you want to make it seem like really natural to the scene that your writing without fully disrupting what's happening between the characters.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about that more when we come back from the break.

[Mary Robinette] Everyone, we want to introduce you to our new producer, Emma Reynolds, and Emma is going to tell you about our thing of the week.

[Emma] The thing of the week is the Earbug Podcast Collective which is a weekly newsletter that is sent out. It is coordinated by one of my friends and mentors in the audio serial area whose amazing. But it is curated by a different person each week. It's just a great way to get your hands-on, or I suppose your ears-on all of the different audio content that is out there for inspiration for you.

[Dan] All right. So, we're back. I want to talk more about this white room concept. In particular, I… One thing I said at the beginning of this year, because I've been doing so much audio and now getting back into more traditional novels, is that I had initially kind of fallen off the wagon and forgotten how to write scene descriptions. So the first draft of the actual Dark One novel that I turned in was basically people talking to each other as if they were in an audio drama.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No one was moving around doing actions, there was no description in between the lines of dialogue to break up what was happening. There was very little scenic description of where they were. That's because my brain had gotten so embedded into this audio space, where that kind of stuff wasn't a part of the script. That really kind of hit home for me the differences that arise when you start breaking these formats, when you start jumping from one to another. Because there are things you can do in one that work really well, but don't work at all when you do them in a different format.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with is… That comes out of audio drama, is using this idea that Erin was talking about before hand, of the interaction with the world to describe what is going on through dialogue. So, in The Spare Man, I don't describe actually that much of what Gimlet, the little dog, does. Frequently, the way I am keeping her alive in the scene is through dialogue. That she's… Like… When someone is having a conversation, it's like, "Is this dog allowed to have people food?" That tells you everything that's going on. But part of what that does for me is that it creates space for the audience. I think any time that you have the narrator they're describing things in a linear way, that removes some of the audience space to imagine the world. One of the things that I think is fun is thinking about deliberately creating that space for the audience. When you're coming back to prose or when you're in the audio realm, is thinking where do I want to allow and encourage the audience to do some lift for me, because that is going to make the story more immediate for them, because it's going to be… They're going to be active participants in this story.

[DongWon] I really love that idea. Sort of pairing that with what Erin was talking about in terms of show, don't tell, one of the things about balancing the showing and the telling is about trust. Right? When you make space for the audience, what you're also doing is saying I'm trusting you to fill that space. I'm trusting you to meet me over there. Right? So making sure that that on-ramp is very easy for them, it's a very easy path for them to follow to meet you where you are, I think is really important and one of the key skills in that. So you can have that little moment of here's what Gimlet is doing and that's filled in, backfilled by us when we hear that, and we then fill in what the dog has been doing for the last like 30 seconds. It's such a delightful way for you as the creator to take a moment and say, "I see you, audience, and you are participating in this story too, and this is a thing we collaborate on." I think that's a beautiful thing that audio drama can do in a way that prose fiction can do, but it's not as natural of a fit. So I love hearing ways that you pull that in.

[Howard] There's a technical tool… Technical? A way of thinking about the absence of the narrator that I find it really useful. In the Dark One: Forgotten, when she says, "I'm recording this in my dorm room." We don't get much of a description, really, any description of the dorm room. It's assumed that all of us have in our head a picture of a dorm room. If, at any point in that story, there'd been action in the dorm room where Sophie and… The name of the main character is…

[Dan] Christina.

[Howard] Christina. Where Sophie and Christina decide to go out the back door… I've never been in a dorm that had a backdoor. But if that's a piece of blocking that you're planning on having in your story, you have to do a little more than just the shorthand when you give us that description. You have to do just a little bit more lifting so that the blocking that happens later works. I describe this as a technical tool. It's something that you have to keep in mind so that you know which pieces you can just let the audience imagine on their own and which pieces you have to specify.

[Dan] Yeah. I think it's important that we kind of draw a line on this. The title of this episode is To Narrator or Not to Narrator. I don't want you to think that that is… That that is a decision that has to be made from project to project. It can be made scene to scene, or even sentence to sentence. There are times within a completely normal traditional novel where you might decide to pull that narrator way back and let dialogue or action do the lifting rather than having the narrator. There are times even in an audio thing where you might want to have a narrator step in and do more.

[DongWon] One thing I do want to bring up, though. If you are making the decision of do I want to do this as a traditional prose project or single voice narrated audiobook versus a full cast production, from the business side, there's an important decision that you will be making there, which is that the right situation is very different for an audiobook versus a full cast production. When you start getting into the full production, you are now walking into dramatization territory, which is what film and TV producers will want if they're going to adapt your work. So, one thing to keep in mind is if somebody shows up and says, "We want to do a full cast production." That's a totally exciting cool thing to do. Be intentional about what you're doing and realizing that if you give up those rights, that may interfere with your ability to do a film or TV adaptation down the line. Now, I know, in a lot of cases, it still works, just doing the thing because the thing that's in front of you and it's exciting. But it's one of the things I want to make sure is clear as were talking about this, that these are different from audiobooks, not just in craft and practice, but in a business sense, you're making a different choice by participating in that or not. There's some blurry space in there. If you have like two or three narrators, I don't remember exactly the distinction, but there's sort of three categories in there. So there's some difference.

[Mary Robinette] It's…

[DongWon] You probably know this better than I do, actually.

[Mary Robinette] One of the big demarkers is whether or not you have changed it from the original form. So, you can have a full cast with almost… I'm not sure if there's a cap on the number of char… Of narrators that can be in there, as long as you don't change any of the words.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Dan] With Zero G, they did full cast audio, but we retained film rights. I don't know exactly how Sarah worked that out, but we worked that out.

[DongWon] It is possible to do it.

[Mary Robinette] You just have to…

[Howard] As an aside, this is one of those cases, fair listener, where having an agent…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Is very helpful. Because they can look up these exact questions for you so you don't have to.

[Dan] Solve the problems for you.

[DongWon] This is kind of an edge case. Right? You can tell from the way I'm talking about it I don't have this immediately to mind as… This is not something I've dealt with a bunch. It's a thing I've dealt with once or twice. So there's a conversation to be had in these gray areas. There's blurriness, there's ways to negotiate it.

[Mary Robinette] It's true, actually, that my definition on that may also be linked to whether or not it is narration versus acting.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] As far as the union is concerned.

[Dan] Yeah. That's a good [garbled distinction?]

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] Too.

[DongWon] Right. Then the union starts to come in, that's a whole nother set of questions that need to be answered as you do it. So, anyways…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Here's a few things that the decision of narrator or not to narrator is a craft one. It is also a business one. Make sure you're talking to your publishing team if you have one. Make sure you're being intentional about the choices that you're making, as you go into those choices.

[Erin] It can also be an experimental one. Which is to say that you can also just see what happens if you take something that you've written just as a regular narrator full prose, and what would happen if you took the narrator out or tried it in an audio format, and see what you learn. Because one thing that I think you learn a lot about in audio is which details you're going to want to have your narrator or your characters mention. Because, there, I think, is a limit, especially in a more fully acted production, to how much people want to listen to a narrator before they're like, "Get back to the drama."

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So you learn like maybe this longer passage that I might be able to put on the page is going to come off much differently, like, when I'm listening to it, especially if it's not in audiobook format listening, but more of a full cast.

[Dan] Yeah. One of the elements that gives me fits when I'm trying to write these pure audio dramas, for example, with the Moon Breaker videogame, is fight scenes. Doing those in something that has no narrator gets so hard. You can actually go and listen to the Moon Breaker episodes and see me doing these kinds of experiments that Erin's talking about, saying, "Well, what happens if I just do a straight fight scene and say, okay, Foley guy, lots of laser noises for like 20 seconds and then the story will keep going." Then other episodes are much more intentional, like, I'm going to block this entire thing out so that I know exactly what's happening, and the only things that are going to happen in the fight scene are ones that I think we can depict with clarity with pure audio and no narration. It is very hard to make a fight scene intelligible without a narrator describing what is happening and no visuals to let you see it.

[Howard] I'm just reminded of the time when Mike Magnola on a panel said, "Oh, yeah. I really trust this artist. In one of the scripts I said hell boy fights an army of skeletons for six pages."

[Laughter] [Oh, boy. Wow.]

[Erin] I think this comes back to why I think narrator or not is such a cool tool, because I was thinking about this fight scene. I'm like, if you want your audience member to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm in the middle of the battle, I don't know what is happening, attacks are coming from everywhere, then having no narrator is great because you're in that feeling of, like, I'm just hearing swords and screaming and dying. But if you want them to actually be able to figure out who stabbed who with the whatchamacallit, then maybe you need the narrator, because the point is for them to understand it, not to sort of just be absorbed by it.

[Dan] Yeah. Those are… That can become a really valuable tool if you think of it in those ways. Like, what am I gonna use this lack of narrator to produce a specific effect, rather than just, oh, boy, I don't have a narrator. This is going to suck.

[DongWon] You use that to great effect in Dark One: Forgotten. Right? So, at the end, when she is captured by the serial killer, we don't exactly know what happens to her. We know that she experiences some stuff that's pretty bad, and she has to go to the hospital afterwards. It's unclear what he has done to her, what injuries she has sustained. I think letting my brain fill that in is more horrifying then if you'd described, oh, he hit her. She fell down the stairs. Whatever it is. Right? It becomes a very upsetting sequence of events that was very tense and difficult to listen to, in a good way. I think by me having to fill in those details…

[Mary Robinette] Making space for the audience.

[Dan] I am very glad that it had that effect on you. When I wrote that scene, this was back when I was still on Twitter, and I got on and said, "I just wrote a scene so brutal, Brandon Sanderson will regret ever collaborating with me." It… We had to tone it down a little, but… Yeah. That…

[DongWon] That's how it came through. I was like, "I am in a horror movie right now." You know what I mean? But that's the intended effect, I think. That's what you were trying to produce. Forcing me to produce all the worst horror movies I've ever seen in my brain, I think, was a great shortcut for you to get the effect that you wanted.

[Erin] Almost makes you complicit in the violence itself.

[DongWon] Yes. Thanks for making me feel worse about it.

[Giggles]

[Howard] I think that Dan Wells being complicit is a note to end on. Almost.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, now it's time for your homework. I want you to do something which is actually the way I started writing prose. I want you to take something that you've already written and I want you to adapt it for audio. When I started writing, I tried going straight to script and it was a disaster. So I started writing a short story, and then converting it into audio. Because I wanted to write audio. You, my friends, are going to take something you've already written. As Erin suggested, you're going to be stripping out narration, you're going to be figuring out what sound effects are. Try to convert it for audio.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we explore writing as an act of hospitality and reader agency. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-12-the-long-shadow-of-unanswered-questions/

Key Points: How do you postpone answering questions? First, we haven't gotten there yet. More specifically, you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer, but it's the wrong one. Or you have an answer, but there's more to uncover. Try-fail cycles! Yes-but, no-and! Plan your information arc, where are they gathering information, where is it revealed. Hide the real question! Cell phones and Google -- I don't know who to call, or I don't know how to ask the right question puts a speedbump in the way. Let the familiar become strange. Go ahead and tell us, and see what happens then. Give us some information that is satisfying and compelling, and build the trust that you will tell us about the other stuff later. Let another character ask the questions the reader wants to know. Use red herrings, things that seem connected but really aren't.

[Season 18, Episode 12]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] There are questions that we have that are unanswered. In our continuing exploration of tension, one of the favorite tricks for tension is questions that are unanswered. This can take a number of different forms. You classically see them in mysteries, but you also see them in romance, like, "Will they get together?" So, let's talk about some ways to avoid answering questions without it being super gimmicky.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have mentioned before my use of my small dog, or of my character's small dog to interrupt questions as… For people not on the video feed…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Erin's cat is also providing a running commentary.

[DongWon] Which has completely prevented us from answering questions about unanswered questions.

[Erin] Her main unanswered question is, "Why no treats? I don't understand."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I think it's worth pointing out that when you write a book, when you're reading a book, fundamentally, information is being hidden from you because you haven't gotten to the end of the book yet. Just the ordering of the material is such that I'm not hiding the answer, I'm getting to it. We're getting there, we're just not there yet. You don't have to… The moment someone in the story or on the screen or on the page has the answer to the unanswered question, that is not necessarily the moment at which that answer would be revealed to anybody. Because the story unfolds at a pace at which that hasn't happened yet. So, I mean, that's the easiest tool.

[Dan] So, to be a little more granular about that, some specific things you can do to kind of stall that answer is you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer that turns out to be the wrong one. Or you come up with an answer that doesn't actually solve the mystery, it doesn't answer the main question, it just spends you off in a new direction, and then suddenly you have together more evidence and answer different questions.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, I think for a mystery type story, this is really the heart of the try-fail cycle. Right? The thing you are trying to do is gain more information. The way you as the author withhold that is you have your characters fail at that or get misleading information or only a piece of it. Right? I mean, this is, going back to another of Mary Robinette's favorite tools, the yes-but, no-and, you can apply that to yes, you now know this one piece of information, but there's a complication because that leads you down to a dead end. Right? So you can think about it in terms of… I think we often give try-fail cycles around action in terms of trying to rescue someone or trying to fix something. But you can apply that to information gathering, because when you're in a mystery, fundamentally, your main tool is the information that's in front of you right now.

[Erin] Yeah. I think the… One of the things I like to think about a lot when I'm writing is information arc as an additional type of arc in a story. Like, you have your character arc, maybe your plot arc, but where is information being gathered, it's where is it being revealed to the reader, and then maybe separately to the characters, really planning that out. Because I think where unanswered questions become annoying to readers is when it feels like you just didn't… You forgot you raised the question, or you just didn't bother getting around to answering it, versus that it was something intentional that you're doing about the way you give out information.

[Dan] Another great thing that I've seen done before is just kind of hiding what the real question actually is. We've used romance several times, which is another great source of tension. The first season of Bridgerton does this brilliantly. In a romance, we often expect the main question to be will these characters fall in love? Yes, clearly, by like episode three, that's answered. But there's more going on. Will they get married? Yeah, like by episode five, I think, they're married. But there's more going on. Ultimately, we realize the actual question that that season is asking is, will they be happy together? Will they resolve their other issues and have a happy life together? Which is just taking it much further than what we initially thought we were asking.

[DongWon] That kind of brings me to what I think is the greatest failure state of how information is released to the audience in a novel. One of the those things is when it's not connected to character. Right? I think one of the best ways to sort of appease an audience when you give them bad information or if they're not getting the answer that they wanted is making sure you're getting more information about who the character is and you're tying that process of trying to get more information into something revealing about who the character is. I'm thinking of like the game Hades, which is a fantastic game. It's a [rogue?] Like, so you're just… It's designed so that you will fail and die. Every time you die, you're rewarded with a little bit more story, as you get to interact with all the characters of this world. So the loop is, we're punishing you for the fact that you've failed, which you're supposed to do, and rewarding you by giving you character. So if you think about like how satisfying the loop in Hades is, think about that in terms of your reader going through the try-fail cycles of your book. Make sure that your rewarding them with something, even as the characters themselves are failing.

[Mary Robinette] That brings me to a great point that when we're talking about these questions, the unanswered questions, there are unanswered questions that the character has and there are also unanswered questions that the reader has. If you want to… I find that when you're trying to emotionally link the reader and the character, but if you give them both the same unanswered questions that that puts the character… The reader on the character's path. But sometimes you'll have a situation where the character knows an answer… This is my traumatic piece of back story… And the reader doesn't know the answer. So that… The reader tension is what is the character's traumatic back story? The character obviously knows it. So that's like… That's a way that you can ratchet the tension up by withholding something from the reader as long as the reader doesn't feel overtly manipulated. The I'll think about that later. That you have to have a reason for them to not think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of reasons to not think about the rest of that and how are we going to do it, I'm going to pose a question, which is, how are we going to keep people from feeling like they're overtly manipulated when they didn't get the answer that they want, and we're going to answer that after our break. Our thing of the week is Ted Lasso. It is currently a two season series. There is supposed to be a third season. I am eagerly awaiting it. It… On the surface, this is nothing that I would like. It is a show about soccer. I love this show so deeply, because it is a show about what happens when you make the kinder choice, ultimately. Because of that, and because of the way they are handling tension and tropes. It's as if they said, "What's a common TV trope? We're going to set that up, then we're going to subvert it by having the character make the kind and understanding response to it." It is funny. It is heartwarming. I care about soccer in ways that I have never cared about them. It has some of the best secondary and tertiary characters of anything that I've ever seen. Highly recommended. Ted Lasso. All of the seasons. If you're only going to watch one thing, that one thing should be Ted Lasso. Except DongWon will arm wrestle me about some other things. But…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So I posed a question before we went to break. That question was how do you interrupt a question… How do you withhold the question from the reader…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And make them feel not overtly manipulated? That moment when someone's like…

[Howard] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] Here's a thing that everyone in the room knows, but the reader is not allowed to know it.

[Howard] 15 years ago or so, there was this up ending of the whole industry of writing and plotting things, because suddenly viewers, readers, listeners, whoever recognized that just about everybody had the sum of all human knowledge in the palms of their hands and could call just about anybody. So if there was a question that couldn't be answered by the people in the room, but they knew someone else had the answer, they would just call them. Screenwriters and writers of fiction and writers of everything had to find new ways to say, "Well, why wouldn't they just call them?" The first answer was terrible, and that's, "Oh, I've got no bars. I've got no signal." There are 10 minute YouTube videos of people in movies holding up their phones and having no signal, because the audience needed to be manipulated, because we needed to not have the answer right now. The right way to do it is illustrated in what happens when someone else's Google Fu is better than mine. I don't know how to ask the right question to get the answer from my phone. I don't know what the right question is. I don't know how to phrase this so I can find the answer. I don't know who to talk to who will have the answer, but maybe if I talk to somebody else, they can help me. That starts putting speedbumps in the… In between me and the answer to the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was one of the things that I had to do in the Spare Man was… It is set in 2075 or 2074, I can't remember. Anyway. My own book. Whatever. Point being, everybody is constantly interconnected. So I had to come up with a reason to turn that off. It was fun, in some ways, because I made it a punitive thing that was being withheld from them. Because they were being falsely accused of a crime, so they were not allowed to connect to the Internet. But that also then allowed me to make it a strong character thing, because it then became a thing that had to be fixed. Also, the frustrations that go with I'm used to being able to just send a ping to my husband, and now I can't. Like, one of the things that I enjoyed was her constantly trying to contact him and not being able to. The reflex of it.

[Erin] I also think that communication devices, just that specific thing, as like the reason you can't get the answer, can also be a way to ratchet up that tension in kind of a similar way that if you're used to something, something is familiar and it goes to becoming unfamiliar, that's always I think a great source of tension in horror. The familiar becomes strange. So if you pick up your phone to Google something and instead your phone is doing something very odd, or you get a picture of a dead body, or something else that's both distracting… So, like, throw something shiny the reader's way. To distract them, for one thing, but also with something you thought was going to happen. You had an anticipation of getting the answer, then that was yanked away from you. That can provide new information and new questions that then the reader will fixate on instead of the one that you didn't answer in that moment.

[DongWon] I'm going to come out with a little bit of a chaotic answer to this, which is if you are really struggling how to figure out the key… How to keep your audience from feeling manipulated by withholding information, try just telling them the thing. Right? I think so often I see writers going through these back loops and just like contorting themselves to withhold information where I'm like, "No no no no. Just tell us what's going on!" It'll be more interesting if we, or even if your characters, know exactly what's happening and they still have to solve this problem. Right? I think one of the week parts of a mystery is sometimes knowing what happened doesn't actually change anything. To spoil Glass Onion a little bit, it has an aspect of this, where, like, the resolution of the mystery still leaves a really big unanswered question of like, "Well, what do we do about this?" In a way that is truly fascinating. Right? So I think sometimes if you find yourself stuck, and your like grinding on this question, try writing it from the perspective of just give them the information. Let their phone connect to the Internet. Let that person call person C and be like, "Hey, the killer is so-and-so." Then what does person C do? It doesn't mean they're going to survive. Right? It could make a much more interesting scenario for you and kick your book in an exciting new direction.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, that often I find that when I just let my character tell the other person the thing, that what actually happens is it just… It opens new questions and they're significantly more interesting questions.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which allows me to keep ramping that tension up.

[DongWon] If you're stuck, you might be asking the wrong questions, is really what I'm saying.

[Dan] So I see this a lot with doing chapter critiques and stuff at conferences and classes. We will be sitting around in like a writing group environment. We've read chapter one of seven different people's things. Especially with fantasy and science fiction, a lot of the questions are, "Well, I don't understand this. I don't understand X or Y thing about your story." I have to remind them, you usually don't in chapter one. There's worldbuilding, you have to give us time to settle into it. But what I find fascinating is that I usually don't get that question when the chapter is providing us a ton of other fascinating information. If you are giving us something that is satisfying and compelling and makes us… It's scratching that itch to know stuff, then those other kind of unanswered questions don't seem as pressing. Because part of that is the distraction that Erin talked about, you throw some shiny at us, but a lot of it is just you're building trust with your reader. You're giving them information, so then I know that you're going to give me this other information if I am patient and wait for it.

[Howard] It's super useful to anticipate the question that a reader might have and to give that question to another one of the characters. If one of the characters does a thing, and you know the readers are going to be like, "Wow, why did they do that thing?" Let another character ask that question. "Why did you do that?" The person who did it said, "You know what? That's a long painful story and we're not going to have that conversation right now. Right now we're busy running." Now I have acknowledged to the reader that there is information you don't have yet, you know who has the information, you know who isn't giving you the information, and everybody in the story to this point is behaving in character.

[Mary Robinette] I will flag though that you do need to make sure though that it is actually a long painful complicated story.

[Howard] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Because the number of times I have seen someone say, "I'm not going to tell you that right now. We don't have time." And really, all they needed to say was like a five word sentence.

[Chuckles]

[yes]

[Mary Robinette] It's… Make sure that there is a legit reason. There was one other thing that I was going to say. What was that?

[Pause]

[DongWon] I guess we'll never know.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I guess I'm going to have to…

[Howard] I have to say none of us know and all of our cell phones work.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, I know what… There was actually a thing. Red… I do want to just briefly touch on how to construct a good red herring. Because red herrings are one of the ways that you can… Are linked to the unanswered question, because they are the question… The line of questioning that pulls your detective down the wrong dark alley. In Glass Onion, it's one of the most blatant red herrings in the history of ever is wandering around in a bathrobe for much of the film. But what you're looking for is something that appears related to the story, that you feel like everyone else should be able to draw connections to whatever it is, and ultimately ends up not being connected. I have a red herring going on in Spare Man. The way I constructed that one… And I will attempt to discuss it without spoilers for the people who haven't read the book yet… Is basically, I did it was that I gave one of the characters a secret so they were clearly hiding something, which is obviously to the reader going to be related to the murder. But it had… That secret had nothing to do with the murder. So that's a real simple way to give… To insert a red herring is to give someone a secret, that's just not the right secret. Which then leads to more unanswered questions.

[Mary Robinette] And… Your unanswered question right now is what is our homework assignment?

[Dan] Well, as tempting as it is to just never answer that question, I will tell you. I will spoil the homework. What we want you to do is take a look at whatever you're working on right now, your work in progress, something that you're writing or creating, and figure out what questions you are asking to the reader. Sometimes that might be an overt mystery question, how does this thing work, where did this body come from, who did the thing? Sometimes it's worldbuilding questions. You've proposed some kinds of things about the way a technology or a magic or a society works. Figure out what those questions are. Write them down. So that you can decide later when and how or if to answer them.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/10/17-28-keys-to-writing-dialog/

Key Points: Listen to how people speak. Learn to evoke that in writing. And make every character's voice distinct. Err and uh and the F-bomb. Cursing with a slingshot or a crew-served weapon? Culture, nationality, age, class, education, community, all define the character in a specific way. Pacing and attitude.

[Season 17, Episode 28]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog Masterclass, Episode One, Keys to Writing Dialog.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are very excited to have with us for this brand-new class Maurice Broaddus. You've recorded with us in the past. You were one of our instructors on our retreat. We are so happy to have you back. Maurice, tell our listeners about yourself.

[Maurice] Well, A, glad to be back. I like to say I have three jobs. I am the resident Afrofuturist at a community organization called the Khewprw Institute. I'm a science fiction and fantasy author. I have… Man, I have two books that just came out this year. Then I'm also a middle school teacher. So, keeping it busy.

[Dan] Man. No kidding. That is a lot of stuff. Well, we're going to talk about one of those books that just came out earlier this year later on as our book of the week. But for right now, let's jump into this class. The next eight episodes we're going to have Maurice teaching us about dialog. So this is where we're starting. Maurice, where do we start?

[Maurice] So, it's one of those things. So, dialog comes easily to some people. It's like a chore for other people. I definitely fell into the chore category when I was first starting out. So I was kind of thinking of like different ways that I could use to just improve my dialog writing. So for me it came down to like three different things. Like, pay attention to how people speak. Then when I'm writing, only evoke how people really speak. Then, after that, it's like how do I concentrate on making each character's voice distinct. So those are the ways I tend to come at dialog.

[Dan] That is really fascinating to me. What do you mean… What's the difference there between paying attention to how people speak, then only evoking how they speak?

[Maurice] Okay. So one of the most helpful exercises I've ever done, so pay attention, this may be homework for you all later on.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Is I was assigned… This was back in college, and I was assigned, hey, record a family dinner. So it was… Yeah, exactly. So I was in college and it was the assignment was record a family dinner and then transcribe it. Just to see what happens. So my family dinner… This like… This was… I was much younger person at the time, so I was still living at home. But it was me, my sister, my brother, my mother, my father. My mother's from Jamaica. My dad is from here in the States. I was born in London. There's a nine year age difference between me and my sister. So I'd never really thought about it before, but when I recorded that family conversation, and, believe me, people forget about the microphone five minutes in, because my mom went from trying to be all proper, blah blah blah, to "all right, so why are you guys throwing food at the dinner table?" That sort of thing. But it was really interesting to just sit there and then analyze that conversation, because all of a sudden, you can dissect people… Well, no, that sounded awful. But you get a feeling, for instance, oh, with my parents, there's different kinds of slang that's being used. Generationally, between my dad and then my sister. There's different word jargon that gets used because my mom is a nurse and I was in college. So there's… And I was a scientist at the time. So, now there's different sorts of jargon that's being used. Then who is driving the conversation? Because people interrupt, and different people drive the conversation. So it was just a fascinating exercise just to see the dynamics of just conversation. But that's different from evoking… Because I have another friend whose name's Gerald. He's a mechanic. Me and Gerald, we go back decades. We're in the same gaming group. But Gerald can't describe the weather without using the F-bomb. I mean, there is no sentence he can't work that into. I love how he speaks, though, because he's one of the cleverest people I know. But I love his use of language. But I can't use the way he actually speaks as dialog because that is a lot. So now it's like how do I evoke how Gerald speaks versus transcribing how Gerald speaks. Does that make sense?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That absolutely does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because one of the things also is that when you are having a conversation with someone in real life so much of it is also happening with nonverbal and with tone. And also there's all of the places where you're like, "Um. Err..." And the sentences are incomplete sentences. We can string it together when we're listening to the conversation in person because we're used to editing that out and adding in all of the nuances that are coming from things other than words. But when you put that stuff down on the page, people just sound incoherent. So you want to get that sense of… As you say, the evoking, the sense of the rhythm and background from the uh, err, uh.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I tried that once in a scene in a book. It was… I can't remember which, it was one of the John Cleaver books where I had just done jury duty.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my.

[Dan] One of the lawyers that was in the case, he said "Uh" between almost every word. It was crazy and all of the jurors were talking about it and how funny it was. So, later, I decided to try to put this into a book. It was the most miserable experience trying to read it. It was as accurate a reproduction of human dialog as I could produce, and it was abysmal to try to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, to be fair, when you put that much uh into uh your uh dialog, it's abysmal to listen to.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we're all talking about it.

[Howard] That's why it caught your attention.

[Mary Robinette] But you can evoke that by having the uh appear at significantly less frequently in dialog, and that will give the reader the sense. Like I will have occasionally my characters repeat a word. In… In the way that we do. Like that one was deliberate, but it is a thing that we do. So I'll occasionally have them do that to give a sense of someone who's like reaching for a word, trying to figure out what they're saying next. But I would never do it to the degree that I do it naturally in real life.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Maurice] The same thing with profanity. Because it's… Admittedly, I've been known to use the occasional curse word.

[Mary Robinette] What! You're kidding.

[Maurice] I know. Just in case any of my middle school students are listening to this. It's been known to happen. But in the case of like my friend Gerald, it's just like… Hey, one or two sprinkled in the in the course of a passage is one thing. One or two sprinkled in every clause…

[Giggles]

[Maurice] Is another.

[Dan] An entirely different experience.

[Mary Robinette] So it sounds like he's using the F-bomb as a uh.

[Maurice] Right. Well, as a uh, and a noun and a verb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled adjective]

[Howard] Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, exclamation, introjection.

[Mary Robinette] Very flexible word.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It is quite a flexible word.

[Howard] Quite the word. It's funny because I think of Maurice cursing… I think… I often think of curse words as weaponized language because sometimes that's what they're there for, they're there to sting somebody. When I curse, it's like a kid with a slingshot. I'm imagining Maurice cursing with that basso profundo…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That amazing baritone and that's a crew served weapon.

[Maurice] Right. Right. It'll stop a conversation.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of stopping a conversation…

[Dan] Speaking of stopping conversation…

[Maurice] Both of you. You're all in there on that one. All right, go.

[Dan] Let me stop this one and let's do our book of the week, which this week is your's, Maurice. Sweep of Stars. Tell us about that.

[Maurice] So, Sweep of Stars is book one in my Astra Black trilogy. It's my first foray into the space opera. It's about this intergalactic pan-African led community known as Muungano, and just their explorations in the universe. So we have Muungano proper that they're navigating, some of the internal political issues. We have a starship powered by jazz music exploring the universe. We have an elite military unit who is exploring on the other side of a wormhole. Then how all of these things are interconnected.

[Dan] Sounds fantastic. That is Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus available right now. Go and buy it with your hard-earned money and read it and love it.

[Dan] Now let me get back to one of the other things you said at the beginning. One of these key tricks or tools that you use you said is making sure that the different people have different types of dialog, that they sound different from each other.

[Maurice] Right.

[Dan] Which is, I find, also a tool that I use in something that I think is very important. To make sure that everyone sounds like a different person. How do you do that? What are some of the tools that you use to accomplish that?

[Maurice] So, this is where diagramming out that conversation was really helpful for me. Because I'm keying in on what makes each of us… Which sounds weird, but each of my family members as characters, what makes us work. Right? So my mother is from Jamaica and her patois increases or decreases… Decreases when she's in a casual setting, but increases when she's either excited or angry or surrounded by other relatives. Then all of a sudden, the patois thickens. But, also, the other quirk about her dialog is she can't cuss right. So she… Despite being here many decades, she can never get cussing right. Which is hysterical. Because then we try to provoke her to cuss at us, and just watch her butcher cussing. But, so, you have those things. Already we have culture, we have nationality, we have… Culture, nationality, and age all factoring in to help define her as a character.

[Mary Robinette] And class.

[Maurice] And class. Exactly. And class. Then… So you just apply those same things to each of the characters. How are they working in terms of their cultural origin, their level of education, their vocation, their age, their use of slang, all these different things, and the community they hang around with. Because people tend to conform to the community they're in in a lot of cases. Then when you take them out of that community… So, sometimes they sound like that community and then sometimes when you pull them out, oh, now, how do they sound? So it's all those little things which all boils down to defining those characters in a very specific way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'll talk about this more when we get… There's a point when we get to talking about the nuances of this, which… Like, just to add on to what Maurice is saying, I just want to hit very quickly that one of the things that he's talking about when he's talking about culture and nationality and class and age and all of that, all of that goes into making up what we think of as accent. It's very easy to think of accent is just this single flat thing that has to do with how you pronounce words. That's the least important part of accent. There's also the other thing… Two major things that affect the voice of the character are the pacing or rhythm of the character and also the attitude. So, like, you can have two Southerners from the same place, one of whom speaks very, very slowly, and one speaks with a clipped, rapid pace. Even though their accents are the same. Just because of their differences in personalities.

[Howard] One of the things that I've… I come back to this a lot when I'm looking at dialog. Back in the long, long ago times when I was dating, there was this terminology… There was this term for the conversation you have with your potential significant other, this person you've been dating. The term was DTR. It meant define the relationship. It's this conversation where the two of you are sitting down and talking about us. A DTR can run for hours. But in, for instance, a romance novel, you get a page and a half. How do you compress the enormous emotional romantic angry whatever explorations of a DTR in a page and a half? The answer is, well, you have to listen to a lot of dialog, you have to read a lot of dialog, and you have to learn a lot of shortcuts. You have to identify what the key moments are and you have to be willing to compress. It's kind of a lossy compression algorithm. But you gotta compress it.

[Dan] I find myself suddenly very curious as to what different patterns of speech you would find if somebody did that analysis Maurice is talking about with one of our episodes. That would be fun.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Although, again, that would also be interesting just because this is not a standard conversation. We are performing. We are teaching. There's the way we speak now is gonna be different than the way we would speak in a non-podcast scenario. But that is…

[Mary Robinette] Forsooth, what are you saying? Verily.

[Laughter]

[Dan] This is going to be our homework. Maurice, you want to send them home with some homework this week?

[Maurice] Yeah. So… I love the idea of people just taking some time and just recording a conversation… With everybody's permission, let's get that out… Make sure everybody's aware that there's a recording in progress. But, yeah, record a conversation, you and your friends, you and your family, whatever. 15 minutes of conversation. Then go through and either transcribe it or just listen to it with the ear of, ooh, how did we sound as characters? How would this work as a dialog exchange?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to ask people to actually transcribe it, because I am going to ask you to use that transcription later in this series for a piece of homework assignment. For those of you for whom transcription is difficult, for… There's a software out there called Descript which will transcribe things for you. But if you are able to transcribe it yourself, I encourage you to do that, because it causes you to pay attention to the way the dialog happens in different ways.

[Dan] Sounds great. So there's your homework and there's a little sneak preview of what will be happening later on in this series. Join us next week, we're going to talk more and more and dig into some nitty-gritty details on dialogue. So. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/20/17-12-structuring-a-story-within-a-story/

Key points: The story within a story structure can give a mythical or mystical feeling. It also engages the reader in discovering the link between the two. Often it adds essential information or explanations. You can also use story within a story to illuminate the theme. Smaller narratives can make the story feel richer. It's especially useful for twists and reveals. Is it one frame around a single story in the middle, or is it a photo collage frame with lots of little stories inside? Frames can add verisimilitude. They can also help control pacing. Sometimes they can help the writer figure out what kind of story they want to tell.

[Season 17, Episode 12]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring a Story within a Story.

[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'll be relating Howard's tale.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Very good. So, this is another structural element we… I don't think we've ever talked about on the show before. Story within a story. Peng, what do we want… Where do we want to start talking about this?

[Paying] Story within a story is such a beautiful and really delicate type of structure, I think. I think it works really well for stories that you want to have a kind of mythical or mystical feel to them. There's always this element of like discovery that you want to uncover the link between the two. So, I think, I mean we could start by just talking about some stories that do this really well, or ways that you can kind of back into this structure.

[Dan] Yeah. Give us an example so people know what we're talking about.

[Peng] Sure. So, I think a really great example, well, everybody knows Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, but a more recent example might be the 10,000 Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. In that book, it's about a girl who… She's got magical powers that she doesn't fully understand where she can open portals to other worlds. Early on in the novel, she finds a journal hidden away in the attic of this house that she lives in. As she starts reading the journal, you realize that it has a much stronger connection to her story then you might at first realize. It turns out that she… Oh, should I spoil it? I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't. Um…

[Mary Robinette] You realize things.

[Peng] Yes. Which is… I'm sorry. It's just such a great book. I just realized that I was about to spoil it. But it's a great example of how you can have an artifact… Not an artifact, you can have a story within the greater story that you're telling, and it ends up adding like essential information that you might need to understand the present narrative or explains magic or something like that.

[Howard] A couple of examples that are not recent. There's the Canterbury Tales which I was alluding to, obviously. I will be relating Howard's tale.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He's not the knight, he's not the baker, he's the cartoonist. Also, not going to Canterbury. And One Thousand and One Nights, which is a compilation of Middle Eastern folktales, compiled during the Islamic Golden age. The editors who put this together created multiple layers of framing stories connecting this material. It's one of the most outstanding examples of story within a story because of how many layers there are and the way it's structured.

[Dan] Yeah. The kind of modern… One of the modern takes on Canterbury Tales is The Hyperion Cantos, which updates it into this big kind of sweeping space opera story. The way they use story in a story, there is a much larger thing going on, this kind of sweeping across the whole galaxy, and by the end of the second book, you know they have fundamentally altered everything about this vast space faring civilization. So they use the story within a story element to kind of illuminate different aspects of that society that they're about to… That they're eventually going to change. So we get to see what the different… Some of the different cultures are like. We get to see some of the different religious beliefs. We get this very widespread vision of the world as we are doing this much larger story that will change it all.

[Peng] I think one of the other… One of the best ways that you can employ this technique, this structure, is, I think, often when you've got a story within a story, you're able to illuminate your theme a lot more directly in a way that isn't going to hit people over the head with it or come off as soapbox-y because you're doing it within the story that is within the story. So you have a little bit more room there to, like, explore something like the theme that you're trying to get at or the lesson, if you have a lesson.

[Mary Robinette] One of the… One of my favorite examples of this is The Neverending Story, which is…

[Peng] Oh, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I don't… Most people know the film. The book, the physical artifact of the book, is just also a beautiful thing. One of the things that happens in it is that as the… As we go between the embedded story within the book, we are also… And then come back out to the hero's main… Real life and then back in, the lessons that he is learning in both places affect the way he moves through the world. It's really, really lovely. The other thing that I kind of want to say about this idea of story within a story is that while you can use it for big overarching structure, you can also illuminate a story or have the idea of story within a story affect something on a smaller scale or a microcosm. Honestly, the thing that comes to mind most is a Star Trek episode, the Darmok episode, in which there's the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It's this culture that entirely speaks in embedded metaphors. At a certain point, the only way to communicate is when Picard tells them another story. The thing for me about this is that these smaller stories, even if it doesn't become a huge structural element, embedding smaller narratives into your work can make it feel richer. Because it gives you these views into the culture and again contrasts, I think.

[Dan] Yeah. I agree. That's one of the strongest… That's actually my favorite Star Trek episode out of any of the series. Part of the reason is it provides this kind of mythic backdrop to it. I mean, Patrick Stewart reciting Gilgamesh would be powerful in almost any context. But once they have established the importance of story as a cultural element, then him sitting down and relating the story of Gilgamesh by a campfire just gives it this absolutely epic tone that is absent in a lot of other Star Trek.

[Dan] We are definitely far enough into this. We're well over half. Let's have our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's right. So I'm going to briefly pause to embed another story in the episode. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a fantastic novel. I listened to it in audiobook. The narrator was Chiwetei Ejiofor. He's just so good. But one of the things that… the whole novel is him writing journal entries. As the story unfolds, he comes across a trove of additional material. I'm going to say it that way to avoid some spoilers. That unlocks a bunch of things and makes you realize that what is happening in the story is not at all what you thought was happening. It's a really, really clever use of the story within a story.

[Dan] Cool. That is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Excellent. Now we've talked a lot about ways that story within a story can kind of recontextualize what's going on in the larger story, the frame that the other story's within. It seems like this is very useful for twists or reveals. Is that the best use? Is that the only use? Are there other things we can be doing with the story within a story?

[Peng] Well, that… Yes. I think so. But I would say that that's one of the… At least one of the best uses. Because often times when you have a story within a story, it'll start with the character who finds the story within the story in whatever form it is, a book or an almanac or something. They, when they find it, are usually not clear on exactly what it is or how it will relate to their life or their journey. So, I think it just creates this kind of an automatic desire in the reader to solve the question and figure out in what way does this story relate to the present narrative, or is it real or is it not. Because that's also usually one of the first questions that comes up when you encounter the story within a story, you're wondering if it's purely some kind of a fable or if it's a second reality that is also happening or has just happened.

[Howard] Yeah. I've found that the… Up until now, I typically just called this structure the framing story structure. Where there is a frame that is its own story, and there's a story on the inside. The realization that I've had recently is that with things like The Canterbury Tales and the One Thousand and One Nights, the frame is framing multiple stories. One of the first structural questions that I'd ask is are we going to build it like, for instance, I think it was Name of the Wind. There is an outer framing story, and then there's the meat of the story which is just one thing in the middle. Or are we building a single frame… A frame like those photo collage frames…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You'll get at the big box store, where you have lots of little stories stuck inside. The big framing story I think is… It's a fun way to make a thing feel epic, but the photo collage approach is a great way to build a very complicated puzzle which resolves itself as you make your way through the various stories.

[Dan] So let me ask a question of you all, because I'm curious. Now that we're talking about frames, Frankenstein, for example, is famously a frame story. There… It is the story of somebody telling the story to someone else. But, also rather famously, most adaptations of Frankenstein, the movies that have been based on it and things like that, do away with the frame. What do we get by adding… What is the value of adding a frame to a story, of doing a story within a story, instead of just telling us the tale of Frankenstein without the frame around it?

[Mary Robinette] So, historically, one of the reasons that you would have a frame story was to lend a sense of verisimilitude, that this is obviously a true thing that is being shared with you because there is a narrator here in the here and now that you can relate to and that will guide you through the story. So one thing that a frame story can do is to do that and give that sense of trust. But, the other thing that a frame story can do is that it can serve as, in much the same way that a frame would for a painting, that you may have a painting that needs a very narrow, thin band just to set it off from the things that are around it, but that helps you focus in on the important things. Or you may have like a miniature that needs quite a large frame around it in order to give you time to get into the meat of that tiny, tiny little thing in the center. So I think that those are things that that frame can do. I also think that frequently it is a tool that authors will reach for because they don't trust themselves to tell the center story.

[Mmmm]

[Mary Robinette] So as a modern writer, we're no longer having to deal with some of… Like, you used to have to do a frame story because that was the only way you could tell fiction.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have a lot more leeway now to do that. So you have to figure out whether or not it's serving the story, the emotional experience that you want the reader to have. The other piece of that, I would say, is whether or not your frame story is only around the outside or whether or not it has interjections and interludes within. Those can be a way to control pacing. Those are often useful in that way.

[Dan] Peng, let me get your opinion on this. If an author is looking at their work, the story they want to tell, what are some signs that they might want to wrap another story around the outside or insert another story into the middle?

[Peng] Well, it's a really interesting thing that you just said right before this, Mary Robinette, because what I was going to say was I often find that this technique can be really great to use if you're stuck. So it's interesting that you said sometimes you feel that writers might use it if they're lacking confidence in the thing that they're writing. But I would wonder if a lot of stories that end up having a story within a story ended up that way or rather started that way because the writer was stuck and they were having trouble figuring out exactly the kind of story they want to tell. So, if you're stuck, and this will kind of relate to our homework, but it can be really useful in some cases to try to go deeper and to write a story within the story you're trying to tell, because you're working with this really encapsulated smaller version of the thing where you just trying to explore the purpose and figure out exactly what you're trying to say. Then, once you have that thing as a guide, you can build the larger story around it, or it can help you move the larger story forward. So it's sort of like a guide in reverse, because it's a smaller thing, but it's a lot more straightforward in some ways.

[Dan] Your description actually calls to mind the Greenbone Saga by Fonda Lee. Which, each of those books includes little interludes that are basically small in world stories or legends or history pieces that are only a couple pages long, but that she definitely is using to kind of help explain what's going on in the present. To give you cultural context for something or just to let you know who this important historical figure is that someone's about to reference a few chapters from now. Yeah. Anyway.

[Mary Robinette] They also serve as pacing. Because, if I'm remembering correctly, there is usual… They often, as kind of an [entre act?], A thing where there's going to be a jump in time. So helping give that also emotional distance from the stuff that happened in the chapter prior.

[Dan] That's true.

[Mary Robinette] Which is a… I know that we are close to the end. We are over time. But I did just want to mention The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust. That has a story within a story which is… The basic set up is there is a painter, modern day. He's trying to… Well, it was modern day when I read it in the 80s. But he needs to do a painting. The book follows him from beginning to end. One of the things that he does, there's a Hungarian folk story that is cut up and interspersed through the novel. There's no explanation for why you're getting it. Until, at a certain point, you realize that it is a story that he is telling to his studio mates every evening. Because he doesn't tell you where it's coming from, as a reader, you try to draw parallels yourself. That is another thing that I think that this structure can do, is that it can engage the reader by giving them another vessel in which to put themselves and draw their own parallels, so that each reader can wind up having a… Their own intimate relationship to this work.

[Dan] All right. Peng, you have our homework this week.

[Peng] I do. Your homework is to take or create some kind of an artifact within your current project. Like, a letter or a diary entry or an in world almanac or a spell book you've got magicians. Flesh it out for a passage or a scene or a chapter. See what that adds to your story. If it enhances the world building or if it lends depth to a certain part of the plot or reveal something about your characters that you otherwise weren't getting at.

[Dan] Sounds like fun. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/13/17-11-structuring-with-multiple-timelines/

Key points: One way to use multiple timelines is to dramatize backstory, telling it in scene rather than in an infodump. Flashbacks, in media res. You can use multiple timelines to feed the reader information, or for pacing. Do beware of killing progress with in-depth flashbacks. Sometimes you may use the past timeline to legitimize something to the reader. You can also compare and contrast the two timelines.

[Season 17, Episode 11]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring with Multiple Timelines.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're multiply in a hurry on several timelines.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] I'm getting carried away.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Howard.

[Dan] That was Howard, by the way.

[Dan] So, last week we talked about multiple POVs. Now we have multiple timelines. Which is a much more overtly structural thing, or more obviously structural. Peng, when… Where do we start here? When might it be a good idea to use multiple timelines, and how do you do it?

[Peng] Oh, I love multiple timelines. I think they might be my favorite structure technique. But, so what I think multiple timelines are great… Well, they're great for a million things, but one of the biggest benefits to using multiple timelines is if you've got a story that has… It's got, like, an old buried secrets that come to light years later type plot, and it's a really good way for you to dramatize back story in scene instead of having to just info dump it. Because if you've got this huge back story that happened decades ago, you don't really want to just throw that right there in the beginning or have a big section that's separated from the rest. You want to be able to weave it in really well. One of the ways to do that is to go back and forth between this back story and do it in scene as opposed to just having like an info dump. I think a really great example of that... Has everyone read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon?

[Dan] I have not.

[Peng] Oh, it's a gre… Well, put it on your list. It is a book about basically a little boy who when he's reeling from the loss of his mother who's just died, and his father takes him to the cemetery of lost books, I think it's called. He says… It's basically a secret bookstore and everybody who goes there gets to choose one book and you have to take care of it for the rest of your life and it's yours. So he ends up choosing a book by a mysterious author and he falls in love with it. He decides that he is going to find more of this author's work because the book is just so good. But it turns out that all other copies of every other book has been destroyed. So it's this mystery about who destroyed those books, where is the author, what happened. So as the boy goes on this investigation, rather than just having big info dumps of what he finds out at every stage of his investigation, which is what you would do if you did the whole thing in present, just one timeline, we end up every time he comes upon a new epiphany, we jump back in time and we get that epiphany as it happens in narration rather than as a something just being told back to him. It works so well, it makes the past just as compelling as the present.

[Howard] I wanted to take a moment to just pin some terms down. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has introduced us to the idea that timeline means multiple realities. But for the most part, what we're talking about here is a single timeline that has multiple pointers on it that we will be jumping into and visiting. Current time, flashback, in media res, that kind of thing. Now, that said, Terry Pratchett's… Oh, I forget which book it was. It was one of the Vime's books. Has a forked timeline in the climax. It happens when Vime takes his magical day planner thingy and drops it into the wrong pocket in his trousers. It's described as the trousers of time, and they're in the wrong pocket. There's this war going on that he has been trying to stop. In the timeline he's in, he's successfully putting a stop to things. His day planner is now on the other timeline and keeps beeping things about our favorite characters dying. It's a fascinating way, here in the multiple… In true multiple forked timelines, to say, "Congratulations. You chose the better one."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] This… Another really good example of this is the one that I used as a book of the week a couple weeks ago. The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina. What the book's plot is kind of sort of about is the inheritance that this grandmother leaves to her family includes a debt to some kind of very mysterious, very dangerous person. If we had gotten everything in chronological order, the life of the grandmother growing up and then all of the family trying to deal with it after the fact, we would already know everything about that mysterious person and the danger that he represents before the family comes into play and struggles against it. So, by jumping back and forth between these two periods of history, we get to discover with the family all of the things that are happening at the same time that we get to see them happening to the grandmother in the past. So having the chapters alternate back and forth is this really smart structural choice that doesn't give away the ending before it matters.

[Mary Robinette] So, you just said that we get to see it happening at the same time that we're seeing something else happen. I just want to remind readers that even when we're talking about a nonlinear storytelling, like multiple timelines, that your reader is still experiencing things in a linear fashion. So as you're thinking about this, recognize that one of the tools that you're manipulating is when you are feeding them information. You're also using it to control pacing, as well as… So it's not just about now we get this thing, now we get that. It's also a way of controlling a lot of different pieces. So when you're… I'm going to flag a danger with multiple timelines. Which is, sometimes flashbacks can stop progress in a story while you sit down and explore something deeply. So when you're thinking about this, remember that you also want to make sure that whatever timeline that we're jumping into carries tension, that it's still serving as a good interesting story in and of itself, not just a way to try to mask an info dump.

[Howard] My rule of thumb on this is that if there's going to be a flashback, the flashback should be an answer to a question that just landed on the reader, rather than an opportunity to ask a new question or don't new information so that the story can move forward. I've found that… Yeah, the flashbacks that I hate, the flashbacks where I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go get a sandwich," if I'm watching on TV, are the flashbacks where it has arrived and I didn't want it because it's not answering a question I had.

[Dan] All right. We are going to pause here for the book of the week. We've got a really awesome one this week because it is Peng's book. Peng, tell us about The Cartographers.

[Peng] Yay. The Cartographers is my second novel. It is a story about mapmaking and family secrets. It follows Nell Young, who's a young woman whose greatest passion is the art of cartography. She's been… She's spent her whole life trying to live up to her father who's the legendary cartographer, Dr. Daniel Young. But they haven't spoken for seven years since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her professional reputation over… It was during an argument over an old cheap gas station highway map. When the book kicks off, her father is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library with that very same seemingly worthless map hidden away in his desk. So, of course, Nell can't resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map holds, like, this incredible deadly mystery. So she sets out to uncover both what the map and her late father have been hiding for decades. It is a… It's coming out right about now. It comes out on March 15. I'm really excited for everybody to read it.

[Dan] Well, awesome. That sounds great. So that is The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. So go look that up. Go buy it. Do your thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Okay. Let's get back to our…

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to say, Peng is a heck of a writer, so you are in for a real treat with this.

[Peng] Well, thank you.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Dan] So. What are some other… We talked about using multiple timelines to provide information. What are some other good uses of multiple timelines in a story? When might you want to do this?

[Howard] I think one of the most fascinating and easy to consume examples is the movie Julie & Julia, which follows Julia Child, the beginning of her career in the 1950s, and a woman named Julie Powell who created a blog in which she was going to try and cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook. This story bounces back and forth between the 1950s and the early 2000s. Directed by Nora Efrain. It was actually Nora Efrain's last movie. She wrote it, she directed it. It's a beautiful way to tell two different stories, each of which if you're familiar with Freitag's triangle or the narrative curve, each of those stories has its own narrative curve to it, and by jumping back and forth between the two of them, we increase the tension, we increase emotional investment, we reach our climaxes at the same… At about the same time. It's a delightful film. Also, just talking about it has made me hungry.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Another really good example is Vicious by V. E. Schwab. Each scene begins with something like 10 years before, five minutes before, three days before. It's… They're absolutely… There's no linearity to when those hop in. But it does this thing of enriching the world and deepening the character motivations. It is a structure that makes me deeply jealous.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because I'm like… I don't have any understanding of how you write something like this. One of the things that I think that she does, which gets to Howard's earlier point about making sure that you're answering a question that was just dropped, is that she doesn't always do that. But she has built trust with the reader so that you understand that if we are doing this jump, that there is a reason for it, and you'll understand it later. But she has built trust by setting… By, at the beginning, that that's the way it's going to work.

[Peng] I think another really good way that multiple timelines can be used is this same sort of, along these same lines as answering a question. If you've got a story in which you have something that you need to sell to the reader that's a little bit difficult to believe were you think you're going to have trouble getting them to buy, whether it's like a worldbuilding aspect or it's a plot point or something about a character, if you put that into the past timeline, just by putting it there, the existence of that history or of that previous mention is kind of automatically legitimizing. So, it sort of works the same way as if you've got a legend in the story. The more times you mention a legend or the more times you mention something about magic, the more it just starts to feel real and believable, just through the repetition. So a lot of times, multiple timelines will have that same effect, where if something… If you tell the reader that something has happened in the past, it just automatically makes it more believable. It's a really easy way to sell something to readers that you need them to buy for the present narrative.

[Dan] It's so weird that… The way that works. Because you're absolutely right. Everything in a fantasy book, for example, is just stuff we made up. Right? But it's… The idea that this has happened before… If I tell you it happens now or if I tell you it happened 10 years ago, either way I just made it up. But that 10 years ago thing does really kind of hack the reader's brain into saying, "Oh. This is very unbelievable, but if it happened 10 years ago, it must be true."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Then that helps us kind of suspend our disbelief of it a little better by setting an artificial precedent. It's so weird that that works, but it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Extending that trick, if you say, "Oh, this exact same thing happened 100 years ago." Yeah, wow, that's kind of cool. But if you say, "This exact same thing happened 122 years ago, only it was in the summer instead of the winter." Holy crap. I am so onboard.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Wow. Because now… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Wheel of Time…

[Dan] There's a specificity to it.

[Mary Robinette] Wheel of Time is based on…

[Dan] There's one more example I want to mention really quickly, just because. It's the movie Frequency which is about a father who is a firefighter and dies in a fire and his son who grows up to become a cop. The story is told with watching them both when their about the same age in life, scenes inter-cutting back and forth, but what's different is that through a weird quirk of science fiction, they actually can talk to each other and the two timelines interact with each other over the radio. It's a really interesting take on this narrative premise.

[Mary Robinette] All right. While we're doing examples, there are two that I want to just throw in there because they are structurally so different and interesting. One is Firebird by Susanna Kearsley. It is both multiple timeline and multiple POV in that she has a character who's in I think the 1500s and one who is in the early 2000s. Those characters never interact. Their stories are connected only by one artifact that they both possess. It's this… It's just… It's a beautiful meditation on time and place. But what she does by going between those two timelines is that the contrast between them also makes you appreciate the commonalities, the things that don't change over time. She's a… It's beautiful, beautiful writing. The other one which is completely different structurally is a picture book called When I Wake Up by Seth Fishman. It's a kid wakes up in the morning and says, "Today I could…" And the story splits into four distinct timelines, each color code… Each are happening simultaneously on the page and color-coded. So I could go to the park. I could make breakfast for my parents. I could… It's this beautiful thing of like this is how my day… It's basically sliding doors for a kid in four timelines with colors. It's really lovely. But, it is, again, it's… What I like about each of them even though they use different versions of the multiple timeline is that they are exploring the texture of contrasts.

[Dan] That's awesome. All right, Howard, bring it home. What's our homework?

[Howard] Okay. Your current work in progress. Look at adding a second timeline, time stream to it. A couple of ways you can do this. Take a character whose back story perhaps you haven't told yet. Write a fun back story for them and find a way to weave that into the existing story bouncing through multiple timelines. Alternatively, you might take your current work in progress and the ideas you have for your second book and see if the first book story could be told as a flashback in the course of the second story. But, dig in and try to do this. I don't want to make it easy. Drill into it and break some things and when they are broken, step back and say, "Howard, you're a jerk. You did this to me." And we will all have had fun.

[Dan] That sounds great. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/06/17-10-structuring-with-multiple-povs/

Key points: Multiple points of view. How does going from a single POV to multiple POVs affect worldbuilding, pacing, and character? Start by asking yourself you want a single POV or multiple POVs. Police procedurals often use an A plot for the main mystery, and a smaller B plot. Multiple POVs can also help control pacing. It also provides a way to flesh out side characters, and even main characters, by looking at them from other sides. It can also help examine motivations. Remember, you choose to use multiple POVs to let you dig into the complexities if you want to.

[Season 17, Episode 10]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring with Multiple POVs.

[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've got the B plot.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now, POV, that's points of view. We want to make sure that that is clear. When we have multiple points of view in a story, how does that change the structure? How can you build the structure to take best advantage of your multiple POVs? So, Peng, what are your thoughts on this? Where do we start when we've got a story with multiple points of view?

[Peng] Weel, I mean, I think the first thing you start with is do you want to have multiple points of view to begin with? Because some stories may not be served by that, and then others, it would really have a... So, when you have... When you think you have a story that you want to tell with multiple POVs, it has really important implications for, I think, a lot of different aspects of craft. We can kind of go one by one. But I would say worldbuilding, pacing, and character are some of the aspects of stories that can be changed the most by taking your story from single point of view to multiple points of view.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to…

[Peng] Mary Robinette, you…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm going to jump in real fast, because that thing you said about you want your story to be single POV or multi-POV. So, full disclosure, I'm about to do a spoiler.

[Peng] Oooh!

[Mary Robinette] For the Glamorous History series. But it's book 5. So in book 3, we had a discussion about… Excuse me, in book 4, which was Valor and Vanity, we had a discussion about whether or not I should do multiple POVs. Because I was doing a heist, and doing multiple POVs would have made it significantly easier to hide information from the reader by controlling which character… The character that was in the know would be the one that… Whose POV I was not in. So it was going to be significantly easier. However, I said no, I have to keep this single POV, because I know… In part, there was the thing that the whole series had been single POV up to that point, but also, in book 5, I had anything planned that needed the shock of suddenly switching POVs. Which is that… This is the spoiler part. You have been warned. This is your last opportunity. Okay. I make the reader think that I have potentially killed Jane, who is my POV character, by having her lose consciousness and switching to her husband's POV. We get his POV for two chapters. So it is… It was something that I did with the intention of using that POV shift for shock.

[Howard] Mary Robinette, that sounds like it might have affected some people.

[Mary Robinette] I have been told, and it is one of the things that I'm most proud of, is multiple people threw the book across the room…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When they got to Vincent's POV because they were shocked and appalled that I was doing that thing.

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That's wonderful.

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That would not have worked as well if you had done the multiple POVs in book 4, like you were saying. It wouldn't have been the shock that you needed it to be.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] When I introduced myself at the beginning of this episode, and said, "I have the B plot," I was telegraphing the entire structural format of lots of police procedurals, the whole CSI franchise. Where a portion of the POVs are devoted to the B plot of the episode. You have an A plot that is the main mystery, and then you've got some side characters who are doing the smaller B plot. Sometimes they tie together, and sometimes they don't. The point of all this is that when you have an ensemble cast, or at the very least, multiple POVs, now you have the ability to manage A plot, B plot, CDE plot, whatever, and thread things together.

[Peng] Yeah. It also, when you've got multiple POVs like this, it's a good way to control your pacing, too. Especially for something… I mean, if we're going to talk about the police procedurals, if you just had on A plot, the mystery would almost seem… I mean, it would seem a little too fast and kind of surface and flat, because that's the only thing you're focusing on. But if you've got another POV to switch to, it can… It helps you control pacing because you can have one going slower or faster than the other. So your readers or your viewers will get a little bit of a break if you've got a really tense moment in the A plot, for example, and then you switch to something a little bit slower in the B plot. It can release a little bit of that fast pacing and give the readers a chance to breathe. It also indicates that both of them are related. It just makes the whole thing… It can make the whole thing feel a lot deeper. If you've got more than…

[Howard] I've seen B plots used to turn super obvious clues from the A plot into "Oh, wait. That must be a red herring." Because of the way it… It's the pacing of a mystery. Using a POV shift to convince the reader that the clue you just given them isn't as important or is way more important than they thought it was. It's cool. It's super difficult to do without multiple POVs.

[Dan] So, while we're talking about this, let's do our book of the week. Peng, you have that this week.

[Peng] I do. Our book of the week is Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey. It is a book with two alternating perspectives. It's this really fascinating clever mystery about these two people, a man and a woman, who keep meeting over and over again in different lives. Like, sometimes they're lovers, sometimes they're friends, sometimes they're colleagues, or sometimes one of them's very old and one is very young. But the weird thing is that they're always in Cologne, Germany, and they're always in the same time. Because everyone else in their lives is also the same. Like, it's the same bartender at the bar that they always go to, it's the same train conductor on the train. So at first, they don't know it, the way that the readers do, but they slowly start to recognize each other and realize that something really strange is going on. They set out to try to figure out what's happening to them together. It's such a great story. I won't spoil anything, but every time you think you have figured out what's going on, you're wrong. Just like the characters are. The ending is just so surprising and different that you think that there is no way that the author's going to be able to pull it off. Then she does. So it's such a great escape. I read it during lockdown in… During the early part of the pandemic. I think it was the first book that I was able to actually read. It was one of those one's where you sit down, and a few hours later, you look up and you're like, "What? Huh. What time is it?"

[Laughter]

[Peng] So it's really… It's great. It's fantastic.

[Dan] Wonderful. That is Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey. So, everyone go read that.

[Dan] We have recently been given a really wonderful example of how multiple POVs can alter the structure of a story. Who is it that put The Killing Floor…

[Howard] Oh, that was me.

[Dan] Into the outline? Howard, talk about that, because I find this fascinating.

[Howard] That was me. In Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel, Jack Reacher is the POV character and the story is told first person from Reacher's perspective, beginning to end. There are couple of side characters that he interacts with, who help… I say help with the investigation. It's really supposed to be their investigation. Reacher isn't a police officer. He has no authority here. But they're off doing police stuff. We get their clues, their information, when they touch back with him. In the Amazon's Prime series that just aired a couple of… Three weeks ago as of the time we're recording this called Reacher, those characters get their own points of view. It changes the way the story unfolds. It makes those characters… It makes those characters feel more important, more real to us, and it gives us tension that we didn't have before. We like them more, we don't want bad things to happen to them. If they die off camera… In the book, in Reacher's POV, lots of people die off camera. We don't see what happens. Reacher learns about another body. But actually having the camera on them changes the pacing, changes the tension. I enjoyed it a lot.

[Dan] Yeah. It was really interesting to watch that unfold. I'm glad that you pointed it out because adding in the extra POVs change the story and the characters obviously, but also required and demanded a different structure. In a lot of ways, the fact that they were turning this into a TV show, the structure demanded multiple POVs. They couldn't have done 10 episodes were however many it was solely with the one person. Now, on the other hand, Lee Child himself has come out and said that because there are multiple POVs, because we got to know Roscoe so well, for example, he is very sad that the structure of the series overall is that of a drifter, and we never come back to Margrave, we will never come back to Roscoe again. So in some ways, it kind of works counter to the book series because now we want to see Roscoe, we want to follow her just as much as we want to follow Reacher. Honestly, probably a little more.

[Howard] One of the thoughts that I had in that regard is that the emotional arc of Reacher being so disconnected that he can just drift. In the books, we don't really get a feel for the cost of that. But as audience members watching the TV show, there is a cost. I'm not going to get to see Roscoe again, and that makes me sad. Why do I have to be a drifter? Well, okay, I'm having an emotional experience because of the kind of story that's being told.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things for me about this conversation is that I think when we're talking about the characterization that it's easy to think about it as giving that multiple POV makes these additional side characters more fleshed out and more interesting. But the other thing that it does for me is that it gives you an opportunity to learn more about whoever tips us in a book where you have a main character, or even on ensemble, it gives you an opportunity to learn more about those other characters because you get to see them from the outside. That's something that a novel or a short story, that prose can do that is harder in film, is that having that second POV and the interiority of the character who is observing someone that you've already met can give you, I think, a greater sense of… Someone can feel like, "Hello, I am a hot mess." Then you see them from the outside, and they're cold and controlled. That's an exciting thing that multiple POVs can give you. One example that I'd love to bring up is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Peng] That was such a good book.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, so good. It's got so many different POVs. It's actually not so many. It's got…

[Peng] I think it's three, right?

[Mary Robinette] Multiple… Three? Is it?

[Peng] Yeah, I think it's three.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The thing that's wonderful about it is that it does this thing, that each of those characters at a certain point intersects with one of the other characters and you can see them from the outside and how they are perceived by the rest of the world, and it is at odds with how they perceive themselves. Which is, I think, true for a lot… Inherently true for a lot of us.

[Peng] Yeah.

[Dan] Definitely.

[Peng] I think the other thing that the multiple POVs in Black Sun does really well is not only does it allow Rebecca Roanhorse to illuminate the characters in that way, but it also helps you, or it can help you explain their motivations too. So it's not just the way that they see themselves versus the way that others see them, but also whatever their goals are. You… When you get to see the other side of it, it really helps you understand that… What each of them wants can be really complicated, it's not just black-and-white or… Like, for example, if you've got somebody that seems like the villain the whole time, if you're only viewing them from one perspective, like the hero's perspective, you're only going to see or get the hero's read on that. But then if you are able to jump to either the villain's perspective or someone else's perspective who can see the villain, you're able to flesh out the quote unquote villain's motivations in a way that you wouldn't be able to if you just had hero, because the hero can only see one way. I think that happens a lot in Black Sun where from the outside it might look like somebody just wants war, they want to conquer something or they want to preserve a way of life that seems very bad to the other characters. But then when you get to hear it from that character, it's so much more complicated than that.

[Dan] This is something that can work both ways, right? If you want to draw out those kinds of complexities, then structuring your book such that it has multiple POVs is a good choice you can make. It's not just an outcome that happens, but one that you can choose. Which I think is really wonderful.

[Dan] All right. It's time for our homework, and, Mary Robinette, you have that this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. So what I want you to do is take a scene in your current work in progress and rewrite from another character's point of view. I want you to look to see what changes, how the tone of the scene might shift, what new information or information might be revealed. If you want to really dive into this, try to make sure that the beats, the physical beats, don't shift. So, if a character enters at the top of a scene and pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, they still have to do that, but now you have to try to write it so that it makes sense about why they're doing that. I can't imagine what reason that would be. But maybe they're saving them from a fire, maybe that old lady in a wheelchair is actually a demon and you didn't know it. Whatever it is, see if you can make all of their motivations make sense without changing the beats. You can include things that the other character didn't notice, absolutely. You can have the scene start a little earlier or end a little later. But what you really want to do is dig into the why of the character.

[Dan] That sounds awesome. I actually think I'm going to do that with the work in progress that I currently have. So…

[Howard] You're going to push an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs?

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Is that not what everyone else got from the…

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the homework, yes.

[Howard] That's what I got, yeah.

[Dan] Excellent. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.33: Tell, Don't Show

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/15/16-33-tell-dont-show/

Key points: Show, don't tell originated in silent films, where the choice was between showing you a visual image or letting you read a title card. However, storytelling inherently has a certain amount of telling. It's a balance between telling and showing. Especially in the opening pages of a book, the writer needs to tell the reader a lot of information for context. Consider it as describing and demonstrating. Or consider it as controlling pacing and emotional distance. You can interweave telling and showing. Show us the good parts, and tell us the other parts. Some of this is the order of information being presented.

[Season 16, Episode 33]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Tell, Don't Show.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're going to tell you stuff.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm not going to show you that I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Well, fine then. As we start off this…

[Dan] Thank goodness.

[Mary Robinette] I want to actually talk about where the advice tell… Or show, don't tell comes from. This actually comes from silent films.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, this is important to understand…

[Dan] A slightly outmoded art form.

[Mary Robinette] As a writer. What this advice originated from is what the reader wants to see is characters doing stuff and action happening. What they don't want is to have to read a bunch of title cards. So, if you can give us information embedded in the scene, that is significantly better than having a title card or having a whole bunch of things at the beginning that your character has… Your reader has to wade through before they get to the meat of the thing. So that's where show, don't tell comes from. But in fact, we are storytellers, so… A certain amount of telling is kind of baked into our process.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah, the thing I always think about is that a novel is mostly the writer just telling you stuff. Because there's too much thing… Stuff, there's too many things that happen in a novel or you to show every single component of it. Right? So I think show, don't tell is really useful advice, but for a 101 level writer. For an introductory writer. When you're just getting started, you need to learn how to make sure that things are seen on the page that reinforce the stuff that you're telling us. But the reality is, it's a balance. There's a lot of telling and a lot of showing. I think when you're in the opening pages of a book, there's so much information that I as a reader need to understand anything. This kind of goes back to our start it with dialogue thing, that if you tell me some stuff first, then I have the context to engage with the dialogue that you're putting up on the page. So I think there are ways in which you can tell us a lot of information. Think about Hill House. That whole first paragraph is just Shirley Jackson telling us about this house. I think that informs everything that's going to come after that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… This has been true for all of the things that we're doing. But frequently what they're doing is that everything is doing double duty. It is both just flat out telling you. I was arrested. That's just flat out telling you. I was arrested. He then proceeds to show the arrest. Yes. But he's not playing coy with the information. It's like this is the important thing, this is the thing that I want you to understand. A lot of times, I think that we internalize this show don't tell so thoroughly that a writer feels like if they just come out and tell the reader something, that they have in some way diminished the surprise, the anticipation of whatever it is.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Using my own novel as an example, the opening of Calculating Stars is, "Do you remember where you were when the meteor hit?" I'm like flat out telling you a meteor is going to hit. A meteorite is going to hit. Before we get into the rest of what's going on. So it's totally okay to just tell people things. He said, she said. That's just telling people stuff.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] The best example I've found for… In support of show don't tell in novel form was a draft I read in which a conversation, a big, detailed conversation between two characters, we are told the summary of the conversation. It is bookended by very specific dialogue, meaningless dialogue, from the pilot about bringing the spaceship into dock. I remember reading that and thinking, "You showed me the completely uninteresting bits, and you told me what happened in the part that I wanted to see." So that felt upside down. But yeah, for the most part, we are tellers, and we tell a lot.

[Dan] I like to use different words for these. Telling and showing, because we are primarily a nonvisual medium, don't have as much meaning as they would in, for example, silent film. So, I like to talk about instead describing and demonstrating. Like Dongwon said, there's a big balance between them. That you need to do both of them. Some things need to be described, and some things need to be demonstrated on the page so that we can see them in action and understand why we should care about them. But using… How to use those two tools is really valuable.

[Mary Robinette] I also use different words when I'm talking about it. Because for me, the decision about showing or telling is about controlling two specific things, the pacing and my emotional distance from the character. So the more I unpack something and take time with it and dwell on it, the kind of closer I am to the character's head. That doesn't mean that my sentences have to get long. Like in the Tom Reacher, that's… We are very deeply in the character's head, but everything's short and punchy. So for me, it's about immediacy versus distance from the character, or unpacking or compressing something. If time passes, frequently, I'm just going to tell you, a lot of time passed. I'm not going to make you, like, live through that.

[Dongwon] I think also one block that people have is they think right here, this paragraph, I'm telling somebody something. This next scene, I'm showing. Then I'm going to tell, then I'm going to show. I think that is… I think the Dan thing really helps disrupt that, because what you're really doing is sliding from showing and telling sentence to sentence, even, like, clause to clause in a sentence. When you have dialogue, Howard kind of hinted at this a little bit, but you can have one person say something and then tell us, "And they said that their day was great." You know what I mean? Or tell, "And then she told me about her day and her morning, and some interesting stuff happened, but mostly it was boring." Right? Like, you can skip over the boring parts of it, but then show us the interactions that matter. Right? So, think of these as tools to be used in a very interwoven, very integrated way. Not one block of that and then one big block of that.

[Howard] It's also useful to think about this kind of the way the MPAA handles content ratings. If you show the splash of blood and gibbets and gore, you've got an R rating. If you show the moment leading up to that, and then the camera pulls away and someone talks about what happened, you have a different rating and the viewer has a different experience. So you, as the writer, by controlling the position of the camera can do some things with content that might otherwise be extremely triggery, extremely graphic, whatever, and handle it in a different way, because it's your book. You show us what you want to show us, and tell us the parts that you don't want us to stare at.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that, may we tell you about our book of the week?

[Dan] That is my opportunity this week to talk about Jade City by Fonda Lee. This is the first in a series, a fantasy series, that I didn't quite know what to expect going into it. It is kind of an epic fantasy about two crime families, basically, in an Asian inspired fantasy world. But in… It's a modern version of that. It is… It's set in like a modern-day style city. The very first paragraph has ceiling fans that took me completely by surprise because I was expecting something more traditional fantasy. The language in the book is incredible. The characters are enormously compelling. The setting is really well drawn and fascinating. It's absolutely wonderful. There's a whole series attached to it, so please go read Jade City by Fonda Lee.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, because I blurbed it. I think I described it as the Godfather meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because it's all of those things, plus all of the stuff that you love from martial arts wireworks as a magic system. It's so good.

[Dongwon] Fonda herself talks about that book as the Godfather with kung fu, right? That's absolutely the premise. I will also point out that Jade Legacy, book 3 in the series, is out this November and I cannot wait.

[Dan] Well, let me use this as an example of what we're talking about with tell, don't show. Because it is entirely about kind of two warring crime families. There's No Peak and there's Mountain, and they're fighting for control over the city. In order to understand that battle, we need to understand how the city functions and how the magic works and all of that. So it begins with what I suppose is technically a prologue, but feels just like chapter 1 of two thieves who are trying to steal a bunch of Jade from a kind of low level criminal. Because they are outside of the system, we're not getting all of the high level ramifications of what's going on. We're getting the very low level jade is important, this is why, this is what it can do, this is why we want it. So it's just really kind of telling us… It's describing to us what is important and why. Then it is demonstrating to us what the magic can do and what it is like to live in the city, all at the same time. It's a brilliant opening.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I mean, she tells us that Jade is important, that the clans are important, how the jade magic works, and how the culture in the city works. She's telling us all those things. Then, immediately reinforces it by showing us the moment of these two petty criminals walking to this restaurant to try and rip off this like mid-level boss, and just everything is a disaster, as you can expect, in a totally delightful, like, very Breaking Bad style way of, like, all these dominoes falling. But it's such an opportunity to set up the thing by telling you, reinforce it by showing you, and then telling you the next thing, when you see the consequences of the first thing happening, right? This is a try fail cycle used to demonstrate worldbuilding. It's a master class in my opinion. The other thing I wanted… I'm sorry, go on.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, we should probably talk about other things besides the book, even though I will… I was… Because I was just about to say, "And also…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, and then in this part…

[Dongwon] We could go on forever about this book. The other thing I want to talk about though, is… I think it's so interesting that Mary Robinette pointed out that the origins of show, don't tell are rooted in silent film. Because I think the way in which… The amount of visual media that we all consume today I think has made show, don't tell really run off the rails in terms of writing fiction, which is a nonvisual medium. Right, as Dan said. The problem with show and tell is we think of it as here's a scene of two characters talking and then here's a voiceover, and that's the telling. We think of telling as the artificial voiceover. In film, that's often a cheap trick. In film, that is a shortcut to giving us information for a variety of reasons. So what we instead need to remember is that when we are looking at a visual image, we are absorbing enormous amounts of information that aren't on the page. We can see the characters' faces, we can see their expressions, we can see what they're wearing, we can see the furniture behind them. Right? You don't need to describe that ceiling fan. If I just saw the opening shot of a movie version of Jade City, I would know, yeah, this is the 1970s. Yeah, there's technology. Yeah, there's cars. Right? I don't need to be told those things. So the thing to remember is that when you're writing a book, the reader will only see what you put a laser focus on. The mechanic by which you often put that laser focus on the stage setting is through telling us stuff.

[Mary Robinette] The example that I use when I am attempting to explain this, to tell people about this, is that a lot of what we're talking about here is the order of information. That the order of information that you're presenting to people on that first page is incredibly important because you're setting up context. So what I use is the example of imagine that you're in a dark theater. That's laser focus, and that you have a single spotlight. The single spotlight rests… Opens up on a pool of red liquid on a linoleum floor. You think, "Oh. Someone's been stabbed. There's blood on the floor." Then it pans over and you see a can of Kool-Aid. You're like, "Oh. Okay. No no no no. I was wrong. I misunderstood what was going on. This is a kitchen drama and someone's just dropped a can of Kool-Aid and that's what the red liquid is." You pan a little bit farther. Now you see a hand and a bloody knife. You're like, "Oh. No, I was right the first time. Someone was stabbed." But, if you do it the other way around, if you provide context for your reader, if you start with the hand on the floor with the knife, and then you go to the can of Kool-Aid, and then you go to the red liquid, the reader can build this very clear picture in their head. So when you're deciding at the beginning kind of what to tell, you're not just deciding what to tell, but you're also deciding when to tell it. You're trying to make sure that you're presenting this information in a way that the reader is building that… The picture that you want them to build in their head. Because storytelling is linear, whereas film, even though we are experiencing time passing, you don't have control. You have some control over where an audience looks on a screen, but, like, if I am watching something and there is a typewriter in a scene, that is always the first thing I will look at. The filmmaker has absolutely no control over that. But on a page, you do have that control. Howard, it looked like you had a thing?

[Howard] I did. A short paragraph of character description from a work in progress, which… I talked about metaphor and simile and whatnot in an earlier episode. How Lee Childs didn't use it in the Jack Reacher thing. Metaphors and comparisons are a form of telling, a form of description, that give us a shortcut. This is short.

Darren laughs. It's a big, friendly, old man sort of belly laugh. Not quite ho ho ho, but if Darren ever decided to grow a beard to go with his massive handlebar mustache, he'd have steady holiday work as a shopping mall Santa.

How much of that is actual description, how much of that is comparison to a picture you already have in your head and I'm telling you to make a connection between these two things, that is something that absolutely… The… A movie can't do that with one of the characters saying, "Your laugh sounds like Santa Claus. Have you looked at…" Which would derail the film.

[Dan] Well, to keep this… My own little terminology going. That paragraph you read us is telling us how to think about this person. It's describing the person. But at the same time, it is demonstrating the characterization of the speaker. We're learning so much about the person who is giving us that information because of the way they choose to give it.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that in mind, I think, let's talk about your homework for this week.

[Dongwon] So, your homework for this week is, again, maybe taking that scene or taking another opening scene, and what I want you to do is to rewrite the whole first scene purely as narration. Right? Take out any dialogue, take out any of that scene setting, and just give it to us as a narrator describing what's happening. Now, I'm not recommending this be the final version of your opening. I think this is a really instructive exercise though to show you what does and doesn't work about this approach. Hopefully, from this you can take sentences, you can take paragraphs, and then work that into your draft. But I want you to really step back and force yourself to get rid of all the tools of showing and only do a telling version of it. See where that gets you.

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/04/12/15-15-dialog/

Key Points: First question: If all your dialog scenes turn into logic-based debates, is that a problem? Yes. One scene like that, okay. Lots? Not so good. Make sure your scenes have two goals, a physical goal and a conversational goal. Logic-based debate sounds like a conflict of ideas, competing ideas. Sometimes you should have other kinds of conversations. Don't forget that most decisions are emotional, not logical. As an exercise, try removing every third line of dialog. Then add bridging material. Do all your character voices sound the same? Manipulate pacing, accent, and attitude for different voices. Punctuation, sentence structure and word choice, and how the person feels. Learn to use punctuation, experiment with m-dashes, colons, semicolons, commas, and ellipses. Second question: How can I create more variety in my dialogue scenes? Move the scene to another interesting setting. Give them two goals, a physical goal and a verbal/emotional goal. Think about the reader's reward. Think about the authorial intent, why do you need this scene, and the character's intention, what are they trying to accomplish?

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm having a conversation with my friends, Brandon, Mary Robinette, and Dan.

[Brandon] We are once again using your questions to sculpt these specific episodes. While the title is very generic, Dialog, there's a specific aspect of dialog you're asking questions about. Here is the first question. Most of my dialog seems to end up being… Turning into logic-based debates between whatever characters are in the room. Is this a problem?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There are times… I shouldn't say that. If it's all of your scenes are turning into that, that's a problem. Having a scene that's like that, that's not a problem. So there's a bunch of things that you can do to address that. One of them is to make sure that there's… If you give two goals in the room, one is a physical goal and the other is a conversational goal, that's immediately going to cause things to shift for the [garbled]

[Brandon] Yeah. Agreed. Now, going back to your first point, Mary Robinette, it's not necessarily a problem unless it's all the time. What this means is, having different scenes feel different is part of what makes a book work. Having some of your dialog scenes that read like Aaron Sorkin dialog, where it's just like back-and-forth, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, is great. It can be really exciting, it can yank you through a scene really quick, it can make you smile, it can make you just have a blast. But if every page is only that, it starts to, like anything in writing,…

[Dan] It can be exhausting.

[Brandon] Yeah. It gets exhausting.

[Howard] Let's open up for a moment and look at the logic-based debate between two characters. Fundamentally, what you have there, it sounds like, is a conflict of ideas, and that is what… If that's what every scene is ending up being, then every scene in which you have dialog, the conflict is competing ideas. There is… If we categorize the types of conversation people have, one type of conversation that can be very dramatic is the one where one person is trying to tell a story without revealing a key secret, and the other person is trying to learn the key secret and doesn't care about the story. They're… Now they're not arguing, but there is tension, there is conflict.

[Dan] The fact that this is a logic-based debate also potentially highlights another issue which is that most people make decisions based on emotion, rather than on logic. I used to work in advertising and marketing, and that was our hallmark. People think they make decisions based on logic…

[Laughter]

[Dan] But at the end of the day, it comes down to whatever emotional connection they have forged between themselves and the solution. So making… If your characters are being very careful to plan out exactly the best possible course of action or determine in steady debate who is right and who is wrong, most conversations in the real world don't go that way. Some do. But most of them are a lot more emotional than that.

[Mary Robinette] There's a trick that I have, for when I discover that I have accidentally written one of those things. Aside from the introducing physical conflict. This is to go through… This is a totally mechanical exercise that's super fun. I go through and I remove every third line of dialog, because one of the things that happens when you're conversing with someone that you're familiar with is that you'll jump ahead. You'll see where they're heading and you'll jump to the next point. So when you pull out every third line of dialog… I want to be really clear. This is an exercise, this doesn't work for everything.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But when you do it, what happens is that those natural jumps ahead begin to happen. You do have to put in some bridging material to cover them. But it gets really interesting, and often has a more naturalistic flow. It compresses the scene, too.

[Brandon] One of the worries I have from this question is, again, if everything is a logic-based debate, I worry about character voices all sounding the same. One of the things I look for as a reader that really makes scenes work for me is when there's a lot of variety to motivations, to how people approach a conversation. Dan mentioned this, a lot of people make decisions based on emotions. Having somebody think that they're logic-based, but there really emotional, facing someone who is very logic-based, or someone who's front about their emotions is often a more interesting scene than a platonic debate or a Socratic debate about here is… Are the logical points that I'm making. Often times, that's just really boring to read, because we want to see the character's investment in this.

[Mary Robinette] There are some tricks to changing the nature of a character voice that I learned from doing audiobook narration. There are five things that make a character voice in audio. Pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch and placement, you can't do a darn thing with on the page except refer to them. Pacing, accent, and attitude are absolutely things you can manipulate. The length of time… So, pacing, you control with punctuation. How long the sentences are, where you put the commas, whether or not a character gets commas. Someone who speaks in a run-on sentence is going to have a very different feel than someone who has lots of short sentences. Accent is the sentence structure and the word choice. So if you take a training phrase, like, "What did you say?" That is serving to say, "I want you to tell me more." It can take a lot of different forms, but a British nanny is going to say, "Pardon me, Dearie?" And a drill sergeant is going to say, "What do you say, maggot!"

[Brandon] [uh-hu]

[Mary Robinette] So, looking at the word choice and sentence structure. Then, the attitude is what the person… How the person feels. Again, that changes the word choices that we make. It changes our pacing. So looking at your use of punctuation, and your word choice, and sentence structure, is a great way to shift the language of your characters.

[Brandon] So, one of the things I noticed teaching my classes at the University over these last years, is that a lot of my students aren't very fluent with punctuation. Now, these are high-level students. It's usually… To get in my class, there's 15 slots, and we usually have 100 or more applications, and we picket based solely on how good are these… The sample chapters that they sent. So these are high-level amateur writers. I just assumed because they are high-level amateur writers that if they're not using certain punctuation structures, they've made a stylistic decision. Right? It's okay not to like m-dashes, for instance.

[Mary Robinette] Sure.

[Brandon] I love them. Other people are like, "You know what, I don't like this punctuation, it becomes a crutch, whatever." Totally all right. But I started to mention to people, like, "Hey, this might use an m-dash. I know you probably aren't stylistically interested in them, but you might want to experiment." They're like, "An m-dash?" I realized a lot of high-level writing student get there by practicing a ton, but they aren't using all the tools because they haven't been able to figure out how to take those boring, dry English major classes…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And apply them to actually writing stories. Using m-dashes, colons, semicolons, commas, ellipses in your dialog… That's like something that's vital to me, in order to make it feel right. I'm realizing more and more a lot of my students don't use it just because they've never been… Had those tools explained as potential tools for controlling how the reader reads a scene.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. That is The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.

[Mary Robinette] By Natasha Pulley. I love this book. The first book is The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. I had enough time in between reading that one and when I got The Lost Future of Pepperharrow that I think that you can actually read this as a standalone. Obviously, there are some nuances. But, basically. The main character is a composer and a synesthete. He has synesthesia. It's set in Victorian England. There's another character who is clairvoyant. It's this whole interesting thing of, like, what is free will, what are the choices that you make, and then there's a clockwork octopus that steals socks. It's just beautifully, beautifully written.

[Howard] That actually explains a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So many things. So beautifully written. I love these books with abandon. One of the other things that I also love is that there's a little girl character whose name is Six. She is… to a modern eye, she's probably autistic. But they don't have the word and the people just accept that this is who she is. They don't try to make her be someone else. She's just allowed to live her life, and there's no like "We're going to cure her" subplot or anything like that. It's just characters who are fascinating. I just love these books a lot. I'm going to ramble about them for days. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. One of the reasons that I actually wanted to bring this up with dialog is that much of It takes place in Japan, where people are speaking Japanese. She has made the choice to render it in slang that is class linked to Victorian England, because the character who is interpreting it is a Victorian. So when someone is lower-class, in his head, he hears them as Cockney. Because…

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It's so good. It's really interesting.

[Brandon] Awesome. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.

[Brandon] All right. So, the second question we have for this week is what can I do to create more variety in my dialog structure, or in my dialog scenes? One of the things you can do is something that I love to do. When I notice one of these scenes… Sometimes I just keep it, right? My dialog scene is working. Sometimes I'm like I have had too many scenes like this. These are the equivalents… I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before. In movies, you will occasionally have scenes where two characters walk down a hallway, stop, and then there's a shot, reverse shot, as they have a conversation, then they walk a little further down the hallway, then they stop, and there's a shot, reverse shot, and then they walk a little further, and then shot, reverse shot. These scenes are okay, but they're kind of the cinematic version of sometimes you just need to summarize in your book. They're the sort of things that you don't want to have to use unless it's the exact right tool at the exact right time. They're a little bit lazy, and they're a little bit boring. In books, sometimes you have these scenes of dialog where you're like, "I just need to get this information across. I know I need to get it across. I don't want to do it as a big infodump. So I'm going to have characters have a conversation about it and do my best to not make it feel maid and butler." I have found most of the time, if I can move that scene into some other interesting setting… Let me give you an example from Oathbringer. I had one of these. It was boring.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It was one of the worst scenes in the book. I just threw it away. I instead had a character… I'm like, "Who is this character? What is happening?" Well, it's Dalinar. He is a warlord who is kind of repentant and becoming a different person, but he kind of wants to hold on to the fact that I'm a tough warrior. So he goes down and he wants to do some wrestling, right? It's this whole thing, I'm going to go recapture some of my youth. He just gets trounced by these younger men. In the meantime, his wife shows up and says, "We were supposed to have a meeting. We're going to talk about this." He's like, "Do it right now." It was during the wrestling match. You would think that this doesn't work, but it worked perfectly, because I was able to over… To give the subtext of he's trying to capture his youth without ever saying it. With the things she's saying representing his new life that he's supposed to be getting better at instead of going trying to recapture his youth. The scene just played wonderfully in this setting where he's getting pinned by these younger men.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That are feeling kind of embarrassed that they're taking their king and basically just… He can't do it anymore. Just changing that scene… When I ran that one through the writing group, one of my writing group members said, "Wow. This is the best scene in the whole sequence. The whole sequence of chapters." It started as the worst one. So just kind of giving some more flavor to the scene can be really handy.

[Mary Robinette] That gets back to one of the things we were talking about ahead of… At the early thing, was giving them two different goals, the physical goal and the verbal emotional goal. Sometimes those two things are vastly… They just are fighting themselves. That sounds like so much fun.

[Howard] I think in terms a lot of what is the reader's reward for having read this chapter or this scene or whatever. I mean, the scene has a purpose, and in some cases the purpose is, "Oh, I gotta do a bunch of exposition so that I can do a bunch of plot later." The scene's purpose is not the reward. One of the purposes should be a reward of some sort. Some page-turn-y bit. Taking the shot versus shot example… Or the whole hallway walking scene. One, yes, those are terribly lazy. But if in that scene, we are traversing a space between two very interesting spaces, and we arrive someplace where the camera opens up onto something wondrous, and the conversation stops because we are now in a new place looking at something interesting… Well, now that whole thing was justified because we set up pacing for an eye candy. Whatever.

[Brandon] Agreed. I love some of those things.

[Howard] I always think about it in terms of what's the reward for the reader? If there isn't one, what can I put in?

[Mary Robinette] You said something that made me think of a thing which is that when you are looking at these scenes, they actually serve two functions. There's the authorial intent, the reason you, the author, need that book… That scene in there. But then there's the character intention. Every time we're talking, we're speaking for a reason. There's something that we are trying to accomplish. Sometimes it's I want to look clever, sometimes I want to get information, sometimes it's I want to prevent someone… It's… There's a purpose behind that. So if you can think about exactly why the character is saying that, and you make sure that that is present in the scene… It's not a scene that's just, "Hello, here is my authorial intent."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah, that's what I wanted to mention as well, because when we start scenes, we often think about what our goal as the writer is, what is this scene intended to accomplish. Making sure that you know what their goals are… Not only does it provide more characterization like that, but usually what it does is it brings a lot of imbalance into the scene. People want to have a different conversation than the person they're talking to wants to have. Or, you will have a power imbalance, where one character is trying to convince their teenager or their employee or something to do something, like, "I don't want to be a part of this conversation at all." Or just a child talking to an adult and not being treated seriously. Those imbalances, wherever they come from and however they manifest, can add a lot of texture in there as well.

[Brandon] All right. That was a really good conversation about dialog.

[Dan] Hey!

[Brandon] Look at that. Let's go ahead and go to our homework, which Mary Robinette is going to give to us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, what I want you to do is I want you to take a scene with dialog. This can be a scene from something that's already written or something that… A published thing or something that you've written. I want you to remove all of the description from it. So that you're just left with dialog. Then I want you to do that thing I mentioned earlier, I want you to remove every third line of dialog. Put the context back in and use body language and internal motivation, where the character is thinking. Build bridging things in there so that the scene now flows, with those pieces of dialog missing.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/10/28/13-43-characters-who-are-smarter-than-you-are/

Key points: To write a character who is super clever, amazingly smart… Gift the character with your indecision. Show the character going through the process of thinking, then show the character making logical jumps. Clean the brain vomit off the screen, but keep the key portions. Give the reader enough clues to understand the problem and try to solve it themselves, so they participate in the intelligence of the character. Brainstorming, pacing, and cleaning it up. Letting the reader arrive at a conclusion before the character does is satisfying, but don't overdo it. Make sure the key clues are all out there for the reader. In mysteries, the reader is one step behind the detective, but in thrillers, the reader is one step ahead. It may take the writer some time to figure out a clever answer, but if the character does it in seconds, the reader is amazed at how smart they are! Similarly, if all the other characters react as if this character is very smart, the reader will accept it, too. If the character knows they're smart and displays that confidence on the page, the reader sees it. Also, borrow expert knowledge from other people. Sometimes, for instance in a heist novel, later revelation of how something gets done works best. But when you reveal the monster, make sure it's horrifying! Lastly, consider Dave and the fizz buzz test.

( Bits and pieces... )

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Amal] And we're not… That… Smart? Are we smart?

[Howard] We… Okay.

[Amal] We're pretty smart.

[Howard] We are rejoined for this episode by Amal El-Mohtar, who I personally believe is very much that smart.

[Hah!]

[Howard] But even at that level, if she takes time… Yes?

[Mary] We should actually introduce all of ourselves.

[Howard] Oh, damn.

[Dan] He's just demonstrating how not smart we are.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm just…

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was so excited to be able to do something right.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then Mary told me I didn't.

[Dan] You know, at some point, the opportunity might arise again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm thinking 2020…

[Mary] What's er name?

[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Mary] What's your name?

[Howard] My name? Or her name?

[Mary] Your name.

[Howard] My name. I couldn't hear you. I said, "What's her name?" I was missing like a little piece of the syllable.

[Mary] He's Howard. I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I was going to start again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Hey, you know what, we're keeping it.

[Amal] We're keeping this?

[Howard] We're keeping it. I was going to pre-roll over the whole beginning again. Amal, thank you for joining us. I'm so sorry for how not smart we are. It's so nice to have you back.

[Dan] Because you are.

[Amal] It's a pleasure to be here.

[Howard] Thank you. One of the trickiest things to do in any of our writing is to write a character who comes up with a solution that is super clever, amazingly smart, in just seconds, and we try to write that in the same amount of time, or even in 10 times that amount of time. We try and write characters who are far cleverer than we are. What are the tricks that you use to make that happen?

[Mary] One of the things that I often use is actually gifting the character with my indecision. Because what I find is that there are two things that will make a character seem smart. One is watching them go through the process, and the other is watching the logical jump. Strangely, I often find that watching them go through the process, especially early in the piece, will make the character… Make the reader think, "Oh, this character's smart," because they can see all of the logical chains. So when I'm struggling, like how would you solve this problem? Having a character who is thinking, "Okay, I'm stuck in a room. How do I get out of the room? Do I try that door? No, that door has killer bees outside.

[Hah!]

[Mary] Do I try this door? There's someone with a drill outside it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Whatever it… Okay. So, I know, I will open this third door, and there's a balcony, and I can hang glide from it. Whatever that process is, that gifting… Basically what's happening there is I am brainstorming on the page in the voice of my character. What the reader is receiving is a character is thinking logically through the problem. Then, later in the story, I don't have to do that. I can brainstorm off the page, and just have the character jump to that, and the reader will then assume the character has exhibited all of those smarts, because I've laid the groundwork earlier.

[Dan] Yeah. When you write that kind of brainstorming scene, and I do it a lot as well, I find that I almost always need to go back and clean it up a little bit, because you don't want to have the full brain vomit all over your screen. But keeping the key portions of it, do… They set it up so your audience trusts you that the character is figuring out all the rest of the things that you don't have to show.

[Amal] I think that… What you're describing there too is sort of a pacing issue more than anything else. There's a difference in demonstrating an intelligent character's intelligence in film and television which I think we're really used to seeing at this point with… Especially in genre with Dr. Who and with Sherlock and with all the iterations thereof, we're used to this kind of fast-paced banter stuffed with things that you the audience can't keep up with how smart the characters are. But on the page, I think that for that effect to be achieved, there's a certain degree of working the readers through the situation. So what you were describing, both of you there, is that giving the reader enough cues to understand the problem and get to solving it themselves as they're reading it is, I think, a big part of sharing in the intelligence of the character. I think part of the question here is not only how do we make our smart characters smarter than us, but how do we make our smart characters have smartness that the reader participates in in a degree that is enjoyable, and to what degree we want that joy to come in. There are… Like I think of… There are narrative level joys there where you have a kind of meta-experience of it, and there are character level joys where you're tense and nervous and wondering how you're going to get out of that locked room as well with this character, and a big part of that is seeing how impossible it is to do that. So it feels like… Like it's… The pacing of it is kind of the middle of the Venn diagram between the brainstorming it in the first place and then the cleaning up of it afterwards that you just described.

[Howard] There's also a piece that if you're… I'm going to go back to the escaping the room. Where you have something that many savvy readers will already know. A character says… Grabs one doorknob, "Oh, that doorknob's really hot. I'm going to need a towel. No, wait. Doorknob's really hot, I shouldn't open it, there might be a fire on the other side.

[Right]

[Howard] Because the reader might already know that thing, and the reader arriving at the conclusion before the character does is very satisfying for the reader. This is the… That's a quick thing that you can give them. You might not want to give them that for the whole book, because then, oh, they totally saw it coming.

[Amal] Exactly. Oh, the doorknob's really hot, I'm going to use it to burn the ropes that are holding my hands together before I do anything else, and so on.

[Dan] I love what Amal said about characters… Or the reader participating in the character's intelligence. That, I think, is really important. You can look at mysteries, which I think are a fantastic example of this. Because there's always… For me, the very disappointing mysteries are the ones where the key clues that solve it are stuff we hadn't heard before. Or something that the amazingly brilliant detective has pulled out of the air. We're like, "Well, I didn't know about that offshore account. I couldn't have solve this mystery." Conan Doyle does this really well with Sherlock. One of the reasons that Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic character is because, for the most part, he does give us all the clues. We can look back and go, "Oh, it was all there, and I could have done this." One of my favorites is in The Redheaded League, where he has an entire interrogation of the character, and we think that that's important, and then, at the very end, as they're walking away, Watson says, "Well, what did you learn?" He says, "Oh, it doesn't matter what I learned. I was just there to look at his knees. They're dirty." We don't know why that's important, but we start to think about it…

[Wow]

[Dan] And we realize his knees are dirty. He was kneeling in dirt. He was digging through into the next building.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's so cool. That makes us feel smart. Which makes us think the character is smart.

[Amal] Right.

[Mary] One of the things… I'm glad you brought up mysteries, because one of the things that I often go back to is that there is a difference between the thriller and mystery, which is that in mystery, you're one step behind the detective, in thrillers, you're one step ahead of the character. So when you're looking at whether or not you're making the character smart, part of that participatory aspect is whether you let the reader figure it out before the character, or if they figure it out after. I think if you want the reader to feel like this character is supersmart, you let them figure it out one step after the character. It doesn't have to be like pages and pages later, but if you let them figure it out just a little bit later. One of the tricks that I will do sometimes with that, I will gift them with my uncertainty, but with what Dan was talking about, about cleaning up afterwards, I'll sometimes pull steps out. Because that allows my character to figure it out a moment before my reader does.

[Howard] Let's pause for our book of the week. Dan?

[Dan] Yes. Our book of the week is a really fantastic nonfiction, called What If by Randall Munroe. This is the guy that does XKCD, which is a really cool science-based web comic. He did a book that I believe is subtitled Ridiculous Answers to Serious Scientific Questions. He will take… People will ask him things like, "What would happen if you had a mole of moles?" Then he will go through into exhaustive detail all of the actual science behind if you had literally millions of moles, the animal, just floating in space in a giant ball, and how would gravity affect them, and what would happen to them? And things like what would happen if a submarine went into outer space? All of these things. In the process of answering these questions, you learn so much about the science and you learn it in a very engaging way. It's something that I have continued to go back to as I write my fiction, because there's really good science in there, presented in a really intelligible, accessible way.

[Howard] There's good science in it. It's quite funny.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] What would happen if the pitcher threw the ball at the speed of light?

[Hah!]

[Howard] He begins by telling you, "Okay. Bad things are going to happen once we're moving at this speed. So, let's assume that a moment after he releases the ball, it accelerates to the speed of light. Because that way, the bad things are going to happen in a more interesting way."

[Laughter]

[Dan] He's got one where somebody asked if the planet in The Little Prince could actually exist, and have its own gravity, and people could live on it. In the process of exploring what would happen to a planet like that, what would it have to be like, how dense would it be, what would the gravity be like, I have gone back to that exclamation over and over as I write my outer space science fiction because of the way he explains gravity. So, What If, by Randall Munroe, is a really great resource. We recommend you look it up.

[Howard] Okay. Coming back around to our tricks for writing characters who come up with solutions that are bit more brilliant than we've come up with. Have there been moments where you've been stuck and the solution you've arrived at is one that you're particularly proud of and would like to share with the class?

[Dan] I do have one. In the first Mirador book, Bluescreen, I've got the characters caught in the middle of a drive-by gang war. Two rival gangs are shooting at each other, the main character needs to stop them, but she does not have combat powers. She is a gamer and a hacker, and I wanted to make sure to solve that problem with intelligence, rather than her just picking up a gun and going Rambo on everybody. I had to stop and think about it for a couple of days before I figured out, "Oh, okay. I think some of those seeds that I've earlier put in about how pop up… Everyone has a computer in their head, and pop up ads will come and kind of intrusively come into your vision." So she was able to use that advertising system to blind all of the gang members essentially, so they weren't able to attack each other. It took me a few days to figure that out. She does it in seconds. I'm very proud of it.

[Howard] DDoSed with pop-up ads.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's horrifying. While you guys… While you all are thinking about the answer to the question, I want to clarify something. This episode actually airs just three and a half weeks from us recording it, because it's a replacement episode. So, Amal, you're not appearing a season later than you appeared before, you're appearing right in the middle of the season in which we're already enjoying episodes with you. The thing that feels weird is that Dan and I have not had the opportunity to record with you.

[Amal] This is true. This is a delight. I have now recorded… Well, when we are done recording, I will have recorded with all the core cast of Writing Excuses.

[Dan] Hooray!

[Amal] Which is really awesome.

[Howard] Any other boasting you'd like to do?

[Mary] So, with Calculating Stars, one of the challenges… And Fated Sky… One of the challenges that I had is that I have someone who can do math, who's a mathematician, and I am… I have dyscalcula. I like legit cannot do math. Not in the math is hard, but like I… Geometry? Fine. Absolutely. My spatial awareness, wonderful. Arithmetic and I are, wow, we are really not friends. We have not been on speaking terms for decades…

[Laughter]

[Mary] At this point. I have this character who is a computer, who is a calculator. What she does is she does math. So my problem was I don't. I'm not actually that interested in it. So what I did was I treated it like a magic system. Rather than having her do all of the math that I need her to do in these books, I laid the groundwork ready early that Elma can do math. Then I decided that Elma can do math in her head and that she visualized it. Which is the same thing that they do in the television Sherlock Holmes films, series, that the BBC series. Where you get to see… Things whipping around him, that's the visualization. Because that way, rather than having to explain the logical leaps, it's like, "Oh. Magic system happens. Math is magic."

[Hah!]

[Mary] So I am particularly proud of that, because it allows me to get around my own weakness in this area. While at the same time, because early on, I have every other character treating her as if she can do amazing calculations. Actually, through the entire book, everyone is like, "Oh, yeah. No one is faster at math than Elma. She can do amazing math in her head." Everyone reacts to her as if this is a truth in the world. Which means that I can just put the conclusions on the page. I don't, in that case, have to step through the process to get there.

[Amal] Similarly, so I have this novella, which… I've talked about it… No, I haven't talked about it yet. Oh, no. Sorry.

[Howard] You will have talked about it…

[Amal] I will have talked about it.

[Howard] In an episode previously recorded.

[Amal] That's exactly it. That's exactly it.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I wish I could… I wish I were smart enough to make that seem like something that I just know from understanding times…

[Howard] It's happened to us enough times, that I already have all those parts of speech.

[Mary] They are used to our time travel.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So, Max Gladstone and I have co-written a novella that is coming out in probably… I think it's… Probably, I think it's July 2019. It's a book of two dueling time traveling super spies. One written by Max and one written by me. I have a number of insecurities in this regard because, first of all, I mean, they're time traveling super spies, they have all of time and space at their disposal, they are the best there… They are the best there are at what they do. But Wolverine quote, "And what they do is not very nice." Etc. So, they're brilliant, and they're constantly outsmarting each other and one upping each other. I am not a time traveling superspy.

[Howard] Probably.

[Mary] What!

[Amal] Probably not. But… The thing was, the insecurity I had around this, is I also haven't read a time of spy fiction. Like, there are, I think, a lot of protocols around this genre, that I only feel glancingly familiar with. So what I started to do, I realized, was writing this character… And especially because Max has a lot more of those protocols than I do. He is far more savvy with all of the kind of… Especially Cold War era stuff. He's literally writing a serial for Bookburners… Not for Bookburners. A serial for Serial Box, which is not Bookburners. Which is the spy… The witch that came in from the cold. Anyway, it's literally Soviet era spy stuff. So what I found myself doing was kind of the opposite of what you described at first, Mary Robinette, of the… Of giving… Gifting the character the uncertainty. I had my character strike constant confident poses. That confidence, like that maintaining of I know I'm a brilliant superspy. I know that I can outsmart you. And stuff. And to just kind of dwell in the affect of knowing that she is that brilliant helps to overcome those hurdles. So I feel like it was like a sustained thing across the whole project, to just find the confidence to display that confidence on the page was the [fall] for me in that situation.

[Mary] One of the other things, like that confidence and the I don't know this thing, that I also find that I use is expert knowledge from other people.

[Uhum.]

[Amal] Ah. Yes.

[Mary] Which I have talked about in other places. That I am totally comfortable with going to someone and just leaving blanks in my manuscript, and going to someone who actually is an expert in this field, and then having them fill in my blanks, so that my character is literally smarter than I am, because they're talking about things that I know nothing about.

[Amal] Right.

[Mary] Whether or not that's one of my astronaut friends.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Wait, wait. Do you have astronaut friends, Mary?

[Mary] I do. I know, I know, it's shocking to everyone.

[Howard] You want to know something funny?

[What?]

[Howard] This episode airs immediately after Writing Excuses interviews an astronaut.

[Laughter]

[Amal] That's so great.

[Howard] We couldn't will have timed this better.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Well, that was exactly why we did this. Will have done this.

[Amal] There is one quick thing I wanted to say, too, just about things that we've been discussing. It occurs to me that some of the things that we've touched on are kind of generic distinctions between… In ways to talk about… To convey the smartness of characters who are smarter than we are. Because I think of… So we've talked about mystery, we've talked about other stuff, but I… If you're writing a heist novel, for instance. I have to assume that part of the way you display the smartness of the character is by revealing afterwards how a thing was done. What you're doing, instead of showing how smart they are, is showing how impeded they are throughout, in order to then kind of just reveal at the end the way that those things fell together. It feels like writing kind of backwards the things that we were initially talking about.

[Mary] I think that gets into that thing we were talking about earlier, about whether or not you want the reader to be ahead of or behind the character. You were going to say something, Dan?

[Dan] Yeah. The more that Amal is talking about this, I'm kind of coming to this epiphany, that a lot of this intelligence that we see in characters follows the same principles of a horror movie when you finally reveal the monster.

[Oooo]

[Dan] Right. It's the monster…

[Mary] I'm shocked that you refer to this as…

[Dan] I know. Isn't that weird that I would go there?

[Laughter]

[Dan] If you've been building up the monster as something horrible, and then you finally show it and it doesn't live up to our expectations, then it feels very disappointing. It feels so much worse than if we'd never seen the monster at all. If you're doing this, if you're building up your character's confidence or intelligence or capability, and then we finally get to the point where we see them, for example, do some math and it's like super simple math…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then that's not going to impress us, and we're going to be like, "Really? That's the math that Elma's so good at?" So that's one of the things I thought, for example, that Elma did really well, that you did well with Elma, was when we finally saw the monster, so to speak, when we finally revealed that capability that we'd been hearing so much about, it lived up to, if not superseded, our expectations.

[Mary] And because… The reason it did that was because I was using someone else's math. The one scene in the novel where I actually have her talking at length about a formula is when she is at the Congressional hearing, and there is a formula, and she is explaining it to the Congressman. That formula comes out of Wernher von Braun's Mars, A Technical Project. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern rocketry.

[Dan] Modern rocketry.

[Mary] So… And that formula, by the way, is ridonkulous.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It is so long. So she explains the first maybe 16th of the formula. It is that… Again, it's like I don't give the reader everything. But I give them… It is competence porn, is basically what we're dealing with.

[Dan] Well, one of the reasons, again, that that particular scene works well is that she is presenting it to a group of very smart, very capable, very competent people, and they can't follow it. So we're seeing not only her own intelligence, but her comparative intelligence.

[Howard] There is a… A test, a quiz, that's often administered to people who are hiring for programming jobs. It's called the fizz buzz test, which is write a program that prints the numbers one through 100, that if it's a multiple of three, you substitute the number with fizz, if it's a multiple of five, it's buzz, and if it's a multiple of both three and five, do fizz and buzz. Write a computer program that will do that. Elegant is good, writing it quickly is good, writing it so it is tight is good. Solve this problem for me, let me see what kind of a problem solver you are. My friend Dave had an interview in which the guy asked this question. Dave said, "Well, first thing I'd do is I'd write a program that says call FizzBuzz.lib from whatever this hub is because somebody else has already solved it."

[Laughter]

[Howard] The guy laughed and laughed and laughed. Then Dave provided his solution. Then, that night, Dave went home, wrote a very elegant, over the course of about four hours, fizz buzz program that he uploaded to the library, so that when his boss to be came in the next morning to look it up, he found it and saw who wrote it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] That is…

[Laughter]

[Mary] That is smart.

[Howard] That is brilliant and beautiful and kind of hilarious.

[Howard] On that note, I would like to offer our listeners some homework.

[Mary] Yes, please.

[Howard] Time. Is. Your. Friend. Your character might not have a lot of time, but you do. Write a solution, off of the top of your head, to a character problem that you are currently facing. First thing you can think of. Now, over the next couple of days, it might be two days, it might be a week, it might be longer, spend time researching on the Internet, in books, from friends, anything even tangentially related to that problem. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's climate, maybe it's geography, maybe it's pop up ads. Research these things and as you are doing the research, write down the solutions that come to you. Then, after you've done all this, order these solutions in a list of what you think is dumbest to smartest, and see how much smarter you are able to get with time. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Because this is Writing Excuses. And I got those out of order. I'm terrible at this.

[Laughter]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/13/12-33-how-to-be-brief-yet-powerful/

Key Points: Brevity, it's not just for short stories! How to get an idea across in a brief number of words. Start by honing in on what you want to tell, during the conception phase. Start with your character, what do they want, what are they doing to try to get it, and what obstacles do they have to overcome? Instead of punch-by-punch action scenes, try an emotional buildup, one headbutt, and the effects of that. Make sure that readers know what is at stake. Specifically. The consequences of failure. Look for powerful moments. Use the cold open! Short story titles frame the story, and often are longer. Look for resonant phrases, or borrow from quotes. To evoke a whole world, be specific about one thing. Food is often good for this. Knowing that a reader will probably read a short fiction piece in one sitting, and only read it once, may affect pacing, paragraphing, and emphasis. Many stories are competent, but forgettable. Make your characters specific, give the reader an emotional connection to the story, make it particular. "The more specific you are, the more universal it becomes."
( Emotional buildup, punch, and consequences? )

[Brandon] This has been a really good discussion. I'm actually going to have to call it here. But Mary has some homework for us.
[Mary] Yes. What I want you to do is we're going to start from a concept. This is a thing that I wind up doing… Weirdly, I have typewriters and I will set up at a convention and I will sit down and I will write a short fiction… Piece of short fiction on demand. So what I want you to do is basically this. You're going to pick a character. An object. And a genre. Then you're going to write 250 words. That 250…
[Brandon] Only 250?
[Mary] Only 250 words. One page. That needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which means, just in case you're thinking about this already, that means that it is one try-fail cycle. So one character, one object, one location. Now if you want to bring in another character, that's fine. But be aware that every time you add another character, those are more words that you need to handle that person.
[Brandon] Awesome. That sounds really hard.
[Laughter]
[Mary Anne] Sounds like a good homework exercise for Brandon.
[Brandon] Yes. This has been Writing Excuses. I'm out of excuses, now I'll go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

NaNoWriMo Pep-Talk from Dan

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/11/23/nanowrimo-pep-talk-from-dan/

[Dan] Hi. This is Dan Wells from Writing Excuses. It is the third week of NaNoWriMo. You have exactly 7 days left to finish your novel. You should be at around 38,000 today. If you're not, that's okay. You've got Thanksgiving tomorrow, which will either eat up a bunch of your time or it will give you a bunch of extra, because you don't have to go to work. Either way...

So, what I want to tell you today is the impact that Nano has had on my career. It took me about a year and a half each to write my first three books. My fourth book was the first one I did for NaNoWriMo. From that point on, I've been doing one or two books a year. It accelerated my pace significantly because it taught me how to write, how to keep to a schedule, how to stop self editing, and more importantly, it taught me how to go back and revise and fix it and make it good later once you've written it.

Fantastic skills. Incredibly valuable skills that have helped me get published.

So. You're doing a good thing. You're doing it well. Keep it up. You're awesome.

And we'll see you at the finish line.

Current Mood: muggles

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 5.16: Critiquing Dan's First Novel

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/19/writing-excuses-5-16-critiquing-dans-first-novel/

Key Points: Avoid discontiguities. Stomp out the cliche that all fantasy starts with a long, dry, boring description. Character before things! Punch it up and show us a character's viewpoint. Consider your genre, but put the promise of the story as early as possible. Start the story where it starts, and don't tell us all the stuff you wanted to tell us, just start it and go. You don't have to fill in everything. One telling detail beats pages of prose. Evoke plot, character, and setting. Make each sentence do multiple things. When you rewrite, make decisions. Consider your pace, and rearrange information as needed.
( Between the bindings... )
[Brandon] All right, Dan. I'm going to let you give us our writing prompt.
[Dan] Our writing prompt?
[Howard] And remember that time travelers may be reading this writing prompt for last week.
[Dan] May be reading this right now? Okay. This is... take an idiomatic expression and literalize it. So, for example, the crack of dawn... a world in which dawn actually cracks, visibly or audibly. Then describe that going on. Not as a pun, but as world building information.
( Final jokes )

Current Mood: fancy

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

June 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.14: A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling Through Voice
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.11: A Close Reading on Voice -- An Overview and Why Time War
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.33: Tell, Don't Show
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful
mbarker.livejournal.com - NaNoWriMo Pep-Talk from Dan
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.16: Critiquing Dan's First Novel

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with pace

Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season

Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together

Writing Excuses 19.14: A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling Through Voice

Writing Excuses 19.11: A Close Reading on Voice -- An Overview and Why Time War

Writing Excuses 19.06: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Length

Writing Excuses 18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice

Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue

Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator

Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story

Writing Excuses 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines

Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs

Writing Excuses 16.33: Tell, Don't Show

Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog

Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are

Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful

NaNoWriMo Pep-Talk from Dan

Writing Excuses 5.16: Critiquing Dan's First Novel

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June 2025

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