wetranscripts | Entries tagged with passion

Writing Excuses 18.18: Launching an Author Newsletter

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-18-launching-an-author-newsletter/

Key Points: Two kinds of newsletters, content newsletters and marketing newsletters. Content or announcements? One newsletter or many? One channel is probably best. What are you passionate about? How often can you do it? Don't overcommit! Look at platforms, MailChimp and others. Consider an assistant! Collect addresses.

[Season 18, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Launching an Author Newsletter.

[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.

[DongWon] So, this week we wanted to talk about creating your own newsletter. One thing that I wanted to distinguish up front is that, in my view, there are two distinct types of newsletters that exist in the world. I think a lot of the confusion that people have, and a lot of the trepidation people have, comes from confusing which one is which. So, the newsletter that I do, Publishing Is Hard, is what I would call a content newsletter. It is a thing that I create and send out on a regular basis that are essays, whatever missives, what we would have once called a blog. The other type of newsletter is a marketing newsletter. This is for announcements. It's not a place where you write an essay about what you think about craft, what you think about writing. It's a place where you tell people, "I have a book coming out. Preorder it. I have an event coming up. Buy tickets. Here's my new cover." Whatever it is. Right? So keeping those two things distinct in your brain, I think, is the first step to really understanding a strong newsletter strategy. So that's sort of like the overall framework I wanted to launch this conversation with. There are reasons to have both. The basic difference is, I think, every single person who is doing a thing on the Internet where they want people to buy stuff should have a marketing newsletter. Should just have one. If you have… Launching a content newsletter is a more deliberate thing and takes a lot of work and thought as to what it is you want to be doing with it. But if you want to be an author, if you want to have published books, please, please, please make a newsletter. We're going to talk a little bit more about why and how to do that.

[Mary Robinette] I was very resistant to doing a newsletter for a long time, because all of the newsletters that I heard people talk about were the content newsletters. I was like, "Oh, that's very exhausting." Even though I had blogged daily for years. It just… It felt different. Then I was also resistant to doing a marketing newsletter because I'm like, "Who's going to read that? It's just going to go in and say by my things. It's just going to be people putting me in spam folders." But I'm finding that actually having control of my audience is like really handy for not just the regular things, but also the surprise visits, the "Hey, I have a sudden giveaway I want to do." That it is a nice way to connect to people.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think one of the things we're finding as digital marketing develops over the last I don't know how many years since Al Gore invented the Internet is the only thing that we know works is email marketing. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think display ads, I think content marketing, all of those things can work in certain circumstances. They tend to be very, very expensive. Email, though, getting in people's inboxes, especially people that you know are interested in what you're providing because they signed up for your newsletter in the first place is just one of the most effective ways to activate people, to get them to go do the thing that you want them to do. So having a marketing newsletter, the reason I recommend it so highly, is it's direct access to your core audience, to your main supporters. It is… You can make an appeal to them that is like, "Hey, please do this thing." Now, the thing to remember with a marketing newsletter is that every time you send one, some percentage of the people are going to unsubscribe to that thing. Right? That's okay, that's part of the process. Right? You're going to lose people every time you send it. So, the thing about that, every time you pull the trigger on sending a marketing letter, is that I'm going to lose some people when I do this. Because it shows up in their inbox, they're like, "I don't remember signing up for this. I'm going to unsubscribe." It's fine. It's how people use the Internet. But you want to make sure when you are doing it as a result, you work doing it for a really intentional purpose.

[Erin] I have a question that is just for me. I am somebody who does a lot of things in different areas. I do some game writing, I do some short story writing, I do some teaching. If I'm creating, because I've yet to put together a newsletter, but I'm using this as the drive to do it, am I like… Should I be having three newsletters? Should I be having one that, like, has a lot of different types of content? Or will people get mad and unsubscribe more?

[DongWon] It's a tough balancing act, because you don't want to hit the marketing things too often. Right? If you're sending one every week when you have something dropping, people… You're going to lose a lot of your audience over time as people unsubscribe, because they're like, "These are too many emails." Right? So finding that balance is tricky. If you're a traditionally published author, it's not too bad, you're doing one or two or maybe three of these a year. Whatever. With the number of things you have coming out, I would advise, like, yeah, have one channel. I don't think segmenting your audience is going to be… I mean, it's just like way too much work for you and too much work for your audience, too, to figure out which newsletter they want to sign up for. I would just try instead and really think about how can I bundle these things together to make sure that I'm not touching them too often.

[Dan] Yeah. Which is kind of, sort of, what I do with mine. I call mine a water cooler newsletter. Based on something a friend of mine told me a while ago, which is, if you think of social media as a water cooler, that's a place where you go and you have interesting conversations with people. If someone shows up at the water cooler and all they ever talk about is how you can buy shirts in their store, you don't want to talk to that person or listen to what they say. So my newsletter is very much a marketing newsletter, and I send it out once a month, whether I've got a new launch or not. I need to tell people about my calendar, and what events I'm doing, and so on and so on. But I also make sure to include I'm going to recommend somebody else's book in every one. What is Dan reading right now? This. I am going to give you a quick update on what I am writing, in case you are interested. Like, I'm halfway through this book. So it is a tiny bit of content to help give you something interesting to read, and to recommend other people as well as just me. So that it's not purely, "Hey, go to my store and buy my merch."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's why, like, mine will often have pictures of my cats and I have an automation set up so that on your birthday, I send you a short story, and every year it's a different short story. That… Remembering to change them is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry for everyone who got the same short story twice this year.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I love that. I love having that little bit of a personal touch. Right? It can be automated, but still, it's like a thing that you receive. It's like, oh, here's a special thing from this creator I follow, who I'm a fan of. I think it's a great way to like get them more engaged with you in a more personal way.

[Howard] Coming back to answering Erin's question, what should you put in your newsletter. I would ask this first. What's a thing that you're interested in and would be willing to write about on a regular basis that might interest other people? That could be movies that you like to watch. That could be… It could be cooking. I mean, there… Any topic. Literally, any topic. Because when you're creating content, when you're creating a content newsletter, when you're creating something with hooks, something that grabs people and holds them, you have to be passionate about it first. If you're not passionate about it, it's going to be twice as hard to write about it. So that's the… For me, that would be the first question. The second question, then, is how often can I do it? How much… What else do I have to promote that I would roll into it? With DongWon's newsletter, it's about your passion for publishing. Which dovetails nicely with Writing Excuses, passion…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For talking about writing.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yup.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It's important when you're asking yourself these questions to remember that you're giving yourself an extra job. For the most part, you became an artist because you're excited about creating art, not excited about promoting art. So don't over commit to something you know you're going to resent. Make it something like DongWon's newsletter is something that they love to write, they're passionate about. If it felt onerous, you wouldn't do it.

[DongWon] That's also part of why it's so irregular in terms of the timing. I do it when I have bandwidth to do it. I am often insanely busy, and it's… I just don't have the bandwidth to come up with another well thought out, carefully worded newsletter. Right? So when it comes to the marketing newsletter, that's why my advice is to make it as light of a touch and like a lift as possible for you of keep it simple. Stick to really basic things. At a bare minimum, just announce when you have stuff. Include extra things if you can, in terms of recommending other people's books, little personal touches like your… Like the cat photos or the short story for… On people's birthdays. Those are lovely little things. Those aren't necessary. You can make it as late as possible for you to make it manageable. Then, when you're looking at the content style newsletter, really think about what your bandwidth is. How much can you take on? Can you do a thing once a month? Once every two months? Don't overpromise to your audience and leave them feeling disappointed. Give them more rather than give them less when you're making that sort of content approach. I want to switch to talking about the mechanics of it, how you do these things, what platforms you use, things like that, but let's first take a break for a moment. Then we will be right back.

[Dan] All right. So, I want to talk about the new book from our good friend of the podcast, Piper Drake. She has a book out called Wings Once Cursed and Bound. It actually comes out in two days from when this airs on May 2. This… Piper has a very successful career as a romance author. Wings Once Cursed and Bound is a step into a bit of a new genre. It is kind of modern fantasy. It is about a woman in Seattle who is secretly hiding the fact that she is actually a char… A kind of mythical creature from Thai folklore. She is a bird person. She encounters a guy who is a vampire who goes around in the world collecting mystical artifacts and locking them up so that they don't cause problems for people. He is currently looking for the infamous red shoes. Kind of the same idea as the Hans Christian Anderson story about the red shoes that make you dance forever. So, it's the two of them and those red shoes. They get embroiled in this big story. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. That is Wings Once Cursed and Bound by Piper J. Drake.

[DongWon] Okay. So, as we're thinking about how do I set up that newsletter platform for myself, Erin, you are currently thinking about doing this for yourself. Sounds like the rest of everyone else has your own marketing newsletter. What platforms are you all using? How did you go about setting that up? What do you feel like works for you? I mean, are there best practices that you're finding really helping you reach your audience in the way that you want to be?

[Mary Robinette] So, I work with a company called Northstar Messaging. Because I have a limited number of spoons. So I had started mine with MailChimp. That was working really well for me for a long time. But there were a number of automations that I wanted to do with onboarding, and it was hard. It just didn't do that well. So we've just switched over to Active Campaign which allows you to build sequences so that… This is called a nurture sequence. So someone comes in, and they get a welcome message. Then, a little bit later, they get a different thing that has some additional evergreen content, as they're being folded into the regular flow. So that's… That idea of a nurture sequence is something that I had heard about a lot, and hadn't known how to execute it. Which is why I was like, "Hello. You are professionals." It's something that I have experienced as a consumer, and I know that they're useful. But I just… I couldn't understand how to do that for myself as a writer.

[Erin] I think that's a great point, which is that it's nice to see what you like in a newsletter. Like, if you have… You see somebody's newsletter and you're like, "Oh, my gosh. This design, I'm loving it." Like, it's nice to see, like, how are they sending it to you. Usually you can find it somewhere. Scroll down to the very bottom newsletter, you might see like, sent to you by MailChimp, or Constant Contact, or one of the many other platforms that is used to send newsletters. Or, if it's the kind of content newsletter like you have, DongWon, you can sometimes tell in the URL. Like, what the service is behind the service.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I love doing that, just because, even though I don't actually have a newsletter, I love making up the idea that I'm creating a newsletter, doing lots of research, and then not sending it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, often I collect lists of places that would be good to use, just by looking at what other people do and saying I want to do that.

[Howard] You're LARPing as a newsletter sender.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I don't actually know what system I use to send out a newsletter. Because of a different tool that I use, which is an assistant. I understand that this is not immediately accessible to every aspiring author. I have an assistant whom I pay. She puts together a newsletter for me, among other tasks. I will sit down at the beginning of every month, and I will write three paragraphs. What is Dan working on, what is Dan reading, what does Dan recommend. Then send them off to her, and she turns it into a newsletter and sends it out into the world. That has been, for me, an incredibly valuable way of offloading the parts of this business that I know are important, but that I don't want to do, and still get some value out of them.

[Howard] I have the same model. My assistant's name is Sandra. Sandra has a full plate of a million other things. With the long Covid and chronic fatigue, it's not just that I don't really want to spend time crunching the text for a newsletter, it is that we have to prioritize my time now so that I am doing the things that only I can do. Anything that can be done by somebody else gets handed off. So the newsletter management has been handed off. Now, that said, Sandra will sometimes come to me and say, "Hey, do you have anything for the newsletter? I need a picture. Do you have… My bank of Howard pictures has run dry." So I will dig around and I will find something. This happens with newsletters. It also happens with a thing that is very much like a newsletter and is core to our business model, Kickstarter updates. When we're working on a project and we need to let people know, "Hey, here's what… Here's where we are in this. Here are some art drops. Here's what's new in the…" It reads exactly like a newsletter, and the audience is exactly like a newsletter audience in that it is a self-selecting group of people who have chosen to hear about this. That's one of the things that I like to remind people about newsletters is that they work better than banner ads or anything else because it is a self-selecting group of people. If someone unsubscribes, they have self-selected out of the group, and that's fine.

[DongWon] But at some point, somebody said, "Yes. I want to take this content."

[Howard] Exactly.

[DongWon] That is such a huge difference versus…

[Howard] Incredibly… Incredibly valuable.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

[Howard] Incredibly valuable. As a data point on that, when we did our last Kickstarter, we looked at… We had a marketing company help us find all of the self-selecting people that… Anybody who'd ever bought anything with us, subscribers to the newsletter, previous Kickstarters, whatever. It was over 15,000 email addresses. We sent out one mail blast saying, "We're launching a Kickstarter."

[DongWon] Great.

[Howard] And had more subscribers than we had ever had before. So, starting a newsletter and collecting these addresses is… It's going to help you in the future, one way or another.

[DongWon] That's the thing. You can start collecting them early. You don't have to send a newsletter. No one remembers signing up for newsletters. Once you do it, you're not like, "I can't believe that person hasn't emailed me yet." Right? So you can start collecting emails now. Then, when your first novel comes out, five years from now, then, maybe, you have a few thousand names on that list. Right? That can make a huge difference as you just grow that a little bit over time. Just make sure any time someone goes to your website, someone goes to your link tree, or Twitter profile, or whatever it is, "Hey. Sign up to get updates from me here." I think starting to grab those like little drips, it adds up over time. What I love hearing all of you talk about this is… It kind of… This is one of those things that plays into the category of what we call authoring. Right? Things that go into the job of being a professional author that aren't actually writing books. Right? Which is an enormous amount of time. It is always shocking to me how much time and effort goes into dealing with email, responding about events, answering interview questions, all these things that sound like nice problems to have until you're doing this so much you don't have time to write. So, newsletters is a great one, especially a marketing newsletter, to offload to a consulting firm, in Mary Robinette's case, assistants, whatever it happens to be. But when you're early-stage, sort of more Erin's position, you're doing that research and figuring out how to launch it and build that up. I love hearing that you've already done all that homework. We'll get you to pull that trigger soon.

[Erin] It's happening.

[Mary Robinette] I should say that the marketing firm is a very new thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Before that, it was assistants, and before that, it was me, and when it was me, it was wildly irregular.

[DongWon] Exactly. That's the process. Right? You learn by doing. I love hearing Erin talk about, like, figuring out what you wanted to do by seeing what other people were doing. I mean, that's so much how we learn how to do all these marketing techniques is what's working. What are authors I like? Who do I respect? What content am I getting in my inbox that I think is good? Just sign up for a bunch of people's newsletters. I know it's going to be annoying for a minute. But just see what they're doing. Right? Go to your favorite authors pages. See what their newsletters look like. Learn some techniques from them. Then start applying that little bit by bit for yourself.

[Howard] It is worth pointing out that your newsletter can be a business model unto itself.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] If you are passionate enough about what you are writing, if you touch a nerve, you may find, wow, Howard writes about lazy recipes for old people, suddenly has 50,000 people reading it. Well, maybe if I turn that into a book, I can make money out of it. That is a legit thing. Which is one of the reasons why I would encourage you, if you're going to do a newsletter, write about things you're passionate about. Because that passion, that's what connects people to your fiction, it's what connects them to your TikTok, it's what connects us with each other.

[DongWon] If you're doing a content newsletter, you can get people to subscribe and pay. It's shocking how few subscribers it takes for that to suddenly feel like, "Oh. This makes sense for me to be spending a couple hours a week on this."

[Erin] I think that's also good because it gives you an assignment. So, one of the reasons that I have not started a newsletter for myself, despite the fact that I once worked as somebody who sent out newsletters for other people as a job. So it's… I know what the thing is. Is because it's so easy to put yourself last and say, "Okay. I only have so much time. I'm going to do stuff for other people." Or to put your writing self first, which is a completely legitimate choice. But the authoring does sort of need to get done. So by being on this podcast, I'm forcing myself to do the authoring. We're going to be asking you to do some of the authoring, too. But I think even more than that, if you have subscribers, it's a way to sort of offload… You're not making yourself do it, you're doing it for somebody else. You're giving them a gift. So, as long as that doesn't become a huge like pressure on you, I think it can be a nice motivation to kind of kick yourself in the butt and sort of make yourself do the thing that you want to do. Because you want to reach other people and let them know about what you've been doing.

[Mary Robinette] It's as if… It's almost as if when you're saying you're using this as a way to get the… To make yourself do the newsletter. It's almost as if you are figuring out who you are, and then doing it on purpose.

[Laughter]

[garbled Exactly. Wow. Callbacks. As if we've planned these episodes. Exactly.]

[Mary Robinette] It would have sounded so much more clever if we hadn't all just giggled at that.

[Laughter]

[Dan] We're clever, we're just not very professional about it.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] On that note, I think I will take us to our homework for the week. I think our homework is probably pretty easy to guess what I'm about to tell you to do based on everything I've said on this podcast so far, which is… Go make your own newsletter. Make a marketing newsletter, figure out what service you want to use. MailChimp is probably the most popular, but do a little googling. There's a million guides out there. Make an account. Make a free account. Just sign it up. Figure out how to integrate it into your personal website, if you have one. If you don't, make a website. Highly encourage you to do that. Then, you don't have to do anything to it. Don't send a newsletter, don't do anything with it. Just make it, get the sign-up form on that site, and let it be.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we talk about why publishers make choices, how writers can use that, and why Howard's been using the Time Machine all wrong. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go start a newsletter. Or go subscribe to ours. Because we also needed to start one, and recording these episodes made us realize that we hadn't. So, use the Time Machine, find our newsletter subscription button, subscribe, and join us.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.30: Write What You Want to Know, with Laurell K. Hamilton

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/26/15-30-write-what-you-want-to-know-with-laurell-k-hamilton/

Key Points: Write what you want to know! Dragons, fantastic things! What interests you, what moves you emotionally? Write about that. When you want to know about it, you are passionate about it. Do the research, so you know what's real, but you can also use the cool. Have fun! Find out what you love and write about that. Do your research, with books, multiple sources, and then experts. Pay attention to the Dunning-Kruger effect - are you too dumb to know how dumb you are? Look for encyclopedias, dictionaries, and bibliographies.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 30.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You Want to Know, with Laurell K. Hamilton.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Laurell K. Hamilton.

[Woo hoo]

[Laurell] Hi, everybody. Glad to be here today.

[Brandon] We are recording live at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] SpikeCon, which, this year, 2019, is also the host of the North American Science Fiction Convention, NASFIC.

[Brandon] We are very happy to be here. So. Write what you want to know. Laurell, you're the one who pitched this idea to us. It was really pithy and we loved it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Where did you come up with this phrase and what does it mean?

[Laurell] One of the things that I have always had a bugaboo about, since college, is one of the things they tell you in the writing courses is write what you know. They say, "Write what you know." Well, I was a Midwestern girl, raised in farm country, raised below the poverty level. I didn't want to write what I knew. I wanted to write about fantasy things. I wanted to write about dragons, like Anne McCaffrey. Dragons of Pern. I wanted to write about the fantastic. Well, there was a lot of fantastic in my life. So I get to college and they tell you write what you know. The teachers get mad at you that you wanted to write something that didn't exist. So, I thought, no. I want to know about X, or Y. I want to know about… Like, for… When I sat down to write the Anita Blake series, I didn't know anything about guns. I'd shot one gun in my entire life. I had a series where she carries a gun to work with the police. I had to go out and find out about guns and do research. I found out about what I wanted to know. So, pick something you want to know. What you're interested in as a writer. If you're… Most of us who write fantasy and science fiction, we want to write about something that makes us happy or that we're fascinated by or that horrifies us. Something that moves us emotionally. For those of us who write in the genre, that is going to be something that we're not going to be able to do in our real life, so we have to write about what we want to know.

[Howard] One of the things that I love about this concept is that… I mean, when I've heard it spun before, it's been, oh, don't bother with write what you know, you can go research and figure out the stuff that you don't know. The difference here is the passion that's going to go into what you want to know. Yeah, you want to write about dragons, you want to write a hard fantasy novel that has something to do with the way in which dragons fly? If that's what you're passionate about, you're going to study bird wings and bat wings and some aerodynamics and pieces of your story… Because that's what you're excited about. Pieces of your story are going to grow out of that research in ways that will grab readers because it grabbed you. You were passionate about it. It's what you wanted to know.

[Laurell] One of the things I found is as you research ru... Like, I wanted to put zombies. My main character raises zombies. So I actually researched voodoo. There are no such things as shambling dead in real voodoo. I'm just going to say that upfront. It doesn't exist. I'm sorry. But no matter what the movies say, it doesn't exist. But I did my research in real voodoo. It came up with other ideas. I finally… Somebody was in an audience and had… It was a part… Or this was their religion. I was waiting for them to lambaste me, and he came up, he says, "Thank you for doing the research in my faith." He says, "Most people ignore it and treat it like it doesn't exist and they don't do real research." I said, "Yes. But the shambling movie zombies, I still use them." He says, "Yeah, but they're so cool."

[Laughter]

[Laurell] So, if you do your research, you find out other ideas and things. Also, people will forgive you going that one step further. I wanted to write about the monsters in the real world as everybody knowing them. I am still having a great time. Give yourself enough toys when you're writing. Don't… You want to be having fun. Think of yourself at seven and you want all your toys. Well, if I wrote a straight mystery series, I don't think I'd be in the 20 plus book of the series. Because I wouldn't be having fun. I have a great time, every time I sit down to write, because I gave myself enough toys that interest me. Be passionate about your writing. You have to be interested.

[Dan] I like to think that research has kind of two main benefits. That story you told shows both of them. Number one, you're getting the right stuff right. People who know what they're talking about are not going to throw the book across the room because you wrote guns or horses or whatever it is wrong. The other thing is, you are buying goodwill with that research. So that then you can get other stuff wrong and people will go along with it, because it's cool.

[Laurell] Yes. Very, very much so. But think about… Make a list of the things. As a beginning writer, make a list of the things that interest you. Look at what you love. Look at what you've loved since you were small. Make a list of that. Because, think about it. Not only can you be a writer, but you can write about the things that… At five, I would beg to stay up and watch Boris Karloff in the original Frankenstein. By myself, because nobody would watch it with me.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I was begging at five to watch a monster movie. Now, here I am, all these years later, and that's what I write. Find out what you love and do that.

[Brandon] Dan taught me this lesson. Actually, because it goes back to the origin of I Am Not a Serial Killer, his first novel that was published. If we can kind of look at our careers, when we were young, in this way, like, we thought that we just needed to write what was being published. Right? The things that we read a lot, we were trying to mimic those. Which is how a lot of writers begin. You read a lot, you mimic what's being published. But we hadn't kind of hit upon yet was what are we going to add to this? What little aspect of the genre is really fascinating to us, that we can balloon into being our thing. For me, it was the magic systems. For Dan, it was a conversation on the way home from writing group, where we were talking about his fascination with serial killers. Dan, you'd always been writing epic fantasy.

[Dan] A very healthy thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. I grew up reading fantasy and assumed that I would be a fantasy author. Wrote five really terrible fantasy novels.

[Brandon] They were not really terrible.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] They were just moderately terrible, like all of ours were at that time.

[Dan] But it wasn't until I learned this lesson that Laurell's talking about, of what are you passionate about. Well. Serial killers. I'm not ashamed of that. Sitting down saying… I think what Brandon said was, "You always talk about this stuff, why don't you just stop flirting with it and write about it?" I don't know if those are the words he used, but that's the message. I did. Some of that, I didn't have to do a lot of research on, because I'd kind of spent my whole life learning everything I could about abnormal psychology and serial killer behavior. Other parts, I had to do copious amounts of research, so that a mortician would not, again, throw the book across the room when I talk about an embalming or something like that to make sure I got it right.

[Howard] The homeless population in our town dropped by like 80%.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Lots of hands-on research.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Okay. On that, let's stop for our book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Laurell, you're going to tell us about Noir Fatale.

[Laurell] Sorry, you just distracted me. I'm going, "Wait…"

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I am in a short story anthology called Noir Fatale. It just came out about a month ago, I think. It has, for me, an original Anita Blake short story called Sweet Seduction. Larry Correia is in it, David Weber is in it… I am blanking. I'm going… I'm terrible with names. I can see everybody's face. Nope.

[Brandon] Lots of really great writers.

[Laurell] It is lots of really great writers. It's based on the idea of the femme fatale from the old movies. Old noir movies. The femme fatale, in any way you wanted to do it. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror. So we're taking the genre of the detective, part detective, Sam Spade and everything, and mixing it with our genre and what we love most. So, it was a lot of fun to sit down and try to do something short where I usually get to write so long. I love short stories. One of the things… A short story anthology is like one of those compilations that they used to do before you could download every song. You would find musicians you had not heard before, and sometimes things you really love. Anthologies are like that. It's like a preview. You buy it for one person, and then you find somebody else that you love. Then you have a new author to follow.

[Brandon] Awesome. So, Noir Fatale.

[Dan] Noir Fatale…

[Brandon] Baen Books put that out.

[Dan] So if you are here at the con, there's a whole page ad for that book in the program book. So look that up. If you're listening to this online, you can find it everywhere, I assume.

[Brandon] So, Laurell, we'll… For my next… Kind of, the next part of the podcast, let's talk about your process of doing research. Let's say you've come up with something you want to know. It's a… There's a bit of it that you're really fascinated by. You've always wanted to learn more about it. What is your first step, where do you go?

[Laurell] First step is books and reading about it. For the Merry Gentry series, I researched anthropology. Okay. First of all, I grew up with a… My grandmother… We were Scotch Irish, so she would tell me the bogeyman… If I wasn't good, that Bloody Bones would get me. Raw Head Bloody Bones would get me. Which is a Scottish nursery boggle from the border countries of Scotland. Of all the things for my family to keep, that one bit of folklore actually narrows the geographic area where my family comes from for generations. I thought, growing up like that, I thought I knew something about the Fae in Scotland and Ireland and England. No, not really. I thought I did. So, I started with what I thought I knew and then go to books. One of the things I do is I make sure that I… Books, not. The. Internet.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I'm sorry, you can start with the Internet, it's a stepping off point, but you also have to make sure it is a book and not someone's opinion on the Internet. Because contrary to popular opinion, just because it's on the Internet doesn't make it real. So, don't just take one source either. Take multiple sources. So, start off with books. Then, if you need an expert… I would have talked to an anthropologist or a psychologist about the belief in fairies and how that had affected people and is it… How is it treated? Is it still thought of as a delusion? Or do people still believe? Like, I went back to the 1700s, to a folklorist who went out and interviewed people who had actually seen the high court of the Fae. Not as a delusion, but actually said, "No, they came to my farm. They rode by." So, first, do your book research before you talk to a person that you're taking their time up for. I really sincerely believe… So you have better questions. Don't just go to somebody and say, "Tell me everything you know about X or Y." You need good questions, because you don't want to waste their time. Their time is valuable. So start with books. I now have two shelves of books on the fairies, on Fae, and anthropology and archaeology and anything in that area. It is… It's taught me things about my own folklore that I grew up with, with my grandmother, that I realize now that some of it, she made up.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] She started with a little kernel of truth, and then she kind of built on it, or my grandfather, great-grandfather did. Because she believed everything my great-grandfather said was gospel. So somebody in my family told a few big windy's…

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] As they used to say. I guess it runs in the family.

[Howard] When I'm starting research on anything, I try to remember the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is when you don't know enough to know just how little you know. You're too dumb to know how dumb you are. Imagine, for a moment, that you are sitting in a car and there's a place you want to be and there's a person standing next to the car, and you ask them for directions. They give you directions. You don't know how to drive the car.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. That's Dunning-Kruger. The directions you just got will not get you there, because you don't even know where to start. One of the things that I've learned, a skill that I have developed, when I search for things on the Internet, and I search for a lot of things on the Internet. Sorry, Laurell. When I search for things on the Internet, one of the first things that comes up is going to be the Wikipedia page. I've gotten really good at skimming it and looking for keywords that I don't recognize that are linked. I will click them to pop open new tabs. All I'm doing now is learning about steering wheels and driveshafts and stick shifts and… Oh, wait, automatic transmission, that's going to make it easier… And filling my head with that. Then I jump down into the bibliography and start finding books. But I'm not actually looking for the books, because I'm way too lazy to go get a book. What I'm looking for is the names of the people who wrote the books. Because often what I can find is that person's blog in which they will say something about this topic. After… Okay, this is time consuming. I'm four hours in at this point, depending on the topic. But at this point, I know enough of the keywords that when I start reading those blog pages, the knowledge is dropping and I have hooks to hang it on. Now, if I go talk to somebody, I'm going to be able to get directions to ShopCo and make the car go there.

[Laurell] One of the things is for… You can use Internet as a jumping off point, you just can't stop there. The other thing you cannot do is use other people's fiction as your only research.

[Dan] Yeah, yeah.

[Laurell] You'd be amazed at how many people try to do that. But I also start with, like, a book that has in its title Encyclopedia or Dictionary of… The Dictionary of Fairies and… There's a long title that goes with it. Catherine Briggs. That was one of the jumping off points for the Merry books. Encyclopedia or dictionary, you have, usually, a lot of information, small bits, and they have a great bibliography. If it doesn't have a great bibliography, don't use it for your research, because you don't know if they did their research or not. I could never do it the way you do it, Howard, my dyslexia would slaughter me.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I can't do keywords, I can't skim that fast.

[Howard] I… About… Oh, gosh, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I recognized that I had an I/O problem. I didn't type fast enough and I didn't read fast enough. So I learned to touch type the Dvorak and learned to speed read and it's saved us some time.

[Laurell] I can… I touch type just fine, but I have trouble skimming.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Laurell] Because of dyslexia. So, yes. I am dyslexic. Lucky for me, it's the middle of the word that moves, the ends of the words stay still for me. That means I can kind of figure it out, what it says and what it reads. For those who have dyslexia where the whole word moves, that's much harder.

[Brandon] We are actually out of time. This has been a great topic, and a great audience. Thank you, audience from SpikeCon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] Laurell, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Do you have, by chance, a writing prompt you can give our audience?

[Laurell] Do I have a writing prompt? I was walking home from work one day. Start with anything. Start with anything, any sentence. Start with anything. Write from there. Because what I've found that stops a lot of beginning writers is they don't have… They stop themselves before they start. Sometimes, they have the fish head, and the fish head is what you chop off so you have a fish you can cook. Until you sit there and write, you don't know how… You don't know if you are writing fish head or story. But to get your whole fish to fry up for your story, you have to write the stuff at the beginning. Just get started. Take that first step.

[Howard] So our fish head prompt is, "I was walking home from work one day."

[Brandon] And go.

[Laurell] Yup.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Brandon] Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/08/15-10-evaluating-ideas/

Key Points: How do you decide which ideas to keep and which to drop? One story cooking, others simmering with ingredients added as they come up. Know how the story ends! Interact with your ideas, explore, write them, and you develop the skill to evaluate them. Passion and excitement! What are you most excited about? It's a different skill, but you need to learn how to force yourself to write. Take the core of the idea and find something you are passionate about. Add your exciting ideas to the pot. Don't throw everything into one book. Find flavors that work together. Keep track of your ideas, write them down. When you're struggling with a story, when do you push through and when do you abandon it? Understand why you are struggling. Have the ending, or at least points that you are excited about writing, in mind. Try to make this chapter or this scene someone's favorite in the whole book. Force yourself to finish books. Make a checklist, what kind of problem is this? Avoid shiny new idea syndrome. Think about your goals. Finishing teaches you how to write.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Evaluating Ideas.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm out of ideas. Help?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Help?

[Brandon] So, we often talk on this podcast about how ideas are kind of cheap. But, let's shelve that. Like, we've covered that idea. That a lot of great… Writers generally can use any number of different ideas. Bad ideas make good books sometimes. So let's just shelve that. Let's actually talk about ideas, because I have had, once in a while, an idea that I was really attached to. I'm like, "You know what, I know ideas are cheap, but I want to write this one just because I want to write it." We have a lot of questions here, because we're doing questions from listeners this entire year, about how we evaluate our ideas and how do you figure out which ones to keep and which ones to drop?

[Victoria] So I am… I look human shaped to those of you sitting here, but I am actually a six burner stove. This is how my entire mind functions.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Six burners on the stove, only one of those at any given time on high heat with the project that I'm actually cooking with. The other five are all simmering on very low heat as I add ingredients to my ideas. So I actually have a very long cook time before I decide if an idea has legs. By the time it's time to assess what next goes on high heat, I know enough about the story to be able to tell whether it's worth pursuing. Now, for different people, these things are different, but for me, I don't pursue a story unless I know how it ends. I do this because one, I'm very prone to quitting and if I have an ending with my story, instead of looking out at the desert, I'm looking across a field and I know it's a finite amount of space. I also am convinced, to go back to the food metaphor, that the end of the story is the taste left in your mouth, and that we will retroactively reassess an entire book based on how strong or weak the ending is. I need my endings to be strong so that I don't lose hope and I want to work with them. So, that is one of the main ingredients that I have to have. When you add that to the fact that a lot of my ideas steep for anywhere from six months to three or four years, then I've never actually trunked a story once I've started it. Because once I've started it, I've known enough about it to know that it has the potential to be a book.

[Howard] As someone who, as of this recording, needs to lose at least 30 pounds…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The taste left in my mouth was the only thing that remained at the end of the meal… That would be heaven. With regard to evaluating ideas, I… You know that character in the police procedural whose skill set is they're really good at judging other people? You, dear listener, and me, we sometimes like to think that we're good judges of people. Or maybe that's a skill that we want. I have come to grips with the fact that I'm still not very good at it. There are people who I have made the right call on, but there are people who I haven't. Evaluating ideas is the same way. It's not going to happen overnight. You have to meet a lot of people and interact with them. You have to meet a lot of your ideas and interact with them. You have to explore them. You have to try to write them. Then, you develop this sense for, "Oh, this idea is a three book idea. This idea is a plot twist." Where… But both ideas could be expressed in seven words and look the same until you've worked at it a lot.

[Brandon] I work very similarly to Victoria with this whole burner thing. Whatever I'm writing on, I often can't say what the next thing is going to be, with the caveat that when deadlines are tight, it's going to be the one that I have a contract coming due on. But when I hit that point, and I try to build my schedule… A here is a free slot. You have six months you're going to be able to do anything. I can't often say which of the other five projects on the other burners it's going to be. I get there, and then I decide. While I'm working on my book, sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to do this thing next." Then it'll change to another one. If I had finished that book right then, we would have gotten a different novel next. Which can be, I know, frustrating for fans, because I'll tell them sometimes, here are the many things I'm planning to do next. I'm going to do one of these. Some of the ones that they really are waiting for just never come up because I'm not, when I'm trying to turn all the burners up, I look at them all and decide which one I'm most passionate about.

[Victoria] Well, there's a commonality coming into play here as well, which is the gut feeling. Which is, of course, very frustrating, because it is of course unquantifiable. It is the fact that we consume enough narrative to begin to feel in our own work when something is ready and when something is not. I just finished a book that I sat on for six years because, even though I had the pieces of it, I knew I wasn't ready, I wasn't a strong enough writer. That's a really hard conversation to have with yourself, because we get excited about ideas. So, I think having this six burner stove or a four burner stove or a two burner stove, giving yourself options, really helps you because you don't know where you're going to be at when you're ready to write that next book.

[Dan] The fact that, for all of us, what it eventually comes down to is passion and excitement, what are you most excited about? You will notice, nobody in talking about how they choose projects says, "Oh, this is what sells." Right? We always talk about don't chase the market. Don't chase the market! Like, there is not a market for any particular genre or style. What there's a market for is stuff that's awesome. You will be able to write better the idea that you just can't wait to start writing. You'll be able to write that better than anything else.

[Brandon] I will add the caveat there that when a contract is coming due, in a lot of ways, you also have to learn how to force yourself to write… Be passionate about something that you've committed to writing. That's a different skill.

[Howard] That's a different… Skill set.

[Dan] But you presumably committed to that because you were excited about it.

[Victoria] I was going to say, this is the thing. This is why it comes back to things we've talked about already, but it's why it's so important that you let passion and what you actually want to write and not what you think people want to read be a guiding force for your entire career, because that's the only way that you guarantee that when those deadlines come up, you want to write this thing. You're not writing something that you had no interest in writing because you thought it would sell. Like, you have to make sure that in some way, you have that emotional connection with everything on your burner stove, so that even if you have to move something into that forward spot, you're not dreading it. Maybe it's… Maybe you're really excited about something else, but it's really important that you have that core fire for everything that you're writing.

[Howard] Last night, my daughters made me sit down and watch several episodes of a YouTube, Teen Fortress 2 commentary gamer. At one point in the episode, he was doing something funny and they were playing a song… I think it was a love song or something. It was a song I was familiar with, but because of copyright, they couldn't actually play the song or the YouTube video would get pulled. So he had a cheesy karaoke version of the music playing in the background, and the Teen Fortress 2 computer voice reading the lyrics. This is the difference between execution on a brilliant idea which is going to sell millions of copies and execution on a brilliant idea which never would have gotten out of the recording studio. The song, as read by the computer voice… It worked in the episode, obviously, because we had context. But if you set these two things side-by-side, that is the difference between an author who doesn't yet know how to really execute on an idea, and an author who does. When people look at the things that I've done and say, "Oh, man. That idea was so brilliant." I shrug and I'm like, "You know what, guys, the idea was not brilliant." What was brilliant, and I say this patting myself on the back, is that I managed to stretch it out across an entire book, and I drew some really fun pictures, and I made some cool reveals. It wasn't the idea, at the end of it.

[Dan] Yeah. I, a few months ago, published a novella with Magic: The Gathering. Which, to our earlier point, I was not necessarily in love with that setting, right? Because I didn't know what it was when I signed the contract. Then I got into their offices, and they're like, "Well, this character and this setting. Go." So what I had to do was take that core of an idea and find something that I was passionate about in it. What am I going to be able to do? So, first thing, I made it into a heist story. It was not intended to be one, but they were cool with it, they rolled with it, because that's what I was excited about. Being able to take those kind of… Victoria talked about adding ingredients to the pots. I had this big pile of ingredients that hadn't gone in any pots yet, and I was able to throw those exciting ideas into the other job, and then get really excited about it.

[Victoria] Also, talking about one of the most difficult and important things to cultivate in yourself, is the understanding of the kitchen sink, right? That you do not need to take every idea that excites you and put it into one book. It's about… And I know I come back to the cooking metaphor a lot, but it's about finding, like, flavors that work together. You don't need to don't every seasoning and every spice and every ingredient in. It's about learning to withhold and say, "This would actually be better on its own as a starlight… The star thing of a different meal."

[Howard] On the second night we were in our house, we ran the dishwasher. You said kitchen sink. The dishwasher drains into the sink. There was this gargling which woke me up because it sounded like a voice. This idea came to me that, "Oh, my gosh, you have a family who's in a house and they think that the house is possessed because the sink is talking to them, and the exorcist can't do anything and the priest can't do anything, and the plumber fixes it." That was the end of the idea. That was as far as it went. This was 1999. Before Schlock Mercenary. Two years into Schlock Mercenary, I realized, you know what, I bet I can tell a ghost story in Schlock Mercenary where it gets fixed by the plumber and everybody is quite upset at that. So, yeah, these ideas, they come from weird places and some of them may seem completely stupid, but… I mean, to the kitchen sink point, I keep track of them. I write them down. You don't write it down, it's lost forever and you don't get to use it.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our awesome thing of the week, because it's not a book.

[Howard] Whoo hoo! It's awesome.

[Dan] It is awesome. So, Howard and I and some other local fantasy authors do a Twitch show. We play D&D online every week so that you guys can watch us. It is called TypeCast RPG. We're using… Right now, we're doing a campaign called The Gods of Vaeron in Fifth Edition D&D rules. That is me as the GM, Howard Tayler, Charlie Holmberg, Brian McClellan, Mari Murdock, and Ethan Sproat, all science fiction/fantasy professionals. All authors except Ethan, who's a professor of science fiction. It's super cool.

[Howard] There's a thing that happens in TypeCast which speaks well to the topic. I will sometimes illustrate moments from the game. There are moments which are beyond my skill, and I'm just not going to try. But, every so often, I will have an idea, and I need to execute on it in literally a minute and a half. Because if I wait too long, if I draw too slowly, it's gone. The practice that this has given me in evaluating ideas has been frighteningly effective. Because I have to make the decision quickly. I have to execute to the best of my admittedly limited cartooning ability. Yes, I've been doing this for 20 years. But I know what my skill set is and what my skill set isn't. That's the sort of thing that I think authors can learn from, in that you have an idea, you don't need to spend a novel fleshing it out. See how quickly you can flesh it out to determine what it leads to.

[Brandon] So, we have further questions along this line. One person asks, "How can you tell the story that you're struggling with has potential and that you should push through or if you should leave it and start working on something you like more?"

[Howard] Someone please answer this.

[Dan] Yes.

[Victoria] Ha ha ha. I mean, that's a difficult thing. I always say it's the same kind of thing along the lines of writer's block. You need to understand why you're struggling. There's a difference between struggling because you're afraid of not doing it justice, struggling because you're bored which you're guaranteed readers are going to be bored then, and kind of like, you need to assess where your mentally at in the process. I will say that some days one of the only things that keeps me going on a story is the fact that I do have an ending in mind. So, coming back to my definitely not prescriptive wisdom, but if you are somebody who struggles to finish things or finds yourself getting lost on the way, I do find that having an ending or at least having mile markers, having things and scenes and moments that you're excited about in the story, having them not all be in the first act, these are things that help me get from A to B to C to D and so on.

[Brandon] That's great advice. Having things you're writing toward, you're excited about. Another thing, kind of on the flipside, you can do is I try to set down… If I'm feeling bored, I try to step back and say, "How can I make this chapter someone's favorite chapter in the whole book?" I find that almost always I can find a way to change up what's going on just a little bit to make that specific chapter a real showpiece for the book. If you can do that for every chapter, suddenly you don't… You're not worried about the idea anymore, you're excited about how this is going. I often say that for newer writers, my experience has been that most of the time, you should use one of those options rather than abandoning the story. There are times to abandon stories, but I think it should be the exception, not the rule. It should happen very rarely. Particularly if you're new, you just need to learn to finish things. So, learn to make every chapter the most exciting or the most interesting chapter in the book.

[Dan] Definitely, if this is your first book or even your second, just finish it. Because forcing yourself to finish a book that you are maybe not in love with anymore is going to teach you how to stay in love with books. It's going to teach you so much more about evaluating their validity than we can just tell you over the computer here.

[Howard] I did an unblocking session, a small group session, at the Writing Excuses Retreat in 2019. It was a delightful session. One of the things that I talked about is that… I've been doing this for long enough that I have a checklist. The checklist is there to determine is this an overarching story problem? Is this a scene problem? Is this a chapter problem? Then, is this a me problem? Am I sick? Have I eaten yet today? Do I need to hydrate? Do I need to go get some exercise? Do I need to go back to the well? Have I forgotten to take my medication today? There's all kinds of things. Until I have… Until I actually acknowledged that there was a checklist and that there were criteria, I was really bad at figuring this out. I've gotten much better at it because I get stuck all the time. I think we all, to some level, get stuck all the time. If the only question you know how to ask is, "Does this mean it's time to abandon the story?" it means, boy, you need a checklist, because there's a whole bunch of other things that come first.

[Victoria] You need more questions before that last resort.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Brandon] I… Even in my professional career, I've rarely abandoned stories. The one thing that I've abandoned most recently was done after revisions determined that revising the book to be as good as I wanted it to be would be as much work as writing a new book. That revision wasn't guaranteed to succeed. So I shelved that book.

[Howard] And the new book would be better.

[Brandon] And the new book would be better. I shelved that book, but I still finished the book. Right? Finishing things… We have another question here, "How do you find energy to keep a story going after that first spark of inspiration fades?"

[Victoria] I feel so strongly about this. This is shiny new idea syndrome. It is a medical syndrome. I think we have all felt it. There's a thing that happens either 50 pages, 100, 150 pages in, where suddenly you are like, "Um. This is familiar. I have…" That's exactly when you get a new idea. Something pops into your head. It's shiny, you don't understand it, it's mysterious and alluring, and you think I should follow that instead. So many writers, especially aspiring writers and authors, dropped the thing that they're working on to go follow the shiny new idea. It is a trick that your brain is pulling because in order to finish a story, in order to write a story, not only its beginning, but its middle and end, you have to become familiar with the material. As you become familiar with the material, that inherent shine of mystery and elusiveness wears off, potential energy becomes kinetic energy in which something is always lost. So we think, surely if I follow the shiny new idea, that one won't disappoint me.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] It is a way toward madness. It is a way to never finish anything. I think that comes back to finish it. Even if it's not fabulous, even if you don't want to revise it, you will learn so much in the process of hitting that finish line.

[Howard] I was a music composition major, and I did not learn this lesson as a musician. I think it may be the reason why I'm a cartoonist and not a musician. Because by the time I started cartooning, I had figured it out. As a musician, I came up with wonderful themes and textures and arrangements and everything was a couple of minutes long. My instructors kept saying, "Give us some theme and variation. Explore this, dig into this. Expand it." But it's perfect the way it is! It wasn't perfect the way it was. I had another shiny idea I wanted to chase instead. Yeah, you listen to an orchestral suite, you listen to the symphonic greats from whenever, there's a core theme in there that they explored and explored and explored and explored and explored before they moved on to the shiny.

[Dan] I think when you're in this situation and you're kind of bored with a story and you want to pursue a new one, you're trying to decide if you should drop it or not, take a look at what your goals are for that. What are you hoping to accomplish with this short story or with this book that you are writing? Because, first of all, as we've discussed, if you're early career, the purpose of that book is not to sell, right? If you think, "Oh, this is impossible. I'm not going to be able to sell this." Well, you're not going to be able to sell it anyway, it's your first book. Its goal is to teach you how to write your second book.

[Howard] We're saying that very kindly.

[Dan] Very kindly and lovingly. I had five garbage truck novels before I finally wrote my first published novel. So, think about it. So really what you're doing, if you're early career, is you're learning how to write books. You don't have to think, "Oh, this book won't sell." Or "This book isn't perfect." It doesn't matter, because your goal is to learn how to write. Finishing it is going to teach you how to write.

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

[Howard] I have some truly terrifying homework for you. I want you to get a writing implement and something to write on. Pencil, maybe a notebook. Set it next to your bed. Or whatever the thing is you sleep on. When you wake up in the morning, write down everything you can remember about your dreams from the night before. If you can't remember anything, write the words, "I didn't remember my dreams this morning." Okay? Do this for a week. At the end of the week, review the journal, and see if there is an idea there that perhaps you want to explore in your fiction.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/15/14-50-write-what-you-no/

Key points: An old writing adage, Write What You Know. But what does it mean? Tap into what you know from your own experience! Extrapolate from what you know. Write what you know is true. Know your genre... or not? Write what you love. Mix the familiar and the strange. Write what you know, but add what you don't know, too. Write what you know may be boring to you, but your experience is individual. As a writer, you filter everything through your own experience. What you are passionate about may be a better story. Use your own emotional touchstones to make a richer story. Expand your knowledge, know more. When you tackle something difficult, put the other parts on an easy setting.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You… No.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] This is an age-old adage in writing circles. Write what you know. You may have been taught…

[Howard] Can I just say write what you nope?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yes. You may have been taught it before. It's kind of confusing. The first time I heard it, I'm like, "Wait. So I can't write fantasy or…" What do you guys think of this adage?

[Mary Robinette] So, I agree that this is one of the things that is often wildly misunderstood. The idea behind the original is that there are things that you know, that you can tap into. You know what it's like to be afraid. You've had these different experiences in your life. If you tap into those and write from your own personal experience, you're going to have a story that's rich in texture. The thing that I often say for fantasy people is extrapolate from what you know.

[Brandon] Yeah, that's a good suggestion.

[Margaret] A phrasing I heard of it once from Alice Chadwick at a conference on narrative and nonfiction. He said, "Write what you know is true." There's some unpacking around that, but I think that really it speaks that same grain of truth, of you don't have to write your own literal experience… I'm not necessarily giving advice to journalists with this, but as a fiction writer, you can write from your own experience. If that is grounded, then that will ground your story, no matter how fantastical you get from there.

[Howard] For journalists, it's write what you've verified with an additional source.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The… Early in Schlock Mercenary, I hadn't done a whole lot of research with military folk yet. But I was fresh out of a very unhealthy corporate environment where… I've talked about this principle before… Position power was being substituted for personal power. I am your boss, therefore you must like me. All the time, all over. It was very top-down. I was familiar with how that worked and how it was broken. I just sort of built the personalities of my mercenaries in that manner. I got email from people saying, "Were you and I in the same unit? Because I swear you've described my lieutenant or my captain." I found that very flattering, because what it said to me is I know enough about broken people to have correctly described one that I've never met.

[Brandon] One of the things that… When I think about write what you know, I get actually really conflicted. Because I like some of the sentiment that this phrase is telling you. But then I go the rounds. If I kind of look at fantasy novels, there is a big part of me that thinks, if you're going to write in a genre, you should familiarize yourself with this genre. You should know the conventions of the genre and you should become part of the discussion. There's another smaller part of me that says, "Yeah, but people who have none of that baggage sometimes create things that are just wildly new and completely off the beaten path and doing something very interesting with the genre." So you can see, I kind of… The two different sides of me fight about this pretty often.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the questions there is, like, where is the line between what you know and what you love? So I think that when people are writing something that… And they're coming to science fiction and fantasy from outside the genre, there still chasing the thing that they love and they're still writing the thing that they know. They're just adding this unfamiliar to it. Which is the same thing that we do in genre. We're writing something that we love. We're always trying… We talk about this all the time on the podcast, the familiar and the strange. It's just that for us, the genre is the familiar. That is us writing what we know. Then we add other things that we don't know onto it. So I feel like it's two sides of the same coin.

[Margaret] Yeah.

[Brandon] How do you guys incorporate who you are into the settings that you're building?

[Uh…]

[Howard] You know what, that's a question that…

[Margaret] I try not to, honestly.

[Howard] That is a question that will be very specifically answered in great detail when I'm no longer around to defend myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I remain unaware of an unknown number of my biases that creep into my work in ways that I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, whatever. I like to think that I'm aware of how I'm influencing these things, but there is a voice up in the nosebleed seats that says, "Expect to be wrong. But don't worry, because you'll be dead before anybody really points it out in detail."

[Margaret] When… At a slightly more literal level, I know my first published short story, Jane, was in Shimmer magazine. This is a story about a paramedic who winds up at the center of a zombie apocalypse. Really, it's about her relationship with her foster mother. I have her walking in the streets of Los Angeles. She absolutely lived in the first apartment that I lived in in LA. Even… It's like… It was boring to me, but I'm like, "Only one other person has ever lived in that apartment with me." So, it's like… Walking up the street, if you were familiar with the street when I lived there, the empty lot that's there was absolutely there. She is fictional, the dog is fictional. Like, I don't know much about zombies, but I can root it in a Los Angeles that I've walked the streets of, and I've heard the traffic, and I understand it.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said in there that I really want to underline for the readers about why write what you know actually works. It's boring to me. But the experience that you have as a person is individual. It's not an experience that other people have. It's why you all get so excited every time I break out the puppetry stuff. When I'm in puppetry communities, it's like… They're like, "Oh, that thing went wrong? Let me one up you with this." It's like this is… It's all old hat to us. But when I come over to writing, to prose, it's a novel and fresh way to look at things. So, one of the things that… To get back to your question about how to put yourself in there, is that you act as a filter for everything that you're writing. We get asked all the time where do the ideas come from. We also always say they're all around you. But what you're doing as a writer is that you're filtering it through your own experience. So I think, for me, one of the things with the… Parts of the way write what you know that is true is to trust your taste, and to trust your own experience, and to trust that it is interesting to other people.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So this is Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. I was the audiobook narrator for this. It's the sequel to Amberlough, which I raved about previously. This is such a strong book. It follows on the heels of Amberlough, which it basically feels like it's the Weimer Republic. Here we have three of the… Or two of the viewpoint characters that we had in the previous book plus a new one. So we've got to people that we are familiar with and they've moved… They are refugees now in another country. So what you're getting there is a lot of the outsider "OMG, what's going on?" But you can still see Lara's voice coming through, even though this is in a totally new place. Also, the characters and their interactions are all informed by where they have been… By their past. I think that honestly you could read this book without having read the first one, but the emotional resonance between the two books is so powerful if you read them sequentially that I… I'm recommending Armistice, but if you have not read Amberlough, pick up Amberlough, then read Armistice.

[Brandon] All right. So, kind of, I want to push on this theme a little bit further, because I think this is really interesting. A lot of times, when I'm talking to my students and working with them at the university course, this is something that they completely miss. This idea that something that they are really passionate about can make a much better story than trying to in some ways write something patterned after what you've seen before.

[Howard] Certainly, write something bigger than they could ever be is…

[Brandon] Or just more bland. Really.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's the thing. People don't trust themselves that what they're passionate about is going to translate into stories. I really do think if you are really excited and passionate about something, that's going to help you make a better story.

[Absolutely]

[Brandon] Now there is a danger there in the kind of waxing too long about a topic or going too deep into jargon or things like this. Kind of losing track of a story because you're too busy writing about the ins and outs of breeding rabbits which is really interesting to you. How can you balance this?

[Howard] For me, it's emotional touchstones.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to share a very personal example. In 2006, I separated my shoulder and was prescribed Lortab and ended up addicted to it. The addiction was not one where I was stealing in order to illegally obtain pills. It was one in which I now had a dependency that was controlling me, instead of me controlling it. We went off of Lortab, and when I say we, it was Sandra removing it from the house and shepherding me through the process of living without this stuff. For two years after that, if you said the word Lortab, I wanted to cry. Because I knew that this was a thing that would relax me, that would make me kind of happy, and I absolutely could not have it. That experience was incredibly alien to everything else about me. You could say a word and it would hurt me. That knowledge… I can use that as a writer. In 2018, I injured my arm in a different way. The doctor said, "Well, we don't know what's wrong yet, but maybe ibuprofen, or we can get you some hydrocodone." I know what hydrocodone means. That 12-year-old addiction came back all at once. I almost broke down in the doctor's office. Now I have this understanding of how when an addict says, "I'm not no longer an addict, I'm just not using. No, I'm always an addict." I have an understanding of that. I don't need to write a story about someone who separates his shoulder and then has a blood pressure problem. I can write a story about somebody who has lost a loved one and thinks they're over it, and 15 years later stumbles across a photograph and discovers that they're not. When I think write what you know, that's a thing that I know.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Yeah. The… Less personal example, but all puppets, all the time, which is what I do, is… We talk about voice and things like this. I've talked about this when we were talking about the voice podcast, that there's three things when we're talking about puppetry, style of puppet. It's mechanical style, the aesthetic style, or the personal style. The mechanical style is what kind of puppet is it? The aesthetic style is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like it's handcarved? The personal style is you can hand the same puppet to two puppeteers and it will look like a different character. It's because of the individual taste of the performer. Jim Henson, if you look at anything else that he did that is not Muppets, like, was much more in a Dada, surreal, experimental land of filmmaking. Steve Whitmire, who initially took over Kermit, was much more of a linear storyteller. So they're going to just make different choices. This is the kind of thing that were talking about with write what you know. It's like when we're saying trust yourself, trust your own instincts, it's… These things will allow you to create something that is special and unique. When you're taking something that's deeply personal, like what Howard experienced, you're going to explore that in ways that are different from someone else who has that. It's going to allow you to bring an honesty to your work when you're reaching for things that you know. This is why also when we, in the larger picture, when we're talking about the hashtag #ownvoices, which is the importance of reading fiction and supporting fiction written by people from a lived experience writing about their lived experience, the reason is because that lived experience is going to inform that fiction. When you sit there and say, "Oh, but my world is boring. My world is normal." What you're also doing is you're setting yourself… First of all, you're devaluing yourself.

[Margaret] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But you're also kind of setting yourself up as the default, as the dominant, and exoticizing everybody else. That's… That is also a problem. This is not to say that you're not allowed to write other people. That's not… It's not that you're never… It's like I am totally allowed to write people who are not a… Let's see when this podcast airs… Not a 50-year-old white woman. But… Oh…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry.

[Howard] I'm already a 50-year-old white man as of this recording, so… Have fun with it.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. To be honest. But the point being that I am allowed to write other characters. I'm allowed to do these other things. But when we talk about write what you know, there's two aspects of that. One is that my work should be influenced by what I know. The other thing is that my work will be influenced by what I know, whether I want it to or not, and I have to be aware of that when I go into stuff.

[Margaret] I think the other thing that strikes me about… I think probably the first time I heard write what you know, I was maybe a second grader, it was like one of those came across in elementary school…

[Howard] I have bad news for you, kid.

[Margaret] Well, that's the thing, because it sort of… You get told that as a child, and it's like, "What do I know?" What you know is not set in stone. One of, I think the charge inherent in write what you know is expand your knowledge. Know more.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I'm going to say is, especially if you are tackling something that is very difficult, it is totally okay to put everything else to the easy setting. If you are… Especially if you are an early career writer, and you're like, "I am trying to get a handle on plot." Don't try to get a handle on writing the other at the same time that you're trying to get a handle on writing plot. With Calculating Stars, I knew that I was going to have to be handling mathematics and orbital mechanics and all of these other things. Judaism! Which, I don't know if you noticed, been raised Southern Baptist and Methodist. Really, this is not… I was handling all of these things. So I set Elma to a Southern woman, I gave her a mother that's very much like my mother, that relationship, I gave her a marriage that's very much like my marriage. I sent everything I could to what I really know, to give myself room to work on and concentrate on the things that I don't know. Even there, I was extrapolating from what I know.

[Howard] And you decided to tackle this project when you are already pretty comfortable with what goes into writing a novel.

[Mary Robinette] That's true. That's the other aspect.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to wrap us up here. It's kind of a sad moment, because this is us saying goodbye to Margaret. Not forever. But this is our last podcast with Margaret, so we're going to let her give the homework this week.

[Margaret] All right. So, the homework assignment this week. We want you to take an area that you are super familiar with and turn that into a superpower. The same way Mary talked about how we all think her puppet stuff is completely cool, the way that my background as a screenwriter has made me a structural god among novelists…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] This is…

[Mary Robinette] Quite true. Accurate. Accurate.

[Margaret] Find something in your life that you maybe don't think is all that interesting and make it the coolest thing on the planet.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you, Margaret.

[Margaret] Thank you.

[Brandon] For hosting with us this year. You all are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.9: Quick Characterization

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/04/13-9-quick-characterization/

Key points: Quick tips for characterizing side characters? Give them something weird and memorable, something in conflict with the reader's expectations. Also something that conflicts with the POV character's expectations. Or use the tricks people use to remember names, e.g. alliteration. To make a character come to life, write a brief scene or piece from their viewpoint. Play two truths and a lie with your characters! Beware of turning characters into a single quirk, a.k.a. Flanderization. Figure out what makes the character do that thing, then pay attention to how that motivates other things. Use peekaboo moments, add a splash of color to a scene highlighting something unusual about this side character. A juggling guard? Just a momentary glimpse of the motivations and passions of the side characters. To quickly introduce characters, have the characters, justifiably, talk about each other. Beware of overdoing quick characterization of side characters! Finally, make sure that the side characters are doing something when the protagonist walks on stage.

( Rounding out the flat side characters... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Quick Characterization.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are talking all this month about side characters. It's a topic we've touched on before on Writing Excuses, so I want to dig into something specific about side characters this week. I want to talk about how we characterize people quickly. Because sometimes, you just don't have a lot of space to dedicate to these side characters. So let's say you only have a couple sentences to characterize someone. Dan, how do you go about doing it?

[Dan] Kind of the cheap and dirty hack that I use is just to give them something that is, in my opinion, unexpected. Based on what their role is or what their situation is in the story, I will throw something else weird on top of that so that you'll remember, "Oh, yeah, this is that kid, but also he really likes this one strange thing."

[Brandon] Right. They put them in conflict with the reader's expectations. It's a really good way to make someone memorable.

[Mary] One of the things that I try to do, actually, is that thing, except not just the reader's expectations, but the point of view character's expectations. I… Because using that allows me to kind of slide past some of the I am telling you what this character looks like. It also allows me to then convey information about my main character, which, when I'm writing short fiction, I have to be able to get every sentence to do double duty. One of the sneaky tricks that I will use sometimes is I will use some of the tools that people use to remember names in real life. Which is… If the character says their name, I will slide a detail in that is alliterative without…

[Brandon] Wow!

[Dan] Without calling attention to it?

[Brandon] That's interesting.

[Mary] Yeah. Monty with the mustache.

[Unsure] [inaudible now]

[Brandon] Oh.

[Dan] So, like an example?

[Mary] Monty with the mustache.

[Dan] Monty with a mustache. Okay. Awesome.

[Mary] I mean…

[Howard] Howard with the hairless…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Hairless Howard. I get… And there are other memory palace kinds of things that you can do with that, too. So…

[Brandon] Right. Make the guy named Jim a butcher.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Actually, that would totally work. So, I was… I'm terrible with remembering names. That's when I meeting someone in real life. So I was taking a class on how to remember names… It doesn't help me actually that much. It's a little better. But I suddenly realized that these were all very useful tools for cementing a name with a reader. So… If I have a character who is a jeweler, then I will… One of the details that all call attention to is the earrings that are hanging from her pendulous earlobes…

[Brandon] Nice.

[Mary] If I have named her Patricia, pendulous…

[Howard] Pendularia…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah. Penny. That is a very sneaky… I do not deploy that all the time, but that is a trick that works distressingly well.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think I got better with side characters once… And this is kind of coming back to the name thing. Once I realized that I wasn't good with names, and I wanted to be, so I started practicing any time I was in public. I learned the names of all the people working the line at the place where I got salads. In the course of doing that, they always gave me the best strawberries. Because I was the guy who came in and knew everybody's names. But in the course of learning their names… They were all wearing identical clothing. They're all working this salad line. But in the course of learning their names, I forced myself to remember some of these details. I taught my brain that this is important. So I started retaining that information. It's fascinating that the two seem to be related. If… I will often see in movies, when I can't tell two side characters apart, I know they've done it wrong. Because I'm pretty good at tracking those things, and if I can't tell, then it's just… It's not been done right.

[Brandon] So…

[Dan] Well…

[Brandon] Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] The… One counterexample being something like Crabbe and Goyle from Harry Potter, who are supposed to be interchangeably faceless.

[Brandon] How do you characterize people without viewpoints? Let me explain this. I find it, as a writer, really easy if I give myself a brief viewpoint through someone's eyes to dig into their back story, to kind of discovery write…

[Mary] Luxury!

[Brandon] Who they are, right? And just suddenly they come to life. If I don't have a viewpoint, then I have a lot of trouble with that. It's like…

[Mary] I will go ahead, sometimes, even when I'm doing short fiction, I will go ahead and do a little bit of an exploratory scenelette thing from the other character's point of view. Usually the same scene that I'm writing. Especially if I've got a character that is being very flat, which still happens sometimes. It's just you're not getting traction on them. So I'll do exactly that. I'll write that scene from their point of view, which helped me figure out what their motivations are, and some of the physical… The body language that they're going to be using. Then I'll flip back to my main character, do the scene again, incorporating the information that I've learned. Which will often… I don't do that every time, but it's a very useful exercise to engage in sometimes.

[Brandon] I've seen you do something similar.

[Dan] Yeah. So the thing that I do, all the time… And this is… This is such a dumb little thing. I will play two truths and a lie with my characters. Because then I get to know things about them, and I get to know what kinds of things they would lie about. It's fascinating. I've done it with… I think at this point, all of my young adult series. The one I'm writing right now, I actually put a scene into the book because I find it so interesting. But just to watch them tell truths and tell lies. Inevitably, I'll have one character that tries to cheat. It just tells me a lot about who they are, very quickly.

[Mary] I want to point something out that you said about what are the things that they would lie about and why would they lie about them? I think that when we have characters who wind up dropping into being just a single quirk, then I think one of the reasons that that happens is because we've thought, "Oh, I'm going to do that quirk. I'm going to give him this quirky thing." That the flanderization…

[Brandon] Right. We'll talk about flanderization in a minute. We can just dig into it right now. Why don't you tell us what flanderization is?

[Mary] So, flanderization is referring to the slow evolution of a character into just being a quirk. It relates to what happened to the character Flanders on The Simpsons. That he started out as being this very rounded character, and then eventually became a single joke.

[Brandon] Because when people saw him come on the screen, they all wanted him to do his thing. So he did his thing, and the writers all just had him do his thing. Then he stopped being a person, and started being a quirk.

[Mary] So, I think one of the things that you can do to keep that from happening is figure out why your character does that thing. Then, only deploy it when the triggers happen. If you want them to do it, then you have to give them the trigger, and the trigger then has to be coherent to the rest of the story. It also makes the character more rounded, because you… Whatever reason they have to do that thing, that same reason is going to motivate a lot of other different choices.

[Brandon] Month, we're going to dig into this kind of idea really deeply. We'll do an entire podcast on the idea of characters who are self-contradictory, or characters who wear different hats in different social situations and act differently in those social situations.

[Mary] Spoiler alert!

[Brandon] We will dig…

[Mary] Everyone does.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Into this a lot.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You are actually going to tell us about Brimstone.

[Mary] Yes. Brimstone by Cherie Priest is fantastic. It is a story set right after the 1st World War. There are two main characters. The… One of them is a young woman who is a medium. She has traveled to this new small town to learn how to use her powers. It's a real town that really had a spiritualist movement in it, and still does. The other character is a man who survived the war and has come back with a ghost. But he doesn't realize he has a ghost. Things just keep catching on fire. It's their interaction and figuring out what it is that is haunting him and has come back with him from the war. The characterization in this is so rich. It's a huge cast, because she's in this small town, filled with spiritualists that she's meeting. There's… It's this very huge community. Each character feels distinct and individual. Even ones that are on stage just for a few moments. It's… Even the ones who actually never come on stage, because they're dead already.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It's wonderful storytelling. It's…

[Brandon] Brimstone.

[Mary] Brimstone.

[Brandon] By Cherie Priest.

[Mary] By Cherie Priest.

[Dan] And if you've never read Cherie Priest, she's one of the few writers who can hook me from the very first sentence of a book. The just… The writing itself, the language is incredible.

[Mary] It's written in an epistolary form so that each character is… That what you're reading are there journals.

[Yeah!]

[Brandon] So one of the things I've learned over the years for characterizing side characters in specific, doing things quickly, is what I call peekaboo moments. It's a measure of great gratification to me as a writer when occasionally someone will come up and say, "Oh, this little side character just came to life for me." Almost always it somebody I've done one of these peekaboo moments, where you are writing a story. In general, you'll describe the scene and then focus in on the main characters and have the conversation or the conflict and things like this. Everything else fades to background, even some of the side characters who are coming in and interacting with them. What I like to do is occasionally say, "No, we're going to add a splash of color to this specific scene, to this specific person. We're going to fade them from the black-and-white background into the characters paying attention to them, saying, 'Oh. This person wasn't what I thought they were.'" This guard, who's standing guard at the door, isn't the person I thought they were. They are, between… While they're waiting, they're standing there juggling or something like this. What I tried to do in these peekaboo moments is show a moment of humanity and back story and passion from somebody who's not related to the main story at all, just so that you get a glimpse that hey, all these people populating this world have their own motivations and their own passions. I find that the occasional use of one of these can really add a lot of vividness to your story. Or using them with a character who's often in the scene, but is never the main character. The reader will take that character and take that image of them and bring it to the next scenes where they're going to be like, "Oh, yeah. This is the person who has twin daughters and is always on the lookout for two copies of things, because they like to give it to their twin daughters." I don't know. Something like that, that human… Gives humanity to the background characters.

[Dan] There's a… One of my favorite movies is Brick by Ryan Johnson. Which is a… Basically a film noir, but set in a modern high school. As much as I love it, I could not tell you who any of the side characters are, except for one drug dealer, who pauses somewhere around the second act break and gives a little monologue about how much he likes the Lord of the Rings books. He's such a beautiful character, because of that moment. It's amazing how much richness that adds.

[Howard] One of the tricks that I use is having the characters, justifiably, talk about each other. The 18th… 18th, good Lord!… Schlock Mercenary book, one of the opening scenes, the company's about to take a job, and our protagonist is talking to her sister. Her sister's saying, "You know, I need medical help." She's like, "I'm not a doctor. Why are you calling me?" "You work for a mercenary company. You got battlefield medics, don't you?" "Well, yeah, our doctor. I guess she's okay. But our battlefield medic is like a walking cutlery station." Then we have the battlefield medic show up behind her and say, "Saved your life." Schlock says, "She also hears really well."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now we have, in two panels, insight into five characters. Okay, it helps that I'm able to illustrate them, so some of this context is…

[Luxury! Chuckles]

[Howard] But the… I did it specifically. I've got a spreadsheet for this. I did it because I knew these characters are all going to be critical to this story, and I need to introduce the reader to them early in a way that is memorable.

[Brandon] But doesn't take a lot of panel space.

[Howard] But doesn't take a lot of panels. Yeah. It took two panels. And while this is happening, we are moving the story forward by establishing why this job is going to make sense for the company to take.

[Brandon] There are some books out there, and I was going to give the kind of warning, that you can't do this too much in most books. If every scene, you're spending a paragraph on five different side characters, then suddenly the point of quickly characterizing…

[Mary] A paragraph!

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But there are some books that this is kind of the way the book is. We've recommended the Gollum and the Jinn.. the Genie... The Gollum and the…

[Mary] Jinni.

[Brandon] The Gollum and the Djinni on the podcast before. I read that because you guys recommended it.

[Mary] [inaudible]

[Brandon] It is a story mostly about the side characters. On this page, you will spend three pages on this side character. On this one, you'll… They just kind of are there, populating the story and constantly interacting with the main characters. But the main characters are almost there as an excuse to explore entire community… [cough] Excuse me.

[Mary] I think one of the reasons it works in that book is because everything is new to the main characters. So that's one of the reasons that it works, is because of the POV focus on who is this interesting person that I've encountered that is unlike anything that I've ever seen, living in a glass bottle for a thousand years. So this is… There are many other books that do that where I think it does not work, it's not compelling and engaging.

[Brandon] I would agree.

[Mary] Can I offer one other trick? Think about… One of the things that I will do sometimes is think about where the character was or what they were doing before the protagonist walked on stage. Because I think one of the things that will make a character seem flat is when they have just been waiting for the main character to appear. So, it's… You don't even have to give the character a name or anything like that, but if my main character walks in and the clerk behind the counter wiped mustard off her mouth and then smiled brightly. "Can I help you?" That character already feels more real and compelling than just…

[Brandon] That's a really good tip.

[Brandon] I think we're out of time. Howard, though, you've got a cool thing that cartoonists use.

[Howard] Oh, yeah. The silhouette test. It's not… Cartoonists, comic book writers, anybody who's working in sequential art where there are characters.

[Mary] And puppeteers.

[Howard] Yes. Puppeteers. If you're going to keep these characters straight, they have to be able to pass the silhouette test. Which is where all of the details of the characters are removed, all you can see is the outline, or all you can see is the filled outline, just the silhouette. If you can't tell them apart, something has to change. I… I have… I ask myself this all the time. What is the prose equivalent for the silhouette test? What I've kind of boiled it down to is the adverbs and adjectives that I will so rarely let myself use when I'm describing characters. Which are the ones that I would only use on character A and would never use on character B? Just make a quick list of those adjectives and adverbs. Once I have those, when I am writing the characters, those adjectives and adverbs need to disappear. Because you expand them out into other things.

[Brandon] So your homework…

[Howard] Come up with those.

[Brandon] Is to come up with those. Yeah, you don't necessarily want to always describe somebody who comes on scene as greasy. But if on one scene, they're the person who's always eating a big hamburger and dropping bits of it to they… To their jeans, then that image you can use repeatedly.

[Howard] So, the homework. Take your cast of characters, and make their adjective/adverb list, so that, in terms of those words, they are passing the silhouette test for you.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/09/17/12-38-what-do-editors-really-want-with-toni-weisskopf-and-cat-rambo/

Key Points:
Q: What do editors really want?
A: Chocolate and bourbon. To give you a contract for your bestseller and $50,000. The next XXX, but not the same. To buy a book that works. The writer to do the work!
Q: What are they looking for when working with the editor?
A: The ability to take direction, to achieve the author's vision. How do we bridge the gap between "Don't write to the market" and "Editors buy for the market?" The first audience is yourself. Readers, like dogs, can smell crap. Write what you are passionate about.
Q: When an editor finds a problem, what is the next step?
A: A challenge to the author. Editors suggest fixes, but good authors don't do that, they do it their own way, in their own voice.
Q: What are some common pitfalls or advice?
A: Be timely. Don't try to be perfect, just respond, and keep the communication going. Ask yourself, "Will this news get better if I wait?" Editors are not parents or bosses. Collaboration is the name of the game.
Q: Is there an exemplary or hilarious incident from the trenches?
A: Don't respond to a rejection slip with the news that your mother liked the story. Arguing with rejection letters is pointless.

( Chocolate and bourbon, over and over... )

[Dan] So let's finish up. I'm very excited to hear our homework. Which is what I have written down as the Weisskopf possum theory.
[Toni] Oh, God. We don't have enough time for that.
[Laughter]
[Toni] Telling the possum story would be at least 10 minutes.
[Dan] Oh, well, we can't do that. Can you give us like a 10 second version of it?
[Toni] Cat, go first.
[Laughter]
[Cat] Here's my writing advice.
[Dan] Okay.
[Cat] Try something new this week. If you always write indoors, go right outdoors. If you always write by hand, try it on a typewriter. Just mix it up a little. See what happens.
[Dan] Awesome. That's great advice.
[Toni] All right. This has nothing to do with possums. But listen to dialogue. Sit down and write down, if you can, how people actually talk. This is not how you write dialogue, but it will help you writing dialogue.
[Dan] That's great advice.
[Howard] When she says listen to dialogue, listen to people speaking to each other. Not TV dialogue. Listen to people talking.
[Toni] Yes. Thank you.
[Dan] Aaron Sorkin…
[Toni] That's why you're the writer.
[Dan] One of my favorite bits of writing advice he gives is go sit in a coffee shop for an hour and just listen to people talking to each other.
[Toni] Yup.
[Dan] Awesome. Well, that is our show. Thank you very much, Cat and Toni, for being here. We are very excited.
[Cat, Tony] Thank you.
[Dan] Everyone else, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.8: The City As Character

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/02/19/writing-excuses-7-8-the-city-as-a-character/

Key points: Let your passion for a place feed the story. Look for special places, and put your characters and events in real places. Make the location feel lived in. Where are the bad parts? How do people get around? Especially if you are using a real place, get it right. Arson can help with narrative problem solving. Even nonexistent settings do better in a real neighborhood. Accuracy adds flavor, and so does passion.
( City on the edge of forever? )
[Dan] All right. Okay. Mary, I apologize for this, but...
[Mary] I knew you were going to do this.
[Dan] Can you give us a writing prompt?
[Mary] Yes. Take a city to which you have been, and set a chase scene from point A to point B.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Sarah] Oh, she's good.
[Dan] I know. It's because we do this to her all the time. Excellent. All right. You are out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: accentuated

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/15/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-25-the-business-of-writing-comics/

Key points: Professional relationships and keep plugging. Don't be afraid to try other things, you need a portfolio more than a specialty. Make your deadlines and be easy to work with. And work hard -- it takes passion and love to break into the comics industry.
( Under the covers )
[Howard] I have a writing prompt.
[Dan] Writing prompt? Let's hear it.
[Howard] Our superhero gained his superpowers by writing technical articles for Wired.
[Dan] Excellent. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: nasal

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 25: The Seven Deadly Sins of Slush Stories

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/03/29/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-25-the-seven-deadly-sins-of-slush-stories/

Key Points: use standard manuscript formats. Not technicolor, not fancy fonts, not multiple sizes. Follow the writer's guidelines for your market. Avoid Star Trek and other fanfic, obvious grammar errors, run-on sentences.

The seven deadly sins are:
1. Infodumping (a.k.a. a story is not a lecture)
2. Staff Meetings (a.k.a. infodumping in dialogue is still infodumping)
3. Incomprehensible actions (a.k.a. lack of setup)
4. Navel contemplation (a.k.a. non sequitur infodumping and no action)
5. White room syndrome (a.k.a. lack of setting)
6. Dystopias (a.k.a. the all-disgusting background)
7. Dark and gritty (a.k.a. all the disgusting little details)

Recommended: Revise, revise, revise. And write your passion.
( Lots of good stuff )
[Brandon] Thank you very much, Nancy. This has been good information. This has been Writing Excuses. Do you have a Writing Prompt, Howard?
[Howard] Write something...
[Nancy] That you're passionate about.
[Howard] About an egg.
[Brandon] A passionate egg!
[Howard] Oh, no. No. Those... oh, dear.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses. Thanks for listening.

Current Mood: jumping

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with passion

Writing Excuses 18.18: Launching an Author Newsletter

Writing Excuses 15.30: Write What You Want to Know, with Laurell K. Hamilton

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.

Writing Excuses 13.9: Quick Characterization

Writing Excuses 12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

Writing Excuses 7.8: The City As Character

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 25: The Seven Deadly Sins of Slush Stories

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