wetranscripts | Entries tagged with plot

Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-02-qa-aboard-the-writing-excuses-cruise-with-mark-oshiro-and-kate-mckean/

Questions and Answers:

Q: How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

A: Is the character redundant? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Is this a more interesting character, so I need to make them the star? If you take the character out, does it affect the story? Are they filling a role that nothing else fills? Is this a protagonist, main character, or hero?

Q: If the story is very plot focused, how can you make it more character focused?

A: Who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Why is this character staying in this plot? What ability do they have to participate in this plot? Why is this character unsuited to solve this problem?

Q: Say you have some cool thing that doesn't quite fit the story. How do you decide whether to rip it out or find a way to shoehorn it in?

A: Is it going to baffle readers? Save it for a later opportunity. Can it do some other things? Don't buy cool solar powered lights for your garden path if you don't have a garden path. Does it fit with the characters?

Q: What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline when there are other fun things to do instead?

A: Money. Fear. Think about what you will lose if you don't finish it. Don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. Reward yourself with joy. Break it into small pieces, and use checkboxes. Think about why you don't want to do this. Write the ending first, and then use it to remind yourself where you are going.

Q: When do you call a manuscript done?

A: Everything can be made better. Can this be more of the thing that I want it to be? Art is never finished, only abandoned. Realize that there is a lot of refinement afer the point where you say it's done. First, is there a little voice saying, "Chapter 3 is really weird?" Second, make it hard for the editor to say no. You get more than one chance.

[Season 20, Episode 02]

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

[Season 20, Episode 02]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Q&A on a ship.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And we are joined by Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean here on Navigator of the Seas. Hey, Mark, tell us about yourself real quick.

[Mark] Hello everyone. I am a young adult, middle grade author of some books that I've won some awards and been on some lists and I'm trying to pet every dog in the world.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Short and to the point. Kate! Tell us about yourself.

[Kate] My name is Kate McKean. I'm a literary agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm very excited to be here.

[Howard] Well, we're excited to have you. And our students here at WXR right on the Navigator have been excited all week to learn from you guys. This has been awesome. But they still have some questions. So, let's turn it over to our students and have someone ask a question.

[Someone] Well. How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and possibly never have been in your book at all?

[Howard] Restating the question, how do you know when a character is taking so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things I look at is… The same things that I look at… I evaluate the character in many of the same ways that I evaluate a line. Is it redundant? Is the character doing things that other characters are doing? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Those are the things that… It's the same kind of metric. But you're just applying it to a different sort of experience.

[Dan] There's a… One of the things that I do in this case and in many other cases, any time the outline goes off track, is ask myself, do I need to get this back on track or is this a better track than I had in the first place? It could be that the character's taking up so much space precisely because you love them and they are more interesting than what anything else is going on. So you might need to just retool a little bit and let them be the star.

[Mary Robinette] Also, then, in some cases, where those two guys should be one guy. And you can just give all of that stuff to one guy, and then cut but you don't need.

[Mark] Yeah. Any instance I've ever had, where I've had to completely excise a character, the question became, if I take this character out, does it actually affect the story? If the answer is no, bye. Goodbye. Throw them overboard.

[Laughter]

[Mark] To fit the metaphor where we are. Please don't throw anyone overboard.

[Kate] No crimes.

[Mark] No crimes. No crimes on this ship.

[Erin] I actually… It's funny, because I was just thinking about the other side of that, which is it's possible that the reason that this character is taking up so much space is that they're filling a role in the story that there's nothing else there to fill. Like, they're the one who is advancing the story, at a time where no one else has that plot information. They're the one representing the characters back story, because there's nobody else to talk about. So maybe the answer could be that you could either add other characters, give part of what that character is doing to other characters, or figure out if there's a way that this story can hold it. Because you don't want to, like, knock out the supporting wall of your house, because you don't like it, and then be like, oh, no, it all fell down.

[Howard] I come back to the tripartite definition, the protagonist, the main character, and the hero. Who can all be the same person, but they can also be three different people. If someone is taking up a huge amount of page space in a story, and they are not fulfilling the role of protagonist or hero or main character, then I am well off outline, I'm now writing a different story, and it's time to figure out which story this character actually fits in.

[Someone] So, if you're writing a new book, and your plots tend to be very plot focused, what are some tricks to making the book more character focused?

[Howard] Restating. So, if you're writing a book, and the story is very plot focused, what are some tricks to making it more character focused?

[Mark] A question I ask myself, actually, because I'm also an outline or as well, is, very early on in my process of developing an idea, is who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Instead of just creating a character whatnot, think of possible… Not just possible conflicts, but, like, what's a contrast? What's a very interesting contrast of this happening to a specific person? That often can help me find a way into a much more character driven story, still within the very plot heavy story.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I… Similar to Mark, but one of the things that I will specifically look for within that is why the character can't just nope out of the plot. So that, for me, then means that being on that plot fulfills a lack, a hole in the character, it's doing something for them. That can usually allow me to find out what it is that they're missing, what it is they're lacking, that they can be on a journey for, separately from the plot, but that the plot is intersecting with, and that that's part of why they're moving forward.

[Kate] Exactly. Like, if they are on the plot because it fell in their lap, it is… They can easily nope out of it. But they have to want to be there for a complex reason. If the reason is too simple, you can make it more complex and that will deepen their… At least that character.

[Erin] I also sometimes think about what is the… What is it about this character that gives them the ability… Not only the desire, but the ability to participate in this plot. What is it that lets them take the action that moves this plot forward, and what is that rooted in? What is it that they're bringing with them to the plot that makes them an interesting person to be advancing it forward? Then, for that interesting thing, what's a way that you can work in… Somewhere where we see that area of interest outside of the plot? Where can we see it on some… In a side scene, or something else that's not necessarily plot focused?

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something that… One of the other tools that I'll use is to look at the character and ask why are they uniquely unsuited to solve this problem? That, again, opens up a lot of tension and just… A lot of juicy, juicy stuff.

[Someone] So, say you have some really cool, awesome worldbuilding thing that you wanted in your story, but it just doesn't quite do it. How would you balance just ripping it out and just saving it for another story versus trying to find an excuse or a place to fit that into the story?

[Kate] Does it pass the smell test? So, if you're trying to shoehorn it in there, and you can find a way to make it work, but you're the only one who recognizes why that works, the reader's going to be like, "What? Why? Huh? Where?" So you're better off saving it for something else, which is an opportunity. You have this cool thing, you get to use it later. Not that you don't, like, use it now.

[Mary Robinette] I had this thing in Martian Contingency that I was extremely stubborn about. Which is that in the real world, when you're looking at time on Mars versus Earth, you use Sol for Mars, and Earth… Day for Earth. That's so that people who are talking back and forth can tell whether they're talking about next Sol or tomorrow. Because they're not lined up. I was extremely stubborn about including this. People were not getting it. But it did a bunch of things. It helped… I actually needed it, technically, to be able to talk about those two concepts. It also did, like, this is a really cool worldbuilding thing that actually did a bunch of heavy lifting. But it was so hard to explain to people. So I took an opportunity and I took another scene that was a little bit flat, and used that seem to just explain it to the readers as a point of conflict between two characters. So it was… It… Looking for what else can this do. If it's doing only one thing, you probably save it for the… Look, everybody, here are my extras. Here's my acknowledgments, which is where the Mars speed of sound went, because I couldn't fit it into the book.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think…

[Mary Robinette] It's different.

[Howard] I think about that one time I was shopping and saw some just really cool solar powered garden path lights. I was like, oh, these are amazing. They're so neat. I mean, you can program the… I don't actually have a garden path. This is one of those situations where no matter how cool it is, it doesn't belong in my yard, because it's just going to end up as, like, a fairy ring or something. See, that would have been awesome.

[Dan] see, that would have been amazing.

[Howard] Oh, well.

[Dan] For me, this comes back to character. Which is kind of what Howard was just saying. Howard, as a character, had no plausible interaction with a garden path. So there was no point in putting extra time and effort into one. Because one didn't exist. If my characters can plausibly interact with and be harmed by and make interesting decisions about the cool thing that I'm struggling to include, then it will be fairly easy to include. Whereas if it's just some neat bit of worldbuilding that I made up that doesn't actually affect the characters in any way, then, yeah, it needs to go.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear my cat say, we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[Someone] What are some strategies you have for finding the willpower for finishing a project that you have a deadline on, so you have to finish it? But you don't want to work on it, you've got another cool thing… [Garbled]

[Howard] What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline, but there's… There are other fun things to do instead?

[Mary Robinette] Money.

[Unknown] Spite.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fear.

[Laughter]

[Dan] They're very primal urges here.

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to give them actual useful information, Erin?

[Erin] I'll try. I don't know. But I think part of it is not thinking of it as motivation. You know what I mean? Because I think there are certain things in life we just do because we have to. But because writing is so personal, sometimes you think, like, I will always write when, like, the moment is there and when I want to. But as somebody who does a lot of deadline work, ultimately, it's about… It is a little bit about fear. Like, I'll lose this… I will lose this next opportunity to write something cool if I burn this bridge by never getting back to this person when I said I would. I will lose the money that I was going to receive from this project. But part of it is thinking, like, I don't actually need to be motivated to work, you just have to work to work. If that makes sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it is just putting down one sentence and saying that's all I'm going to do for today, but at least it gives yourself a small goal to get through that doesn't require motivation, just action.

[Howard] There's an aphorism that I come back to all the time that I think applies to just adulting in general. It is, don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. I come back to that all the time. In my doing this thing now because it's just what I want to do now or am I doing it now because it's leading me to what I really, really want.

[Mary Robinette] I have a similar thing, which is what gift can I give to my future self? But the other piece that I will say is that one of the tools that I use is coming from dog training. We're having… We're working with a dog trainer on Guppy and while I said money, the fact is that my dog gets a form of payment for doing the things. It's a joyful form of payment. So, for me, the thing that I have to do… That… I shouldn't say that I have to do. The thing that I've found that is most effective… I can force myself to work. But that just makes work worse. It makes me resent it, and it starts to bleed over into the writing that I'm doing for fun, when I'm having to force myself to write. So, if I can make it more joyful, that helps. One of the things that you do with dog training is you do a lot of small sessions. So I will break things into smaller pieces. I will give myself ticky boxes, because the joy of watching a ticky box turn green is like… Um… Like… It should not be that effective. It makes me mad that it is.

[Howard] Our episode spreadsheets… I went to great trouble to program our episode spreadsheets so that all the little checkboxes are red until you check them, and then they turn green. That gives us joy every time we finished recording.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, it's like oh, when I finish this, then I get to do the next piece of it. And I get to cross something off. Like, I have literally given myself gold stars before.

[Kate] I have also done that. And I love a checkbox that I can physically do…

[Chuckles]

[Kate] What I do is turn it around and say why do I not want to do this? What am I scared of? If I'm scared to take the next step on this project, or I don't know what scene I'm writing next, or when I… I have to do the big edit when I finish this task. So when I… Even just say, like, I don't want to do this because I don't know what I'm doing after. Saying it out loud makes it less scary. It doesn't mean that the actual fear goes away, but you're like, oh, I'm just afraid. Great. That's easy to be afraid.

[Dan] That's so much better than the technique I got from dog training, is I wear a shock collar.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then, anytime I get off of the main document, it buzzes me. Don't actually do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually need a different trainer.

[Laughter]

[Mark] If I can add to this too. I… A thing… So I do actually something before I'm drafting. Some of you have heard me speak about this. Which is it's very important that when I'm about to start a book, I know how it ends. And I want to be absolutely unhinged and feral about that ending. Because then when I'm in those moments where I'm stuck, I will actually turn to the end, because I actually write my final scenes, final line first, and remind myself, like, that's where I'm going. Which often sort of related to you will help me figure out, subconsciously, why am I stuck in this moment? Why does this moment feel unmotivating? I will also say if you do just really require motivation, often, for me, it's I want to get this done so I can go to the shiny new object over here and work on the other thing that is also making me slightly feral and unhinged.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. Sorry. One last last thing which is, like, what I love about all of these different answers is I think what they remind me is we're also different in the ways we handle this. I think one way that's good is how have you ever forced yourself in your life to do anything else? Like, if you are like I always… When I don't want to go to a party, make… Say, I can get a pizza on the way home, then maybe you're, like, reward, like, focused. If you're somebody who… Like, whatever the thing is that works for you in other areas of your life can also sometimes be repurposed for your writing life.

[Someone] When do you call a manuscript done, because it seems like you could be stuck in each [garbled step of the process?]

[Howard] You had me at when do you call a manuscript done.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing. Everything can be made better. There is not anything in the world that can't be made better. I think if… Some people have heard me talk about this when we've been doing office Hours where you've come to me for one-on-one. So I know I've said this multiple times on the ship. When you're… If you talk to someone who worked on the Princess Bride, which is a perfect film, I am certain that they would say, "If I would've just had one more day." So, for me, the question is not can this be better, but can this be more of the thing that I wanted to be. Like, if I got a chair, if you look at the chair, listener, that you are sitting in right now. There's probably a scuff on it. Could you fix that scuff? Yes. Would it make it more of a chair? Would it make it more useful, would it make it better for you? No. So, when the thing is doing what you wanted to do, then it is done. Can you make it better? Yes. But you don't have to.

[Howard] I think it was Picasso who said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." And I have taken that as a gospel truth. I never finish anything, I decide to abandon it. Which is very emotionally liberating.

[Dan] Yeah. One thing that I did not realize when I was very early career, when I was still trying to break in, is how much refinement there still is to do after that point when it is done. Right? The agent is going to help you make it better. Your editor is going to help you make it better. The copy editor, the proofreader, like every step of the process will continue that refinement. It doesn't need to be completely perfect. It never will be. But it's good to remember this is good enough right now, and there's a whole army of people that's going to help me make it better later.

[Kate] I did two kind of litmus tests, both as a writer and as an agent. The first thing I do is I ask myself, whether it's my book or somebody else's, is there, like, this little voice in the back of your head going, "Chapter 3 is really weird." The quieter it is, the more I need to go back and look at chapter 3 or whatever part. The loud voice that's saying, "This is horrible and you're a blah blah blah blah blah." That's not your intuition, that's just fear and anxiety and all those things. It's the tiny little bit, like, yeah, this scene doesn't make that much sense. Then you go back and fix that one. When I'm in… When I have my agent hat on, and I'm editing a client's manuscript, my goal is to make it really hard for the editor to say no. But that goal is not make it perfect and ready to go to the printer. Because that's not my job and I don't have the power nor the time to do that. But when I look at a manuscript and say, okay, well, the beginning's a little slow. That might derail an editor. Let's fix that. Let's address that, and then not worry about some hand wavy things in the middle. Because by the time they get there, they're invested and they'll want to know the end.

[Mark] Most of the time, I'm teaching to young kids who haven't written at all, or very interested in it, have never even finished a short story. So a lot of their questions are around, like, well, how do I know it's done? Like, when do I know? Is it just writing The End? Which, often times, I'm like, yeah. Actually, yes. Then you're done. It's done. But I also like to talk to them about how those of us, especially here in the States, we have been raised in a system in which we are taught you have one chance. Right? You write an essay, you take a test, you get a grade. The end. That's it. So they often approach writing the same way. I see adults then struggling with that in adulthood, of I only have one chance to do this. So I love how all of us can sort of dispel the notion of, like, the thing you're writing is… You don't have one chance. It's not you write this manuscript, it's done, and that's the only chance you're ever going to get. So, for me, at least with my process, I know a manuscript is done initially, just when I reach that ending point that I've already written. It's done. Then I can give it to my agent. I can start having conversations with my editor. Then, even then, as it goes through developmental edits, line edits, and then we all get down to pass pages, where we're reading the proof of your pages. For me, I know it's done when I can read long periods of the book without stopping and going, oh, this doesn't make sense, something here is tripping me up. That's when I'm like, it's done. Maybe five or six things over the course of a whole novel, I'm like, I don't know if I landed this. But if it's very few of them, then I'm like, this is done. Like, I can let this go. Or abandon it, to use that language.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The UK edition of Shades of Milk and Honey is three chapters longer, and 5000 words longer, than the US edition. Because they made the mistake of asking me, "Is there anything you'd like to change?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You made the mistake of answering.

[Erin] I think that just shows the power of time. Because I will sometimes abandon, whether temporarily or permanently, a story because I'm like, I am not where I need to be at in order to make this any better. Like, I have done… All that I'm doing now is… I… Always call it like shuffling, is on the Titanic. All I'm doing is making very minute changes. Nothing is changing at the core. Because if there's something wrong at the core, I cannot figure out how to change it now. Sometimes I send it out anyway, and it's like, I hope that the editor at the magazine is, like, oh, actually it is this, or, you were wrong, it's fine. I accepted it. Then I'm like, oh, well, maybe that was all in my head. But sometimes, it is years later, I'm like, oh, I could have written this different, better story, but the story I wrote was fine for the writer I was at that moment. I think it sometimes nice to, like, acknowledge who you are and what you can do now, and worry about what your future self can do later.

[Howard] So you freeze the document in your trunk cryogenically until you've developed the technology to really fix it.

[Howard] We've got time for one more question. No we don't. We do not have time for any more questions. What we have time for is homework.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to give you the same homework that we are giving the participants in the Writing Excuses workshop here on the Navigator of the Seas that is the daily challenge. Asked and answered. Ask someone a question about writing. Either to learn more about what they're working on or to work through a project of your own.

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

mbarker

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

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

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

[Season 19, Episode 15]

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

[Season 19, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Etiquette.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

[Erin] Who is Elsie?

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Personal voice.

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

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

[DongWon] Exactly.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Absentmindedly.

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But I know which parts!

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] "When I wrote it."

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

[Howard] Oh, my.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.35: Organizing Your Writing, or Managing the Mega-Arc

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-35-organizing-your-writing-or-managing-the-mega-arc

Key points: Tools to keep big projects in line. Use string to align things! Simple tools can manage big things. Airtable, a database. Track character names, places, what you've done, what you mean to do. Find things that you are missing! E.g., over using one gender, or personality traits or alignments. Tracking helps you recognize patterns, and be intentional about them. Obsidian, a digital whiteboard for visual layouts, and automatic linking, a kind of mind map of connections. Wikidpad, use tools that work for you, that seem intuitive. Use find to see if you have already written something, so it is canon, and a collection of useful links. Measure twice, cut once, or relative measurement. Think about monetizing your references or research results. Worldbuilding, prep work, pre-writing is not wasted work if it works for you and your project. Spreadsheets and other pre-writing can tell you what you care about, what's important to you. The beginning needs to introduce the important characters, and the end needs to resolve or answer questions asked at the beginning of the book. What is the big story? Who are the specific characters in this book?

[Season 18, Episode 35]

[1:30 minutes advertising, almost inaudible]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Managing the Mega-Arc.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] This week, we're going to talk about big projects and the tools we use in order to keep them in line. I'm reminded of the… I can't remember who it was who was making such a big deal about how the stones and the pyramids were laid out in perfect straight lines, and someone else pointed out that, "Dude, they had string." You pull the string straight and, boy, you got a straight edge right there. You can just line these things up. There are some very simple tools that we can use to manage really big things. So I'm going to pitch this to the rest of the cast. What is your string?

[DongWon] Hey, Erin, do you want to talk about airtable?

[Erin] [chuckles] I do want to talk about airtable. So, I will say first that while airtable is actually free to use, I am not being a shill for airtable. Any sort of database or way of tracking things can work. It's just the one that I really love, because it has a really great fun way of looking on the screen that works for me. But what I like to do is a lot for my game writing projects is to track things like character names, places, what I've done, what I mean to do. One of the reasons that I really like tracking is actually maybe for a different reason than other people do. I use tracking a lot of the time, and I use airtable, which is, like, I set up this database and I'll list like every character I've ever mentioned. Every place that's ever shown up in this particular game, is to find places… To find the things that I'm missing about myself. So, for example, if I track all of my characters and their genders, I may find that I overly skew one way or the other in terms of gendering characters. If I then add in a little bit about their personality traits or alignments in like a D&D or TP RPG world, I may find, for example, that I love chaotic good women, which I do, because I am one. So I… And that I make all men evil, because they… No, just kidding.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Those types of things we often miss in our own work, the patterns that we're creating. I think that a lot of times when you create patterns, and you're not intentional about them, that's when you can replicate bad things in the world that we don't necessarily want to put on the page. So, for me, tracking is a way to keep things straight, to learn that I love names that start with the letter K, and that I can't make everybody's name a two syllable K name…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Because eventually it will be very difficult to keep them apart.

[DongWon] I don't know. World of Karen seems pretty terrifying.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. That's actually a bad theme park. The World of Karens.

[Howard] That feels very much like the string metaphor I led with. You stretch that string out, and if one of the bricks is sticking just a little to one side, oh, you can see, oh, that is so clearly a thing I've done wrong. Let's fix it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I also do a spreadsheet for similar reasons about my internal biases. But then I also… The thing that I started doing, and this gets to the… Over the course of a long series. I originally was putting in the characters ages. But, in the Lady Astronaut books, I just finished writing book four, which takes place 17 years after the first book. So when a character, a new character enters the world, I'm like, "Okay. So I just wrote down their age, but their age in what year?" So now I write down what year they were born in instead, which makes it much easier to track. I still have to do math. But it makes it much easier to figure out, like, where they are in relationship to the other characters in the book and how old they are as the story progresses.

[DongWon] Going back to tools specifically, Erin mentioned the airtable is a database, which is technically true, but also makes it sound very scary. Functionally, when you're interacting with it, it is a series of linked spreadsheets is kind of what it looks like, that you can make it show your information in various ways. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It's a very cool tool, and one that I highly recommend playing around with and exploring a little bit. If you want something that's slightly less hierarchical for… I use this a lot for my games. I use a tool called Notions… Or, sorry, not Notions. I use Obsidian which is sort of like a series of linked text documents. But the reason I really like it is it has two features. One, it has a digital whiteboard version, so you can sort of lay stuff out visually. The other is it automatically links different documents together. If you mention something in one document, it'll give you a sort of a mind map, so you can sort of see how things are connected and clustered and it gives you a really useful way to be like, "Okay, this location, these characters, these plot points are all linked in this way." So you can find connections, or see where you didn't draw a line that you need to. So a lot of these tools are just different ways to visualize all the information that's in your head in a really structured way that can give you more insight into what it is you're trying to accomplish.

[Howard] Often we resist tools that have a learning curve at the front of them. You look at a tool, you're like, "Oh, I'd… I don't want to have to learn how to program a database. I don't want to have to learn how to format a spreadsheet." The very first planning tool that I really used for Schlock Mercenary was a standalone wiki software called Wikidpad. Wiki D Pad. I always pronounced it Wikidpad because it never occurred to me that the developer was making a fun pun and calling it wicked pad. I loved it because while I was typing, by doing just a couple of keystrokes at the beginning and end of a name, it automatically turned that name into a link for a new page. So I could just right and by doing whatever those little blips were, I don't know if it was double pipes or whatever, by doing those at the beginning of the thing, I was making a note to myself that says I'm going to expand on this later. Then I go back on it and click it, and boom! Up comes a blank page and I could start writing again. The desktop version, the only me version of the Schlock Mercenary wiki, was born. We talked about it in an early episode of Writing Excuses. I'm not here to pitch Wikidpad to you. I'm saying the tool that's going to work for you might be the tool that is the most intuitive. Maybe that's sticky notes on the wall, maybe that's a clipboard.

[Mary Robinette] So the two… Like, you'll hear people talking about needing to build their worldbuilding bible and things like that. Yes, I use a spreadsheet to track my characters ages, I use things like eon timeline to track the big over… Making sure that I've actually allotted them enough time to get from point A to point B. But most of my worldbuilding, I don… My two organizational methods are the find function…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that I can look for it in something that I have already written. Because if it's not in the document, it is not canon, and I can change it. Then, my Scrivener, I have a section that's called useful links and I just dropped the links in randomly. Like when… After I've researched something, I will drop a link into what I've researched. The reason that I'm bringing this up is that I know a lot of people who feel like they have to create this very detailed document before they can start writing. I am here to tell you that if you are chaotic neutral about your organization, or chaotic evil as my case may be, you don't actually have to… What Howard said earlier about using the tool that works for you to solve the problem that you need to be solved. All I need to solve with my links is if someone says, "Where did you get that?" that I have someplace where I have it saved.

[Howard] I think my alignment is lawful lazy…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] In woodworking, which is another one of my hobbies, permitting me to pull extended metaphors from my hobbies, there's two ways… There's the old saying that if you're a carpenter, you measure twice and cut once. There's a whole different school of thought to that. Right? So in this case, measure twice, cut once, is very much like I'm cutting this to this exact dimension, it is going to be this size, and I've planned it all out, and you've built a cut list of like 15 different things that are exact measurements and you have to follow that to a T. If you screw up, your whole project is going to be off. Right? That is how I think of very much this, like, worldbuilding document where you're pre-building all these things in a very detailed way. There's another mode of thinking that I find more useful. It's a very traditional method called relative measurement. Right? You have a board. You are now going to mark that board in ratio to the next thing you want to make. Right? So if you have a drawer back, then that is the size of your drawer, you're going to cut your drawer front in a way that matches the size of that. It doesn't matter how big it is. You don't need to know that it's 9 inches and three quarters. You just need to know it's this size, I'm marking it to be the same as that size. So you can do that with all your joinery and all of your pieces, and you have a thing at the end that is very beautiful and very proportional that fits the design that you wanted, but you're doing it all relative to each other rather than trying to impose this top-down hierarchy on it. So if you approached your organization that way, I think for a lot of people, I think it can be much more intuitive and fluid, and sort of takes some of the stress off, of having to figure all these things out before hand.

[Howard] My own woodworking mantra is I've cut this three times and it's still too short.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Then you just cut the other board to be short enough that it fits.

[Howard] Exactly. When we returned from our break, I'm going to talk about turning my planning tools into money.

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk to you about Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This book… Like, I started recommending this book before I finished it, which is unusual for me. He imagines a future where the sea levels have risen, as they're going to. That's not really imagining the future, but one of the things he's looking at is whether or not octopi… podes can be sapient. He's got that layered on with the way AI might manage fishing vessels. Like, there's all of these different layers, and it's heavily, heavily researched. All of the characters are also scientists at the top of their game. So the amount of research that he had to do was huge. But it feels pretty effortless on the page. So if you want to look at, like, what the end result of some of these tools that were talking about are, and you want just a really good read, it's very thought-provoking. I highly recommend Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler.

[Howard] Probably the single most profitable thing Sandra and I put together for Schlock Mercenary was the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. I have a PDF of the Planet Mercenary role-playing game on my desktop that I refer to all the time so that I can get my worldbuilding details right. It's totally fair to write a 300,000 page role-playing book and expect to make money off of it and then to refer to it yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I joked in a previous episode, between the words schlock and mercenary, which word suggests I wouldn't do something like that?

[Mary Robinette] So I've done a similar thing, which is not the role-playing game, but one of the things that I've done to monetize my research is that I have a bookshop.org, so I have on that bookshop.org, I have a list of… The bibliography that I have for the books that I used to research my stuff. It's there for two reasons. One, it makes an easy reference for me. Two, people are always asking me, like, where can I go to get information like this. Then, because it's through bookshop.org, I actually get an affiliate kickback from that. It's not that you have to do this thing, but one of the things that you will be doing as a writer is looking for multiple income streams.

[DongWon] Just one thing in general I want to remind you is that there's no such thing as throwaway work in writing. Right? It may be frustrating to feel like you've written however many words in worldbuilding and prep work and pre-writing, 50,000 words, whatever. That all goes into building up your internal understanding of this world in the way that you may need it, so that that work is going to go into the book that you're writing. Right? Words that you write and throw away just because they're not ending up on the final printed page doesn't mean that they were worthless. It just was what the project required. Right? Not every book will require that. Maybe that's something you do for your first book. Maybe it's something you find you need to do for your seventh book. Right? But I love framing, like, being able to take the pre-work you're doing and make it work for you in other ways. I think that's an absolutely brilliant way. I think writers yeah… Look for ways to monetize that work you're doing. Look for other income streams. But also don't feel like you're wasting time by doing these things. Yes, sometimes for some people it's a mode of procrastination, but I just encourage people really, like, if that's your process, that's your process. Lean into it. Find ways to make that work for you, and don't beat yourself up just because that doesn't end up on the printed page.

[Howard] One of my favorite outgrowths of the research was I had a spreadsheet for when people were born. I realized that two of my main characters were from the same area, had the same life… About the same life span, and may have been sitting on different sides of the same war. I had never explored that. An entire story and the whole bunch of character data came out of one moment where I looked at a spreadsheet and went, "Huh."

[Erin] Yeah. I think something else that spreadsheets can do, and, granted, I love them more than I should, is it teaches you what you care about. So a lot of the process of making a spreadsheet is trial and error. So you decide, I'm going to make a spreadsheet today. You're like, "Oh, put all the character names down," or something very easy. You're like, "I'm going to track their age." Then you're like, "Oh, no, that's wrong, because my thing goes through time. Actually, I need to track their date of birth." That tells you something about the way you view the story, the timescale that you're working on. If you keep going back to your spreadsheet and being like, "Oh, this spreadsheet is not working because it doesn't tell me X." That means X is important. Number one, figure out if there's a way to add it to your spreadsheet. Number two, like, that should be, then, something… If that's important to you, then it's something important to the story, and you should see is that actually coming through. That thing that you keep thinking about. So, I think that a lot of times what tools do is they force you to take the wide creative universe that you're working in and put it into some sort of structural mode. Even if it's just like I've made power points of stories before, being like random things I mentioned that I should get back to. They don't have a lot of form to them, but it's a way of putting it somewhere on paper, put it in some sort of box, even if it's just a box that I'm going to rifle through later to see if there's something really interesting that I can use to inspire myself going forward.

[DongWon] Aabria Iyengar has this brilliant worldbuilding question that she uses that is, "What is the lie that the people of your world believe in?" Right? The questions you're asking and putting into your spreadsheet can be so thematic and so creative and so generative that… Yes, you want the biographical details, when was this character born, who knows who, what are the connections. But also, going to Howard's example of here are two people on opposite sides of the war, what lies were each of those characters told? Right? What things do those characters believe and how is that going to drive story down the line? The way that... These tools are storytelling tools. They sound cold and mechanical when you say, "It's a spreadsheet. It's a database." But I think from that you can find such rich narrative hooks and chase your own interests, as Erin was just saying. You list the things that you are interested in. Sometimes you will be like, "This is boring. I'm not interested in this part of this world, or the set of characters, or this question," because when you're making a spreadsheet you are asking a question, and I think that is a really useful way to think about these things as you approach it.

[Howard] In structuring Schlock Mercenary, I realized on around I think book 5 or six, I realized that every book needed to stand alone. Because it needed to be a salable product without someone having to buy the earlier books. That may sound crassly commercial, and that's because it is. It would have been a terrible business decision to tell people, "Oh, you have to start with my very first thing that I ever did before you can read this thing that I'm super proud of." The solution… I mean, it should be obvious, I need to make sure that the beginning of every book introduces the characters who are going to be important, and that the end of the book resolves questions, answers questions that were asked by those characters at the beginning of the book. That started going into my planning spreadsheets very early on. I would have some cells for this is the plot, this is the big story. Then I would have columns and cells for the specific characters that this book was tracking. I had people come to me later and say, "You know, I always thought that Schlock was the main character, but he's almost never the main character in the stories." Yes. Yes, I'm so glad you noticed that. That's how we're supposed to say that, right, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yeah, I'm so glad you noticed that. He's very rarely the protagonist. Because he very rarely gets an arc that tracks things. I realized on about book 17, book 18, I realized that I needed to return to Schlock for the finale. So the ending that I had originally envisioned, the big solution, the big resolution to the plot that I had originally envisioned and that I had in my spreadsheets needed to have more Schlock in it. I went back to, and this is going to sound funny, I went back to an old forum post from like 2003 where someone said, "Yeah, the answer to a lot of these stories is just Schlock eats it." I looked at that and thought, "You know, I bet that'll work."

[DongWon] Character is destiny, you know.

[Howard] I bet that'll work. It felt so… It was one of those moments… Again, it grows right out of staring out the spreadsheet and realizing there's this pattern and there's this missing piece of this pattern, and I have to fill it with this character. I took my proposal for the changed ending to my brother and said, "This is what I'd like to try." His response was, "Oh, my gosh, that's genius. How long have you been planning this?" I'm like, "30 minutes."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed. Speaking of 30 minutes, we don't want to run for a full 30 minutes. So, let's wrap this up with some homework. Erin?

[Erin] So we have talked about a few different tools today. Sometimes I think about tools as hammers in search of a nail. So the homework is for you to actually find what are the nails within whatever story that you're working on? What are the things that you can or could track within your story? What I would challenge you to do is find three different things that your story could be tracking, whether those are informational, thematic, character driven, emotional. Write down what those are. Maybe a few examples of what those could be. If it's birthdays, right down five characters birthdays. If it's theme, write down what five characters are thinking about thematically. Then start looking at what are some tools that could actually help you take those nails and build something really cool out of them.

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

[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-34-seventeen-years-of-foreshadowing

Key points: How can you take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing in it, how can you look back and edit to put good foreshadowing in, or how can you make what you've already written work? What are the foreshadowing tools? Use stuff that's already on the table. Take what you're already doing and make it intentional. Use both plot foreshadowing and emotional foreshadowing. Foreshadowing can be for red herrings, too! Use alpha readers to find out what needs more emphasis, where to hang a lantern. Foreshadowing leads to a reveal, so make sure the pieces are in place to justify the reveal. Do you have to put foreshadowing in your work? What does foreshadowing do for us? No, not necessarily deliberately. But character drives plot, which is a form of foreshadowing. Plot, worldbuilding, character, theme, it all can contain foreshadowing, so the story makes sense. When you explain a story you are writing to someone, you stop and say, I need to explain X. That's something to foreshadow in your writing! Genre, telling a story, plot beats, they all are kinds of foreshadowing. Plant Chekhov's gun on plenty of mantles, and fire them as needed.

[Season 18, Episode 34]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing. In the previous episode, we talked about me ramping up to the finale of Schlock Mercenary, and the… I think it was Mary Robinette asked the question, "When did you know what the ending was going to be? When did you know you were going to have a big ending?" There's 17 years of foreshadowing going into the final three years of Schlock Mercenary. Because, even though I didn't know where I was going at the very beginning, I managed to make the early stuff work. That's part of what we want to talk about today is how to take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing at the very beginning, how to look back at what you've done and edit so that there's good foreshadowing in it, and, when, like perhaps a web cartoonist, you don't have the luxury to go back and edit and put in the foreshadowing, you can make what you've already written work. So, I'm going to pose this to our august body of…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Of hosts. What are your favorite foreshadowing tools? How do you like to do it?

[Mary Robinette] My favorite stuff is actually using things that are already on the table. I very rarely will be writing and think, "Um. I need to put this in because I'm going to use it later. Let me foreshadow this plan that I'm going to do." I'm much more likely to hit a point where I need to use something and then look back at stuff that I've already laid down, grab one of those things, and then go back and tighten it or tweak it and maybe put it in one additional place. The closest I've come to really… It's probably not true, but the closest that I can think of that I've come to doing additional… I mean, intentional foreshadowing in the Glamorous Histories, I was like, "And then Jane uses…" And I said bracket. I was like, "And then Jane," and I said bracket, "uses a technique of glamour that is going to become very important and plot specific later…"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then when I got to that point where I knew what that thing was, I came back and dropped it.

[Erin] I'd say I'm a pretty, like, instinctive whatever you call that type of writer these days, pantser or gardener or what have you. So, for me, a lot of times it's figuring out what have I… What's my subconscious already done, similarly, and then make it conscious. Take the things that I'm doing unintentionally and make them intentional. There's a story that I'm working on now that involves rhyming in it, which I promise is better than it sounds, and I realized that the rhymes were happening at random times in the story. I thought, "Well, what if they happened at moments… At specific types of emotional moments?" So I wanted to have these rhymes in the story, but could they be doing more? Then, that way, when you see the rhyme, the fifth or sixth time, even if you don't notice it on some level, you're going to see like that means that there's been a ramp up of emotion. So it's less the plot foreshadowing than an emotional one, but it's because I'm like, okay, if I'm going to do this thing, I might as well do it on purpose.

[Howard] I love that kind of micro-structuring. Absolutely love it. In the mixed mediums, cartooning is words plus pictures, there's even more of it available. The fact that you can cant the camera a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, and, if when a particular speaker is on, you always skew the camera just a little bit in one direction… It doesn't have to be much, five or 6 degrees is enough. The reader probably won't notice, but the reader's subconscious is going to be on board with there is something about this character that weird, that's tilted. The rhyming, a purely prose version, that's neat.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I will sometimes do… I said that I rarely do foreshadowing intentionally, is that sometimes I will, when I'm writing my story stuff, I will foreshadow as a way of laying down a red herring. Because I want the reader to spot it and go, "Oh, oop. She's foreshadowing something that's coming up." Then I don't use it. Like, it's deliberately putting the gun on the mantle with no intention of using it. So I will do that sometimes. Because I… When I am reading and I spot something where the author has put something in, and it's very clearly foreshadowing, it can often make me frustrated, because I can… It reminds me that I'm reading in some ways.

[Howard] It can knock you out of the story because you see… You start seeing the narrative scaffolding and… You're not supposed to see the scaffolding, you're supposed to live in the house.

[Erin] One thing I find really interesting about foreshadowing is to me it's a received action. So, someone has to take up what you are putting down. So, like, sometimes you think you have put so much scaffolding, you're like, "How could anyone not notice it?" People read it and be like, "I did not notice that that one, there was doing all the work that you thought it was doing, because you understand the entire story." So one thing that I find really fun to do about foreshadowing is to do it, and then give the story to someone and say, like, "What did you actually get?" Then adjust from there. I find personally that I read more into things like as a reader, I tend to take the tiniest things and think that they're foreshadowing. So I write that way. It turns out that sometimes I actually need to hit a point harder than I think I needed to. So sometimes what I do is just go back and take a moment that I'm like this was the teeniest bit of foreshadowing and then like shine more of a light on it. Because, to me, it was big, but to the other people it was small. It sort of feels like when you have a crush on someone and everything they do, you think is really momentous, but they're not noticing because it's all in your head. It's the writing version of that.

[DongWon] I've been having this problem a lot, not necessarily the crush part, but I've been having this problem a lot in general, which is, I've been doing a lot of [TDRBG?] GMing. So I've been running [garbled] campaigns and things like that, and I keep doing this thing where when you're starting a campaign, all you're doing is foreshadowing, you're laying out a huge buffet of plot hooks really, which will be foreshadowing things later. Then my players keep looking at me and being like, "We don't know what we're supposed to do now." So I think I'm having that thing of sometimes you really need to hang a lantern in a way that feels very obvious to you, the writer, that won't necessarily feel as obvious to the reader, because he'll be presented with so much information. Right? So putting your finger on the scale to make sure that this thing is highlighted in a certain way is such a challenge to sort of put yourself in the audiences shoes so they're set up to receive that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it's… It is that making sure that they notice it, but walking the line between not noticing it and being predictable.

[DongWon] Yup. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that happens to the creator is… The reason it's… Like, but it's so obvious, is because you know the end. You know all of the intentionality behind it. The reader does not.

[DongWon] Well, this is where you can hook into pattern recognition in your readers in a really useful way. This is kind of what Erin was talking about a little bit in just… You can set up these rhyming structures, because we've seen heist movies before. So we know when you're going to show the vault in a certain way, we have certain expectations of where that story's going to go. You can leverage these story beats, these tropes, whatever you want to call them, in a way that helps you emphasize the foreshadowing that you want, and then you can either subvert our expectations in terms of the red herring that Mary Robinette was talking about or you can fulfill them in satisfying ways, and then that'll feel, when the reader gets there, they'll be like, "Oh. They were telling me about this 50 pages ago. That's so satisfying." Right? So I think a lot of when you're starting a story, when you're in those early stages, and maybe you do or don't know where you want to go, but a lot of what you want to start doing is start laying out these early parts of different story patterns, and then figure out which ones you want to conclude, and pick up on, and which ones you want to like close the doors on as you go. Right? So, for me, sometimes thinking about those like little micro arcs, of like a character arc or a plot arc, can be really helpful in setting reader expectations and sort of priming the pump for them to get interested in what the eventual foreshadowing is going to result in.

[Howard] Well, the foreshadowing has to lead to a reveal. We will get to that reveal after our thing of the week.

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Babel by R. F. Kuang. This book just blew me away. One of the… I listened to it in audio. I highly recommend the audio edition, which is narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown. It is a story of a group of young students in Victorian Oxford who are translation students. It's a story about colonialism. It's a story about patriarchy. It's a story about friendship and found family. The magic system is so exciting, because the power of magic comes in the tension between words that cannot be translated into another language… Or, they can be translated, but that the process of translating, you lose some essential meaning of that. It's just really, really delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to highlight it for you is that she does this beautiful thing where it's this group of friends in the way they interact and behave with each other in the beginning when everything is going well foreshadows the way they are going to interact and behave with each other when things go poorly at the end. It's just… It's lovely because it sets up an inevitability and also is not predictable. Because you are hoping that things will go a different way. It's a beautiful book. One of the reasons I recommend the narration, the audiobook, in particular, is because you get… There are footnotes which are part of the structure of the book. But the footnotes are read by native speakers of the languages, so you can hear how the words are actually intended to be said. So that's Babel by R. F. Kuang.

[Howard] When I was 10 years old, I found a mystery novel and I started reading it, and immediately realized there was highlighting and handwriting all over these pages. I asked my dad what was going on. He said, "Oh, that's one of the books that grandpa read." Like, why did he write in the book? "Well, your grandfather loved reading these mystery novels, and every time he saw something that was a clue, he would write notes about it. He would highlight it. Because he wanted to be able to solve the mystery before the detective did." So he was putting in this conscious effort. I want to go on the record right now and say that is not how my foreshadowing works.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I write to the reveal. I don't write to you figuring out the reveal. I write to the reveal. So that when a thing happens, you look at it and you say, "Oh, of course that's what happens because there was this bit of foreshadowing." But, to use a silly example, if the camera has panned across gasoline dripping from the bottom of an automobile, then, well, there's going to be an explosion, and when you get the explosion, you're like, "Oh. Because there was gasoline and whatever." But there could also be no explosion because someone grabbed the fire extinguisher. It's… Whatever the reveal is, I want to have the pieces in place so that it feels justified. One of the only places I can remember consciously planning ahead for a big foreshadow was, and I think it was in book 15 or book 16, I had one of the characters talking about Fermi's Paradox. In a galactic society, where there's… The aliens have been around us for a thousand years, what does Fermi's Paradox even mean? Why is it even important? The answer is, well, um, galactic society should be a lot older. This galactic society is only about 40 or 50,000 years old. We are there other ones? What is happening? What is going on here? Having one character puzzling over that, and other people brushing it off, made for good comedy, but it also let me come around to, towards the end of Schlock Mercenary, coming up with my answer to Fermi's Paradox as a way to help drive the end of the story.

[DongWon] So you could have a plot load bearing academic concepts?

[Howard] Exactly. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, as we've all been talking, it's actually occurred to me that we may be having some listeners out there going, "Oh, I'm not doing any of this." So, let me ask the question, do you have to put foreshadowing in? In your work? Then that leads to the follow-up question of what does foreshadowing actually do for us?

[DongWon] I want to say that, no, you don't have to do it in a conscious and deliberate way. But there is one aspect of this I want to touch on, and we haven't talked about much up until this point, which is one of my favorite modes of storytelling is what I think of as character as destiny. Where, I mean, this is… Game of Thrones is very famous for this, Fonda Lee's books do this incredibly well. There's a mode of storytelling that's very much about the plot is going to derive from these foibles or characteristics or essential aspects of who your characters are, and then how they're going to interact with each other. Right? Circe wants… Loves her children, loves her family, and therefore will do anything to defend them past the point of reason. Right? We know this fact about her. So that is a form of foreshadowing in certain ways for later events when she becomes completely unhinged. Right? Over the… Spoilers, I guess… Deaths of her children. Right? Those little things that character is destiny can operate as a form of foreshadowing. So I guess my answer to your question is, no, you don't have to have it explicitly in there in the way that we've been talking about in terms of like certain plot hooks, setting up certain plot beats later, but it will always kind of be there if you've written your characters well. Because your people… Your characters will make decisions that should make sense to the reader. Therefore, we will always have a certain satisfaction when they make choices that are true to the characters that we've met so far. That is, in itself, its own form of foreshadowing.

[Erin] Yeah, I think a lot of times we think of foreshadowing as such a plot…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Specific thing. Like… It's like a plot thing you need to do. But I actually think that all… I agree, like… Foreshadowing is kind of sense making. You help people make sense of the story. Sometimes you do that in a plot way and sometimes you do that in a worldbuilding way. Like, there is worldbuilding foreshadowing where in order for a thing to exist in your world at the end, it's probably good for people to understand that it is like… That there is something of that in the world earlier on. Otherwise, it feels like a deus ex machina, where it's like, "And then there were spaceships." You're like, "I thought we were in Lord of the Rings, so that was surprising to me." You need to somehow… Maybe there's wreckage of mechanics that people find along the way, and that's a foreshadowing of its own. But I really think that foreshadowing can be… Can, I think, lead people sometimes to put too much of it into the plot, and not enough in other places. Because one of the things I sometimes I find myself doing in stories is like I figured out how to make the plot make sense, but now the characters don't feel like they're in that plot.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The characters are just being dragged along by it. They're doing things to foreshadow the action, but their behavior hasn't been foreshadowed, so it doesn't seem true to the character. So I would sort of challenge folks to look for ways in which your story makes sense on every level, character, theme, world, as you move along, and not just think of foreshadowing as something that needs to move the action.

[Howard] For the discovery writer, it's useful to point out that at some level, foreshadowing is the inevitable outcome of the syntax of a narrative. If you have a narrative in which things happen one after the other, you can look at the things that happened earlier and they are foreshadowing for the things that happened later. At some level, that's all foreshadowing is. The larger foreshadowing, the example I gave of Fermi's Paradox, that's the case where I'm now working to an outline and I want to have something big happened. I wanted to be big and satisfying, so I have to do some advance planning. But if you're discovery writing, you can probably read back through your manuscript and find foreshadowing everywhere. Because it's a natural growth of the syntax of the narrative.

[Erin] I actually think humans are natural foreshadowers. But we do it in asides. When you're telling a friend a story about something that's happened to you, you will often pause midway through the story and go, "Okay, but to understand why I hate my boss, you've really got to think about like that time she broke the copier on purpose and I've never forgiven her." Do you know what I mean? We naturally foreshadow, we just don't do it in a very like artful way…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because we just stop and go like, "Now you need to know this thing." So, sometimes I find that if you actually talk about your storytelling to other people, you will find yourself explaining the story that you've been writing, and then you'll stop, and you'll be like, "Oh, wait, the thing I didn't explain is X." That's the thing that is really important to foreshadow. So, by doing it like artless Lee like to a friend over a drink, over coffee, you can actually figure out what you need to do more artfully on the page.

[DongWon] I would argue that one of the best storytelling podcast that's out there right now, it's a podcast that's very popular called Normal Gossip, which is people telling gossip stories to each other about normal people. It's not gossip about celebrities, it's gossip about somebody you know. It's the single most funny thing I've ever listened to in my life. But also, it's so useful because it's exactly the stuff that you're talking about. Where each story has to be so beautifully structured and crafted to get the right feeling and rhythm of storytelling out. I love this idea of that's… If we are always naturally foreshadowing because you want to communicate to the person that you're talking to what kind of story are we in? Is this funny? Is this sad? How is this character relevant? What kind… So often, it's like, well, I know that person's going to make some chaotic choices, because you're telling me a story about them. Right? Otherwise, this isn't going to resolve in an ordinary, normal way. We all know it's going to get crazy from here. So I think that's part of the joy of a certain kind of storytelling. So, just by the fact that you are telling a story, you are foreshadowing a certain kind of elements, a certain kind of plot beats. So, in some ways when we talk about foreshadowing as an official technique, it really is just turning the dial up a little bit on some of those features. It's intentionally ratcheting up what are already natural storytelling patterns that we all have, and that you're already doing if you're writing anything.

[Howard] When the next door neighbor's gas grill explodes, and somebody says, "Y'a know, this reminds me of a story," we are all paying attention. Because contextually, you've just foreshadowed something that I'm on board for. I want to start this last little bit by saying we're probably familiar with Chekhov's gun. I had people accuse me of using Chekhov's gun. "Howard, in Schlock Mercenary, there are so many mantles, and so many guns, and so many… We just expect there to be gunfire all over throughout the ending." Yeah, for my own part, I had lots and lots and lots of throwaway gags that I knew I could return to if I needed them in order to make something feel like it was inevitable.

[Howard] I have homework for you. Last week's homework, take one of your favorite things and write a new ending. Homework this week, take a throwaway gag from one of your favorite things. Something that was only a plot point in one episode or in one book or in one scene. Right… Outline a scene in which that turns out to have been foreshadowing for something of huge dramatic import.

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

[DongWon] This episode is made possible by our incredible Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&As, live streams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

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

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

[Season 18, Episode 33]

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

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ha ha ha!]

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

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.

[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fart.

[That's it for… Garbled]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.38: Oh No I Lost The Thread

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

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

[Season 17, Episode 38]

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

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Marshall] Because you're in a hurry.

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

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Right.

[Howard] What is the process?

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] Chelsea?

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Oh]

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

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

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

[Chelsea] You heard it here first.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Howard] Awesome. Thank you.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Howard] Marshall?

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] Yeah, that's accurate.

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Yup.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] You're not alone.

[Marshall] There's more threads.

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Chelsea] This is a metaphor.

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

[Howard] Okay. Homework, Mary Robinette.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/03/17-14-structuring-for-disordered-or-order-less-reading-order/

Key Points: Stories or structures that can be read out of order? That ignore or bypass a specific order to events? Being able to read books in a series, or sections in a book, out of order, and it still works. Television episodes often do this. Although books usually still have to build. Fixup novels do this. Often there is a frame that explains why the story is told this way. Webcomics demand that each installment is understandable and rewarding enough that people want to find more. Series often require that readers be able to start with any of the books. Different characters and big time jumps can help readers with this. Make sure that at the beginning of the story or episode, the character has earned the reader's/viewer's trust, belief, admiration.

[Season 17, Episode 14]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes or so long.

[Peng] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Howard] And I'm not allowed to write episode titles anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I suppose I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I could be Peng.

[Howard] I'm Howard. I'm out of zoomer.

[Dan] I demand that you may or may not be Howard.

[Howard] Is that in order?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Disordered or orderless reading order.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are books that can be read out of order. There are stories, structures that demand a specific order to events, and structures that ignore that or just bypass it. Peng, what do we mean by this? What are we talking about with orderless reading order?

[Peng] Well, there are a couple of different ways that I think we can take this. I would say that it's one of the… It's a rarer structure for sure. Because we, as readers, especially Western readers, have been conditioned to expect that you start at the beginning of the book you finish at the end of the book, or the series. So, when we say flexible orders of reading, we could mean something like reading the books in a series out of order, or, if you got books that are… Have multiple sections, you might be able to read the sections out of order. But it's basically a story in which you can read all of the pieces either in the order that's suggested by the book or in whatever order you choose and it still has to work.

[Dan] Yeah. I think it is funny that we talk about this as a rare style of storytelling. Because within books it definitely is, but that's how television was for decades. Right? Modern detective stories, something like The Killing, you have to watch those in order because there's a very large serialized story being told. But go back to the 80s. You can watch any Magnum, PI, episode out of order with no context whatsoever, and still understand what's going on. So I… It's definitely a style of storytelling that we are culturally familiar with, just not really in our prose, in our books.

[Peng] Well, I think the main difference between TV shows like that, where every episode is its own thing and you can just watch any out of order, and books that are trying to do this is that with those TV shows, they're not necessarily building towards any kind of greater narrative. It's just every self-contained episode is a half-hour of entertainment, and that's that. Whereas books that can be read out of order, or they have some kind of a flexible order of reading to them, it doesn't matter what order you do choose to read it in, it still has to build in a way that these TV shows don't necessarily. So I think that is the greatest difficulty of this form, but also a really rewarding aspect of it. Because it is very hard to pull off.

[Mary Robinette] It's a… I think it's a structure that we did… We have seen perhaps a little bit more in a type called the fixup novel. Which is where an author takes… The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, is a prime example of this. It was a collection of short stories. He put them together, then added some interstitial material to kind of stitch it together. But you can really pick up The Martian Chronicles and read a chapter without reading the rest of the book, and it's fine. There are other examples of those. Most of the ones that I'm coming up with are in the fixup novel category, which is really a collection of short stories that are masquerading as a novel. But there's one that I… I haven't tried reading it non-sequentially, but The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Ward, I think you could read it non-sequentially and still get the overwhelming sense of loss that she builds towards.

[Peng] Does that book… Does it give you instructions to read it in any order you want, or is it just something…

[Mary Robinette] No, no. It's just something that I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it. It's not a fixup novel. It's just… It is… When I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is not a three act structure or any of the other structures." Yeah, but there's no instructions that you should read it out of sequence. There are books that tell you you can read it out of sequence?

[Peng] Yeah, so there's… Oh, go ahead.

[Dan] I was just going to say I'm familiar with one called Second Paradigm by Peter Wacks that's a time travel novel that every chapter can be read out of order and the story still makes sense.

[Wow]

[Dan] You could just open it up to a random chapter, read to the end, start at the beginning and wraparound. You could read the chapters in random order, and it all still works. It's really a brilliantly constructed story.

[Peng] That's really, I think, that's another really good point to call out about this structure is that because it is not so standard, a lot of times you… The story that you're working on, it might require some kind of a frame to give your story a reason for being told that way. So, out of order or in any way and order you want to read. It sounds like the book that you just named does that, because it is a book about time travel. So the jumping, like the book itself is conscious that it can be read in that way because it is about time travel. So it provides, like, a really good reason or frame for it to exist that way.

[Howard] When we think about this in terms of a physical novel where you're paging through in order to read, it's often difficult to imagine, well, why would I not just go to the next page? Why would I just open it up and start in the middle? My… And I'm going to use these words completely non-ironically… Magnum opus, Schlock Mercenary, the webcomic which ran for 20 years and you can still read at schlockmercenary.com. On any given day, if you went to schlockmercenary.com, the strip that is up in front of you is the very latest event in the story. I had to make sure as I was telling the story that every installment was comprehensible enough and rewarding enough that someone would click a button that says take me to the beginning of this chapter. Take me to the beginning of this book. Just throw me to a random location in the archives and let me see if I like it. We had all of those buttons. In fact, when we put the random archive button up, I got all kinds of feedback from people who said, "You're a monster. I click that button and then I look up and I've been reading for two hours. How did you do that?" Well, I guess I didn't build the story to be read in any order, I read the story… I built the story to make sure that the first element you see, no matter where you see it, is an invitation to go find more in whatever order you care to.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have a thought on that, but I'm going to wait until after we talk about the book of the week.

[Peng] Ah, okay. I've got the book of the week. It's Crossings by Alex Landragin. This is one of the… This is a pretty intense example, I think, of a book with a flexible order of reading. So I'm going to try to describe it. It's… The frame of the book is… It starts in Paris, during the Nazi occupation. It's introduced by a German Jewish bookbinder who stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings, which is the title of the book itself that you're about to read. Crossings is made up of three stories. One is a ghost story written by the poet, Charles Baudelaire, I think. The second one is a second noir romance about a man who falls in love with a woman who… She draws him into this dangerous hunt for a real manuscript that might have supernatural powers. Then the third is this memoir of a woman who claims that she has been alive for seven generations or something like that. But the really innovative thing about this book, Crossings, is that after you read that introduction by the German Jewish bookbinder who says, "I found this book, Crossings, and it contains three stories," is that he gives you the option to either read it straight through, so you just read one story after the other and then get to the end, or you can alternate back and forth between the stories according to directions he gives you in the book until you end up uncovering the reason that all of these stories are together. So if you choose to follow his direction, you end up bouncing back and forth like, I don't know, 12, 15 times between all these stories, working your way through all three at once until you get to the end. It's… I mean, it's just so innovative, so creative, so unique. It's really… It's worth reading because it is amazing how each story can build on its own if you read them one at a time or when you read all three of them together, they build up to something larger, even though you were going in a really different order.

[Dan] That's so cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's like…

[Dan] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] That is really cool. I'm like, that's like a grown-up literary choose your own adventure.

[Peng] Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's…

[Howard] When we put together the 70 Maxims collection, there's an annotated version of it that's an in-world artifact where the book has been in the possession of four different people. They've all made their own notes in the margins. I had a spreadsheet that tracked the chronological order in which the people had the book, and the chronological order of the events that they are making notes about. But none of my spreadsheet is actually in that book. So you are holding in artifact that has a very nonlinear, very read it in any order sorts of stories written in, no lie, the handwriting of my children and a neighbor kid and Sandra in order to capture that effect. It is structurally super weird. No, it's not how I would want to tell a mystery story, but I love what we ended up making.

[Dan] Cool. So that was Crossings by Alex Landragin.

[Howard] Oh, sorry, I interrupted the book of the week, didn't I?

[Dan] No, everyone interrupted the book of the week. But it was super innovative and fascinating. That's okay. But. Mary Robinette, you had something you wanted to say?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So what Howard was talking about, about how he had to make sure that when a reader lands on a new strip, that it was comprehensible and also part of a build. That is something that… For those of you who are like, "Uh-oh, nonlinear. I can't even… Uh-uh." Which is, honestly, where my brain lands when I'm thinking about this. But it is something that I think about when I'm thinking about plotting novels in a series. Because I really genuinely want anyone to be able to pick up one of my novel as their starting point. But that means that I have to think about all of the previous books as prequels. Even though I didn't write them as a prequel, I have to think about having them function as a prequel in case someone comes into the series at a different point. So I think that even if you decide that you don't want to structure an individual story or novel in this kind of read it in any sequence way, learning some of the tools can help you with your… With the overall thing. Like, The Lady Astronauts universe started with a story… The way a lot of people come into it is The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is set years after The Calculating Stars, but it was the first thing I wrote. So people will ask me, "What order should I read this in?" I'm like, "It honestly doesn't matter." You can read… You can go Lady Astronaut of Mars, Calculating Stars, Relentless Moon, Fated Sky or you can go Calculating Stars, Fated Sky, Relentless Moon, Lady Astronaut of Mars. It doesn't matter. But it took a lot of… It's basically me making decisions about what things I want to hold as an emotional… A piece of emotional oomph. And what things I don't mind being backstory. As soon as I decide that they are backstory, that means that I no longer think of them as something that I want to avoid being spoiled.

[Peng] That's a really good point about that the most important thing if you're going to approach a book or a series with… By giving it a flexible reading order, would be to hold like the emotional resonances or the theme as the most important thing, whereas the plot might not be. So I was wondering, I was going to ask you, because you said one of your books takes place 60 years after the one that comes before it, even though you wrote it first. Would you say that if you're going to attempt something like this, that having a different character for every story or having bigger time jumps between them might be a way to allow for greater flexibility, because readers might be more forgiving if the character's going to change or if there is a big time jump versus feeling like they need to go in order if it's the same character the whole time or the time jump isn't very big in between?

[Mary Robinette] That sounds right to me.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Dan] It sounds…

[Mary Robinette] I mean…

[Dan] Yeah, it sounds good, although I… In my cyberpunk series, the Cherry Dog books, the Mirador books, I specifically intended them all to be episodes and you could read them in any order. But they all take place relatively at the same time. The… I was kind of specifically aping the TV model. Right? Where the characters are all the same age, they kind of exist in a timeless space. That seemed to work fairly well.

[Howard] One of the things that I keep in mind is the principle of whether or not a character has earned the reader's or the viewer's love and belief at a given point in the beginning of the story. As an example, the very first episode, for me, the very first episode of The Mandelorian, the Mandelorian earns the right to be awesome without a training montage or anything. He just… He earns the right to be awesome. The first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett, Bobba Fett does not earn the right to be awesome. All he has is the name Bobba Fett and the legacy of a bazillion Star Wars things. If the first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett is your introduction to Bobba Fett, I had to ask myself, "Why am I interested in who this character is?" So that dichotomy, for me, if there's the possibility that books are going to be picked up out of order and one of my characters needs to do something that requires the earned trust, the earned belief, the earned admiration of the reader, I have to put something in there for them to earn it. It can be another character saying, "Hey, Bobba, would you mind terribly being awesome for a moment? We need you..." And then Bobba does it, and now the reader's onboard because the other character was on board. So those kinds of tricks… Every time I started a new Schlock Mercenary book… Eh, from about book 10 to about book 20, I kept that in mind. Who are my characters going to be, how do I make them earn this early on?

[Dan] I think that's probably the reason that every James Bond movie starts with the last scene of a previous one we have never seen before. Because right off the bat, they're establishing, okay, this is who the character is. This is why you like him. He is awesome. Now we're going to tell a story.

[Dan] Mary Robinette, you have our homework this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I actually have two homeworks for you. Because I recognize that one of them may break your brain. So, depending on how your brain works. So I'm going to give you a choice. You can do both if you want. So. Look at your current work in progress. Are there pieces of backstory that you could unpack into a sequel? For instance, as I mentioned, Calculating Stars is a prequel to Lady Astronaut of Mars. It's basically me unpacking her backstory. So is there a story that's in there for you? The second one, and this is the one that may break some of you. Take your current work in progress. Make a copy of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So that you can do this safely. If you're using Scrivener, this is going to be easy. Otherwise, however you want to do it, shuffle it. Shuffle it, and then see what bridging pieces you need to put in, what elements you need to add in to make it still make sense in that new order.

[Peng] My brain broke because that was so exciting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Peng] I'll go do that one now.

[Dan] Okay. I am excited to hear, dear listener, from those of you who attempt this shuffling thing. Because I think it could be really fascinating. So. This…

[Mary Robinette] I'm…

[Dan] Yes?

[Mary Robinette] I am going to say that this came as an exercise because of a real-life incident that I had in which my cats played across the notecards… Played a game of tag across the notecards that I was using to plot my book. When I picked them back up, I was like, "Huh. That's actually a more interesting order."

[Chuckles]

[Peng] Cats are geniuses.

[Dan] Let your cats plot your books, I guess, is…

[Howard] That's the next [garbled]

[Dan] A take away you should not have from this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.50: Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/12/16-50-worldbuilding-finale-making-deliberate-choices/

Key points: Making thoughtful, deliberate choices in worldbuilding, along with cool and fun stuff. Think about how your speculative elements reinforce plot, character, and theme. Don't just fall back on the familiar, make sure you have a good reason for including it. Pick your time and cultural analogues. Interrogate your defaults. Be aware that the defaults, the cliches, the trope elements carry a kitchen sink full of implications. Balance what you are borrowing from real world analogues with what you are building from the ground up. Make sure you keep the kernel of cool in your writing, even while you make all these deliberate choices. Look for your armored bears!

[Season 16, Episode 50]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We have been talking about worldbuilding for seven weeks now. Now, here in the eighth episode, we're very excited to kind of tie this all up with what we hope is a very intelligent bow. What do we mean, Fonda, by making deliberate choices?

[Fonda] So, what I hope I've done over the course of the eight weeks that we've been talking about worldbuilding is encourage listeners to really examine why we worldbuild and how we worldbuild and how it serves the story in ways that are not just it's cool and fun to worldbuild, but are actually really thoughtful and deliberate. I have often taught writing classes, workshops, at different conventions and venues, and sometimes early career writers will submit work, and very frequently I see them fall back on worlds and speculative elements that are familiar and that are default. Because we've seen and absorbed them so much before. Like medieval European analog, or a magic school. Fantasy races like elves and orcs and so on. Those are all perfectly fine magic worlds, but what I really would like to encourage writers to do is to ask yourselves well, why am I making worldbuilding choices, and what are those speculative elements that I'm including because they really reinforce plot and character and theme? Why am I choosing something as opposed to I'm just falling back on something that I feel comfortable with or that I've seen other people use before.

[Dan] This is something that I talk about a lot, the idea that a cliché is not bad because it's familiar, it's bad because it's thoughtless. All of these elements that we see so often repeated like elves and orcs and magic schools and things like that, they're not flawed things you should never put in your story. You just need to be sure you're putting them in for the right reasons. That you have… You're not just using them because they're familiar and you don't want to think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's that… The metric of "Write what feels good. See how it moves you." is useless because… Not completely useless. But it's a… It's very wiggly wobbly, because frequently something feels good because it's familiar. When we're talking about right reasons, it's again, that's a wiggly wobbly thing, because different stories have different reasons and different this is right. So there's not… It's not as… It's not an easy metric to go by. So what you want to make sure you're doing is that you're doing it deliberately and with intention. It's the intentionality that we've been talking about for the past several weeks.

[Fonda] Yeah. I especially want to encourage people to think about what time, and what cultural analogues they're choosing to use and why. I, earlier on in the master class, in the previous week, I talked about my aesthetic reasons for wanting to write the Green Bone saga in a latter half of the 20th century analog. There's also a thematic reason why I did that, because one of the big themes in that series is the tension between a very old culture and tradition with all the forces of modernity and globalization and the conflicts that are inherent there. So I chose a time period that is uncommon in epic fantasy, because it reinforced a theme that I wanted to be at the front and center of the whole trilogy. So, just think about, like, what is it that you're trying to do with that story, that you want to leave with the reader, and bring that into your worldbuilding choices.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing that we talk about a lot when were talking about a default character. We've talked about this in previous episodes, the unspoken default, and that in modern-day America at this time that we are recording, that's a 30-year-old white man. People will say, "But, why have your character be… Be… I don't know… Be a woman? Why can't you just…?" The question that I find myself asking is, like, I'll go ahead and put down whatever my defaults are. Then I'll go back and interrogate them. That also includes where I'm setting it. So why am I setting it here? What does that buy me? Because I'm going to be spending a lot to build this place, spending a lot of words. So what am I buying with that? Is there a reason that I'm doing it here? Sometimes that reason is this is a place that I'm comfortable, and I'm going to be doing something more challenging in some other part of the novel. That's not a ridiculous reason to set something someplace that you're familiar. Especially if you don't enjoy research. But it is a deliberate choice at that point. You're making it on purpose instead of just falling into it by accident.

[Howard] Now, one of the things to be aware of as well with the defaults… The defaults, the clichés, the trope-tastic elements, whatever those may be, is that… Its kitchen sink effect. They don't all fit. If you put all of the things that you love from various Western themed fantasy stories into one story, and then begin exploring the implications of any of them, actually being thoughtful about them, they will crowd some of the other ones out. They… It doesn't all work together. It's one of the reasons why highly derivative stuff feels so flat, because it feels like, "Oh, you just painted a Disney version of Tolkien as a backdrop for characters to act against. The dragons would be eating the sheep. This doesn't make sense."

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to pause us here…

[Dan] Let's pause here…

[Mary Robinette] To talk about the book of the week. Because it's actually right on point for this. It's Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. It's inspired by pre-Columbian Americas. It is, at its heart, an epic fantasy full of the kind of political machinations and prophecies that you get from other epic fantasies. But she's made deliberate choices to pull from a different mold, from a different palette than most of the epic fantasies that you read. Because of that, she's got access to all of these different areas, different intersections of politics and culture that's rich and thematicly give these additional layers that… So she's buying a lot. It's not just, "Oh, cool. This is a different setting. That's neat." Thematically, narratively, there's so much richness to this world. She's able to… She's doing one of the things that we talked about in a previous episode by having her POV characters come from very different worlds and different cultures. Some of them are outsider characters. I think, actually, all of her POV characters are outsider characters in one way or another. Your able to get this really broad, rich, just gloriously textured landscape that the characters are moving across. It's a beautiful book. It's one of the Hugo finalists this year. As we record this, it's still just a finalist. But who… It's so good I would not be at all surprised to see this one walk home with the rocketship.

[Dan] Cool. That is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Dan] Now, Fonda, let's get back to something that you mentioned earlier. You talked about making deliberate choices about what kinds of real-world cultural analogues to… That may or may not show up in your story and in your worldbuilding. So let's talk about that a little bit. Without getting into a massive discussion of appropriation. Let's just set a baseline, do your research and be respectful. Talk about this idea of real-world cultural analogues.

[Fonda] Yeah. One of the choices that I want all writers to consider is how much, when you're creating your world, how much are you importing from the real world versus building from the ground up? Maybe I can illustrate this best with the example of this term Asian fantasy. So my books, the Green Bone saga often get described as Asian fantasy. Which is a term that I can understand the usefulness of this term from a marketing perspective, but I am not fond of it. Because it is used as an umbrella term to encompass a lot of things that are potentially very different, completely different types of stories. As an example, let me contrast a few books. There's a new novel, She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. It is a story set in ancient China, and it is based on a real historical figure, the founder of the Ming Dynasty. It obviously changes some things about our real history by re-imaging the identity of this very real person. So that is borrowing a lot from our real world, and then telling a story within it. Then you have The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K. S. Villoso which is set in a secondary world that is very reminiscent of the Philippines. K is from the Philippines and the story is a secondary world that is like if the Philippines had not been colonized. So you have very strong cultural cues, including what the characters eat, the way they dress, that say that this is inspired by the Philippines. On the other hand, you have my series, the Green Bone saga, which is in a secondary world that is not based on any one specific Asian nation, because I wanted the story to be in a place where there was this magic element, and it was this isolated culture that was on an island. So the fact that there is magic Jade would have influenced their entire development. It could not simply be Japan or Taiwan with the serial numbers rubbed off. Like, it had to be its own thing. So that influenced my worldbuilding choices, and I made really deliberate decisions when I was writing the story not to use words that tied it to specific places. I never use adobo or sushi or dim sum. Like, I never use words that would make you think that this is based on a specific place. So that's an example of three books that fall, from a marketing standpoint, under the same term, but have made very different worldbuilding choices in service of different narratives.

[Dan] And are going to appeal to very different audiences.

[Howard] When I think of worldbuilding, I'm often… And the clichés, I often force myself to question the boundary states that I've created around given terms, like… The example I'll use here, what does it mean when a place is crowded? My house has, I think, 2500 square feet, and there's five people living in it. There are people who would say that that's crowded. But I spent some time reading up on and looking at pictures of Kowleen free city, which was in the… In this area between two political entities. It was essentially 60,000 people or 40,000 people living in a space the size of a… The footprint of a football stadium. That… Was crowded. It was literally one of the most crowded places on earth. I looked at that and realized, okay, the boundaries that I've got in my mind for crowded are light years away from that, whatever that is. I perform these interrogations anytime I'm creating something to make sure that I haven't used the word like crowded to mean something that it doesn't really mean.

[Dan] Now, as we talk about making these deliberate choices, whether they are for narrative or aesthetic or thematic reasons, we don't want to lose the idea that your worldbuilding should still be cool. That there should still be awesome stuff that makes us want to love that book or wish we could live there. So, how can we do that? Fonda, give us some homework along these lines.

[Fonda] Yeah. I… To your point, I want to kind of bring the whole master class back around to, like, why do worldbuilding? We've talked this entire time around how it should support your narrative, your plot, your characters. It all should work together seamlessly and be this perfectly balanced three-legged stool. But I want to come back to the fact that many of us worldbuild because it's really fun. When you are a novelist, and you're going to devote years to a project, and spend so much time in this world, you need… There needs to be something about it that is so compelling to you that you'd rather spend time in this fictional world in front of your computer than out in the real one. So I often ask writing students, "What are your armored bears?" I'm… I point them to Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series. Right? That is a series that has really meaty themes. I mean, it is interrogating organized religion and oppression and some pretty meaty stuff. But what do we… What is on the cover of the book? What is on the movie poster? It's the armored bear. Because armored bears are just really freaking cool.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So that is my cool theory of literature, that you've got all this awesome worldbuilding that ideally just support your narrative and does so much heavy lifting and is meaty and rich and nuanced and full of texture. But there has to be that kernel of cool that just draws your reader in, draws you in, and keeps you there.

[Fonda] So, my homework for the week, and to close out this master class, is I want you to consider for your own work, what is your armored bear? What element of the story your writing right now makes you most excited to worldbuild and why?

[Dan] Sounds good. We would… At least I would love to hear what some of you come up with. This is a really great way to end this. So, thank you, Fonda, so much. This has been an absolutely wonderful master class. I've learned a lot. I hope the listeners have as well. So, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.46: World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/14/16-46-world-and-plot-the-only-constant-is-change/

Key Points: To make your world feel real, make sure it incorporates change! A past, a present, and a future, with the events of your story and the historical context interacting. Plot is about constant change, and you need to think about how that intersects the changes in the world. At whatever scale suits your story. Pay attention to why a status quo exists, and what is holding back change. People don't all react the same way to changes. What can you use to give your story a sense of time? Break it into chunks. Use labels for times and events instead of dates. Idioms! Pay attention to diaspora, the movement of people and the interaction of cultures.

[Season 16, Episode 46]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Fonda, the only constant is change. That's a phrase that we hear a lot. What do you mean by that? How does that relate to worldbuilding?

[Fonda] So, often times, we come across fantasy worlds that feel unchanging. We're out of time. I think we see this especially in portal realm fantasy, fairy tales, fables, stories that have that once upon a time feel to them. We know that in our world things are always changing. Our society is constantly evolving, technology is changing, social norms are changing. Even though I think there's absolutely a place for those sort of timeless ancient unchanging fairytale fable type fantasy worlds, personally I aim to create worlds that feel as real as possible. Part of that is making the world feel like it has a past, a present, and a future. And that the story that we're experiencing exists in a historical context, and the events of the story are also impacting what will be the status quo after you close the book on the final page. The fact that in our world the only constant is change intersects with the plot, because plot is also about constant change. Right? Each scene, each chapter, is a change that is driving that story forward. Because if you finish a chapter and you're in the same place that you were at the beginning of the chapter, that chapter is not necessary. So when you have change in the world intersecting with change in the plot, you're able to heighten and reinforce both.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to make sure to point out that this applies to a story of any scope. We're not suggesting that even the lighthearted romantic comedy that you're writing has to fundamentally alter the entire world. That's not what this says. The world of your story might be much smaller than the entire planet. But that it still needs to have that sense of past, present, and future.

[Fonda] Yeah, definitely. I mean, you don't necessarily have to be working on the scale of global change, it could be very small change, and world being the scope of what your characters immediate circumstances are. It could be change in a small town. Change in a high school. Change within this family. You have plot intersecting with world and that the changing world could be complicating the plot. For example, you have a romantic story, you have two protagonists, but some element of the world changing the industry in this town, causing one of the protagonists to have to move or a war pulling one of these protagonists away. I mean, all those potential changes in the external environment could complicate your plot. You could also have the events of the plot acting upon the world. So there is a give-and-take between plot and world.

[Howard] I like to think of change from the other side of the coin. Which is, why would things stay the same? Why does a status quo exist? There are status quo's that exist literally because we don't know any better. Because the technology hasn't been developed. In the 19th century, status quo for traveling around town was being a pedestrian or riding an animal or riding something that was being pulled by an animal… I mean, there was railroad obviously, but that was for longer trips. All the way up to the point that there were electric scooters and that there were people you could hire to take you to an airport to get on a plane. That degree of change was huge and a lot of it was driven by us learning things and things… Learning to do new things. But there's also status quo that is artificial. Where there is some sort of force keeping things from changing. Whether it's an economic force, someone has something to lose if we change things in the following way, or something, some structure has been built that prevents us from making the changes we want to make. Then there's status quo changes that are natural or huge, nature-sized, like… Was the story… Series of stories, Hellconia Winter, Spring, Summer… I can't remember the name of the author. Where you've got a planet that orbits twin suns, and it orbits on the outside… Complicated orbits. They have, like, a 1500 year year with hugely long seasons. So there would be these seasonal changes where suddenly the snow begins melting and it stays melted and what the heck is going on. So there are things that might change as a result of nature actually changing around you.

[Mary Robinette] The other piece of this is that people are going to have uneven reactions to that change. Depending on where they are in culture and society. So some people will embrace the change, some people will actively fight against it. You're going to have both of those things happening simultaneously, which is part of what makes something feel vivid and alive is that not everyone is having this even reaction. When you've got an event, whether that's the invention of a new technology or an invasion or just even class change, the events affect culture and culture affects events. Like, one of the kind of on a very granular level, when you're looking at rules, rules in a school or laws in a society, those rules… Or the ones that your own family sets… Those rules, the things that get delineated are always set in response to something. You don't have to create a rule about something if you don't… Aren't either afraid that someone is going to do it or if someone hasn't already done it, and often, it's, like, why would any sensible person… There's a… Why do we have a rule about the number of questions that is appropriate to ask a guest? Not saying that we have someone in my family is perhaps a little too curious, but…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] These are the kinds of things that can exist and can make that sense of history. Because people will… You can always have someone who remembers before the rule. Like, I remember flying bef… When you could go and meet someone at the air… At the airplane door. At the gate. That's… That is outside of memory for many of my peers, just because of where I was born. Or when I was born.

[Dan] There's a park just about a block away from my house that has a big sign posted that says, "No fireworks, nudity, or horseback riding."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I would love to know what event prompted the creation of that sign.

[Dan] But, let's pause here. Let's get our book of the week from Fonda.

[Fonda] So, the book of the week is Black Water Sister by Zen Cho. I wanted to highlight this because it is a great example of a story in which the fantasy elements interact with a changing society. So it is set in modern-day Malaysia, and there are ghosts and deities, but they are interacting with greedy land developers who are potentially going to be destroying a temple. The way that Zen Cho makes those elements interact is both very… It's very on point and it's also very witty and hilarious, and I really think it's a good example of what we are talking about. Because often times there are… We talked about choosing where you want to build the world in order to reinforce your themes, and Zen certainly does that because there is this sense that the fantasy world, the fantasy elements, are not unchanging. They are being affected by the real world, and things like… Like land development.

[Fonda] One of the reasons why I set the Green Bone saga in an analogy of late 20th century was because there were so many forces of modernization and globalization that were going on at that time. Some of them continuing to this day, but especially post-World War II and the economic boom of the Asian nations, and intersected really nicely with one of the things that I wanted to bring to the forefront in that story, which is that there is this magic element, and for a very long time it has been the birthright of the people who live in this place and control that resource. But there's no way that that would be immune to technology and to economics. Someone would find a way to, and they do, a foreign power finds a way to develop a drug so that what was once exclusive to these people is no longer exclusive. That intersects with the plot, and that's why these clans start having conflicts in going to war. So, let's talk a little bit about ways that you can make your fictional world, your invented world, feel like it has a sense of time.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I've… An example I'm going to throw out is my own book, Extreme Makeover. Which is set in our world, but is specifically about how that world is slowly degraded and destroyed by a new technology. It's a hand lotion that overwrites DNA. I realized quickly early on that while I was telling a kind of an apocalyptic story about the end of the world, that would necessitate massive societal changes over time. So the… My solution was to split the book into four distinct parts, each of them presenting the world in a different way. There aren't necessarily huge time jumps between each part. But it… Categorizing it that way gave me a chance to kind of make more obvious this is our world today. This is the part of the world where this new technology has been invented and people are focusing on that. Then, as that gets worse and worse, and as the world changes, these little breaks and it make it kind of easy for me to convey those changes over time.

[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I use sometimes when I'm trying to create the sense of change is to make sure that my cast of characters are not all the same age for the reasons that I've already talked about. But the other thing that I found very, very useful is the way we identify time, with the exception of 2020…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Is rarely by the year. It's usually something like before the war or after… Mid-panini, I've heard people talking about. But we come up with a catchy label for it. The something something dynasty. One of the things that you can do to create this sense that your world is very thought through is to just have people refer to something in the past with a label instead of an actual date. Because it also implies that… I've used this example before, that I had the battle of the seven red armies. Like, I have literally no idea what this battle is. I just needed to reference something that happened in the past, like a far distant event. That makes it sound like, oh, yeah, there was this whole big cultural war that went down. I don't know. I don't know what that is.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But it makes my world sound richer. It's the shorthand…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] [of cheats?]

[Fonda] That can apply to not just things that happened in the past, but the sort of echo of the historical origins for names and customs and behaviors. So, like, for example, there's… In my story, there's these people who are known as lantern men, and they're sort of patrons of this clan. But the reason why they're called that has a historical origin that dates to wartime. So having a… Having little idioms that people say to each other. I have placed interludes in my book that are structurally a way to create a sense of history. They're these brief looks back into myth or history. But then I bring them into the main narrative by having them tie into sayings or legends or TV shows and comic books or pop-culture that the current day characters are experiencing. So there's clearly a link between what came before and how that has, like, filtered into current day culture and behavior.

[Dan] We're getting… We're running out of time, but one aspect of this that's in your notes, I want to make sure that we talk about, is diaspora. Which we talked about a little bit during lunch. But I feel like the Green Bone saga is very good at conveying the concept of diaspora, and the way that different cultures migrate and kind of interface with an interface into other cultures. So can you talk a little bit about that?

[Fonda] Yeah. I mean, that was an element that I very much wanted to capture in my books, because I rarely see it depicted in fantasy novels. There's always races, different fantasy races, but they don't always take into account that people move. I mean, our whole world history is so based on the migration of people. There's a lot of cross-cultural pollination and cultures mix and they change and diaspora cultures are different from the culture that those people came from. That is an element of change and time and history that was very important to me when I was writing those books. I wanted to make it really obvious when you're reading them that these people who might be ethnically the same but have migrated to different places, now feel very distinct. Yet they have also some commonalities, and they've… So that was a tricky balance to strike.

[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite real-world details for this is the food in Peru. Peru is South American, it is very deeply steeped in the indigenous cultures, and then the Spanish who arrived. But also, they have had Chinese influence in their culture for hundreds of years, to the point that the traditional like grandma's house Sunday dinner is a stirfry in a wok.

[Fonda] Yes.

[Dan] Which changes… We don't tend to think about that being in a South American country, but this concept of the way the cultures have pollinated each other is present.

[Fonda] Yeah. In the before times… Dan, you're making me hungry, because I visited Peru, and the food there was one of the highlights.

[Dan] Oh, for sure.

[Fonda] But they have this fried rice dish which is called chaufa. I learned that it's called chaufa because the Chinese immigrants who moved to Peru and started these restaurants, the Chinese word, and I'm going to butcher it because I don't speak Mandarin fluently is chaofan, come eat. So when they would say choafan, like, that got transmuted into chaufa, which is this fried rice dish. [Garbled] That's just like a little, very cool worldbuilding detail that if you can find ways to create little moments like that in your story are just going to make your world feel so much richer and more real.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to actually recommend that people who want to dive deeper into food, because we could talk about it for hours, go back and check out episode 14:30, Eating Your Way To Better Worldbuilding. Which digs really deep into this. Including a fascinating detail, which is that often a side effect of a diaspora is that the food of the people who have emigrated to someplace else will freeze at a particular… At a cultural moment. The moment that they left their home country. Whereas the home country will continue to carry on and the food will continue to change. Which I found fascinating and totally relevant to this conversation.

[Dan] Yes, very much.

[Mary Robinette] But you can go listen to the full episode.

[Dan] Awesome. This has been a great episode. Fonda, take us out with some homework.

[Fonda] So, the homework this week is for you to take a timeless story. So pick a fairytale or a fable and reimagine it happening during a period of change in that society. So my example would be, let's say, Sleeping Beauty falls under the curse and she wakes up 100 years later. But that kingdom has been through a socialist revolution. Now the Royals are in exile. How can you imagine a timeless story being very different as a result of the world changing?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to tag onto that really fast, and then will let everyone go. Beauty and the Beast, the Disney film, if you look at the fashions in it, takes place about 10 years before the French Revolution.

[Dan] Yeah. Sorry, Belle. Anyway, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.43: The Narrative Holy Trinity of World, Character, and Plot, with Fonda Lee

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/24/16-43-the-narrative-holy-trinity-of-world-character-and-plot-with-fonda-lee/

Key points: The story is like a three-legged stool with world, character, and plot working together. Worldbuilding is a part of all kinds of fiction. Most stories start with a kernel, either a world kernel, a character kernel, or a plot kernel. Then you build out from there. For example, starting with a world kernel, look at what attracts you to this world and what kinds of conflicts does it have. That will suggest potential plots, and lead you to types of characters. Starting with a character kernel, think about the character's journey, and what kind of world would make that journey more compelling and difficult. From a plot kernel, backfill, and think about what kind of world would make the stakes of that plot compelling and gripping. The world, in turn, is made up of environments, culture, and technology. Think about the ways things are interconnected. Wherever your story starts, take that kernel and build the world around it, tie the world, characters, and plot together.

[Season 16, Episode 43]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Master Class with Fonda Lee.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are incredibly excited to be starting a brand new eight episode series. We're going to be talking about worldbuilding. We have one of, in my opinion, the very best worldbuilders working today. Fonda Lee, can you tell us about yourself?

[Fonda] Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm Fonda. I write science fiction and fantasy novels. I'm best known for the Green Bone saga, which begins with Jade City, continues with Jade War, and concludes with Jade Legacy, which is coming out November 30. I'm also the author of a few science fiction novels, Zeroboxer, Exo, and Cross Fire, and a smattering of short fiction. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I love food and action movies.

[Dan] Cool. Well, thank you for being on the show. We're really excited to have you here.

[Dan] You have prepared a class for us about worldbuilding. This first episode, we're going to talk about what you call the narrative holy trinity, world, character, and plot. What… Start us off with that.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, I love worldbuilding. It's one of the topics I always enjoy talking about. People often ask me about my worldbuilding process, how do I actually go about it, how long do I take, what steps. I often have a difficult time describing the actual process for them, because in my mind it's really impossible to distinguish the act of worldbuilding from that of developing the plot and character. The reason I called this episode the holy trinity is because in my mind, the story is like a three legged stool, or perhaps a three cylinder engine, that only functions because the pieces of world, character, and plot are working together. When you ask yourself as an author, "Well, why do you go through all the effort of worldbuilding in creating this entire fictional campus?" On one hand, you could say, "Well, it's really fun." Which is true, a lot of us authors worldbuilding because it's really enjoyable. But for me there also has to be a reason why that invented world exists and contributes to making the story uniquely what it is from a narrative perspective. I feel like we often talk about the relationship between plot and character, and what I'd really love to do in this master class is dive into the relationship between the world and the other elements of story.

[Howard] As I was thinking about this, I looked at the outline last night, I was reminded of an anecdote that I love to share about college Howard. Which has each of these elements in it. I was waking up in the morning and thinking, "Oh, I'm so happy that today is Friday, because I don't have my 7 AM class. I'm so glad that today is… Or, no, I'm so glad that it's Thursday because I don't have my 7 AM class, and I'm so glad it's Friday because the weekend is beginning." Howard is lying in bed, mulling over these things and suddenly realizes, "Wait, those can't both be true." I asked my roommate, "Hey, David, what day is it?" He's like, "It's Friday." "Oh, good, I'm glad it's Friday. Wait, what time is it?" "It's 6:45." At which point, I leapt out of bed. The worldbuilding detail that I've left out is that the day before, David and I had installed bunkbeds, and I was on top.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So I pancake on the floor and David looks at me and says, "If this is going to happen every morning, we can trade."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The point here though is that there is this character who's kind of doofy, and there's this plot about what he likes and what he doesn't like. Then there is this worldbuilding detail which arrives a little late, but which sells the whole story. If you don't have all three of those, it's just another story about me waking up late.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The other… And there are so many of those, honestly.

[Fonda] Now I want an entire series of just Howard's college exploits.

[Mary Robinette] Right! But actually, this is a thing that I do want to point out for our listeners, because I know that while we tend to focus on science fiction and fantasy, and people think about worldbuilding as being a science fiction and fantasy hallmark, and it certainly one of the things that drives us, worldbuilding is something that you have to do with any kind of fiction. Even something that is set contemporary in your real home because you are still making narrative decisions about every piece of the world that goes on the page. So all of the things we're going to be talking about are things that you will still be able to find and apply, even if you're writing something that is contemporary.

[Fonda] Yeah. I've often said that even if you have your story set in a small town, or a nuclear submarine, the odds that your reader has actually been to that small town or has been on a nuclear submarine are vanishingly small. So you have just as much work to convince your reader of that world as you do a fictional world. The only advantage, or really difference, that you have when you're writing that is opposed to a speculative fiction story is that you have more… You can count on your reader having more real-life cues to help them along in building that world in their mind than you necessarily would if you're creating a completely secondary world from scratch.

[Dan] Yeah. I made this mistake yesterday, actually. In the book that I'm writing, I have a scene set in a law office. I wrote it. It just didn't feel wrong, it felt hollow and weird, and I realized I had included zero worldbuilding details in it. There… If someone doesn't already know exactly what a law office looks like or how it works, they would be completely lost trying to read that scene and understand it. So, yeah. You need to include this whether it's real or… Real stuff or stuff you make up.

[Fonda] If you don't get those details right in a real-world setting, there are people who will tell you that you got your worldbuilding details wrong.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Even if you do get them right, I'll just say, FYI, even if you do get them right, people will still tell you that you're wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yes, but at least you can feel good about yourself.

[Mary Robinette] I know. So, what are some of the tools that we can use, Fonda?

[Fonda] Well, often times people have asked how do you come up with the ideas for your story? Like, every single one of us has had that question put to us, at a reading or a book signing. The reality is that there's no idea factory. Most of the time, we have some little kernel, and we glom additional material onto that kernel in order to make it turn into something that could potentially be a story. I find, at least in my case, that the story tends to show up as an initial kernel of either a world kernel, a character kernel, or a plot kernel. This is happened to me with each of my different projects. They've come to me as different kernels. The Green Bone saga, for example, that came as a world kernel first. So the world, the premise of the world, was what first arrived, and then I had to do the work of developing plot and characters. So if your world comes to you first, I think the thing to ask yourself is what attracts you to this world and what inherent conflicts are there that are present in that world? That will lead you then to what kind of potential plot might unfold as a result of the conflicts. It might lead you to what types of characters will enable the reader to experience that world and to experience those conflicts. But if you have, let's say, a character kernel come to you first, then you can ask yourself, well, what is the character's journey and what is it that you can do with your worldbuilding that makes that journey more compelling and difficult. Then, finally, if you have a plot kernel come to you first, it may be a twist or a cool climax idea, then you can backfill it with, okay, now you're going to go do your worldbuilding. What kind of external worldly pressures are going to make the stakes of that plot extremely compelling and gripping?

[Dan] I am excited to talk about all three of those and dig into some examples. Let's do a book of the week first, which is actually me. I'm going to talk this week about a book called She Who Rides the Storm by Caitlin Sangster. This came out just a couple of weeks ago, and it is an epic fantasy heist novel, with some really just incredible worldbuilding. One of the main characters has this incredible magical sense of smell. So, not only is it written with this really wonderful sense of sensory detail, but the smells that she is including in her fantasy world are all incredibly compelling. It has kind of driven her to create all kinds of interesting foods and medicines… She's an herbalist… Things like this that came together through the sense of smell to give a really fascinating sense of place to the world that she is telling the story in. So that is She Who Rides the Storm by Caitlin Sangster.

[Mary Robinette] Cool. Well, there's a thing that Fonda was talking about right before we took the break that made me think of a thing, which is that when we're talking about the world, that I also find that the world is another three-legged stool. That it's made up of environments, culture, and technology. And that each of those pieces influence the others. One of the things that I want you to be thinking about as we're going through this whole thing is that just as the culture's influenced by the environment… If you're in a very warm place, that's going to affect the kind of clothing that someone wears. The technology that you have will affect that as well, because if you're in a warm place with air conditioning, you're going to have a completely different reaction than if you're in a warm place without air conditioning. So there's this kind of cyclical interconnectedness. When we're looking at all of these things, again, through the whole master class, one of the places that people come part with their worldbuilding is that they don't think about the way things are interconnected. So they don't think about how the technology affects the character and that then affects the plot. Or they don't think about the way the plot affects the technology. Like they don't think about the ways… That there's a web. The thing about a three-legged stool is you can't take any of those legs away without the whole stool falling over.

[Howard] There's the classic example that we used in one of the very first episodes of Writing Excuses, which is the continual light spell in the Dungeons & Dragons setting. Which, if it's been around for a generation or more, candlemaking is dead. Because I don't care how much those things cost, now… They're continual. You've upset an entire economy. So contemplating the implications of that cool stuff that attracts you to the world is key to making that world feel believable. Because at some point, we walk through these worlds that people create and something rings wrong and we realize it's because, "Oh, wait. If A, then definitely not B. We're spending all this time on B. We need to skip straight ahead to M."

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] Right. I mean, there's so many choices that you make in worldbuilding. Ideally, you want all of those choices to continue to reinforce your characters, challenges, and their choices, and enable the story that you want to tell and make your plot more compelling. You don't want your worldbuilding to undermine your story. I think we'll talk a lot over the course of this master class about how do you make choices that help your story as opposed to just acting as a backdrop for the story.

[Dan] I really love this idea that you gave us about the kernels. World first, character first, and plot first. I'd love to dig into those a little bit and get an example. I kind of want to ask about the Green Bone saga. You mentioned that idea came to you as world first. Can you give us, very quickly, kind of a sense of how you developed that? How starting with the world informed the way that you came up with the plot and the characters?

[Fonda] Yeah, so my initial kernel for the Green Bone saga was Jade City. That was… Those were the two words, it's the title of the first book, and that's what came to me first. The premise of it was almost an aesthetic one. I wanted to create a world that had these… An awesome kung fu magic powers that I saw in my favorite films. People being able to like leap off buildings and punch through walls, and ground that in a story where that made sense and there was a magic resource that explained that. Then mashed it with my favorite crime drama aesthetics. So that was the premise of the world. In order… Where I built off from that was saying, "Okay. Well, what kind of world is going to most fulfill this vision?" That allowed me to decide where to set it in terms of time. Because the default with a lot of fantasy stories is to set it in like a medieval period. But I had a really clear aesthetic in my mind. I'm like, "What is a gangster family drama unless it's got luxury cars and the submachine guns and the dark alleys and the men in suits smoking in rooms?" So that led me to the decision to set a fantasy… An epic fantasy story in a more modern, latter half of the 20th century time period. Because I knew from the start that I wanted to invoke a family saga, like the Godfather, that made me make a decision around characters. They have to be… I had a multiple POV story with a cast of characters, and each of them has a different role in the family. Then, that led me to a lot of plot decisions, around how the characters would interact. So it's sort of a cascading effect in which you come up… You have a kernel, and then you make a number of choices in your worldbuilding that help you tell the story that you want to tell.

[Howard] I find it really useful to prioritize the things that you loved early on, the decisions that you're making. Because I inevitably in my worldbuilding in my storytelling will arrive at a point where I can see very clearly, "Oh. This is the thing that I absolutely need to be exploring, but in order to do this, I have to knock down that very first piece of foundation I built because those don't work." Because I'm working in comics or in prose, that's not terribly expensive. If I were working in cinema and had already built a movie set, then that would be a terrible decision to have to make, but I don't. So that's not the way it rolls.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We are running… Letting this episode run slightly long because we wanted to introduce the full master class. Let me give a really quick example of a plot first story kernel. With my Zero G middle grade books on Audible. The whole impetus behind that story was Home Alone in space. The idea that there is a kid on a colony ship who has to defend it from pirates, because everyone else is asleep. In order to tell that story properly, starting purely with the plot, that created or forced a lot of worldbuilding decisions such that I didn't want it… If he has to defend the ship by himself, then the cryo-technology that keeps everyone asleep can't be something that he can just undo… He can't wake people up and put them back to sleep again. It forced a lot of the technological details because I needed a story in which a 12-year-old boy had to solve all of the problems by himself. Does anybody very quickly have an example of a character first?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I do. Ghost Talkers started with the character of Ginger Stuyvesant. All I really knew about her, the sense that I had, was that she was this glamorous heiress, and that she was a medium. That was kind of all I knew. I wanted there to be some banter, and that there was a noir feel, kind of a… Then I had to figure out sort of where she lived and figure out what the world was that she inhabited that allowed her to be a medium that solved crime. Which I knew that… That also then gave me the plot. It's like, "Oh, she's solving mysteries. That's what she's doing with this thing." But it definitely started… I had a very clear image of Ginger. Then I had to figure everything else out around her.

[Fonda] What I love about all these examples is that it shows that wherever your story starts, you are taking that kernel and you are building that world around it as opposed to just sort of putting it up against a backdrop. You're trying to find ways to tie the world into all the elements of character and all the elements of plot.

[Dan] Awesome. Well, this has been a fantastic episode. We're going to end with some homework. Fonda? What would you like our listeners to do?

[Fonda] I would like you to pick a favorite book with worldbuilding that you admire, and see if you can identify in what way the worldbuilding supports the character journeys that happen in that story, supports the plot, and also supports the themes.

[Dan] Cool. Well, there you go. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.41: Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/11/15-41-researching-the-fck-out-of-things-with-cory-doctorow/

Key Points: When you don't know the facts, tag it with FCK for later fact checking. Do layered research, and check later. Watch out for Wikipedia click holes! Texture detail or plot related? Use FCK for internal consistency checks. Beware research procrastination. How little research can you do? For locations, use the Internet. Use "modified" to get the reader to help fill in. One hard-core, 100% true detail can support a lot of vagueness. How much research do you need to do? It depends on how you cover it.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 41.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow.

[Piper] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cory] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm wondering what FCK stands for.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, how do you research things?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] A couple of us write things that are based in some form of reality, not Howard. I know, he's making a face at me.

[Howard] Nonono, that's totally fair. I've… Let me just say that I love the term FCK, which means fact check, and the idea that you can just be hammering away on a manuscript and realize I don't know the facts here, and just say FCK and keep going.

[Mary Robinette] So this is a concept that I use a lot, which is I do layered research. The first thing is that when I am writing something, I tend to gravitate towards things that I am already excited about. So I tend to have a general knowledge of the thing that I am writing about. I will make a short thumbnail sketch of the thing. Then I do slightly more targeted research as I begin to drill into it, and then more targeted research. Then, as I'm writing, if I hit something I don't know, I hit a squ… I just do a square bracket and throw in a descriptor of what is supposed to be there, and then keep going, like [And then the captain said jargon as he handled the thingie that you used to control a ship] and all of that's in square brackets. Cory, you said you use FCK.

[Cory] Yeah. It's an old journalism thing. There's two useful journalism bits. One is TK for to come. That's for a thing that you need to go out and get later. FCK is fact check. The Brooklyn Bridge, all 819 FCK feet of it, would be fact check. TK would be like if there's a quote to, or a thing that you're waiting to look up or what have you. I think, for me, the great benefit of it is not merely that it reminds me to go and look stuff up, it's that it avoids the temptation to engage in what I call writing-related program activity.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] Which is writing adjacent Wikipedia click holes.

[Piper] I do that. Or I used to do that. Or I won't do that after this podcast.

[Cory] It's like, you're… If you're like me, and riven with imposter syndrome and self-doubt, as you work, there's a part of your brain that's just going, "You're screwing this up. Just stop." When you give it an excuse, too, like, go down the Wikipedia click hole, it is going to grab the tiller, and it is going to like take you so deep into that swamp… It was a hole, now it's a swamp… That you will just never find your way out again. Or at least not until your next writing session. So, this is a way to keep going. I guess there are some exceptions where it comes to a… Where you really just can't proceed unless you know an answer.

[Mary Robinette] I find that this method works great for me when it's a texture detail. But if it's plot level, then it's a terrible idea. Because I have written scenes… I'm like, "What about this?" And have written scenes and built novels around something that was wrong, and the thing comes apart. I just recently critiqued a manuscript, and the person had not done their homework. On a plot level. It wasn't the… Like, the details, that wasn't the problem.

[Cory] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It was the things that they had wrong affected the plot. So this is… I'm…

[Cory] I hear y'a.

[Mary Robinette] It's…

[Piper] It's another case of it depends.

[Cory] Well, okay. Let me try and square that circle. So, first of all, the other thing that it's really good for is internal plot consistency. Like, if you can't remember…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Cory] Whether they still have the pen. You try to… If you write FCK, make sure they still have the pen. Then you can go back and back shadow your foreshadowing. But… The… For me, the research starts with not an idea, but with the world as it exists in the world. Because I write Science Fiction for the most part, and it's mostly futuristic, mostly near future. I, like you, am non-consensually eyeball banged by headlines all day long. They make me anxious and sad. For the longest time, now 20 years, I have done this thing that sounds like Gollum with indigestion, I've been a blogger.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Borp…

[Piper] I was waiting for you to do that.

[Cory] The thing that blogging, for me, does is it is a way to be reflective instead of reflexive about all the fragmentary ideas that cross my transom. What I do is I block out time every day, and I take all those things as they fly over my transom, and I make sense of them to the extent that I can. I talk about where they fit, how I'm thinking about them, and so on. It has this ancillary benefit that it becomes a thing that other people want to read that is separate from my novels, and makes them interested in my work, and so on. But I would do it if no one read it, first of all for my mental health. Right? Like, it is how I organize narratives about things that are going on in the world, and helps me feel like I have some mastery over it. But also, there's a powerfully mnemonic element to gathering these things and explaining them for notional strangers that differs from a commonplace book. When you write in a commonplace book, you can cheat. Right? You can make these notes that when you go back to them, you have no idea what you meant. But for a notional stranger, you have to be more thoroughgoing. Then you end up with a subconscious that's just kind of like a supersaturated solution of fragmentary story ideas that are banging together and they nucleated and they crystallize into often like semi full-blown novels and short stories and essays and speeches and whatnot. So now you've already done the research. Right? You're already cruising along, the foundational premise, you already know about, because you chased it because it was in your feeds. Right? That's where the story grew out of.

[Mary Robinette] That's very much what I do. It's like why did I write about space? Because I was already reading and thinking about space. Why did I write about Jane Austen era magic? Because I was already reading and thinking about Jane Austen era magic. I have done stuff that's set in a period or a time or dealing with something where I'm like, "Oh, this would be really interesting," and I have to chase it is I don't know anything about it. There I find that I have to do more reading, but the reading is very much to give me that kind of foundational feel of it. It's very organic. I often will read in parallel to writing whatever it is, because it's still just continuing to feed and churn in my mind.

[Piper] I think when I was… Oh!

[Howard] I was going to tell a joke in Schlock Mercenary that involved drawing our solar system millions of years ago. I realized that the age of Saturn's rings would determine whether or not I was going to draw them. I really liked this joke I was going to tell. I can't remember it, which means…

[Cory] It wasn't that funny.

[Howard] It really wasn't that good. But I burnt two hours reading the research and realized they are probably young, but not enough people are convinced that I can get away with drawing Saturn without rings or with proto-rings without making the fans angry, and I don't have the time for that crap. I don't have the time for that crap was the result of two hours of research. But that is a thing that happens, and that was a case where I knew I can't do this without doing the research upfront. There are lots of cases where I'm getting ready to draw a panel, and I realize I need reference art for this. Get Ref is the penciling that goes in that panel, and I set it aside until I got time to get the reference art.

[Piper] I think one of the dangers, though, that we look into… Because we've talked a lot about when it's absolutely needed and absolutely a point, especially when it has to do with plot, or how the plot comes together. But some of the dangers, particularly for those of us who do have imposter syndrome, is that it becomes… Research becomes a form of procrastination, because you justify that you're doing writerly things. Right? You're doing writerly things. It's to improve your book. It's there to prove the veracity of your storyline, add to the plausibility, all the things. Therefore, you've spent hours procrastinating when you actually should be writing the thing. You have a whole bunch of facts that you have checked, but you have not written any further scenes or chapters in your book. You have to make a judgment call as to how important this is to your ultimate storyline.

[Howard] It's the writer's version of $10,000 worth of legit business expense lunches with people, which theoretically would contribute to the bottom line, but the bottom line is not supporting $10,000 worth of lunch.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. I want to approach this from a different way, but let's first pause and talk about our book of the week.

[Cory] Sure. I want to talk about Annalee Newitz latest book. It's called The Future of Another Timeline. It's a time travel story. It's a world in which there are these great regoliths, these huge stone monuments, that if you hit them with mallets in the right way, you go back in time.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] If you're lucky, there's someone there who's got mallets that can send you forward in time again. There are all these protocols, as you can imagine, and there's historical researchers and people do stuff around it. But, men's rights advocates are trying to end feminism. There's a group of feminist time travelers who are trying to head them off at the pass.

[Laughter]

[Cory] It's built around the punk scene in Orange County in the 80s. Now, Annalee Newitz was a poke in Orange County in the 80s. You want to talk verisimilitude and bad… I want to say… Crappy dudes. That's not the word I usually use. Terrible dudes in the punk scene in Orange County in 1980, boy, she's got their number. They say write what you know, and Annalee Newitz knows what a time traveler… Time traveling feminist from the 1980s in the Orange County punk scene would be up to. They're great books. They're really fun. They called them… The secret cabal is called the Daughters of Harriet for the first African-American senator, Harriet Tubman. Boy, is it a lot of fun, and, like, it's madcap in places. There's chase scenes. It's great.

[Piper] I kind of wonder what the mallets look like.

[Cory] Well, they're diff… When you get very far back in time, they get very different, too.

[Mary Robinette] And you'll have to read the book to find out. That book was…

[Cory] The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz.

[Howard] Which, as of this recording, isn't out yet, but… As of this listening, has been out for almost a year. So…

[Whee!]

[Howard] Your timeline…

[Cory] Time traveler.

[Howard] Your timeline has this book in its past.

[Cory] Although someone is coming back in time to stop me from promoting this feminist time travel novel.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] We will keep the mallet away.

[Mary Robinette] So the thing that I want to say is we keep talking about how much research do you want to do, but I think actually the question that most writers should ask is how little research can you do?

[Cory] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] so, like, if you're doing location research, do you have to go there? How little research can you do you want to use a relocation in the real world? Opinions? I mean, it has not hurt the Dresden books.

[Laughter]

[Cory] Right. I have a stupid writer trick that is not location based. So you talk about location, and then I want to get in a stupid writer trick.

[Piper] There's never any stupid tricks. It's just the trick.

[Cory] No, I mean like David Letterman's sense. It's delightful.

[Piper] So, I once talked about how much I enjoyed finding a location and soaking it in, to be able to add to my book. Like, I will literally walk around and be like, "I see a story," and start writing it. But I also travel 475 to 80% of my time as part of my day job. Not everyone can travel that way. Not everyone has an expense account for that kind of thing. Also, not everyone wants to travel for various reasons. So, how do you research it? One of the answers to you is the fact that we have this wonderful thing called the Internet, and the Internet, particularly certain platforms like Google maps, actually allow you to not just check something out geographically, not just look at something from a sky level view, satellite map wise, but you can actually look at street-level things. Then you can even research further. There are YouTube videos out there, so you can hear what a place sounds like. One of the recent things that Mackey did with me was take me to a location which, again, we had the lucking us of the fact that we could go to this location. When I took video as reference, I recorded it with sound. Other things are, you write about the place you live in now, or you write about the place that you're visiting now, you take advantage of that, and save that in notes for when you might use it in a future book. But mostly, I really like the fact that the Internet is there for that. You can actually call out. Like, I had a friend who was traveling to a place, and she took pictures for me, and she gave me her impressions of the feel of the place and the people that were there, and the taste of the water out of the tap, which was disgusting.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Those were cool, like, things that you could capture and put in the book to make it feel like it is actually that thing.

[Cory] If you do have a yen to travel, though, it should be noted that any place you go to research a book, if you're going to generate taxable income from it, becomes a tax deduction.

[Piper] Oh, yes.

[Cory] So, this is very nice. I've written a lot of fiction about scuba diving, as it turns out.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] The… My stupid writer trick I got from James McDonald. He is a gun person, and I am not a gun person. I'm a Canadian who's naturalized British, and I know nothing about guns. But I'll tell you his top tip was anytime you put a gun in your book, people are going to find errors. Because people who like guns like to find errors in the way that guns are treated literately. However, if you put the word modified before you insert the name of the gun, a modified Walter PPK, not only will they forgive you any errors that you've made, they will tie themselves in knots thinking of which modifications you had in mind to make that gun work. They will create elaborate theories. The further they have to reach to make that gun do what you need it to do, the more satisfied they will be with your amazing gun foo.

[Laughter]

[Cory] And the cool gun modification you came up with to make that gun work. It is my favorite super writer trick. I think it applies to other things that people [inaudible]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] A modified Saturn five.

[Right. Laughter.]

[Mary Robinette] Like, I have so many modified rockets in my… That is… Like, I have used a similar trick. My trick is to drop one piece of knowledge that is absolutely hard-core, completely 100% true, and then be vague about everything else. They assume that I've done my research.

[Cory] Yeah. It's a Douglas Adams tell.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yeah.

[Piper] I will say that modified works for recipes, friends, so if you have food… Food reflecting your character building in your books, modified recipes, you have readers for life because they want that recipe.

[Cory] Yeah, software too. Just like, if you want to make your character like a bad ass super nerd, have them download the source code, modify it, and recompile it. Now it does anything!

[Hooray!]

[Mary Robinette] So these are handy ways. Basically, the answer to the question is, how little research do you need to do? Very little sometimes if you have a way to cover it. The… I think that we're going to wrap it up here. There's some other topics we could talk about in terms of research, but I feel like we've given you some good meaty tools to dig in with.

[Mary Robinette] So let's go ahead and give them some homework assignment. Piper, I think you have that.

[Piper] I do. Actually, it has to do with my little tip. So, often we want to research by going to a place that will be our setting. So we want to go in person and get a feel for the place. But that's not always feasible, due to cost, due to timing, what have you. Maybe it's not even safe to go. So, go onto the Internet, friends, and research a place. Not just for the geographic location detail. But for the feel of the place. What it's like for people walking in the streets or not. For what it looks like at street-level, or if there's no streets at all, and even how it sounds. Bonus if you can get actual details about taste and scent from first-person accounts.

[Howard] You know what's a fun way to find first-person accounts? Go to your location, Google your location, discord, Pokémon go…

[Cory] [garbled]

[Howard] Find the Pokémon go community in that location. The things that they have to say about wandering around. So many fun facts.

[Cory] I thought you were going to say Yelp reviews.

[Piper] No. No. Ingress. Pokémon go. Harry Potter. All by the same company. All gathering all that data. Friends. Have fun with that.

[Mary Robinette] So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write and research. And write.

[Cory] Can we take a moment to appreciate the sunset?

[Mary Robinette] We can.

[Howard] I'm facing the wrong direction, then, so I will play the part of the listener who didn't get to see it.

[Mary Robinette] I'll give you the word picture if you want, Howard.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Beyond the reflections of my balcony window lies the smooth ocean that is wine dark. Above it, the rosy colored fingers of dusk creep across as the ocean undulates gently.

[Cory] There's some trees out there, too.

[Mary Robinette] There are no trees.

[Cory] Yeah, there's a little island out there.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, is there really?

[Piper] Land ho!

[Cory] Oh, no, sorry, it's clouds. False horizon.

[Mary Robinette] But you didn't know that, listeners, did you?

[Piper] No.

[Cory] The magic of radio.

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Use the Internet to pretend to visit a place.

[Mary Robinette] Secretly, we're in a basement.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 36.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Collaboration.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

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

[Shannon] Whoohoo!

[Dean] I'm Shannon.

[Shannon] Opening so much…

[Dean] I'm awesome.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys collaborate quite a bit.

[Dean] Yes, we do.

[Shannon] Some would say too much.

[Dean] Ooo. Two children too much.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] But which two?

[Laughter]

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

[Shannon] Besides the children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dean] Nominated for an Eisner.

[Shannon] So, but now…

[Dean] [for those inaudible]

[Shannon] We've done…

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Out-of-print.

[Shannon] So, how do we do it?

[Brandon] So, how do you do it?

[Dean] She does it.

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

[Dean] Who was…

[Shannon] The subcontractor.

[Dean] Exactly. Exactly.

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

[Dean] The steward.

[Shannon] That was obviously me.

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

[Chuckles]

[Dean] So we just fell right into it.

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

[Dean] Different from when you write alone.

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

[Dean] And breaking the story.

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

[Dean] [after we made an error]

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

[Dean] We walk around the lake holding hands.

[Shannon] Like every time a commercial.

[Dean] Chatting plot.

[Shannon] It's beautiful.

[Dean] It is. I love this job.

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

[Dean] Yeah, it is.

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

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

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

[Dean] Bleah.

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

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

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

[Dean] The script.

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

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

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

[Dean] I can visualize it more than…

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

[Dean] I did the squirrels.

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

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

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

[Dean] Except I did the funniest parts.

[Shannon] No, but they were probably mine.

[Dean] Oh, okay.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Does that clarify everything?

[Brandon] Oh, yes.

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

[Shannon] Everybody needs to take that model…

[Dan] Replicate it right across…

[Shannon] Take it home.

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

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

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

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

[Garbled]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] We talk about…

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dean] Right. Exactly.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah.

[Shannon] We like and respect each other.

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

[Shannon] When the kids are at school.

[Dean] Yeah.

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

[Shannon] I mean, not really officially.

[Dean] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

[Dean] I only practiced football one year.

[Shannon] They slip past him.

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Which is Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dean] It is. You're right.

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

[Brandon] Like, magically pulled into them?

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

[Brandon] Awesome. And this…

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

[Shannon] Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] And the release date is…

[Dean] Not sure.

[Brandon] Right around this time.

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

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

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

[Dean] Post-apocalyptic horror.

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

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

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

[Dean] That's true.

[Dan] And encounter it like 10 years later…

[Shannon] I know. I thought of that.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Which I love.

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

[Dan] You cheated.

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's just say that.

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

[Brandon] One time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled with him]

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

[Oooo…]

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

[Dan] That's awesome.

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

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

[Brandon] Right. I…

[Shannon] I thought that's what…

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Dean] That's true. Definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Dean] Why this is awesome.

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

[Dean] Ooooo...

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

[Dean] Even better…

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

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

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

[Dean] It's a gift for you.

[Shannon] Delete, delete, delete.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

mbarker

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 29.

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

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

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

[Megan] Hi.

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

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

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

[Megan] Yes, I am.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Megan] And it's super fun.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do you film this?

[No]

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

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

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

[Megan] It's all improv, right.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

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

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

[Dan] This is super cool.

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

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

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

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

[Megan] That happens a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

[Megan] Then they destroy our book.

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

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

[Janci] And suits our characters and…

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For Star Wars toys…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] By like a billion dollars.

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

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

[Gasp]

[Dan] It's awesome.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Janci] It is so cool.

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

[Janci] Not necessarily.

[Megan] Not necessarily.

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

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

[Brandon] Oh, okay.

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

[Janci] So well.

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

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

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

[Janci] It does.

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

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

[Brandon] Okay.

[Megan] Usually they just set there. Yeah.

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

[Dan] The visual aids.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Megan] You have all the outfits.

[Janci] It's amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

[Brandon] My wife has been consuming these voraciously.

[Yay!]

[Brandon] So she loves them.

[Oh, that makes me happy.]

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

[Brandon] [garbled]

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

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

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

[Janci] In the first year.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Megan] Oh, boy. Keep the faith.

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

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

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

[Megan] That was not good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

[Oh, yeah]

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

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

[Mmmm]

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

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

[Brandon] Yeah, it is.

[Laughter]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like…

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Janci] Especially with the comedy.

[Megan] Oh, the comedy. Yeah.

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

[Megan] We start laughing.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Yes!]

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

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

[Howard] Homework.

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

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

[Janci] Whatever. You can use your own.

[Dan] Okay.

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

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] That is great.

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

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

[Megan] Yeah, you're invited.

[Brandon] Thank you, audience, at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/06/14-31-cultural-setting-as-conflict/

Key Points: To some extent, every story has some aspect of characters in conflict with their setting. Consider conflict as either a desire to move or resistance to being moved. Also, I don't like the way this is built, and I want to change it. A.k.a, ideals in conflict with reality. Immigrants are automatically in cultural conflict. Children of immigrants, growing up, face a challenge between what their parents want and what the culture around them teaches. Nobody represents 100% of their culture, we are all slightly in conflict. But don't use this as the main conflict, use it to make the characters more well-rounded. Start with a character in friction with their society, then let the main plot smash into them. Cultural conflict may not drive a story, but it often grounds us in the character. One story archetype is the person who doesn't fit saves society. Consider sensory writing -- what senses show the conflict of character and culture? What are the standard conversational moves that the character doesn't know? Casual or respect? Use conflict with your culture to add layers to the plot and enrich your story.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 31.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Cultural Setting As Conflict.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] Cultural setting as conflict. A little preface here. This is using my definitions for worldbuilding. I define physical worldbuilding as all this stuff that exists if human beings or sapient races weren't around, and cultural setting is all the stuff that they create. I think I announced that last month, too. But just so you know, when I say cultural setting for this particular podcast, we're talking about all of this. Religion, linguistics, economics, all of this stuff. We want to talk about how to put your characters in conflict with their setting, and with their culture. Obviously, this is one of the great ways to tell a story. In fact, I think every story that I write has some aspect of a character in conflict with their setting.

[Howard] I think the easiest place to start with this is to look at the conflict as either a desire to move or a resistance against being moved. For instance, if you are a member of the wealthy class, you do not want wealth to be redistributed, because that is moving you into a different place. If you are impoverished, perhaps you want to move into a different class. Those two work within whatever framework of the culture may exist. I mean, whether it's economic or gender or racial or multi-species or whatever. I want to move or someone is trying to move me, is one of the easiest ways to define the conflict. The other big one is I don't like the way this is built. I want to change it so that everybody can move. Or nobody has to move. Or something.

[Brandon] Right. Putting your ideals in conflict with the actual reality of the system.

[Mahtab] You know what, the very fact… Just from personal experience, the very fact that I'm an immigrant in Canada is straightaway a cultural conflict. Because there are certain things that I'm used to doing in India, there are certain traditions that we follow, certain norms. But take that out and put me in a North American setting or a Canadian setting, and all of a sudden, I want to follow certain things, but I cannot. So, I mean, just… For example, I love cooking Indian food. When I first came to Canada and the winters were cold, I would cook with the doors closed. I would be smelling like a day-old samosa. Maybe a week-old samosa. Then you'd go out into the world and you would have people just kind of… I was nose blind, but people would wonder, "Does she not know what she smells like?"

[Howard] What is that smell?

[Mahtab] It took me a while. I mean, I had to get onto an elevator with someone who was a lot more fragrant than I was till it hit me. So, the fact is, I can still cook Indian food, but even in the midst of an Ontario winter, I have to have all the doors and all the windows open… Not the doors. All the windows open, proper ventilation, and then… So it's just like… The fact is that you can have conflict if you just take someone who's used to following a certain cultural norm, put them in a different setting, and that's it. Also, with kids growing up. When, especially, the kids are young, the parents are not very well educated or not very well integrated into a certain culture. They are still holding to the old norms, whereas the kids who are growing up are now influenced by the culture they are growing up in. They are treading a very fine line between what should I follow, because this is what my parents want, and this is what my friends and teachers and everyone are doing. It can be huge. I mean, I've seen a lot of teens go through a lot of anguish because of that.

[Dan] There was a really cool movie a couple years ago, and I can never remember the title of anything. Sorry. That was about a group of Korean American teenagers, all of them first-generation Americans, who went to like a cultural summer camp. Their Korean families are like, "You need to know about our culture from back in the old country, so you're all going to go to this thing." It was just fascinating to watch that whole dynamic play out as they were trying to embrace their roots while also staying true to who they had become. There is a lot of cool compelling stuff that can be pulled out of this.

[Brandon] Is it called Seoul Searching?

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] I just googled it for you.

[Dan] Seoul Searching, Seoul being the pun. Ha ha ha.

[Brandon] I… It's interesting to think about this, because nobody 100% represents all aspects of their culture. None of us do. Which is this weird thing to think about, in that there is this nebulous sort of culture, right? Whichever set of culture… Religious culture or whatever. Society. There's nobody that is that thing. We are all not aligned exactly to everything in that culture. So we're all going to be slightly in conflict with our culture. There's not a person who isn't. We're just going to be in conflict with it in different ways. I think as writers, sometimes, we want to make this the main conflict of the story. Sometimes it's appropriate to do so. Sometimes this is what our story is about. But I think in every story, these sorts of things are what's… Are the sorts of things that are going to make your characters become well-rounded and feel real. People often ask me, "How do I make well-rounded characters?" Our kind of cliché but true response is don't write them to a role in a story, write them as they are and make the story kind of come along and make things messy for them. I think this is one of the ways you indicate this is these characters are going to be having friction with their society and culture, even before whatever the main plot of your story is comes along and smashes into them.

[Howard] It's not uncommon… I say it's not uncommon. I can't actually think of any examples off the top of my head. But you have a protagonist whose motivation is I want to fit in with my family. Or I want to get a promotion. It's very cultural, but then they are thrown into an adventure that has nothing to do with fitting in with their family or getting a promotion. At the end of the adventure, they have changed or their family have changed or the corporation has changed, and they have the thing that they need. So the cultural conflict there is not necessarily what's driving the story, but it's what's grounding us in the character.

[Dan] One of the books that I talked about last month, A Memory Called Empire. Like I said, it's a political story and it's a murder mystery, but the main character is an ambassador from one tiny nation who has gone to this massive Empire. What's fascinating about her attempt to fit in is that she loves their culture. So it's specifically kind of has this subplot in there of you're the big evil empire that's trying to consume my little nation, but I love your art, I love your stories that you tell, and I watch your TV shows all the time. It added a really interesting dimension of that cultural conflict.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our book of the week.

[Mahtab] Right. So, the book of the week that I'd like to recommend is one that has been written by yours truly. It's called Mission Mumbai. This is a story of a friendship between two boys. One of them is an Indian, Rohit Lal, one of them is an American, Dylan Moore. They have a friendship that is based on their love of reading fantasy novels. But it's a very fragile friendship. When they take a trip to India, that is when they realize that there is a certain amount of jealousy involved. Their friendship is not as strong as they expected it to be. But one of the reasons that I love having written this story is that I take someone from a North American culture and put him into the Indian culture. Which is just as alien as having gone to a totally different place. I give both the boys certain problems. It's only when… Their friendship is stretched really, really thin, and it's only when both the boys decide to put aside their own issues and help one another is when their friendship becomes a lot stronger. So it's a coming-of-age, it's a friendship, it's a loyalty story. But it's also a fun way of exploring India from your own room.

[Howard] Less expensive than plane tickets.

[Mahtab] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] That's Mission Mumbai.

[Brandon] For this podcast's second half, let's kind of try to drill into the why… Or the hows. The nitty-gritty details of how to use conflict with culture as plots in your stories. I'll give an example. Oftentimes, I notice that in films and in books, one of the things you do at the beginning is show the character not fitting in as a method of showing what their kind of arc is going to be. They're the person that doesn't fit into their society. Taking classic Disney movies, if we look at Mulan. Mulan doesn't start with her out sword fighting. It starts with her not fitting into the society of gender roles and the marriage rituals and things that she's expected to participate in as a way to reinforce that she's kind of outside her culture. So that when she leaves to go do something very different from what someone in her situation would do, you believe that she would do this. Because she obviously doesn't quite fit in. Then, the whole story is about this idea of the person who doesn't fit in being the one who saves the society. You see this used a ton. It's a really great story archetype. It's used in Dragonlance, it's used in a lot of different stories. It's one of those ways you use someone in conflict with their setting in a small way to inform your entire story.

[Howard] We talk about sensory writing quite a bit. Mahtab, you described the way you smell when you've been cooking. The smells of things, the colors of things. When you're uncomfortable with a culture, if you've been dropped someplace where you are not comfortable, which of your senses are uncomfortable? Which… Where are you feeling the conflict? Is it because it's too loud? Is it because it's too quiet? Is it because it doesn't smell like you want it to smell? Is it because the flavor of the food that makes you comfortable just isn't available anywhere? Is it because you're one of those people who is genetically unable to appreciate cilantro? Because there's a group of people for whom cilantro is just terrible. These sorts of… And Indian food, which I love, and I love cilantro too, has lots of cilantro in it. So you got this whole class of people who are genetically unable to appreciate the thing that you cook, Mahtab. Those senses are a great way to ground us in a character's fitting in or not fitting in. How much you love the smell? How much you love the color? How it feels like being embraced to all your senses?

[Mahtab] One of the things that I also felt or experienced when I came here is that there is a whole unspoken language which is just by looks and gestures, and some things that are… I mean, just to give an example. Whenever you start a conversation, now, I'm not saying that it's not done in India, but over here you discuss the weather a lot. In India, all you have is rain and heat.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] So you really do not open a conversation with, "Oh, we're having a really nice day today." So when I was doing sales and I was on calls, I would be like, "Hello. I'm calling from so-and-so and just wanted to talk to you about XYZ." I was told, "Nonono. You're supposed to talk about the weather," and this and a TV series going on or something. Or a little bit of the news. So, the thing is that in terms of making the story or the character a little bit more layered, it's not just the sensory, which is very, very important. But it's also the unspoken stuff that the… The norms that the culture that you're in follows, which is not quite what you do. So there are lots of clues that you have to pick up which are not… Sometimes, may be told to you, but sometimes you just have to observe. It took me at least a few years of observing, or being corrected or being told that this is what you're supposed to be doing. Again, I had no idea about time zones. I remember calling someone at 6 o'clock in the morning from the East Coast to the West Coast…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] I'm like, "Hi." He says, "Do you know it's 6 o'clock?" I'm like, "Why did you pick up the phone, then?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When I went to Korea for the first time, the thing I kept getting in trouble with is, Americans can be very casual with how they give things to one another. Which is nothing… Something I hadn't ever thought about. But, in Korea, a lot of people expect you… If you're going to give something… Just, like, if you say, "Hey, pass me a roll," that you're going to hand it and present it to them as a gift, with two hands.

[Mahtab] Two hands, yes.

[Dan] Two?

[Brandon] Two hands, and kind of respectfully. Whereas Americans, we'd be like, "Hey. Roll!" I did that to someone. They're like… I'm like, "Hey. Roll!" And threw it. They were like hugely offended. This was a teenager my age, but that is just not something you do in that culture. It was one of those things I had to really get used to. The kind of casualness versus respectfulness.

[Howard] I have to remember not to ask anybody to pass me the bread in Nebraska.

[Garbled] [without having my eyes open. Boom!]

[Dan] Just throw it at you. The Asian market where I shop, even the receipt. They will pull it out. They'll rip it off the thing. Fold it, and hand it to you with two hands. Because that is how you're supposed to do it. One of my very favorite cultural stories is a TV show called The Americans. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's Soviet spies, sleeper agents, living in the United States in the 1980s. So every episode has like an espionage story, but the overall story it's telling is how do these people who are like trained, practically brainwashed to hate America, how do they live and fit in and look and act like Americans.

[Howard] I grew up during the 80s. I would not want the job…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Of fitting in in the 80s. Oh, man.

[Dan] It's just a really compelling thing. They're doing a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Where they will confront situations where they would do something the way it would be normal to them. Obviously, they have been trained in American culture, but it comes off wrong. Or they react the wrong way to something and they have to remember, "Oh, no. I'm American. I have to treat this like an American, not like a Russian." It's just really, really interesting, and really well done.

[Howard] There are a lot of cultural dialect sorts of things, whether it's jargon or just dialect things. In the UK, just now means immediately prior. What was that noise? A bookcase fell over just now. In South Africa, just now means really soon, about to happen. Yes… Not really soon, but kind of soon. I'll be there just now. I'm on my way, I'll be there just now. Are you in a hurry? Okay, fine, I'll be there now now. Okay, I like now now as a construct. When I first heard it, I thought, "Well, that's brilliant. That's a great way to say ASAP." But these sorts of things, if you don't… I don't want to crossover too much into the language discussion we'll be having later. But there have been a lot of times, especially online, where all participate in an online chat about a game and realize, "There is a jargon here." Somebody just threw a string of characters, and they are very clearly making a request, and I do not know how to respond, because there's like six acronyms in there.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I don't know what any of them stand for.

[Mahtab] I would just like to say here that conflict with your culture is important, but don't make that the focal point of your story. Just use that to flavor it, to add layers to the plot which would make it richer. But don't make that the focus of the story. Because that would be too kind of clichéd or stereotyped, and you're just going to end up going a very predictable path. But use that to just enrich the narrative.

[Brandon] So, we're out of time on this, but we will come back later in the year and do an episode on worldbuilding culture and mores, so you can look forward to that. I have our homework this week. I'm quite tickled with this one. I want you to clone yourself and make an entire planet of clones of you. I want you to decide what the culture would be like if everyone on the planet were you. Then, I want you to create a trading post with this planet where people off world who are not you have to trade with you and what they have to go through in order to make trade deals with an entire planet of you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There's going to be a war, and my planet's going to get wiped clean…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Very, very quickly.

[Dan] The galaxy will decide we can't let this planet hang around any longer.

[Howard] Nope.

[Mahtab] I am going to try that prompt.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/28/14-17-its-like-car-talk-meets-welcome-to-nightvale/

Key points: Comp titles, or comparative titles, are titles that a book reminds you of. Who is this book for? E.g., a pitch like X in space. Or traditionally two books, with your book in the overlap. Not the sum or combination, but the intersection. Comp titles early in the writing process can help you refine your book. Comp titles can define genre and category. Think about the elemental genres. Comp titles can help identify your audience and target a market. Consider the set dressing and structure when picking your comp titles. Comp titles is not just A meets B, you can say which elements you are referring to. You can also throw in a wrench with a third element to give it a twist. Be aware that readers may not understand the shorthand of comp titles. Use comp titles as the base of longer explanations. Comp titles are a clarifying exercise, to help identify the core elements of your story. Beware the comp titles that have been overused, like Harry Potter.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 17.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale."

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are talking about comp-titles. Those things that you cite when you are trying to describe the thing that you've created in terms of other people's stuff. Dongwon is back with us this week. Dongwon, in your line of work, agenting, you use comp-titles kind of a lot.

[Dongwon] Comp titles is how we think about the universe. So, comp titles are, just for clarification, it means comparative title. So any time you're talking about any given book, what you're usually doing in the back of your head, if you're a publishing professional, is automatically coming up with the one to two to three titles that this book reminds you of. Part of the reason you're doing that is, in publishing, one of the main questions is who is this book for. The way we talk about that is we use other books as a proxy. So if your book is like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, then that tells you something about who this book is for and, hopefully, how many copies it's going to sell.

[Dan] Yeah. I just sold... at time of recording, I have just sold a middle grade to Audible, based almost entirely on the pitch, Home Alone in Space.

[Dongwon] Hell, yes.

[Dan] That is working everywhere. The editor's taking that around the company and says, "Hey, can I get some resources?" "For what?" "Home Alone in Space." "Yes. Here's all the money that you need." So a really good comp title can have incredible value.

[Mary Robinette] That is basically how I sold my first novel. It was Jane Austen with magic. Then I also have Thin Man in Space.

[Dan] Which I've wanted to read for so long.

[Dongwon] I will point out that every example of a comp title that we've given so far has been one book with an extra element. That is one way to do a comp title. But most traditionally, what you really want to do is have two different books. In the Venn diagram, the overlap between book A and book B is where your book lives. Right? So, the ones that we've been giving so far can be really useful just to give a feel for what the book's going to read like, but it's not telling enough yet about who this book is for in terms of the audience. That's sort of an interesting gradation that you'll see [garbled]

[Howard] The first time I ever had to come up with a comp title for my work, I was making a pitch to a media guy who, of course, never got back to me because that's the way a lot of these things work at Comic Cons. I described Schlock Mercenary as it's like Babylon 5 meets Bloom County. Babylon 5, science fiction that pays attention to story, science fiction that remains consistent. Bloom County, comic strip with short serial elements.

[Mary Robinette] So in that, is Schlock Bill the cat?

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you pay close attention, both Schlock and Bill the cat have mismatched eyeball sizes.

[Ooo!]

[Howard] So the answer to your question is not no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My work is not just highly derivative...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It is markedly and easily identifiably derivative.

[Dongwon] We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the things that I think is interesting about comp titles is that... I find that when I come up with the comp titles early in my process that it also helps me sort of refine what it is that I'm working on. That sometimes it's like, "Oh, yeah. This is an element out of that Venn diagram." So as we're going through this, I kind of want to talk about what we mean by the Venn diagram of where the two books overlap. You're the one who introduced me to this idea, Dongwon, so I'm going to put you on the spot and make you explain it.

[Dongwon] So the Venn diagram is really useful. I think the way people think a lot about A plus B is they tend to think that it's the combination, it's the full territory defined by book A plus book B. That's the wrong way to think about it. What you're doing is, you're looking at the narrow overlap between those two books. One of the reasons this is really useful in pitching, for example, is it does a lot of the work to define genre and what category your book is before you start telling people the details of your book. So if you start saying that it's Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, then you already know that this is for someone who likes dinosaurs and laser swords, right? It's not... The combination of those two things, it's you're putting the laser swords into a park full of dinosaurs or something to that effect.

[Howard] It's also worth calling back to our... Oh, was it Season 11, Elemental Genres? Calling back to the Elemental Genres. Let's talk about Star Wars and Jurassic Park. It will not always reverse engineer this way, but if you are talking about Jurassic Park because there are cool monsters and it is a horror story in which there is a sense of wonder, and you're talking about Star Wars because Campbellian monomyth and swords. Then, if those are the elements in your story, Star Wars meets Jurassic Park is a great way to say which elemental genres you are using. But it could also be dogfighting spaceships meets biological technology that hasn't actually gone wrong...

[Dongwon] I'm now picturing raptors learning how to use X-wings. It's a really delightful image.

[Mary Robinette] I would totally agree the heck out of that.

[Dongwon] There you go.

[Dan] Now Mary mentioned, Mary Robinette mentioned earlier the... That it's often a very good idea to come up with this comp title, this comparison early in your process. One of the reasons that that can help is it can help you identify your audience and it can help you target your market a little better. I sold my YA cyberpunk to the editor, to the publisher, using "This is Veronica Mars meets Bladerunner." Which is great, but he's my age. It very quickly became obvious as we started figuring out how to market this in the YA market that when we sold this six years ago, there were no good well-known cyberpunk properties for teenagers. We tried everything we could think of. Today it would be easy. Because we have... There's a new Bladerunner movie that's been very recent, there's all these other cyberpunk things that are popping up. We've... I use it now, I usually pitch it as Overwatch. But six years ago, if I'd taken the time to think about it, I could have identified maybe... Maybe there isn't a slot in the market for this. Which is what turned out to be. It was a very poor seller because the market... I was maybe two or three years before the market was ready.

[Dongwon] And yet… Sorry.

[Howard] I just… I wanted to pause for a moment for a book of the week, because that sounded like a nice point to transition. Except Dongwon had a thought and I didn't want to step on it.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I'll say my thought really quick. Dan has stumbled on, I think, one of the reasons why publishing can be a very conservative business sometimes. It's one of the flaws in the system. It's how we think about things, but it's one of the issues is if there isn't a prior example that's been successful, it's very hard to do something that is very new and very different from what has come before. Now there will be breakout moments when that thing happens, and you get to do this big new thing. But often times, there are a number of books that preceded it that didn't get traction. Often, when somebody says, "Oh, this is a brand-new genre," that's not actually true. That work has been happening, it just hasn't been selling particularly well.

[Howard] Well, that's kind of a down note to talk about a book that we want to [inaudible]

[laughter, yeah]

[Dan] A positive spin on that particular thought is that my kind of tepid reaction to cyberpunk actually paved the way for the new Blade Runner movie to be a big success.

[Chuckles exactly]

[Dan] That's where I'm going to go with this.

[Dongwon] You provided a lovely steppingstone.

[Howard] Who's talking about Arkady Martine's book?

[Dongwon] I believe that is me. So, our book of the week is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's a brand-new space opera that's just out from Tor Books. The comp titles that I'm using for this book would be that it is John McQuarrrie meets Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It is a political murder mystery set in the heart of a future massive galaxy-spanning empire. A young diplomat is sent to the heart of this empire because her predecessor, she discovers, has been murdered. She needs to prevent her tiny nation from being annexed by this empire. It's a really wonderful fraught political thriller full of massive world building and a very sort of complex view of how people interact and how empires work which is where the Ann Leckie part comes in. It's a wonderful read, and I hope you all enjoy it very much.

[Howard] Outstanding. That was A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine?

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] Available now?

[Dongwon] It should be available now.

[Howard] Should be. Because we record these things in advance…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And our listeners never get tired of us talking about this weird time travel thing that we do.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, according to some of our listeners, they really do get tired of it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Will cut all this out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It is absolutely available now.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one thing that I wanted to kind of circle back to about when we're talking about the comp titles and how to pick one is that there's kind of two things that you're looking at. One is the set dressing of the thing. The other is the structure of the thing. So the set dressing are things like Jurassic Park, if we think of Jurassic Park and the set dressing of that, we think of dinosaurs, we think of a park. But the structure of Jurassic Park is thriller and horror. So when you're picking your comp titles, I think it's imp… I think that it's worthwhile making sure that you're trying to find a comp title that has both axes in alignment with what you're picking. Otherwise, if you're like, it's like Jurassic Park, but it's all gentle and soft. Unless your other comp title brings the gentle and soft into it, you're going to wind up sending a false message [garbled]

[Howard] It's like Jurassic Park meets Gummi Bears.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then I think people… But see…

[Dan] Ooo, yeah.

[Dongwon] Then your raptors are just bouncing around the park. That's [unsettling, upsetting]

[Dan] I'm digging that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but that…

[Howard] That sounds just delicious.

[Mary Robinette] That could be like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man version of…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] rampaging Gummi bears.

[Dongwon] One thing to point out when talking about comp titles is you don't have to just say it's like A Meets B, right? You can say different things about it, right? So you can say it's the voice of A and the world building of B. Or you can say it's the plot of this meets this set dressing element. An example I just gave for the Arkady Martine, John McQuarrie is providing the elemental genre, it's a thriller, it's a political thriller. Then Ancillary Justice is providing voice and setting, more than anything else. One I talk about a lot is Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, which is… I talk about it as an Arthur C. Clarke big idea story as told by Octavia Butler. So it gives you this is old school big idea science-fiction, but told with this contemporary voice that has a cultural focus.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing you can do is add a third element to throw in a twist. My Partials series, we marketed that as this is The Stand meets Battlestar Galactica, starring Hermione Granger. That third element can kind of be the wrench that helps the other two twist around.

[Dongwon] Dan is very good at this game. I'll point that out.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'd like to take a moment and leash this just a little bit. Because in my experience, I'm excited to hear if it's at all universal, the comp title tool does not work well with large bodies of readers. If I go to the customer and tell them this is like Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, they do not have necessarily the vocabulary, the syntax, to know that I'm not saying the nostalgia you have from Star Wars and the nostalgia you have from Jurassic Park, you're going to get both of those in this book. When I've seen people try and pitch their books in that way, often hand selling, it feels fraught. Whereas if you're having a conversation with an agent or a publisher or an editor or a bookseller, they speak that language and they know exactly what you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that you're right that if you do a shorthand, if you just toss it out just as those two comp titles to the average reader, they don't have the insider shorthand. But I also think that if you use those as the basis of a longer sentence, that it is very, very useful. It's one of the things that… With the… The way I talk about Calculating Stars to readers is I say, "So, it's 1952. Slam an asteroid into the Earth, kicking off the space race very early when women are still computers. So it's kind of like Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact." They're like, "Oh! Oh, sign me up for that."

[Howard] See, that is a… For me, that is a perfect pitch. Except not… Perfect pitch has a different…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It is an outstanding elevator pitch for a book because it goes very, very quickly, and at the end, you have planted a hook. That, for me, is one of the most important parts about these comp titles is that it's supposed to give you a bunch of information, but also invite you to ask a question. Which is, Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact, how bad does it get?

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that I'm also focusing… Using that initial sentence, I am telling the reader which parts of the comp titles to focus on. So I do… It's like you have to decide what is important and why you picked that comp title, and then set it up when you're talking to a reader.

[Dongwon] Also, the comp titles are really a clarifying exercise. It helps you to focus on what are the core elements of your story that you want to be telling to other people about the book that you've written. So, once you have your comp titles in mind, all of your copy, your longer pitch, that can descend from that. So even if you don't end up using the actual comparative titles when you're talking to a reader, if you meet them on the street or in a bookshop or whatever it is, you still have in your head the target audience in mind that is shaped by those overlapping properties.

[Howard] Dongwon, I think that's a great place to phase into our homework, except Dan's telling me he wants to say something.

[Dan] There's one important thing I want to point out before we leave comp titles.

[Howard] Go.

[Dan] Which is in line with thinking about your audience. Especially when you are pitching this, when you are presenting this to an agent or an editor, keep in mind that they have already heard four bazillion of these. So don't use the really obvious ones. Don't use Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. Because they've seen those so many times.

[Dongwon] Well, the thing I want to add to that, just a little bit of clarification about why those are bad, is because the comp title's a proxy for the audience. So if you say Harry Potter, what you're saying is my book is for every human who's ever existed on the planet.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That's not useful information. It made plot wise be correct or it may have elements that are correct. So you can cherry pick an element, you can say starring Hermoine Granger just because that's good shorthand for a character. But you can't use Harry Potter as a comp because it doesn't tell me anything useful. You're only… Your Venn diagram is a circle of the human population.

[Howard] I think that that's probably the places in which I've seen the hand selling fail. Because if you tell me it's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park, I don't believe you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's not the result that you wanted.

[Howard] We have homework.

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to come up with six comp titles. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you take some work in progress and you come up with three comp titles that are from works in progress, and that you come up with three additional ones that are for work that you have not written but you just think would be a cool combination. Literally, the Thin Man in Space, which we have just sold to Tor at the time of this recording, that began as a comp title. I had the comp title before I had anything else. So, six comp titles. Three for existing works to help you clarify what you're working on, and three as an initial brainstorming for something that you might want to write.

[Howard] Once you've got those three that you might want to write… [Garbled may be planted]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] It may be time to write it.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you may be out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/31/wx-14-13-obstacles-vs-complications/

Key points: obstacles versus complications. People, things, or circumstances that impede the progress of the character or the story. Obstacles can simply be overcome, but complications cause ramifications that make the story take a turn. In terms of MICE threads, obstacles keep you on the same path, but complications take you to another thread. Obstacles are linear, complications change the direction or goals. Obstacles often are within scenes, while complications strengthen act breaks and make the audience come back. A story that is all complications may be too twisty, while a story that is just obstacles may be too linear and frustratingly slow. Try mixing yes-but, no-and with complications and obstacles. A couple of major complications may be plenty.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 13.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Obstacles vs. Complications.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm in the way.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, I wanted to do this because a couple of times on Writing Excuses, you've heard me say, talking about obstacles versus complications and how I learned about it from Margaret Dunlap, and it occurred to me that we actually have Margaret here, so instead of having to listen to my fumbling attempt to distill this theory that she has come up with, we could just have her explain it to you. So, Margaret, tell us, please, about obstacles versus complications.

[Margaret] Okay. So, obstacles versus complications is, I think… I was trying to think back to the origin of this. For me, it goes back to learning how to write to act breaks. Because you… Classically, you write to the act break, you're going to stop, have commercials, and you want something that's going to drive the audience to come back. The problem of writing television today is the television audiences have watched hundreds of hours of television, and they kind of know how television works. So if you put in a classic kind of cliffhanger of like, "Oh, no. Is Mulder going to die?" on the X-Files, well, probably not. Most of your audience is pretty well aware that at the end of act one, it's likely Mulder's probably still going to be with us for the rest of this episode. So, TV writers had to get better at making stories twistier. So, obstacles versus complications, both of these are people, things, or circumstances that are somehow impeding the progress of the character or the story. The difference is, while an obstacle is something that your character can overcome and then keep moving, a complication is something that they have to deal with and then causes ramifications that causes the story to take a turn.

[Mary Robinette] If I can jump in here, one of the… Because we spent a delightful period of time talking about this, and for me, one of… It clarified something that I've talked to my students about, which is when I talk about the MICE quotient and talk about how you can have multiple threads and they can be braided together, I intellectually like… Not intellectually. I had an intuitive sense of what it meant, but I had a difficult time articulating it. So an obstacle keep you on the same path. It's like a straightahead thing. If you're on a milieu line, you stay on a milieu line. Whereas, a complication will kick you off over into a character line.

[Brandon] That is really fascinating.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it!

[Brandon] Yeah. That's really helpful.

[Howard] Obstacle is the speedbump, complication is the detour sign which you're not actually sure which side road it's pointing to.

[Margaret] Right. Or the detour sign that someone has taken away, or… I have an example of if I am a renowned thief and I am trying to break into Mary's home, the locked door is an obstacle. The fact that Mary is home, and I thought that she wasn't, that is a complication. Potentially. If I knock her out because I am awesome, because I'm an internationally renowned thief, then she is effectively an obstacle. But if she provides information that the thing I have come to steal, I'm not stealing it back, I'm just stealing it, that creates a complication.

[Brandon] Yeah, this is really interesting, because a lot of plot formats, particularly some of the ones rooted in screenwriting, talk about this idea of at some point during the story, you're… The characters are going to realize their goals are larger or different than they wanted them to be. Knowing the difference between obstacle versus that complication that can open their eyes to a greater plot could be really helpful.

[Margaret] Yeah. It's also a way to take a story that has a very linear progression, and think about… Because often we know where we want a story to end. It's like, "All right. Well, the character starts and they had that way." If you think in terms of complications, maybe they start out going in this direction… Yeah, as you can tell from watching me moving my hands on the podcast…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] They start moving to the right. A series of complications might bend them around 180° and get… Or, more likely, 90°, speaking narratively. We rarely have a character start out seeking the exact opposite of what they wind up getting. But those are the complications that can create those twists that aren't… A shocking twist that you'll never see coming. But just those little shifts in the narrative.

[Howard] There is a classic twist in the… Elementary, CBS's Sherlock Holmes thing, that I've described to my kids as the act two corpse. Which is the point at which we are moving along, and then someone is dead who we are not expecting to be dead. Maybe it's an obstacle, because we can no longer ask that person questions. But we discovered that it's more complex. What's fun is that even though my kids will now watch TV with me and lean forward and say, "Act two corpse? Is it… Yay! Act two corpse!" The episode still works, because we don't know what the complication is going… We don't know what's going to happen. We just know there's been a complication, and we are on board for where our heroes take it.

[Margaret] It's the murder mystery where your prime suspect is the second victim.

[Brandon] I've done that before. It's very handy.

[Margaret] And classic for a reason.

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

[Mary Robinette] Great. So our book of the week is Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a fantastic book. On one level, you can read it as just monster hunters going after monsters. But it's so much more than that. So this is after the world has basically drowned under the big water. It's set on what used to be a Navajo reservation. It has been reborn as Dinetah. All of the gods and heroes of the land are kind of there again. So, like, there's Coyote. It's wonderful. It's relevant to this because it has a great series of obstacles in complications. There are obstacles that are just getting in the way of her tracking down the monster, and then there are complications which are completely affecting the way… A relationship with herself, her relationship with other people. It's wonderful, wonderful storytelling.

[Brandon] So tell us one more time.

[Mary Robinette] It is the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Since we are talking about obstacles in complications, one of the things that I wanted to also talk to our listeners about, we've talked a little bit about how to use them. I also want to talk about the dangers of them. Like the dangers of a story that is only complications.

[Margaret] Only complications. The danger of a story that is just piling complication on top of complication on top of complication is that it can be easy to lose track of the stakes. If we are constantly shifting what's going on, what are we after, how is it happening, it's tough for the audience to… It can be difficult for the audience to remain invested. Because it's who's on first. They're losing track of what is our ultimate goal, what are we actually pushing towards, are we making progress towards it, or do we keep just getting derailed into detours? It is possible to make a story too twisty.

[Mary Robinette] Is it possible to go the other direction, and just have just obstacles?

[Margaret] Yeah. I think the danger of a story that is only obstacles is that, one, it can feel like your character isn't getting anywhere because anytime they're building up a head of steam, they're hitting another wall. The other risk that we sort of talked about earlier is that the story can feel very linear. It's like I am headed to grandma's house. The road goes out. So I've got to get a boat. The boat blows over. It just keeps going. One thing to another thing to another thing, but we never shift years. You can do it. But there is a risk that it just feels like a straight shot down a hallway, and why is it taking you so long to walk?

[Brandon] I've worried about both of those things, with the yes-but, no-and methodology that we've talked about, that Mary introduced me to, which is great. I use it in my class for those discovery writers who don't know how to outline, and don't really want to outline. I say, here's a method. But I worry about if they do this the wrong way, you're going to end up with only complications, because it's so easy to say, yes, they do accomplish this, but weird wacky things happens that sends us off in another direction.

[Mary Robinette] So that brings up the question of progress in pacing. One of the things that I talk about sometimes with the yes-but, no-in is, since in Western storytelling, we have the rule of three. Which is three times are funny, third times a charm, three times are unlucky. We just… We're geared to think in terms of threes. That you can use that in hack with it. If you want something to feel easy, then you have it happen with less than three trial error cycles. If you want it to feel hard, then you do more than three try-fail cycles. So with a yes-but, it's like yes, but complication. Then with no-and, it's like no, and obstacle. To a certain degree. So you can… I feel like you can control pacing to a certain degree that way. How do you con… Do you use these as tools to control pacing?

[Margaret] Um…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, it's hard… It feels like it when you're talking about act breaks.

[Margaret] Yeah. I mean, it is a way to control pacing. I think when writing in television format, it's such a set structure. Even now, as we're seeing more TV being written without commercial breaks. If you're writing for a Netflix or one of the other premium services, you don't necessarily have commercials that are coming in between, but I like to try to write on that 4 to 5 act structure anyway, just because it ensures that things are happening. That you're not getting the episode that feels like, "Okay, this is just an installment, but nothing's really happening. It's a lot of kind of dithering around and nothing is really changing, nothing's really progressing." Having those sorts of stops along the wheel of setting up the problem of the week, making our first attempt at it, a big turn at the midpoint that shifts things around, having to recover and prepare for that, and our final confrontation act five, having that is a kind of baseline structure sets up that… One, the idea that we're accomplishing something in a single episode, even if it's a piece of a much larger story. But also, again with a television audience that watched a lot of television, there are certain rhythms that you get use to. You can shift those rhythms. I watched a lot of Law & Order in high school and college. Then I started watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I realized that I would start getting really antsy around the half-hour point in Homicide, because subliminally I was waiting for the cops to hand it over to the lawyers to handle the second half of the show.

[Mary Robinette] [Ooooo]

[Margaret] But Homicide is all cops. It took a while to get used to the different pacing and the different rhythm. But having that television falling into those… Saying familiar patterns feels like it's cliché, but just that sort of the storytelling rhythms that at a certain level feel comfortable that you can use or shift up in order to really unsettle your audience.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, I realized that when I earlier said yes, but complication, no, and obstacle, that made it sound like those are the pairings that you have to do. Which is not actually true at all. Yes his progress towards the goal, no is progress away from the goal. Then, complications and obstacles are additional tools that you can use in terms of shifting. I find that I am more likely to use obstacles as a… Within a, roughly put, within a scene, and then use the complications kind of as I approach a scene end.

[Margaret] I think, complications, you do have to be judicious with them, at least in terms of major complications. If you look at… If you look at the Leverage pilot, which I'm guessing many listeners and people here on this podcast are familiar with, you get a couple of really big complications in that, but only a couple. We've been hired to steal airplane plans. It turns out those airplane plans, we didn't steal them back from the person who stole them. We just stole them from the people that created them. Then they have obstacles in trying to get revenge from the person who set them up. With… There are some additional complications buried in there, but they aren't all necessarily… A complication doesn't have to be earthshaking. It can be you have to take your little sister with you on this heist job, and how are we going to handle that?

[Howard] The nice thing about the Leverage show format with regard to complications is that when the heist is one in which we are going to be shown, after the fact, that there was a piece they were actually prepared for this. The final complication looks to us like the nail in the coffin that, nope, they're not going to survive this twist. Oh, wait, this is the one they were ready for. That bit of formulaic TV writing… Yes, if formulaic, and yes, if you watch an entire… You binge watch Leverage, you can start to see the seams, but… It's beautiful. I love the way it's done.

[Margaret] I would just like to say, John, Howard said it was formulaic, I didn't.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right. Let's… This has been really fascinating. It's really helped kind of frame this in my head. Something that… Like Mary said, I've always kind of known, but never been able to put words to.

[Brandon] You also have a piece of homework for us, right, Margaret?

[Margaret] What I'd like you to try to do is take a story, either something you've written or another story, and either find or insert an obstacle into it. Then, brainstorm what might happen if that obstacle were actually a complication. It's something that forces the narrative to take a turn. See what happens.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/10/14/13-41-fixing-character-problems-part-ii/

Key points: Fixing broken characters, part II! When a story just stops, you may need to spend more time developing the characters before hand. When a story stops, check either the character building or the world building. Sometimes you may need to add another character to bring out another side of a character. Sometimes brokenness shows up when outlining. Without a sense of the character, you can't write (or outline) the scene. Look at the blanks, that may be where your story is. Put the plot aside, and focus on who the character is and why this is a problem. Sometimes, with a big cast and many storylines, you may need to map them out, and combine characters. Sometimes, just lean into the prose. Ignore the story issues, structure, character, or plot, and just lean into the prose. Sometimes you just unravel part of the story, then crotchet or knit it back together again.

( Here comes the words! )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fixing Character Problems, Part II.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] And we have broken characters. How do we fix'em?

[Eee!]

[Brandon] This is part II. We talked about this previously with the other podcasting team. I really want to get Amal and Maurice's thoughts on what they do when a character just isn't working. Have you ever had a character, when you get done with your piece, or even midway through it, that you know the character isn't working?

[Maurice] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Okay. Podcast over.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It's happened a couple of different ways. I remember early on I had a story, it was a young woman, and I was very much in her head, story's going along just fine, and then I killed off her husband. Then the story stopped. I'm just like, "Yeah, but what do you do next? What…" Nothing. Nothing came after that. That was like the first time when a… I started filing away the whole idea of, you know what, I have to spend more time developing these characters before hand, because… Like I said, this was early in my career, so I hadn't quite reached that whole let's spend weeks with the character and really get to know them, because I hadn't done all that work, that back work yet. I didn't realize that back work still needed to be done. That's actually become my big hint is the work isn't done because the story stops. So either I haven't done enough character building at that point, or I haven't done enough world building. Because sometimes the story stops because I haven't developed the character… The world as a character enough, and the story stops.

[Brandon] Okay. So with you, when the story stops… Is this most of the time, if you've got a problem, it's a need to go back and I have not spent enough time with the characters?

[Maurice] Yeah. Usually that's the case. But there was a time when it was pointed out to me that a character wasn't working for me. That was, ironically, with The Usual Suspects, my middle grade novel. The editor wrote back, and among the editor notes, they were like, "You do know that… I love your main character. But he always has a hard edge to him. He's always hard. That works when he's in the school situation, but he becomes almost one note because he's always doing that." So, her suggestion was, why don't you add another character to bring out his softer side? So I ended up…

[Mary] A foil? Ingenious.

[Maurice] Right. A foil.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] In this case, the foil was a little sister. Because he would act one way at school with his defenses up, but around his little sister, he can't help but lower his guards around her. That brought a whole new dimension to the character, and a whole new… Basically, a whole new arc to the story. I was just like… I was so pleased by the time it was done, going in and inserting those scenes of the two of them interacting. I was like, "All right, maybe editors aren't the enemy."

[Laughter]

[Amal] So, in my case, because I mostly write short fiction, I find that… The identifying the brokenness of a character almost always happens at the outlining stage. I say outlining, I don't act… I mean, my… The way that I tend to write is very slowly, but then my final draft… My first draft is usually very close to my final draft. So there's a lot of that time that spent kind of figuring out the story, before I start actually diving into prose. It's usually at that stage that I'll see a yeah, this character is just not… Like, I mean, if I don't have the sense of the character, I just can't write the scene. So it hasn't yet happened for me that I've written a whole draft of something and been like, "Mm, that character's actually not working. I need to do something." But the problems that I'll encounter as I'm trying to do it are usually dependent on whether or not the character has come out of the needs of the plot or whether the plot as come from the character, the idea of the character. So that a story I've mentioned before, Madeleine, where with the kind of like memory flashback hallucination thing, that was the idea that I wanted to play with. It actually came out with… I wanted to write… I thought to myself, I want to write a time travel story where the way that you time travel is through sense memory, is through like being triggered through your senses, and it's an involuntary thing, and you're literally traveling through time. It was as I was trying to work out the implications of what that meant, that I decided actually, I think what I want to do is tell a story more about someone experiencing this. So it's less a high concept thing, and more about the experience of memory. I had to sort of keep zooming in on that idea until I had a character, and even then, when I figured, okay, well, so this is the character, I know that her mother had Alzheimer's, but… But what else? Those blanks were where the story ended up living. The way that I ended up fixing that was basically just by… By putting the plot aside completely and thinking like, "Well, who is she? Why is it a problem that this is happening?" Like, all these other things came out. Like, she's really, really lonely in the wake of having tended to a parent in the last stages of a really terrible illness. She's… Her friends have more or less abandoned her, because they can't deal with how terrible that pain is… How sustained and terrible that pain is. Like, all of those things, they kind of just came together.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] So, I'm curious. You both talked about like the story stops, or looking for the story and kind of the space and putting the plot aside. Are there symptoms that tend to… That you've now learned that oh, when the story is breaking in this particular way, this is the kind of fix that I usually end up applying to it?

[Maurice] One of them, one of the fixes happened with my urban fantasy series, because again, I had that big sprawling cast, and again, part of the issue was I had all these different storylines I was trying to track. Then I didn't realize until actually I was starting to map some of them out, there was like, "Okay, some of these just stop and go nowhere." I would introduce something that I would never pick up ever again. So what I ended up doing was, and it helped… It actually solved another problem in the book, which was I had so many characters in the book that what I ended up doing was combining characters, which (a) cut down the sum of the characters and (b) it allowed for some character growth and whole arcs at that point.

[Amal] For me, what I've realized I do, to the point where now I design workshops around this, is that I feel like the break or the problem happens because I'm trying too hard in one direction. What I end up doing is leaning into the prose. Like, this is going to sound weird and super inside baseball-y, I guess, but what I end up doing is because I also write poetry and I tell all my students that I feel like there's a day brain and a night brain for poetry, which is a concept that I first heard articulated by my friend [garbled]. But, similarly to the way that when you sing, you use different parts of your brain than when you speak, so that if you have speech impediments with your speech, you might not have them if you sing, I find that if I'm really, really focused on a lot of prose… Like, a lot of story issue stuff, structure or character or plot, if I let myself just lean into the prose that I'm writing and let my poetry brain take over, then I can sometimes just jump over the skip in the record or the scratch in the record rather, and just move into something else and keep going. So that definitely happened in this story. And I… It's weird. I can't definitely remember what the line was. I just remember very, very clearly that there was a line where I was like, "I have no idea where I'm going with this," and I just tried to follow the poetry logic of the line. It took me somewhere unexpected, and into a different metaphor, and then suddenly everything just kind of fell into place for the character.

[Mary] I will let you guys know a thing, because I do… I didn't have that language for it, lean into the prose, but like you can spot this in my fiction. If you see my character doing an activity, thinking about what it is that they are… How am I going to solve this problem, and Jane is like working with glamour and how is she going to solve this relationship thing? And then she's like, "Aha!" And she puts the glamour down and goes away. That is me freewriting…

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] To try to figure out a plot problem with my character.

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] That I'm like I can't get her from this point to this point. I can't get her over this decision hump. What is the thing that she needs to do? I'll usually go back and trim that sucker down, and sometimes I'll pull it out altogether, but one of the things that I have found is that I do like lean into the prose, that I will freewrite as my character and I will give her an activity that she's doing while she's trying to figure it out.

[Brandon] This is really interesting to me. It's going to be a slight tangent, but it kind of plays into a theory I have, where… When I was younger and when I was becoming a writer, I always imagined writing as more of a craft. It's like you are building something brick by brick by brick and whatnot, and the more I've been a writer, the more I realize it's more a performance art.

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] You go over something over and over, at least for me, I'm a planner, over and over in my head. I practice it, I practice certain skills, and then I sit down, and it's like, "Blam." This thing happens, and then I'm left with this thing. Now I'm going to cultivate it, but the actual creating of the story, it's like doing a play where this is performance night. Then I get to go back and revise it. It's this really weird shift that's happened in my brain, the more I've become a writer, which is an odd shift for someone who is kind of an outliner, like me. That always kind of saw it brick by brick.

[Mary] I mean, this is a thing that I think I talked about in my very first episode with Writing Excuses, before I was a full-time cast member. That my training as a puppeteer was to break techniques apart so that when you got into the art of it, you worked thinking about the technique anymore, you could just do the performance. I think that that's a thing that early career writers, we're still thinking about all of the technique. So when you're trying to figure out a character problem, it's… Like a character problem can lie in so many different aspects of character. It can be a motivation issue, it can be a back story issue, it can be a goal issue, it can be the personality issue, that the character's personality doesn't fit with the thing you need them to do. Learning to identify where these problems lie is difficult. Once you figure that out, a lot of it does become very intuitive.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Book of the week is actually The Only Harmless Great Thing.

[Amal] Oh. Yes. Oh, my gosh, I love this so much. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a Tor.com novella by Brooke Bolander. It's amazing. It's about… Oh, it's about… Ostensibly, it's about the fact that during wartime on Coney Island, they started teaching elephants to use paintbrushes so that they could paint, I think, what was it, clocks with radium or something like that. So they basically offloaded the extremely dangerous and terrible task of interacting with radium onto elephants, because they could survive longer than the underprivileged women who had been doing it until that point. So it's about this woman who is teaching this elephant how to do this at first. But it's a narrative. It's also broken up by a kind of… It's an alternate future sort of where those events took place. So imagine an alternate future from that same actual real thing that happened, but it's intercut with elephant folklore, like folklore that elephants have with mythologies that elephants have, so it imagines that elephants have this storytelling tradition that reaches back to the mammoths, and that they have incorporated this incident into their own mythology. So it's this beautiful, beautiful defamiliarization of a bunch… It's doing so much stuff that I could go on and on about, but the thing that struck me was that because Tor.com also put out novellas about other megafauna and alternate histories, which are Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth and The Taste of Marrow. Those are like rollicking heist novels, novellas. So because Brooke Bolander's stuff that I've read up until this point has been very fast-paced, very… Like, just like… I think it's like… Whiskey is the way I talk about it, it's like knocking whiskey back, is like what Bolander's stuff…

[Mary] Why would you do that?

[Amal] I know. Well, when it's hard and you're angry and you want the burn, like there's… Right. So. But, so that's what I was expecting from this. I knew it would be difficult and full of unhappy things, but I still expected it to be what I think of as a Bolander story. Instead, it's slow. It's like… It's like sipping that whiskey. It's like a slow, long pour of something. The voices are so distinct and so sustained and it's just beautiful. Like the… Being in the mammoth space and that kind of like elephant mythology voice, just forces you to slow down, and really appreciate everything beautiful that's going on in the prose. It's absolutely wonderful. It comes… Yeah. It came out in January. So…

[Brandon] Awesome. So let me throw a question at you guys that I threw at the other podcasters, which is, is there a time where you pushed yourself on a character that maybe was giving you trouble, or that when you were outlining, you were like, "This is going to be a little bit tough," that was rewarding? That you're glad you did?

[Mm… Hum.]

[Amal] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] This is exactly how we all answered it.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I'm trying to think of an exclusively character instance. Because the one that I want to use is the character in The Truth about Owls, who is a girl named Annise. Anisa, rather. I made that mistake. Anyways, she… Like initially when I… This kind of plays into some of the things that we were talking about in other episodes. Initially, I was going to have her be Indian, and I had wanted the story to be about gender, and I was going to explore those things through the Blodeuwedd story, which is a Welsh story about a woman made of flowers who gets turned into an owl. I had like all these important structural things I wanted to do. Then I realized I couldn't do any of them, because I had no idea who this character was if she was Indian. Like, I had no access to the things that I wanted to talk about. I had like some thought processes for why I had wanted that, but it was insufficient. This discouraged me to the point where I just didn't want to write the story. I literally wrote to the editors and went, "You know what, I just don't think I can do this. I'm sorry. I'm going to back out early while it doesn't have a problem." The editors, Julia Rios in particular, went, "But, we really want a story from you. Can you not just tell this story, like through backgrounds that you're more familiar with?" I ended up making this character Middle Eastern instead. I ended up making her of Lebanese extraction, and everything fell into place. Every single thing that fell into place, I fought. Basically. Because I did not... I was like, "Okay. She's going to be… Her family is from Lebanon, but I really don't want to write a story about war, so I'm… I'm… No. I'm just not going to do that part." Then I realized that the time constraints that I had chosen set it squarely in the time when Lebanon was being bombarded by Israel in 2006. I was like, "Crap." Okay. So. Well, I'm going to put her in this other part of Lebanon, where she won't have experienced any of that, because most of the bombing was on Beirut. I put her in Rayak, which is my mom's village, which is a place that I spent time in. Then did a tiny bit of research and realized the only other airfield in Lebanon is in Rayak…

[Laughter]

[Amal] It also got bombed. I was like, "Oh, God. There's just no escaping this. I'm going to write this stupid war into this story, and I didn't want it to be about any of this." But as soon as I made those decisions, then the writing came out, and it all sort of happened. Every difficulty, everything that was like, "No, like I just, I didn't want to do this." As soon as I decided to like, "Fuck it. Fine, I will do it." It ended up working out.

[Maurice] So, I already talked a little bit about the process of writing a middle grade. That would have been one example. I can give two examples that all revolve around the same issue. The issue was agency. So one… I'll give one example where I fixed the problem in one example where it kind of slipped by all of us. Which was an interesting experience. So my… The story that I have with Uncanny Magazine, Ache of Home. I'd sent the story in, they loved the story. They were just like, "Yeah, but that ending. You know, your main character, she doesn't seem to have enough agency in solving the problem. Is there a way that…" We need to fix that, basically. So they gave me some notes. So it basically involved going back and… Actually, whenever I think about fixing character problems, I have this visual view, like when you're, I know, [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary] You're looking very frightened right now.

[Maurice] But, like you were crocheting the other day or something, and just the whole idea of just… You sat there, and you'd be like, "And now we're going to unravel."

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh. Yeah.

[Maurice] That's what the process was like. I was like, "Okay, now I'm going to unravel the last third of my story."

[Mary] I'm so glad that you said that, because that was… That's a thing that as an early career writer, when you're fixing character problems, one of the most liberating things for me was realizing that I could just pull a giant chunk of text out and write a different chunk of text and it cost nothing.

[Maurice] Not a thing.

[Mary] It's like the thing I enjoy personally about writing is writing, so… It was like… My husband said this. He was watching me pull a bunch of crochet out, and he's like, "But… But… You did all of that work." I'm like, "Yeah. But I get to crochet again."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Right.

[Mary] Like, I'm still getting to crochet.

[Maurice] Yep. So, when I unraveled, and then I got to re-knit it back together. The re-knitting, for me, it just looked like… In a lot of ways, it was just a matter of reordering and reprioritizing, just doing a series of just little shifts here and there. Ultimately, that's all it took, was just some little shifts here and there. I'm like, "The story was already there. I just had to bring it out a little bit more." Now, the one that slipped by a lot of us was with Buffalo Soldier of all things. It isn't a major critique or anything, it was just one review that said, "Loved Buffalo Soldier. Loved the world building. Loved all these aspects of it. It's just that the child that the main character's protecting has no agency, and is little more than a damsel in distress." That's one of those things that just kind of haunted me. Well, it's just like… Hum, that one slipped by me. I get where… Because the whole story started with the whole image of… My nephew's on the autism spectrum, and is like the worst hide-and-seek player ever. Because like we'll play in teams, and like me and him will go hide. Like, as soon as someone goes, "Hey! Where's Orion?" He doesn't want you to be worried about him, so he'll jump out of the bushes. "Here I am!" You are awful at this game.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the whole premise of this story revolved around the idea of like trying to play… It was basically a chase novel with a child whose like, "Hey. You know what, why are we hiding?" But it was one of those things where it was like, Mm... He doesn't… While he drives the story, I missed the fact that he doesn't really have a lot of agency in the story. So it's one of those things where it's like lesson learned. I will keep that in mind for… If I come back to write more of this, that problem will be fixed.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to stop us here. This has been really good. I'm glad that we did this, this kind of one-two punch on this topic. I have some homework for you guys. It actually relates to some things Maurice and Amal were talking about. I'm… I find that often the way to fix a character problem is to add or subtract a character. So I want you to take one of your characters from a story you've written, and I want you to split them into two people. See what happens with those two people interact. Then, in another story, I want you to try combining, for a scene, two characters that have been the same person… Or two different people for a while, combine them into one and see how that scene plays out with a character combined, with two characters combined. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 7.25: Writing Capers

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/17/writing-excuses-7-25-writing-capers/

Key Points:
-- Capers, or heists. Start with a job to do, a mastermind/leader, a team of experts to collect. A talk to set up the plan, and the execution. And then there are twists and breakdowns.
-- Two big variations: don't tell the reader the whole plan, and then twist it into something different at the end, OR reveal the whole plan, then have something go horribly wrong.
-- Almost inverse: knowledge of the plan and degree of things going wrong. Note: not revealing the whole plan can be difficult in writing tight third person.
-- Capers have plenty of witty banter and dialogue, partly to carry the reader through the large amount of setup. Use jargon to make readers feel as if they know more than they actually do.
-- Heist plots aren't always about stealing -- it's the team, plan, preparation, and execution.
-- Don't overload the characters, but give them clear roles.
-- Consider the Xanatos gambit, turning evident failure or things going wrong into victory.
-- Plotting can be complicated, because capers require characters and plan to interlock. One approach is to figure out the plan, then work backwards to the necessary characters. Another is to start with characters, then tailor the plan to their skills.
( Putting the team together, planning, preparation, and pulling it off -- the four Ps of capers! )
[Brandon] But we're out of time. So, Dan, give us a heist...
[Mary] Related writing prompt.
[Brandon] Sort of writing prompt.
[Dan] Okay. Your characters need to perform a heist in reverse, and put jewels into a safe without anyone seeing them.
[Brandon] Nice. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: rainy

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Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/10/writing-excuses-7-24-project-in-depth-way-of-kings/

Overview: Summary of Way of Kings. Three prologues? Shallan? Setting? Dalinar? Outlining, plotting, and writing? Revision? Ending? Naming? Kaladin?
( Whew! All the news that's fit to print? )
[Howard] Writing prompt time, folks. Take a page from Brandon. Literally, page 320... No. Take a page from Brandon. Take a character of yours who you think maybe is not working the way you want them to. Split that character into a character and a foil.
[Brandon] Ah. Nice. Very nice.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brandon] All right. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: JIT again?

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Writing Excuses 7.21: Project in Depth -- Force Multiplication

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/05/20/writing-excuses-7-21-project-in-depth-force-multiplication/

Key Points: Why are you telling this story? How do you pick the characters? How do your characters solve problems? How do you choose the setting? How do you name things? How do you balance exploring characters and plot? How do you make it interesting? How does this hurt people? Who gets hurt? Why? How do they respond?
( Answers! )
[Brandon] All right. Your writing prompt this week is actually to do this with your own work. Have your friends sit down and interview you about something you're working on and about your process. Hopefully you will become more conscious of how you approach your writing. Which is one of our big goals as Writing Excuses podcasters, is to get you to think about that. All right? So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: you know

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

April 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.35: Organizing Your Writing, or Managing the Mega-Arc
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.38: Oh No I Lost The Thread
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.50: Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.46: World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.43: The Narrative Holy Trinity of World, Character, and Plot, with Fonda Lee
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.41: Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.25: Writing Capers
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.21: Project in Depth -- Force Multiplication

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with plot

Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean

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

Writing Excuses 18.35: Organizing Your Writing, or Managing the Mega-Arc

Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

Writing Excuses 17.38: Oh No I Lost The Thread

Writing Excuses 17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order

Writing Excuses 16.50: Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices

Writing Excuses 16.46: World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change

Writing Excuses 16.43: The Narrative Holy Trinity of World, Character, and Plot, with Fonda Lee

Writing Excuses 15.41: Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

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

Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

Writing Excuses 7.25: Writing Capers

Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

Writing Excuses 7.21: Project in Depth -- Force Multiplication

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