wetranscripts | Entries tagged with point of view

Writing Excuses 20.14: Third Person Limited

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-14-third-person-limited

Key points: Third person limited. First person, I. Third person, he, she, names, pronouns. Metaphor, the camera. Limited versus omniscient. Moving POVs, head hopping. Slide, don't hop. Inner thoughts or not? Threshold between first person and third person very close, very limited? Internal thoughts. Third person offers separation between narration and character. Third limited close is the default for commercial fiction. Third limited allows shifting POVs and distance more easily than first. First may be more visceral. Distancing words. Some books jump between third and first. Perspective shifts can be useful!

[Season 20, Episode 14]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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

[Season 20, Episode 14]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] Third Person Limited.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm really excited to talk a little bit today about the third person limited point of view as part of our little mini-course, mini-set of episodes on proximity. One of the reasons I'm like most excited about this is I feel like this is one of the terms in writing that is used the most and understood the least.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like Othello, a moment to learn, a lifetime to master. So I'm...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Going to attempt to explain, like, at its very basic, like, what do we even mean when we say third person limited, and then I'm going to invite all of you to tell me what I'm missing and why I'm wrong.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I figure… So, on its, like, very basic level, when you use first person, you are using I, you are using, like, the pronoun I to describe everything that is happening. When you use third person, of any type, you use he, she, somebody's name, they… You're using a pronoun that is the third person, that is why it's called third person. So instead of saying, "I watched as all the podcasters stared me down, waiting for me to finish speaking," it would be, "Erin observed the other podcasters as da da da da…" And limited is that you are limited to a specific point of view at any one time. Unlike omniscient, which we will get to in the next episode, you can't see everybody's thoughts all at once. You're sort of following one particular person at any distance that you want. We'll get into that later. But that's what I think of at the very basic. What am I missing? Why am I wrong?

[DongWon] I'm not going to tell you why you're wrong, but I am going to ask you a question.

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] Which is, do you think third person limited and third person close are the same thing or is there a distinction between those two things?

[Erin] I would personally say that there is a difference. So I think that you can be at any distance and still be limited. I mean, it's…

[DongWon] I see.

[Erin] At a certain point, it's hard to be limited. Like, if you get… a lot of times, the metaphor we use for third person limited or third person close is the camera.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] So it's like you're the camera behind the shoulder of whatever character. But you can be right up on their shoulder or you can actually get a little bit of a distance away. Like…

[DongWon] It's like third person action game versus Mario. It's like that…

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly. [Garbled]

[Howard] Third person limited contains third person close.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Exactly.

[DongWon] But you could be third person limited, but have this 10,000 foot view, where I have no access to Erin's interiority. I can just see her moving through the landscape and…

[Mary Robinette] Right. Raymond Chandler does this a lot.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Like, where your… You're with one character, you only see the things that they see, and the movements that they have, but you have absolutely no access to their thoughts.

[DongWon] Because the interiority of people is a mystery to his… In his books.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The example that I use… When I'm trying to explain the difference between limited and omniscient. Erin sat across from the podcasters and Howard looked like he had indigestion. Okay? That's limited because Erin can tell that I'm making a face and she's passing judgment on what my face is. Omniscient would be Erin sat across from the podcasters. Howard was thinking about… And then you state my thought explicitly. Now, we were in Erin's head and then suddenly we're in Howard's head. That's not something Erin can be. We hope.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yeah. Another example of that… Not necessarily a good one, but it's, like, though Erin sat there, looking at Howard's face and thought that perhaps he'd had indigestion, Howard had had 16 eggs this morning.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] As they worked their way through his system, he hoped that no one would notice.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] He was wrong.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Right. Oh, this is going to make a noise.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I'm looking forward to when we talk about…

[Howard] That's third person omnivorous.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh… Howard. I am looking forward to when we talk about omniscient. But one of the things that I will say with third person limited is that you don't… I think one of the things you're missing potentially is that you can do third person limited and move to different characters' POVs in different scenes. Arguably, you can also move to their POVs within a single scene. It's when you move back and forth that I think you've shifted over to…

[Howard] It's the head hopping.

[Mary Robinette] Omniscient. Yeah. Which is not a flaw. It's just a different mode. But I'm thinking specifically of a scene in Ender's Game where the camera arrives with Ender into a scene, and then Ender leaves… We're still in the scene, there's no scene break, but we stay with Bean's character. So it's a through scene, there's no scene break, but it is still third person limited even though we haven't done that hard break.

[DongWon] I love when you do a little bit of that sliding from one POV to another and then back without dropping into omniscient…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Without dropping into the head hopping. There's an example, I think, of… From one of Robert Jackson Bennett's books, the first… Foundryside. Where a character is like sneaking into a facility, and we just slide into the guard's POV for a minute and see them sneaking past from the guard's POV and then slide back to the protagonist again. It never feels omniscient, it never feels like we're knowing more than, like, what the individual characters experience. But that fluidity that you can have in limited I think is really, really fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that in that case, for me, what's happening is that he has gone to a different scene…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But has chosen to do what I call a through scene as opposed to a scene break.

[Erin] So, follow-up question on this, because I think, like, head hopping… A lot of times when people say head hopping, they're talking about being in omniscient and going from one character to the other in a somewhat frantic way in which you don't know who you're even following or what's happening. But head hopping can also be used if you switch, like, abruptly from one limited perspective to another. I've seen that critique used for that as well. How do you make it feel like a slide and not a hop? Like, how do you actually make it feel like it's been passed off in an effective way that you can follow versus that you're like jarring the audience?

[DongWon] I really think about it in filmic terms, and I think about sightlines. Right? So the example I just gave of moving from the thief to the guard and back is because you have the thief, the thief's looking, sees the guard, now we're in the guard, guard does their thing, thief sneaks by, guard notices something has passed, and then now we're back in the thief. Right? So you need a handoff transition every time you're going to make that slide as literally thinking for me about the camera moving with the perspective of the reader.

[Mary Robinette] I have a similar framing. For me, it's about thresholds.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is, I think the same thing as the sightlines that it is about. For me, the distinction between that and omniscient is that there is a reason that both characters are not actually in the same place at the same time. Like, the example that I gave where one character literally leaves the room and the camera stays with where we are. Whereas in omniscient, you would be able to visit everybody's head within, who's in a single room. And you would be sign posting, and now we're going over to this person. Jane Austen does this… I mean, she was extremely good, which is why her works are still classics. But there's this one scene where two characters believe that they're having the same conversation and they're having different conversations. You only know that they're having different conversations because she goes from one character to the other and she sign posts by telling us whose head she's going into before we get the thought, but it is all within one thing, and then she also comments on other things that are outside of that room that none of the characters would have access to. So, for me, it's all about what the characters have access to and the thresholds that we cross.

[Dan] I'm wondering as well if… This goes back to our discussion of close and far perspective. But the closer the perspective is, the more it's going to feel like head hopping, because you are getting more of those inner thoughts. You're getting more of that internality. Whereas in this case with the guard watching for the thief, you're not getting a really deep examination of who they are as a person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I want to say that this is going back, this is a fashion thing. In science fiction and fantasy, it is in fashion to either use first person or third limited. But when you go over to romance, often you do get POVs… You do get back and forth between the two POVs. I'm going to back away from what I had said earlier about that not being third limited, because it usually only two characters. The hero and the heroine, or the hero and hero, depending on the… Which slash we're in. But often you do get both of their POVs within a single scene. It's just that in science fiction and fantasy, at some point, people decided that this was bad and they put a label on it called head hopping as opposed to controlling point of view, even if you are limiting yourself to only two people. It's still a limitation, it's still not an omniscient because you're not giving the reader access to any information that those two characters don't have.

[Dan] Well, I think it's worth pointing out that this is one of those cases where anything you can make work, works.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Yeah.

[Dan] Right. Like, just because the label has been given that certain aspects of this are good or bad, if you can make it work, then it works. If you can just… Excuse me… If you can jump between heads, between characters, even if it's head hopping, as long as the reader is always very clear about what's going on and they know whose head they're in and they know what perspective they're getting, then it works.

[Howard] Yeah, I don't… I don't personally use head hopping as a way to denigrate anything. I say… Unless I'm saying you're trying to do third person limited, third person close, and I think you may be unintentionally head hopping, just to describe what's going on. But I think you can head hop on purpose and make it work very well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We'll talk about how to do that when we get to omniscient for sure.

[Erin] Erin had another thought, but realized that it was time for the podcast to take a break.

[Erin] All right. Back now, because one thing we talked about earlier… I think we're talking a lot about… In talking about head hopping and the difference between limited and omniscient, we're talking a little bit about, I think, slightly more distanced…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] One of the questions I now have is what is the difference, like, what is the threshold, other than the use of pronouns between first-person and third person very close, very limited? Like, is there something that for you distinguishes it or could you take a first-person piece, turn all the I's to she's and not have to change anything else in order to make that story work?

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Laughter]

[Erin] All right. Well, there we go.

[Dan] Next question?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, because I've done it. I've had pieces that I wrote, originally in third person and moved to first, and I've had pieces that I've written in first person and moved to third. The biggest thing for me is that in first person, the degree to which I get the character's thoughts is significantly higher than it is in third. I have… Like you can get away with it for part of a scene, sometimes even a full scene, but there are times when, in first person, if I do not get the character's full emotional reaction, I will feel cheated as a reader. Because that's one of the things I sign up for when I'm in first person is to be all the way in that character's head. Whereas third person, I am okay with selective access to their head. Sometimes I get a direct thought, which is either written in quotes or italics. So these are the words that exactly are what the character is thinking. Sometimes it is free indirect speech, which is where the character's thought has just been transported into being part of the narration. So, like, instead of saying Mary Robinette sat in the podcast and thought I have to remember I have to pack my luggage during our break, I would do something more like Mary Robinette sat in the podcast. She needed to remember that she had to pack her luggage during her break. And I would just put it into part of the narration. But, it does create a little bit of a… More of a distance, and that form is one of the differences between first and third is that being all the way into the character's head.

[Howard] For me, one of the big differences between first and third, beyond… I mean, everything that you've said tracks beautifully. But if I'm in third limited, it's usually because I want to follow two or more characters. And the high bar for me for third limited is for each of those narrative voices to sound different. Whereas, in first person, your narrator should sound fairly consistent, unless the character undergoes some really huge change that reaches all the way into their voice. Whereas in third limited, I like to be able to tell whose scene it is. By halfway through the book, I want to be able to tell whose scene it is without you telling me their name. Because the voice… I'm now familiar enough with that voice that you've telegraphed it to me.

[Mary Robinette] I will say the other thing that I thought about as you were talking is that one of the tools that third limited offers me that I do not get from first-person is that I have a contrast between the narration and the character. Which can be an extremely powerful tool sometimes. Especially when you've got a character that is lying to themselves or lying… That… Or is on a journey that they haven't yet figured out that they're on. That sometimes I can let the reader in on what that is in ways that I cannot do in first person.

[DongWon] So, I think third limited close is sort of the default voice for commercial fiction these days. Right? In a lot of ways… There's a ton of first-person, that's rising in certain sectors, you still see third omniscient, but, like, what we think of as transparent prose, what we think of as like the dominant voice in adult commercial fiction tends to be this third limited perspective. Especially fairly close in. I think this is kind of driven by a lot of the visual media we consume. Movies are like this, videogames are like this, it's just like your… Because we don't actually know what the character's thinking, you're just like write up on them, and sort of observing the world as they go through it as the camera follows them, literally in the case of a TV show. I think that has really sort of shaped how we think of it. And because of some of the things you're saying, of having the ability to have the narration come in and the narrator have a different perspective than the character, but still be very close to one or a very small number of characters, kind of gives the easiest lift in terms of communicating a lot of information to the reader using the fewest tools possible. That requires the least sort of, like, mental weights. There's always a… I talked about this a little bit on the last episode, but there is a little bit of a mental lift when reading first-person for a lot of readers. That, I think, is a very small threshold that people can cross, but they're sometimes reluctant to. But it's… The use of third person limited close, I think, if you're looking for where's my default starting point, it's a really useful one to at least try that and sort of see if that solves any perspective problems you're having, and then expand out from there into, oh, wait, maybe this should be first-person. I need more interiority, or I want that deep subjectivity of the character or I'm feeling really claustrophobic, maybe I should step back in omniscient and expand out more from their. But starting with third close, really, I think, is a great default position to start from.

[Erin] I love all that, and I think it's interesting for me to hear, because I think one of the reasons I asked the question is I actually find when I write that my third person limited is fairly close to first. Like I…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I believe, I do a lot of third person limited that has, like, full interiority… And in case we've never said what we mean by interiority, it's, like, how much are you getting from inside the character's mind. My third person limited often uses the same cadences of thought that first-person would use. Like, the same… There's usually not a lot of distinction. So I was like, well, why do… What is the difference? For me, and I love everything that y'all have said and I also… For me, I'm thinking that some of it has to do with is there something… Like, is there ever a time when I'm going to want to go into another character, which I cannot do in first easily. For some reason, I find it harder to switch from one character to another in first, because first is very immersive, until I come out of it. It's like… Feels like a lot of work, like it's something you can do maybe chapter to chapter, but it's harder to do, like, scene to scene. Is there ever a time when I'm going to want to pull back the distance to explain something or note something even for a moment that the character wouldn't fully get into? Or is it, like, my intent is for you to feel like the character is being observed versus experienced? That one's a hard one, because I feel like it's very like… I, you just… It's like… You just know, like, when you know… Like pornography… When you know it when you see it. But… The infamous Supreme Court case said that. So it's, like, I'm thinking about, like, is it… Yeah, it's like is it sometimes when I want you to feel like you're within this character's mind or do I want you to feel like you are just a fly on their shoulder being like, oh, my gosh, what is this character getting themselves into, even if you're close enough to hear them whisper every thought to you?

[Howard] And to eat the crumbs off their shoulder if you're a little [garbled]

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like the one that I took from third into first, one of the things that I was playing with in that one was… I had a character who had PTSD and I knew that I was going to be dealing with some flashbacks and not, like, a brief insertion into the middle of a scene, but a full on, like, confusion dementia sequence. Being all the way in their head so that I wasn't… As they are disassociating… It was just… It was conveying the sensation of disassociating in first person is significantly easier than it is in third. Because that distance, that narrative distance, already exists because I'm observing the person, distancing it further… It's not as visceral when you distance it further. So when I got to those scenes where he's disassociating, I wrote it as if it was third person, but used the I, so… And I used all of the reporting words that we try to avoid in third person… Like, I noticed that I was, I watched my body do this thing. And that was a technique and a tool that I could only use in first person.

[Erin] I love that you called out the… Those distancing… I call them distancing words, like watched, looked, she looked at versus just saying, like, what the person actually saw. Because I think that's a really interesting… They have their absolute place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, there's a time in which you want to be calling attention to the act of seeing. Whether it is disassociation or somebody who is, like, at the wall of a party and all that they are doing, noticing, is the action that they are taking.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. A spy is going to be… I watched this.

[Erin] Exactly. But somebody who's not a spy, you might be, like, well… The watching brings one more layer between you and the actual thing that's going on. Which I think is such a fun thing to play with. And another thing where I think, like head hopping, sometimes people will say this doesn't work, and I think what they really mean or should say is this has its place. Is this the place for it?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I just want to jump in really quick and point out that I have seen books, very successfully jump between third and first.

[Yes, yup]

[Dan] One of my favorite books is House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, which is about half and half. The way that she makes that work and makes it always obvious what you're hearing and what you're listening to is, it is… The first person is one specific character. Every scene that does not have that character in it is third person.

[DongWon] Yeah. In general, when it comes to these POV conversations, again, we're giving you tools, not rules...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is the thing to remember. I think a lot of people get so prescriptive when it comes to talking about whether using third person limited, are you… It's like your third person limited close, and then you go, you come out for a second, and they're like, oh, no, you broke POV. You can't do that. I'm like, what are you talking about? If it worked in the scene, it worked in the scene.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? I'm not going to remember two chapters later that, like, you stepped 10 feet away from the character for one moment. Or, like what Dan's saying, in terms of mixing first person and third person, that's absolutely a thing that you can do. You can even jump to omniscient for a second, and then drop…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Back to third person limited. I think what we're giving you are ways in which you can use proximity to your character's perspective as tools. I encourage you to find exciting ways to use those tools, moment to moment, rather than book to book.

[Erin] And… I know we're running a little long, but I just want to… I love this point, so I just want to underline it, that some of the things that I've seen that are extremely effective in scenes are when perspective shifts.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you suddenly pull back the camera, like, all of a sudden, you're saying something. Like, if you're doing it on purpose, you're doing it intentionally, there's something you want us to see from further away. If you're a little bit further away and you suddenly, like, kind of zoom in to one character's perspective, maybe it's because they're having a moment of deep emotion where that's the only thing that the story can contain at that moment.

[Erin] And that brings us to the homework. Which is to take a scene that you've written and write it in the closest third person limited you can possibly stand. Get right up in there. Then write it again at a slightly more distance, but still limited third person. Look at those two scenes side-by-side, and then say, what did I do differently in one than the other? What did I emphasize? Figure out from that which perspective you want to use when actually writing the scene.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-13-first-person

Key points: First person. What does it do well? Direct address to the reader, the aside. Subjective unreliable point of view. Intimacy. What is first person not effective at? Clarity, complex scenes. Multi POV ensemble cast! Mirror moments, what does the character look like? Tools for first person? Avoid navelgazing by adding a activity. Multiple senses! Cadence. Why use first person? Proximity, emotion. Genres of the body, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Tapping into emotional subjective experience. Plot reveals! Character change. Coming of age stories. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? When character's goals shift. What is the lie that the character believes?

[Season 20, Episode 13]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] First person.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are beginning today a small cycle of episodes in which we're going to talk about the lens of proximity, how close you are to a character and how much you get to know about that character's reactions and motivations and so on and so on. We're going to begin today by talking about first person. First person feels as if it might be the most natural way to tell a story, because that's the way we talk about ourselves. Though obviously, the other persons that we will discuss in future episodes are also and equally useful, just useful in different situations. So I want to start by asking what is first-person good at? What kinds of situations do we love first-person? What does first-person do well?

[Mary Robinette] I think the direct address to the reader, the aside, where it's like, this is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm feeling in the moment. It's not just about the internal thoughts. It's one… It's a… The thing that I've found that first-person can do that kind of nothing else gets to is hang on, let me just explain this one thing to you. So that kind of direct address of here's some exposition. I think one of the things that it has is that it immediately connects it to why it is important to the character and that is it's sometimes harder to surface things.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about first-person is it's a thing that you can do in text, in prose, in a way that's incredibly difficult or artificial to do in other media. You can have first-person asides, like the aside in theater, being… Or a soliloquy, and you can sort of fake it in films through voiceovers and things like that. But in a novel, you can have it in direct access into the interiority of a character in a way that you can't in almost any other medium. So there's something really special about the ability for prose writers to use that first-person perspective to say explicitly here's what the character's thinking, here's what the character is perceiving. And when you want to root someone very much in a subjective unreliable point of view, first-person is the go to in your toolkit.

[Dan] Well, that unreliability is so fun to play with, too. Talking about this direct aside to the reader… You could do that in third person. But in first-person, it feels like there is no artifice there. It feels like you're getting it much more directly. But… Of course there's artifice there. Because you are telling this through some other person that you've invented. It's the first person. It's not actually me, it's John Cleaver or whoever I'm writing about. So there's still a lot of artifice, there's still a lot of kind of artificiality about it, but it feels truer, it feels more direct, and that allows you to be unreliable and shaky and shenaniganry.

[Erin] I also think it creates a feeling of intimacy, or it can create a feeling of intimacy between the character and the reader. Because it's like… Like the direct aside, it's like somebody has sat down and said, okay, I'm going to tell you something. I'm just going to tell you, the reader, this thing. And nobody else in the story will understand how I feel about this at the core, nobody else will know my internal thoughts except for you. One of the reasons I love writing in first person is because you can really lean into the voice in a way that I think third person can do, especially third person where it's very close, but it doesn't have that quite the same feel as, like, a friend sat down. And part of what I'm trying to do as a writer is to capture that friend's voice and how they would tell the story in a way that nobody else could.

[DongWon] There's something really, really interesting about first person, because it is both our oldest form of storytelling, because just the way that we tell a story is I was walking down the street the other day. I was going to the store. The dog jumped out in the street, and I chased after it. Right? Like, that is just how we tell stories, and the way people have told stories as long as they were telling stories. But as a literary convention, as a part of the novel, it's one of the newest forms. At least in a dominant way. Like, there are examples that go back. But in terms of being so dominant in terms of how it exists in the contemporary novel, it is very much a thing that arose in, like, modern days, in like early mid twentieth century. Right? So one thing that I see people struggle with, when people push back against first-person, which I still see kind of a shocking amount. But when I see that pushback, it's… There's like an artificiality to first-person that can be a tough hurdle for some readers to get past. Because you're reading a text, but the text is being told to you as if a person is narrating it. So who is narrating it to you in that moment becomes a question in certain reader's minds. So there's like a… There is both an incredible immediacy, intimacy, and familiarity to first-person, and a layer of artificiality that requires one extra jump for the reader.

[Howard] And… That's weird, because I will accept that there is magic and spaceships and vampires, but I'm really struggling with the fact that there is a book.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's not so much that it's… Like, I can think of a bajillion examples of first-person. Because the novel would often start… When you're looking at the trajectory of the novel as a travelogue. Then you're looking at Poe, who often used first-person.

[DongWon] It's like where does epistolary end…

[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly.

[DongWon] And first-person begin is a we… The distinction that you and I are drawing here. But [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. But… But I think the thing is that one of the reasons it fell out of fashion is that people started to get hung up on the… But really did they have time to write this while they were being dragged away by eldritch horrors?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Yes. Always yes.

[Dan] Yeah. At what point in the story is this account being given? Well, I like you mentioned the kind of newness of it. It is… First person is going through a huge Renaissance right now in certain corners of the market. A lot of book tubers, books to grammars, book talkers… There's a big trend going around. I see where they will just flat out refuse to read something unless it's in first-person.

[DongWon] Huh.

[Dan] That's obviously not everybody, and it's not the whole market. But it's kind of having a heyday right now, which I think is really interesting. I want to ask the question what is first-person bad at? As long as we're talking about it, what can you not do very effectively with it?

[DongWon] Clarity.

[Howard] Avoid the capital I.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I think first-person… It can be harder to truly communicate to the reader what's happening in a complex scene. Because you're anchored to one perspective and one understanding of what's happening in a particular moment. So there's an immediacy to that. But when you think about your subjective experience of a large event, you're not getting the full picture because you're only seeing a little piece of it. Right? So I think we think of first-hand experience as the most true, but in a lot of ways, the way we consume information about what happened is somebody explaining from multiple perspectives. So when you're limiting yourself to one POV in a story, you are removing access to a lot of tools that you have that you would have in cinema, for example. You think cinematically, all the things the camera sees are just what the character's actually seeing, what the character's seeing is very different. Right? So you're much more constrained. So if you want real true like grounded clarity about feelings, emotions, what happened in a complex scene, first-person's pretty tough to make that happen.

[Howard] Your multi POV ensemble cast…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In a heist thing… Yeah, that's difficult to pull off in first-person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I think, first-person… You can cheat when we get to third person, you can cheat to show us what a character looks like even when you're in tight third person, but when you're in first-person, unless they step up and have a mirror moment, which… I was walking down the hall and I stopped to regard myself in the mirror.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I had curly red hair, bright green eyes, and was extremely buxom.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I think that everyone thinks about themselves [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[Erin] Just in that tone. Well, I agree with it. Like, clarity is part of it, and also just knowledge. Like the characters… A lot of times, you have, like, but the reader knows and what the character knows. In first-person, they get… They are the same. Because… Unless… Now there are ways to cheat out of this, but in general, you only know what the character knows about the world, about the situation, about the experience. So if there's something that you really need, like description, self-description, the reader to know, but there's no reason for the character to know that, you're going to have to figure out a workaround. Even in unreliable… Like, one of the things I really like doing in pieces with unreliable narrators is setting up a reliable outsider that is… That can be established, like, because they hold a position of authority or you see them being reliable in several scenes, and can point out through dialogue or through their own actions what's happening outside of the first-person, that character's first-person experience.

[DongWon] They can also…

[Erin] They can then misinterpret what that reliable person does, but the reader… It's clear enough to the reader, like, what happens. I think about a scene I wrote in my story Wolfy Things where the mom is crying and the sun misinterprets it that he's like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] She's trying to salt the food with her tears. Like… Because no one's going to do that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, you, as a reader, know that seems unlikely. Probably she's just crying over the soup.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But he cannot accept that. But because it's something clear enough to the reader, it comes through. But it requires a lot of work to do that. Where is in a third person, you could probably just say, like, she's crying and then you would know.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You could cheat that also with chapter bumps. You insert in universe material that appears at the top of the chapter, and then the first-person account either accounts for that or doesn't account for that. That can argue with the character just fine.

[Dan] All right. Let's take a moment here to pause, and when we come back, we'll discuss this further.

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[Dan] All right. So we've talked about things that first-person does well and does less well. Let's talk now about how. How can we use first-person effectively? What are some good tools for using first person as a perspective?

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about one of the traps of first-person is a way of bringing us around to an effective tool. One of the traps of first-person is navelgazing. So it is, I think, one of the things that it does really well is that you can get into the character's interiority, but you can, like, have a character just sit in a room and think about themselves and never move on. So, for me, one of the tools that I often try to use when I'm doing that to combat the navelgazing is that if I have a scene where my character needs to think about something for whatever reason, I try to pair it with an activity that is somehow plot related. So, like, if there's this is a conspiracy, I think a conspiracy thing is happening, I will have them trying to repair a rover. Then, as they're repairing the rover, and having conversations, different things will then trigger for them. It's like hum, I think this is… You just said something very fishy, and what's going on with your face right now? But it is… Having that interaction with the outside world keeps… For me, keeps my navelgazing to a minimum.

[Howard] Yeah. It's the multi sensory approach. Only saying what the character is thinking about is just the navelgazing. But, I'm thinking about this. I'm seeing that. I smell this. I heard that. I'm touching this. My heart is pounding or I have a headache. I have… There's a whole huge spectrum of senses that you can tap into with first-person. If you don't use at least three of them, I feel like you're leaving too much unsaid.

[Erin] A tool that I really like that… To play around with with first-person is cadence. What the rhythm of that person's thoughts are as they're driving things. Because it tells you about the emotions. One thing that's really… You can have a very self-aware first-person character, but a lot of times they're not sure what's going on, exactly. They're afraid, but they may not say, like, I am afraid right now. They may just be experiencing fear. But what you can do is go with a faster Kayden. All of a sudden, like breathing heavy, like the heartbeat racing, when you're afraid. They're noticing things that are fearful, but also, the entire cadence of the piece as that sort of taut feeling to it, and then when they're safety, the cadence slows down. It gives a completely different feeling without you needing to signal it from the outside.

[Mary Robinette] Also, that is something that is extremely apparent when I'm doing audiobooks. When I'm narrating and the author is thinking about that, it shows up on the page and you can really hear it. It is much easier to [garbled]

[Howard] [garbled] makes your job easier.

[Mary Robinette] So much easier. I actually think that that's one of the reasons we're seeing the surgeon audio, in first-person narratives, is because they do better in audiobook. But there are times when I have to narrate something and the writer has not paid attention to the Kayden, and attempting to get the emotion into that scene is significantly harder, even though you have the added layer of I do cool things with my voice. It is undercut by the cadence.

[Howard] One of the reasons, Mary Robinette, that your first half of the episode mirrors scene was so humorous is that it breaks the true cadence of that person. That is not the pattern that you would use, that is not the cadence of… At least not of my inner voice. When I look in the mirror…

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] My inner voice… Well, I'm not saying mirrors scenes are bad. I will look in the mirror and the cadence for my mirror scene is, Howard, you gonna go outside looking like that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yep. Then I'm off. Now the reader has an insight into how I feel about how I look and how much I care. That's all we need.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, most of my mirror scenes would actually be…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] How did you sleep on your hair to get [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like that.

[Dan] So, if we are using first person as a lens… Let me rephrase. If are using proximity as a lens, this is how we want to look at our work and we… What are some of the reasons we might choose first-person then? What is going to guide us? What… I guess this kind of comes back to the question we asked in the beginning of what does first-person do that the others can't. But what are some situations where we will say you know what this really needs? First-person.

[DongWon] It's so intimate. Right? We're talking about proximity. Right? First-person is… You're right up on that perspective, you're in their head with them. So when you need anything that is raw emotion. Right? That's why it works so well in YA, why we see it there so much. That's why you see it a ton in what I think of as genres of the body. Right? So, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Right? Like, horror in particular, first-person is just so valuable there because as a person is experiencing disruption, fear, sensations in their body, all of those things, are stuff that you can get to so quickly and so closely as first-person that can take extra work when you're having to do the work of third person limited or omniscient of describing a broader scene. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I think whenever you want to tap into someone's like emotional subjective experience, first person does so well for that. I think that's why it's doing so well on things like book talk right now.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] When you've got a plot reveal that that moment, first-person can do that so well. Because we are right there. The Revelation of whatever it is, the plot twist, the monster, the whatever, the reader is getting that reveal at the same time the character is getting that reveal at the end. Yeah. Immediacy and proximity. And, as a writer, that lens of proximity… You may choose to look at your reveal's pacifically at the reveal you have in mind and say, you know what? This is going to work better in first-person than anything else I can do. So maybe that's the way I need to shape the rest of the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that a lot of times, I think of first-person stories as stories of perspective. Because you've chosen to use this particular… That character is the lens into the story more than anything else. Because you are filtering everything through the way that character experiences things. So, choosing it when you're going to have a reveal that shifts that character's perspective, where they understand something they didn't understand before, that they couldn't understand before, is where something… Where it really appeals to me. Where there is a reason in which that person as a filter is the best filter for the story.

[Mary Robinette] That ties into one of my absolute favorite things that you can do with first-person that you cannot do with any of the others. It's the proximity thing. That you can have the character change by the act of telling the story. Like, some of my favorite stories are ones… It's one of the reasons I love the John Cleaver books so much is that John is not the same person at the beginning is at the end, and the way John is relating to the reader has changed. That is so… I think that's so interesting. It works really… I think, really, really well in coming-of-age stories. I think that's one of the reasons we often see first-person paired with younger protagonists, because you more commonly have a coming-of-age story with them. But it is something that is just so delicious, so intimate.

[Dan] Yeah. I know that we are kind of running up against the end of time here…

[Erin] The end of time!

[Dan] The end of all… Not necessarily all time, but the end of our time for this. I do want to get back to…

[Mary Robinette] As I was sitting on the couch, Dan told me that I was running up against the end of time. I paused to look in the mirror…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Are you really going outside like that?

[Dan] This is part of the lens of where and when.

[Erin] Exactly. At least I'll look good during my final [garbled]

[Dan] I do want to circle back to unreliability. Because not only… That was something we mentioned not only as a strength of first-person, but it's one of the things that is… One of the downsides of first-person. Not necessarily a downside, is that it's really hard to not be unreliable with it. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? This isn't really an unreliable narration episode, but it's so closely linked to first-person. You were talking about the John Cleaver books. That's leaning so heavily on that, the idea that what he is telling you is what he thinks is true, not what is actually true. That dramatic irony of being able to listen to him talk about himself and know, oh, dude, you are wrong about so many things. What is the value of unreliability and why might a reader, an author, I mean, choose to put that into their story?

[DongWon] I mean, going back several episodes to goals and motivations. Right? A character's goals often involve them lying to themselves a little bit because they think they want X, but what they really need is Y. Right? So the movement from understanding what your original goal was to what your new goals are is one of that unreliability coming to the fore so you realize that, like, oh, my understanding of the world is shifting. The reason why first-person is sort of inherently unreliable, because character growth necessarily changes what is quote unquote real for the audience experience. Right? So you're shifting… Which is both what makes first-person fun and so challenging is that it's always already moving around you at all times.

[Mary Robinette] There's the idea that we talk about periodically, what is the lie the character believes? There's a bunch of different forms that that takes, but I think one of the things that you can really play with in first-person is that you can reveal character by what the character is lying to themselves about and how they are lying to themselves and the lengths that they will go to to preserve those lies. That's something that's, I think, much easier to do in first-person because of the navelgazing. But because they can do a soliloquy in ways that a third person really can't. Then, that in itself, can become a form of conflict as they are struggling with the fact that all of their reasons are breaking down.

[DongWon] I call that narrative parallax because the slight shift in perspective lets you reveal more.

[Erin] Something that just occurs to me as you asked this question is that the reason because I love unreliable narration. It's like my favorite thing ever. I think it's because I like characters that don't necessarily change or grow. Which means that the forward momentum in the story has to be the reader realization of the truth of who that character is. So, like, if they're not, like, because if they were doing… They externally sort of do the same things, but you… They understand more about the world, you understand more about them. It grows in context, as opposed to in action. Sometimes I think unreliability works well because it feels like you're moving forward as they continue to misinterpret the world, even though they don't do anything different. It still gives it a sense of a forward lean in the reader's mind.

[Howard] I think two of my favorite examples of unreliable narrators are in first-person our books where you don't realize until the very end that this is a single POV that has been telling you a story in multiple POVs. The Fifth Season and Player of Games by Iain Banks. Fifth Season by N K Jemison. You discover late in the stories, oh, this story has a first-person narrator who is part of the action, and they been lying to me about their involvement the whole time, until the very end. That's not really a first-person narrative, and maybe that's a segue into how we mess with proximity later.

[Dan] Well, now we finally have arrived at the end of times…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, it's homework time. What I would like you to do is go pick up a book that you love, something that you enjoy. Find a scene that you think is really great that is not in first-person, and take a crack at rewriting it in first-person from the point of view of one of the characters in it. Pay attention to what types of changes this requires you to make, how information comes across differently.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-05-lens-1-who

Key points: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I'm so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses.

[Season 20, Episode 05]

[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining our writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 20, Episode 05]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The lens of who.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And we've got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what's the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must've read a different book, moment you've ever had with a friend?

[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it's one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it's a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, "Oh, I love that dragon killing game." I'm… I was like, "Dragon killing game? I guess there's a side quest where you can kill dragons…" He was like, "Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there's no achievement for that." I was like, "Yes, because that's not what the game is about at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The game is not… That's not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.

[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[DongWon] I mean, it's called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.

[Howard] The point here is that, and I've said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can't count the number of times where I've come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They're like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I'm like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can't be friends.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.

[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I'm a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they're most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you're not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you're not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn't be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it's a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that's maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.

[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they'd be like… I don't know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that's so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it's easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you're like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don't get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you've created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's also… That's one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don't have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that's when you can start making a character that's multidimensional.

[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what's around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what's on the page. If you don't understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn't expect, that you didn't want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there's so many pieces to this that we're going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we'll be covering in upcoming episodes.

[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character's eyes, view, gaze. Even though it's obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It's always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character's having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character's eyes. They're going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.

[DongWon] It's important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It's why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I'm always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That's where tension comes from, because… But that's true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person's emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that's how you pull people into the story. That's how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There's… It's impossible for us not to do so. I think.

[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don't have to share… And I don't think any of us are saying this, the character's lens, in order to care about that character.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don't want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it's still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don't wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it's really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.

[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don't necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don't have to do an awful character. I think that's fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Howard] I've got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.

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[Howard] So, we've talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character's biography before sitting down to write the story. But I'm pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where's the shortcut?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.

[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there's a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what's here] character's name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character's coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who's an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they're going to bounce off each other, how they're going to react, how they're going to see the world.

[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character's afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Erin] For every meal. Don't know why. Then I'll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I've decided that she's just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that's an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it's a very discovery… Because I'm a discovery writer, it's a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it's like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?

[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That's not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people's pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I'm now speaking as if I'm the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don't remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they're afraid to face, which is that they didn't depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don't use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it's the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it's the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don't have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I've got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn't know and didn't care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it'll be a different tool for each character probably.

[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we're giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it's the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I'm very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you're right, doesn't know what tool you used. They're enthralled by the story, they're charmed by the character, they're connected.

[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there's really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…

[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin's thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you're trying to be general, you're trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you're trying to be broad, you're saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn't work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can't control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that's okay.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's not just okay, that's essential.

[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you're seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That's one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it's important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you're going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don't see it, if they don't get it.

[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it's because you did this and this and this, and the response is, "Oh, I'm so glad you noticed that."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "I didn't put that in there on purpose," is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, "I'm so happy you noticed that." Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else's lens. It's really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we're talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we're talking about let's give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You're having a bad day, you're going to bring a different lens to the table. You're having a really fantastic day, different lens. It's just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.

[Erin] I also just think that's a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it's like you love your characters so much that you don't want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it's the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.

[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it's entirely about character. Right? You're always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character's perspectives. But because it's collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character's perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.

[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.45: A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All Together

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-45-a-close-reading-on-structure-tying-it-all-together

Key Points: Key takeaways? POV as structure. Fitting in to the genre, and changing it. What's the beating heart of your story? Parallelism. Permission to experiment. Know the rules, then step away as needed. Not taxonomies, conversations. Figure out how it works. Who am I writing for? Early drafts are a mess! Build it in layers. Take little bits of joy along the way.

[Season 19, Episode 45]

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

[Season 19, Episode 45]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All Together.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] This has been such a fun conversation. I have been enjoying this all through this series, of getting ready to really dig in. When you're thinking about these conversations, what's one of the big pieces that you took away that you're like, oh, I'm going to think about that a lot more now when I'm approaching my own work?

[Howard] For me, the big one was POV as structure. Because in Fifth Season, you have the usual scene switching of POV… I say usual. It's pretty common, you switch POV when you switch chapters, and that defines a structure. But there is… There's an all underlying superstructure there that we weren't expecting, part of the big turn, and there's an element of that that is hugely thematic. So I guess that's the big thing I came away with.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think for me, and this might be evident from how much I talked last episode…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] But, for me, the thing I think so much about with this book is how it fits in the genre, and what it has done to the genre and the excitement I have for books that will… That are coming out and will be coming out in conversation with this book. Moving away from restoration fantasy to a different model is so exciting to me, and I'm really interested to see where that goes and how that continues to develop.

[Erin] I think I'm going to be thinking a little bit about trying to figure out what the beating heart of my manuscripts are. Like, you know what I mean? Is it in this one… We were saying, like, it's the breaking apart of the world, it's the breaking apart of the Earth.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And you see it resonate so many different times. I'd love to think about what is that for my work, and how can I make it so when we… We talked about in one episode when you see it from all angles, you're still seeing that same central theme and central idea.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's… That one was also very exciting to me. I think the thing for me that I had honestly not thought about before we started talking about it and seeing examples in this book was parallelism. I've talked about symmetry all the time… I think about that, I think about mirroring. But having those parallels and the different ways that things get represented… That I hadn't thought about using as a conscious choice going into something. I'm very excited about that as a tool to use that I haven't been consciously using.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's really one of my favorites, and it's one we've seen throughout the entire series of close readings. But, in this one in particular, I think N. K. Jemison does something really interesting and really just integrated into each of the storylines. All of the beats of the plots.

[Howard] The… Along with the point of view and parallelism, the shift in… Using second person and using third person, using both of them, threw me a little bit at first, and then it became a structural signaling device. And the big thing that I took away from it is, hey, Howard, that one project that you've shelved because you can't figure out whether you're allowed to change tenses and change from first to second to third person? The answer is, you're allowed to do this. Whether or not I do it well? Whether or not any of you ever see it, is a completely separate question. But, this book gave me permission to try some things that I look forward to failing at.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. The… This book, also, when I read it the first time, gave me permission to start thinking about structure in a different way. Up to that point, I had very much been thinking seven point plot structure. That was kind of my go to. I knew that I was using a structure that… I was using it as a prompt in many ways, to help me spot for things. With this book, I think what Erin was talking about before, with that beating heart, that… That this was the book that made me start thinking, okay, but what if… What if I didn't use someone else's structure? What if I didn't use something that was existing? And went into it and made my own thing. So, like the model that I'm working on now, I have scenes that I want to hit, but I'm deliberately not using a three act or seven act structure, I'm setting my breaks where the emotion is pulling it through, rather than… And I'm letting that beating heart of the story pull it through. But, having said that, one thing that I want to flag for readers is that I don't think N. K. Jemison could have written this as her first book.

[DongWon] Oh, absolutely not. This is what, her sixth book, seventh book, something like that. Yeah. I mean, she had two full series before this, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and then Killing Moon. So, like, she's deep into her career by this point, and was already quite successful as an author. Right? Then, I think, as we're going through this, a lot of this is, I think, yes, giving permission to break rules, but she's also showing such a mastery of the rule as she does it. She'll set it up, and then she'll break it. Right? I think that if you want to break rules is something that's really important of communicating, yeah, I know what I'm doing. Watch me do this, though. You know what I mean? There's so much the energy of how you can get away with quote unquote breaking the rules. So, I want people to read this and feel permission to try different things, to experiment, to not feel tied to a single tense, a single point of view, a single plot structure. Do some stuff that just feels really wild, that feels different and really stretch and grow. But do remember that you have to be good at the rule first, and understand the rule, so that you know what it is you're stepping away from.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Although, I am going to push back on that slightly, just a language thing, and hearken back to something Dan said much earlier in the season, which was that we want to talk about tools, not the rules.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That's, I think, something that Nora shows is that she basically went into the hardware store and said, "Gimme your tools. I'm gonna make something."

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, like, a tool is, there are ways you're supposed to use them in ways you're not. You can use it in ways you're not supposed to. There are risks to that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You have to know what you're doing to get away with it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You do not want to cut off fingers.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] At least not unin…

[DongWon] Not your own, and not on accident.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Sometimes you just have to try it in order to learn that that's not… Should you open the glass jar with a hammer? Maybe.

[DongWon] It'll work.

[Erin] If you try it and then… Hum. Like, there's some… There were some downsides to that process. It didn't quite work the way I thought. Okay. Next time, same thing, but in a bowl. Okay, sure, like maybe you don't learn exactly the lessons…

[DongWon] Just know you need a broom nearby.

[Erin] Exactly. Like… But then through that, like, who knows? Maybe the broom, to kill this analogy, is, like, turns out to be the thing that you end up using. So I think there's a lot of times… I love what Howard said about, like, the permission to try to play. And no one will know, like, what you write in the dark. If you write something in, like, fifth person, which is a new tense…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Maybe… So…

[DongWon] Fifth person?

[Erin] It's like [garbled] season.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You've got first person…

[DongWon] Perspective that has broken off of other perspectives…

[Erin] If you can figure that out, go for it. [Garbled]

[DongWon] Does it tap into the cosmic mind of the being that doesn't experience time as a linear…

[Howard] It's like second person subjunctivitis…

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] the only time [garbled] when you're alone…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And with a net.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And if you figure it out, look, come out and let us know, and we will have you on the podcast. I promise.

[DongWon] If you figure it out, publish it. You're going to win a Nobel Prize

[Mary Robinette] I have created the fifth person…

[Howard] Hey, let's take a break for a moment because when we come back, I want to make a food metaphor.

[DongWon] So, this week, I want to talk to you about one of my favorite movies I've seen this year, and possibly ever. It's a movie called I Saw the TV Glow. It's out from A24, from the director Jane Schoenbrun. It's her second movie. She's a queer trans director, and this movie is very much for the queers. It's like a really beautiful story. Really, it's technically a horror movie, because I think no one knows what else to call it, but there is very little in it that's, like, actively scary. At the same time, that is a profoundly unsettling experience for a very wide range of reasons. Basically, it's a story of two young people who are obsessed with a particular TV show. It's sort of set in the late nineties, and the TV show is very Buffy the Vampire Slayer like. So it's a movie that's a lot about our relationship to the media that we consume, our relationship to each other, and to our own sense of identity, and how that changes over time, and what do we owe each other and what do we owe ourselves. It's an incredibly beautiful movie. It's so well done. It's really… Has such a specific incredible visual palette. The soundtrack is absolutely killer. I cannot stop listening to it. It's full of bangers. So I can't recommend I Saw the TV Glow high enough. It just hit [VOD?] And it will probably be on streaming soon, so you should be able to watch it.

[Howard] While I was reading this book, I was experimenting with some nondairy non-wheat sauces for Sandra. And realized I needed words. I didn't even know what certain things were called. So I went googling and I found out that there were five French… And they call them the mother sauces. The more I drilled down into that, the more my inner taxonomist began to scream, because one of the sauces is a water and oil emulsion, and the other four are all… All begin with a roux. All begin with flour and butter thickening. I was like, that's not five mother sauces. That's two mother sauces. It should have been a mother and a father sauce. The point here is that when you are making something… The whole French cuisine thing, all of the quote daughter sauces, you start from an understanding of the sauce that you came from to make something new. And you don't step too far from it, or nobody will know what they're eating.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And so I was ha… I had that whole epiphany sitting over the pot making a sauce, realizing it has to still be food when I'm done. You know what else is a water and oil emulsion? Industrial lubricants. Mixtures of water and oil that are designed to provide a coolant and lubri… You can't eat those.

[Mary Robinette] That is not where my brain went with industrial lubricants.

[Howard] The point here though is that as we learn these tools, and as we file them for ourselves, we need to know why we're using them. We need to know how people in the past have used them. DongWon, as you categorized these families of genre books, I feel like that's super important for us to remember.

[DongWon] Well, that's why… I think it's important that it's not taxonomies, it's conversations. Right? Genre is a conversation that we are all participating in. All the fights we see between different parts of the conversation, different subcategories, different subgenres, who's initiating it, who's leading it, and who's determining it, all of those are because the conversation that were in feels very natural and very important to us. Right? So when you talk about the mother sauces, it's not so much that here are the five categories of sauce that everything needs to fit into, it's this is in conversation with the veloute, this is in conversation with the bechamel.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's like those conversations… And once you say that, I see it on a menu, and I'm like, okay. This descending in this kind of order. Right? This is epic fantasy, this is adventure fantasy, this is romance. All these things create a conversation that I can then jump in and I know what language we're using, I know what terms we're agreeing on. And the comp titles that you're talking about so often are the most rigid form of that, the most specific form of that. Because we need it, for, like, a business purpose. But I do think that they are useful still in certain ways of letting us understand who it is we're talking to and why we're having this conversation. Right? I think military science fiction is having a different conversation than postcolonial fantasy is.

[Erin] I was thinking about comp titles, and I think they're really important, obviously, for business. But I think it's also really cool to think about, not just the what of a comp title, but also maybe some hows.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin], so, like, there's, like, my book is like X plus Y, but also, like, I would love to have, like, the word styling of this, and the plot of that, and the character relationships of this third thing because I think that helps us focus not on, like… If you're not in the middle of selling a book, like, comparing yourself to the end product of somebody else, but trying to understand the process. Joining the conversation versus sort of listening and then thinking, like, well, why isn't anybody talking to me?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Part of it is figuring out how it works. I think that's so important, and why I've loved doing this reading series, because it really got us into the how does it work.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] And that's the thing that, like, I think ultimately I will remember even if I forget the individual books, which I won't, because there amazing. But, like, even if I did somehow…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, I think I still will remember, like, the tools and the craft that came with them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that… That thinking, again, more consciously about the traditions that your writing in, which is one of the things that we were looking at with the Fifth Season. It's like, oh, yeah. If I think about that, if I think about who I want to be writing for, which I always think about kind of generally… I usually am also writing for one specific person. But if I am thinking more consciously about that, and about the ways in which I want to invert something that somebody else has done, it gives me a broader palette to play with. That's fun. I have really, really enjoyed the way we've been able to dig into this book, and I honestly wish we had more episodes that we could do with it.

[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's such a big, rich, dense text that there's so many things and so many conversations we could have here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] One of the things that I'm looking forward to, and I… As of this moment, we haven't done it yet, is interviewing N. K. Jemison, and taking all of these thoughts that we've had across all of these episodes and trying to distill that into a conversation where we find out what really happened.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because almost certainly, what we think the process was is not the process that went into creating this book.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I want to reiterate for our listeners. We've kind of hit this a couple of times, but this… Howard, you were quoting from the acknowledgments of the book at one point, about how incredibly difficult the process of writing this book was for N. K. Jemison. We can look at this and say, this is a masterpiece, that this is so exceptionally well done, and X, Y, Z. And as a reader, that can feel very intimidating. Right? But what I want to remind you all is that this was hard work that she did over years and a lot of careful thought and…

[Mary Robinette] And nearly threw away.

[DongWon] And nearly threw away. This book was, I think, a real struggle in a real way to get to where she wanted it to be. That's because writing really good books is hard. Writing really exciting fiction, breaking new ground, is all very difficult. Especially when you're trying to find a fifth POV to write from. Finding that territory is difficult. So if you're sitting there, writing, and being like, I don't know how to structure like this. I only know how to do five act structures, seven point plot structure, whatever it is. That's okay. We're not saying that you have to do anything like this. We're saying, look at this, there is so much we can learn from this. But also, God damn, this is hard.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There's a piece, an art piece, called Ink Wing. It's framed, hanging on the wall in our house, which was done by my daughter while she was at art school, or during the time when she was in art school. She was at home at the time. And which she had given up on, was furious at to the point that she threw it and it frisbeed and ended up on the roof of the house. Then she climbed up and pulled it down from the roof of the house. In the way we've framed it, you can't quite see the bent corner. But I love that piece, because it's gorgeous. I can't see flaws in it. I can't see anything wrong with it. Yet I know personally the artist who created it was so upset at it that she threw it onto the roof of my house.

[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that a lot of people forget about. That there is that point in the process. One of the other things that I want you to take away from this, when you're thinking about your structure, and your writing something, and you're like, oh, this is a mess. For those of you who do crafting, as anyone walked into your crafting room while you were in the process?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] You know what that looks like.

[DongWon] I do not want people looking at my wood shop halfway through.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It is an absolute mess. That is what early drafts are like. That is what the early structure is like. So you have freedom to be messy in these early drafts. The finished product that we have been all going Whew! Ha! That's something that came after many iterations. So remember that while you're working on this, if you take nothing else away from this structure discussion, remember that you can work it in layers.

[Erin] I think also that there is a way to take little bits of joy along the way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I have been learning to play the guitar this year. I am quite bad, I will say, still.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That there are chords that I do know now how to make with my fingers without thinking about it that I didn't before. One time I was strumming badly and I was like, but I actually know this is a G chord and I didn't before. I was like it is important to take a minute to marvel at the things you have mastered, the things you have learned, the things you feel good about. Because there's always something more you could be doing, there's always somebody writing quote unquote a better book. There's always somebody else doing something you wish you could. But only you can do the things that you have done. I think there's just something so important to take that with you and celebrate yourself. Because you rock.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] With that, I think we're going to give you homework. We're actually going to give you homework with your own work in progress.

[Mary Robinette] I want you to reverse engineer an outline for your work in progress. This doesn't have to be incredibly detailed, this can just be like here's the one important thing in this chapter. Much like we had you do with at the beginning of this where we had you look at the table of contents for this book. Then I want you to look at that outline that you've got, and I want you to try to add one parallel.

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

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-44-a-close-reading-on-structure-tradition-and-innovation

Key points: Where does it fit into the fantasy lineage? Using tradition, but also breaking from it. In conversation with... What the writer intends and what the audience thinks. The conversation that the author is having with the genre and the conversation that the reader is having. Anxiety of influence! Fifth Season is a break from the restoration line of epic fantasy. "The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there's no changing it." Each POV is in a different genre. Story as unfolding and telling. When writing, do you think of being in conversation with other books, or with the canon? What has made you the storyteller you are? Who are you telling stories to? Be aware of the traditions you are following, and of the ones you are breaking.

[Season 19, Episode 44]

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[Season 19, Episode 44]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week I wanted to talk about another aspect of Fifth Season. I think we're going to zoom out a little bit, a little further away from the text. This is coming from a little bit of my perspective, both as an English major and someone who almost went into academia, and also as a publisher. But one thing that I'm really interested in talking about this book is the way it fits into the lineage of fantasy novels. I think this is a really interesting thing to think about when thinking about how to structure a book, how to frame a book. This kind of touches on some stuff like Hero's Journey kind of things and the way that's used in fiction. But also, just the place that this book has in the canon of fantasy literature, to use a loaded term. So, in a lot of ways, modern epic fantasy is established by Lord of the Rings and a lot of it is descended from that. I think Fifth Season is a really interesting break from that tradition that nonetheless is in conversation with it. Right? One thing that struck me on my second reading of the book several years ago was how much of it uses the classic fantasy tropes. Right? To me, it felt so contemporary and so fresh and so different. But when I stepped back for a second, I said, "Wait a minute. This is a book about wizards who go to a magic school and use crystal magic." I was like, this is just the most classic fantasy I've read in a second. Like, harkening back to, like, Tolkien seventies, eighties fantasy. And the way she pulled from that and yet flipped it and reversed it to create such an exciting, fresh work.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things… I'm glad you brought this up. One of the things that I also love about that, in that is that much like when you look back at the Wizard Master… Excuse me, The Wizard of Earthsea, that magic does basically one thing, you use words and you can change things. Yes, there are nine different Masters, but it's basically, you use words and you can change things. The thing that's happening here is you've got one thing they can do, they can do some vibrational stuff.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] It's all of the different ways in which it can be twisted and pushed, and then is in conversation with this whole, larger body of work that is outside of fantasy that causes it to be doing some really interesting fresh things. Also, I just need to put out a little shout out to Dark Crystal, which is my favorite crystal magic.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] I [garbled really] like the phrase in conversation with… Such an interesting one, because some of it is like we don't actually know…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, we believe that a work is in conversation with another work. I remember earlier you were saying that this work is maybe a little bit in conversation with Octavia Butler. I agree with all these things, but it's interesting, like, how do we know sort of what tradition a book is drawing from? How much of that is the book doing it, and how much of it is us doing it? Because we bring our own context…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] With us. So we're like, oh, I see these things here, and I've seen them in other places.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's a really interesting thing. Unless you ask the author, which we will…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] It's hard to know.

[DongWon] Well, it's the difference between sort of intent and the reader. Right? My subjectivity… Sorry, we're getting a little academic here. But my subjectivity as the reader is projecting all of the stuff that I've read. Right? Like, I'm not super familiar with Dark Crystal, so I don't see that. I do… I am familiar with Earthsea and Lord of the Rings and parable of the sower. So, for me, I'm seeing this book as being deeply in conversation with those three things. We were off mic talking about Omelas as well, the ones who walk away from Omelas, another Le Guin story that this feels very in conversation with as well. Right? So…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think what traditions it's pulling from is fascinating.

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, one of the definitions of genre is that it is literature that is in conversation with itself. That you are both be… Not just that it's the writer is thinking about it. It's that it is… The readers are having conversations about it. So, regardless of what Nora intended with this, because of the way it's being read, because of the way it's positioned, it is in conversation through the conversations of the readers. Actually, as we were talking about it, I think for me… I said Dark Crystal because it is puppets, but for me the thing that it actually brought to mind more was Crystal Singer. Which is a much older…

[Howard] McCaffrey. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Anne McCaffrey. Sorry, my brain just… Similar, one of the similar things there is that you have to have this particular skill, which is, in that case, perfect pitch. Then you go to this planet and you go through this transformation. Some people get turned into rock people by accident. But you are locked into this career now. Because you can no longer exist… There's a symbiont in this case, is the mechanism. But it's still that idea of this being locked in, being enslaved, for the benefit of this other civilization that then convinces you that the reason it's okay is because you are highly valued. So that then the characters become part of their own narrative.

[Howard] I just realized that's exactly like being a web cartoonist…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I could no longer exist without the Internet.

[DongWon] Also, you start to turn into rock…

[Howard] I was just going to die…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Howard] I started to turn into a rock. No, the… Sorry, the important thing that I was going to say was that whether or not the author is consuming, is aware of, is having a conversation with the genre, the reader probably is. The best example I can think of for this is the TV show Heroes, which, when it came out, a bunch of us said we've already read this comic book. It's just the X-Men. Why are you trying to read tell it? We've already done this. Heroes was wonderful. It did neat things. But it was trying to do so without the audience having read comic books. Which can't happen. So, when you talk about tradition and innovation, it's entirely possible to convince yourself through anxiety of influence that you are innovating because you are not reading everything else. That's probably not the way it's going to be read.

[DongWon] Right. One thing that I think about Fifth Season is it is deeply in a lineage, in a tradition, and I do think that Nora knows that. Or N. K. Jemison knows that. But… How she thinks about it, I'm very curious to hear. I've not had a conversation with her about it. But, something that I do think is really important is that this book also represents a rupture. This is a very stark departure from one of the core… What I think is one of the defining impulses of epic fantasy, and what I also think is exciting is that because of this rupture, we've seen the start of a new lineage. I see fantasy works now in conversation with Fifth Season, rather than Lord of the Rings as they sort of… I mean, the Poppy war is the example that this brings to mind the most. And because… What I see the difference is, is most epic fantasy… I'm not saying that N. K. Jemison was the first person to do this, but she did it, I think, in a way that was very effective and sort of opened the genre up, is most epic fantasy is what I think of as restoration fantasy. Right? So, Lord of the Rings, the world was good, it has fallen through the rise of Sauron, and just the general, like, rise of the age of men, and the goal is to restore the former glory. The goal is to get Aragorn, the heirs of Numenon, back on… Not Numenon…

[Howard] Numenor.

[DongWon] Numenor, back on the throne. That is so much of what that book is about. The farmboy finds a magic sword can defeat the evil, restore the kingdom to the place of justice and glory and good. It is about restoring a former order. Right? This is part of what makes a lot of epic fantasy inherently conservative, because it's saying things that used to be good, we need to get back to those ways of being. Right? Fifth Season is saying the exact opposite, of examining structures over and over again and saying these things are broken beyond repair. Because we are exploiting people, damaging people, hurting people in a way that the only answer is to burn it down and start something new. Right? Or it's not even particularly interested in what the new thing to start is. It is interested in the examination of what has gone wrong entirely at this point, to the parts that we, as the readership… I don't know that every reader is feeling this way, but are coming around a little bit to maybe Alibaster was right. Maybe he had a point. This is the Magneto is right argument for X-Men fans, of which I've been a big component of. This is Kill Monger's right, this is siding with the villain a little bit because restoration can't be the answer for everybody.

[Mary Robinette] There's a line in the book that is the world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there's no changing it.

[DongWon] Exactly. Speaking of accepting things being the way they are, let's go to break for a moment, and will be right back.

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Family Reservations by Eliza Palmer. This is so good. It is not a science fiction or fantasy book. This is mainstream. You should read it. It weaves together some of the most complex family dynamics I've seen. Part way through it, I was thinking, "Oh. Oh, this is King Lear." Eliza describes it as succession meets fine dining. So it has some of the most delicious food descriptions ever. The story does a beautiful job of handling omniscient narrator. And I highly recommend it, not just because it's a fantastic read, but also because it is a masterful use of omniscient narration. If you been wanting to play with this tool, this book is a really good one to read to see how it's been handled in a modern context. Although you should expect to come away being very hungry.

[DongWon] Okay. Before the break, Mary Robinette, I think you had a point that you were trying to expand on with the quotation of that line.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's just that when we talk about things that are in conversation, and when you look at when this book was written in the conversations around Black Lives Matter and breaking the world, there are parallels that a modern reader will bring to that, whether or not it is intended. Then, I think, also one of the things about it for me that is interesting structurally is that if you think about the structure of the book also breaks structure. Like, it is not structured the way you've seen other books structured. That is part of what makes it feel so fresh, is that we aren't seeing regurgitation of the hero's journey. Although she is re-purchasing parts of it. Like, when you look at a hero's journey, there's a mentor, there's a character, like, Alibaster is literally called the mentor. The Guardians, one of the other things that happens when they go into the Threshold is that... In the Monomyth, you meet the Guardian, and they are literally called the Guardians. But they are the evil ones in this. It's... It is interesting to me that then the way that first book works, it interrupts the hero's journey at what some people call the dark night of the soul. Sometimes people call it the descent into the abyss, where we literally go into the earth. Like… So… But it is fundamentally not the hero's journey.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This book is fundamentally not that. It is taking those elements, it is breaking them, and it is re-purposing them to build this entirely new structure.

[Erin] I think it's like bringing new things in. I mean, the… It's so funny to think about the hero's journey. It's also maybe… It's there, but, like, it is only one small… There are a lot of ways to tell stories.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] There are a lot of traditions of storytelling. We have a small one that we've taken and sort of, like, that has been part of fantasy that I think does come from that Tolkien way of thinking. I feel like one of the things that I've been really loving in recent works in general is seeing different ways of telling stories coming into things. I think that probably there's also some of that that this… That this book is in… Is in conversation with. Even though not everyone may know that that's a voice that's being…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Added to the conversation.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think that's something really cool that books can do, which is that you don't have to understand every single thing that the book is working with in order to enjoy that story, in order for that story to be influential on other stories that are being told.

[DongWon] Exactly. It goes into the ambient conversation and space, and then people start responding to it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I particularly enjoyed is that each kind of track of the story has a different structure.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That works with each other's. So, Dam…

[DongWon] Damaya.

[Mary Robinette] Damaya. Damaya is very like, "Oh. Here is the orphan child who is becoming the chosen one," kind of thing. Syonite is getting very much the reluctant hero journey. For the beginning of it. But then when you start braiding them together, where these things are working in parallel, they fracture, they go in different directions. Then you got this other thing, the whole second person section, which doesn't play by any of those rules.

[DongWon] This is a trick I think of most clearly used in Game of Thrones, where each POV character is in a different genre of story. Some are in event, like… You have… What's the young girl's name, I'm blanking on her. But each of the characters, they're like, some are in an adventure story, some are in a political stunt story, some are in a straight up horror story. Right? Some are in a supernatural story, some are in a grounded political fantasy. N. K. Jemison has done that here, where again, we have the child coming into her own power, we have the wizard at the height of her power exploring the world, and then we have the very contemporary sort of like tragic hero story. Again, going back to the parallelism or the POV, realizing that all three are the same person…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is just… Makes it a stunning trick in terms of how it operates within the genre conversation.

[Howard] Um. I was just reading a bit from Leverage Redemption, the new seasons of leverage. One of the characters says, "Hey, look. We're going to mess this guy up pretty hard. Are we the bad guys here?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sophie says, "Oh, yes. Never forget that, Brianna. We're not heroes, we're just necessary." I love that moment, because in one context, yes, you're necessary and I'm siding with you. You are in… You're hurting this person, but you're doing a good that needs to happen. And on the other hand, I look at it and say, in the context of Fifth Season, well, this is probably how the Guardians feel about themselves. Oh, we're not the good guys, but we're necessary. And just that brushstroke across the Tolkien line of black-and-white, good versus evil… That's silvery gray brushstroke, it just shimmers and invites you to stare at it. I love it.

[Mary Robinette] There's an interlude at the one third mark in this book, which arguably is the end of Act One, sure. But it literally says, "A break in the pattern, a snarl in the weft. There are things you should be noticing here, things that are missing and conspicuous by their absence." I think that's one of the things that makes this so powerful, is that she is… There's a line from Hemingway that says that a story is the things that you leave out. And the things that she's choosing not to show, the structural elements that she is choosing not to use… We don't get the reconciliation. We don't get the restoration. All of those things that are being left out on purpose are what makes this so interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah. An earlier [garbled] reference how she calls out I'm not going to tell you the nice part of this story…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, no rude.

[Howard] When we talked earlier, previous episode, about… Erin and I had this conversation off-line about… Sometimes we'll just read spoilers because we want to know what happens, but we still want to enjoy the story. A story is an unfolding, and it is also a telling. I can appreciate the telling without the unfolding, and I can appreciate the unfolding while not paying attention to the telling. The consuming media with that in mind, feels to me like a break with tradition. It also, and I'm just going to put a pin in this, argues really well for this book, because it is so well told. The telling is so much more than the unfolding.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's why we would encourage you to read it more than once.

[DongWon] I have one question that's a little bit of a pivot. As a publisher, I've talked about this a lot on podcasts and elsewhere, I think in comp titles. Right? I'm inherently wired to think, this book is like these other books. This book is in conversation with these other books. I'm curious, as a writer, are you guys actively thinking about lineage in that way, or, like, canon in that way, and the idea that a canon can be a personal thing. Right? In terms of, like, what you've read and where that comes from.

[Mary Robinette] Um, I mean, definitely, I've never done anything like Jane Austen with magic or The Thin Man in space…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah, that is true. Yeah. So I think you're very unaware of your influences…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely never done Apollo era science fiction that was influenced by Ray Bradberry. Absolutely haven't done that. I don't know what you're talking about.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I don't know that I… I mean, I know what I've read and if I… I could reconstruct the things that have made me who I am as a storyteller. I think it's a lot of things though. I think some of it is canon science fiction, I think some of it is barbershop tales.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I think some of it is a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I do think that this is something that I a lot of times will challenge a student to do, which is to think about what has made you the storyteller that you are.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And who are you then telling stories to?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think those are two really key things, because otherwise, other people will tell you, like, when you put a book out in the world, anyone can tell you who you're in conversation with. But when you're writing it, you get to decide.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At that moment, take the power and say, this is who I am and here is how I want to tell this tale.

[Howard] The better you get at reading, at comprehending what you read, the more able you are to, when you write, to consciously say, I am writing like the things I have consumed and to be able to say I am going to attempt to write unlike the things I have consumed. I am aware enough of the traditions I've been consuming that I am going to break with them and I'm going to write differently than them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's a… I see that as a late career skill that takes a long time to develop and you develop it by reading.

[DongWon] That's what I love about Fifth Season is it is both deeply honoring and in conversation with the traditions that it comes from, but also is so deeply interested in being like, "Uh uh, I'm doing something different."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Erin, I really loved what you said in terms of the books that made you a writer or, like, the things that you're in con… The stories and not even just books. Right? We're pulling from all parts of our lives. For you, that being different from the conversation that you think the audience is, like, who is this for, what books are they reading, what books will they know and understand? Then, thirdly, the one that you can't control in any way, which is, what people will actually say your book is like. Right? What people will say once it's out in the world. I think your relationship to each of those three different interpretations is really, really important. As a publisher, I'm most interested in the second one, the one that I want writers to come in with is an understanding of here's my audience, here's what they're reading, this is like that. But you understanding for yourself why you're writing this and where you're coming from I think is so important and so powerful.

[Mary Robinette] I think it is the most important thing. To know why you're writing it and who your writing it for.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because you can lose yourself. I mean, I think it's important, you want to get published, you want your stuff out in the world. But I think if you lose hold of who you are as a storyteller, then you won't be happy with the story no matter how successful it is, no matter how many other people like the way that you told it.

[DongWon] 100 percent.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It is a common thing that I will see with… When I was going through the slush pile, I would see people attempting to mimic someone else.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And seeing people thinking about what does this editor want? What does that editor want? But it is that thing about what you want… I'm also going to say one other thing about the conversations that we're having. I would not be surprised if Nora had read Crystal Singer and forgotten that she had read it, and that that turned up in the book. Because I have, when I'm gone back and reread some things, I've been like, oh, I didn't actually think about the fact that when I was writing Glamorous Histories, I'm like I'm going to do this something fresh and new with my magic, it's all going to be based on folds and threatens. Then, I'm watching Game of Thrones… Not Game of Thrones. Wheel of Time. I'm like, oh, look at them using folds and threads. No consciousness of that. But this is what we're talking about, that you can be influenced by something, it can come into the book, but it's still your own.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's still your own, even if you have been in conversation with something and forgot the the conversation happened.

[DongWon] This is me talking about patterns once again. That's okay, that's how stories work. We are all absorbing stories that we've read, we are all absorbing fiction that we've engaged with, and recombining it and putting it back together in our own ways. Right? So just because a reader will come up to you and be like, "Hey. This is just like that thing from… That Anne McCaffrey did," doesn't invalidate your work at all. Your work is still your work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So don't let that throw you. It's okay to have influences, it's okay to come from a place and… In fact, I think it's one of the most important things, is to recognize you come from a place and try to understand that. If you don't have a perfect understanding of it, that's fine too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With that, I have some homework for you. Very much along these lines. I want you to make a list of the books that you consider the antecedents to this book that you're working on now. What works is your book in conversation with? Are you following on and building on that foundation, or are you disrupting and pushing back on that legacy in one way or another?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.43: A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and Inversion

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-43-a-close-reading-on-structure-parallelism-and-inversion

Key points: Parallel structures. 3 POVs. Mirroring structure with inflection point in the middle. Inversion. Fifth season of catastrophe. Narrative rhyming. Echoes, imagery, emotional states can create parallels. A knife in the hand can create parallels. Read this book twice. How do you do this? Ask a question, again and again. Revision!

[Season 19, Episode 43]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and Inversion

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week, I really wanted to talk about the parallel structures that are present in Fifth Season. We talked a lot last week about perspectives and POV and how those shift. And we got a little bit into parallels, just inherently in that, but the way Fifth Season is structured has two major structural things, in my view. One is you have the three POVs of Damaya, Syonite, and Essun that all have their own arcs. Right? They all have the arc of being pulled through the story in a beginning, middle, end way. There's also an inflection point somewhere in the book where you have this mirroring structure of beginning with a child's death and ending with a child's death. Right? We have Essun/Syonite losing both of her children, or two of her children. The inversion of her husband killing her son, and then her killing her own son at the end of Syonite's story is this absolutely devastating mirroring effect as we have the inversion across the book. That works because we have these three parallel structures. So I just kind of want to toss it to the group a little bit. Like, is that something you grokked in the moment of the sort of rhyming between the different narratives, or did they feel really distinct to you?

[Howard] I did notice that there were parallels… I've only read it once. You have the advantage of a second and perhaps a fifth read on me.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think three total now. So, yeah.

[Howard] I've only read it once, so a lot of my time was spent figuring out what's going on. But, by the end, I definitely noticed the parallelism of the three POVs. The other thing that I noticed, and it took me a while to really grasp the in-world terminology of Fifth Season. The Fifth Season is not there have been four seasons and now there is a fifth. A fifth season is a season in which a catastrophe adds a season to your year…

[DongWon] Or your 10 years.

[Howard] And it… Yeah. It adds a season to this year…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And that season may span multiple years…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Or decades. And there was a parallelism to that, because they kept coming back to previous… Or talking about previous fifth seasons. The choking season. The season of teeth. The… Oh, what was…

[DongWon] The acid season.

[Howard] The acid season. The idea that there was a season in which they learned metal just doesn't last well…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because we get acid rain and it will destroy these nice things you've made.

[DongWon] This goes back to secondary world contextual tension that we were talking about many episodes ago now. But it's such a wonderful idea of seeing that in-world understanding of the context of a thing, where Syonite will look at the metal doors of the rich… What was the term for the towns?

[Howard] Yumenes.

[DongWon] Oh, no, no, no. There's like the whole… Like the towns with…

[Erin] Comms.

[DongWon] Comms. Thank you. Where she would look at the big metal doors on one of the Comms and just be like, "These damned fools have no idea what they're doing," because of the contextual sort of history there. So, yeah.

[Howard] Coming back to the parallelism, there was this idea… And I didn't get this until, oh, 80 percent of the way through the book, the idea that Damaya, Syonite, Essun's life is itself punctuated in the same way the world's life is punctuated by fifth seasons. There are these periods of disaster, these periods of upheaval, and I love that.

[Erin] I'll say, for me, it felt more cyclical than parallel. I think I felt more like life changes, but does it change?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think the fact that it's called the Fifth Season sets me up contextually… If you think about it, the title is the most obvious piece of contextual thing that you give your reader. It's the one thing that no one in your story knows. They do not know what the story is called. You do. So I was set up for a cycle, but I'm curious to ask, what you think is required to make something parallel? Like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] How many things need to work in sync for it to feel like a parallel structure for you?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think it's almost maybe more narrative rhyming than parallel, exactly. Right? Because I think you're right, that it is cycles, especially in this book. Right? So much of what N. K. Jemison is trying to get across is the way cycles of violence and abuse perpetuate themselves, the way cycles of exploitation perpetuate themselves, the way cycles of seasons… All of that. So, to me, I think it is rhyming of certain things. Right? Like, it's hard for me not to connect Schaffa and Damaya in some of those early scenes with Syonite and Alibaster going to the Node Maintainer. Right? As we see two endpoints of the same logic, as we see two aspects of the absolute horror of what the Guardians are. Right? Then I think there's also later rhymings of seeing the Guardians die when Damaya goes and finds the socket versus I think the later scenes we see of the Guardians, both the truly horrifying attack on Alibaster…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] When they're in the city where… The coastal Comm…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Then, sort of seeing them again at the end of the book. There's sort of this thing of, like, what the hell is going on with the Guardians? Is, like, such a big question. Right? So, like, I think those rhyming things really do kind of set up that parallel. I don't think you need parallel arcs, like… I don't think every beat needs to be the same. But I think having points here and there that echo each other, that have overlapping imagery, that have overlapping emotional states, I think all three of those can be ways in which you can create a parallel.

[Howard] I talked about this in the class I taught using Beethoven's fifth and some other musical pieces, just talking about parallels and how you don't need much. If you put a knife in someone's hands in two different scenes…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In the book, they are completely different people, they are completely different knives, the reader will create a parallel out of that for you. That's an extremely useful tool. Just reading that one sentence, one bit of imagery, one element of a paragraph on a page can be enough to forge a parallelism in the reader's mind. Once you've done that, you can play all kinds of games.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's drawing the connection between two dots, and once you have that connection established, then they will feel on parallel tracks or on similar cycles, too, I think play with as a writer.

[Erin] Yeah. I love the concept of narrative rhyming that you just dropped in here, which I don't know if you… Like, I know what you mean by it, but it might be good to sort of talk about what you mean when you talk about narrative rhyming?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think narrative and visual rhyming is, like, one of the most important techniques in all of storytelling. Right? It is to… I'm trying to find a way to describe it that isn't just relying on other metaphors…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like, to me, it's like a leitmotif, right, in music. It is a thing you return to over and over again, and as you do so, you can layer on more meaning to it. Right? So, like a very simple example is the way Stonelore works in the book. Right? Where Stonelore references in all these different moments in the book, and every time we get a new piece of Stonelore or someone telling us the lore of the Stonelore, so, this is Alibaster explaining the secret tablets and things like that a little bit, the apocryphal text and things like that, we're getting all those extra layers and that adds richness and texture to our understanding of it. Right? So that's like a very simple form of… That is a very simple form of that rhyming. Right? Another example is the moments in which parents understand that their child is an orogene. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] like, hey, they have that power and the ways in which they respond to…

[Howard] [garbled]

[DongWon] Whatever it is. And then, of course, we have Essun's husband literally killing one of the children and then leaving. Then we have the other parallel on the island of how they treat orogene children. Right? So we have this rhyming, and each time, we see a new one, it's a different layer, different kind of hostility, different learning about what the world is.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] I think of… When you say narrative rhyming, my mind immediately goes to The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe. Because the word Bell is used over and over and over again, and technically, it's not a rhyme, because it's the same word. Of course, it rhymes with itself. But it is a concept, and parallel to it, or sitting alongside it, is the types of metals. Iron and silver and gold and brass are all part of a narrative rhyme, because they are all a metal and they are categorizing what we are getting from the bells.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And I like distilling it down to something tiny like a poem that super effective because it extrapolates out big for me more easily.

[DongWon] Rhyming creates a pattern which creates tension, because then you can resolve the pattern in one way or another. While we are back on patterns for a moment, let's fulfill our pattern, and take a break.

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

[A] I'm so sorry I'm late. I was just talking to my sister about protecting abortion rights.

[B] Wait. Didn't we already do that in Ohio? We passed Issue One last year.

[A] I know. By a wide margin, too. But now it's up to our state Supreme Court to decide whether they enforce it or ignore it.

[B] Ignore it? Will they really do that?

[A] They will if we don't keep extremists out of the court. But we can protect our rights by electing justices Donnelly, Stewart, and Forbes.

[B] Um. I don't know if I can remember that. Listen, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

[A] Here's a trick. All you have to do is remember Don't Stop Fighting.

[B] Don't Stop Fighting? Oh, I get it. D, S, F. Donnelly, Stewart, Forbes. I love that.

[A] Tell everyone you know. If you supported Issue One last year, Don't Stop Fighting. Vote for Donnelly, Stewart, and Forbes.

[C] This message was paid for by Red, White, and Blue, a community of women who care about reproductive rights as much as you do.

[Erin] Eden Royce is one of my favorite short story writers ever. I had the pleasure of editing an issue of Strange Horizons that featured her story Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, which, like, just from the title, right, you're there. It joins another story of hers, the Shirley Jackson nominated Room and Board Included, Demonology Extra, and 17 other short stories in her new collection, Who Lost, I Found. So, Eden is an amazing black Gothic horror writer from South Carolina, and she brings Geechee-Gullah culture, which is the culture of the sea islands and the coastal areas of the Carolinas and Georgia into all of her work and all of her stories. They're written in ways that make you tense, but also make you feel filled with love. So, please check out the amazing Eden Royce's stories in Who Lost, I Found.

[DongWon] So we talked a bit about sort of the narrative rhyming in the parallel structures, the cycles. One thing that I think is super interesting… I kind of mentioned this at the beginning, but it starts with a truly awful moment and ends with a truly awful moment. These are paired in a certain way, and there's sort of an inflection point in the middle that we get somewhere that creates sort of this inversion by the end of the book. I'm wondering if people have thoughts about, like, how that structure works, some sort of end to end rather than layered?

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that you can do is introduce surprising elements, like, hello, everyone.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] For me, the thing that was interesting about that was that they hit that beat of a parent killing a child more than once. There's a point in the middle of the book which sets up, besides the beginning setting it up, there's a point in the middle of the book where she says that… In one of the Syonite's sections where she says that she would later understand why sometimes killing them was more… Was kinder than sending them to a Node Outpost.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That… When you hit the first arrival at the Node Outpost, you're like, oh, okay. Then when you get to the moment where she kills her own son at the very end, you also realize… For me, there were two things about that. One is that is… That predates the killing at the beginning.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it is only… What it does is it recontextualizes our understanding of why that death… The many, many layers of why that death was so horrible for her.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love a reveal or a twist that echoes back through the narrative you've experienced before and rewrites your understanding of all of those beats up until that moment.

[Howard] This, per the episode that we just had where we were talking about whose perspective is it anyway, why do you break up a timeline and tell a story in media res so that you can align emotional arcs differently. The emotional arcs aligned via this parallelism, via this inversion, are so much more powerful when you discover that the killing of a child that happens first… When you learn about it, and so it now re-informs your whole understanding of the thing that we opened the book with.

[Erin] I've been thinking about, like, earthquakes and epicenters and sort of as its own thematic element… I've been thinking about how… Thinking about this book and I was thinking about Ring Shout and how I would summarize them, like, in a word or two. To me, like, Ring Shout is about the power of community, and Fifth Season is about breaking the world.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I love that in some ways, this is like a seismologist, like, going back and finding where the actual break was. Where was the worst break? It's the one that we end with.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even though we start with the worst on paper, like, for the world break, we end with the worst emotional break. Like, we been sort of tracking back to it the whole time.

[DongWon] It's the reveal that Stonelore is wrong, you don't look to the center. It's not just the center, it's… The epicenter can be somewhere other than a perfect circle. Right? So the elliptical nature of these two points that create this… This sort of ovoid space of the novel. Right? I don't know, there's something about that that's really powerful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's a line in the book where she says, "This is what you must remember. The ending of one story is just the beginning of another."

[DongWon] Oof. Yeah. Right. Oh, I'm so mad at her sometimes.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Very much so. Very, very much so. And one of the things that I love about the way she is using the inversion and the parallelism is that she's… Sometimes people call this foreshadowing where you set something up. That's not exactly what the way N. K. Jemison is wielding this. Because it is the… It's, like, yes, something bad is going to happen later. But it is the recontextualization of that first element because of the bad thing that happens later. So it's not just foreshadowing, it's that that thing that is a foreshadowing becomes re-contextualized.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of the thing that happens later…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And that's that inversion, the parallelism, that's the power of that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, also, just FYI readers. You should read this book twice. Because when you read it a second time, there are layers upon layers of this kind of thing that are happening all the way through it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, I think what we were talking about in terms of rewriting itself by the end of it and being able to see all of those tricks up front. It's just an absolute master class and, on a craft perspective, you just learned so much about structure, about rhyming, about all these different things if you just go back through the text a second time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That actually brings me to a question, which is, let's say I'm writing something and I'm not N. K. Jemison, which I'm not, like, how do I then figure out how to create this kind of, like, layered parallelism in a story? How do I rhyme narratively?

[Mary Robinette] Some of the techniques that I have been playing with, because I have the same question…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Much of it rising after reading this book the first time. But, one of the things I've been playing with is thinking about it when you go into the book, about a question that you want to ask. So, she's not… Like, rather than saying, I am going to tell a story about, you say, how does this affect? What are the ways… How does a parent feel when they have to kill a child? And then you ask that question…

[DongWon] What a question to ask.

[Mary Robinette] Right? Yes. Okay. So. But then you ask that question again and again, and that allows you to set it up. Or, like, what does it mean for a world to end? How do you define world? Is it a personal world, is it a larger world? And it's a question that she's asking over and over again, what does it mean to end a world. What does it mean to start again? And she doesn't do that much starting. Like, we see the aftereffects of the world ending. We see a little bit of the starting again for the Syonite version of her. But it's a lot of… There's a lot of endings that happen over and over again.

[DongWon] And we can see Essun starting again. It's just… There's a middle part of the start again that we don't see of her life in the Comm. But we do see her have to start again… With the knowledge that her husband killed her son, and how do we survive this season. Right?

[Mary Robinette] I guess that I feel like that is all part of the ending. I feel like that is still part of her [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled] beginnings.

[Mary Robinette] right? That's fair.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Mary Robinette, when you said foreshadowing but not really foreshadowing, I had a bit of an epiphany that I'm now going to go ahead and share. The etymology of foreshadowing is the idea that something is coming toward you and it's backlit and so its shadow arrives first. Then I immediately went to Plato's cave, the idea that the shadow is not the thing, and the idea that some of these parallelisms are foreshadowing because you are being told the shape of the thing, but not the thing in advance of the thing arriving, so that when it arrives, you realize, aaa… I was staring at it the whole time, but the light was coming from a different angle, and so I didn't recognize it.

[DongWon] This is the power of the rhyming, and this is the power of the perspectives, is every time you see the thing, you're seeing it from a different angle. So, from that parallax, you begin to understand more and more the true shape of the thing or the consequences or the context. So that repetition is adding more and more power to your encounters with the object.

[Erin] I also thing, like, circling around, thinking of circling around an object is really interesting because one of the things that I really like is we talked earlier about how you're like, why would someone break the world? And at the end, you're like, why wouldn't they?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And there is… There's something really interesting there, in that looking at the exact same action and being able to see it from all sides.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The thing that is both horrible and necessary is the same action. I think that there's something really powerful in that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. To get back to your question, Erin, about how you do that. One of the things that I want to also flag for readers is that as brilliant as this book is, and as brilliant as Nora is, this did not spring out of her head in this form. You have to do revision. That's the other way you can get this kind of parallelism and these inversions, is during the revision process.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So don't feel like setting yourself up with I'm going to be thinking about these things. You can do that. But a lot of that's going to come as you layer it through the revision process.

[DongWon] Yeah. I was literally last week working on this with an author actually, where we are breaking it back down to the outline, and looking at each of the character arcs, figuring out what needs to be here, what doesn't, and then also how to enhance the parallelism of those arcs. How do we line up certain beats? And really, taking things from act five, putting them in act one, taking things for Mac two and putting them at the end. Like, so much moving around and restructuring so that we can get that rhyming repetition rhythm going through the book that will build to a conclusion.

[DongWon] So, on that note, I have a little bit of homework for you that kind of builds on what Mary Robinette and I and Erin, we were all just talking about here in terms of how to do this. Right? So what I want you to do is to take a look at one of your main character's arcs. Then, try to rework another character's arc to match similar beats and structure to the first one. This can be a villain POV, this can be a love interest, this can be a traveling companion. But see if you can take the arc of one and then have that rhyming structure in the second arc. See what that adds to the overall emotional state of the book.

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

mbarker

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

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

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

[Season 19, Episode 41]

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

[Season 19, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Erin] This is a great book.

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] 10 years old.

[DongWon] Yep.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Howard] You want teasers?

[Mary Robinette] I want teasers.

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

[Mary Robinette] Right.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Snort laughter]

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, oh…

[Howard] And you would not exist. Really?

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-24-an-interview-on-worldbuilding-with-arkady-martine

Key points: Deep historical roots, in Byzantine history. Medieval empires. Did the novel come from the research, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just reach for the things you knew? Was it a challenge to blend elements from two different cultures? How do you know when you've done enough research? Complexity of history versus complexity of worldbuilding? How do you keep track of all that stuff? How often do you find yourself looking stuff up, or does writing it down once mean it stays in your head? How do you take that research and make it come alive for the reader? You tie character and theme together, and connect it with worldbuilding. Are your characters a lens on a thematic element, or is it scene-by-scene? Is there an example of someone with a different set of lenses that impacts what they see and how you portray the world? Was the novel always from Mahit's point of view, or did that come partway through writing?

[transcriptionist apology: Arkady seemed to be talking in a metallic echo chamber, which I found difficult to understand in some spots.]

[Season 19, Episode 24]

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] With us this week we have a very special guest. We've spent the last month talking about A Memory Called Empire. I'm very pleased that we were able to get the author, my friend and also client, Arkady Martine, to join us today to talk about her experience with writing the book, how she thinks about worldbuilding, and some ot the stuff that went into it. So, Arkady, welcome to the podcast.

[Arkady] Hi. I'm so glad to be here.

[DongWon] So, obviously, I love the book and I loved it from the very first time I… It came across my desk. One of the things that really stands out to us is all of the dense, intricate, and complex worldbuilding that you put into this novel. Right? Science fiction/fantasy kind of lives and dies on the worldbuilding a lot of the time. But this one felt very distinct and unique and special. I wanted to hear a little bit of where all that comes from. I know you have, like, deep academic roots as well, in history, and… I would love just to hear from you about where the origins of this novel were for you when it comes to the cultures and societies you decided to put in it.

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Okay. Great question. So… Things not to do when you have a [garbled] in medieval history in Sweden. Write a book about the same things that you are working on in your [garbled] instead of writing the academic book that might have gotten you tenure.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] So I kind of did that. Which is all to say that I am trained as a Byzantine historian with a specialization in the eleventh century sort of eastern frontier. Armenia, Byzantine, are two different Arabic speaking kingdoms. I'm super interested in diplomacy and letter writing and empires and frontiers, and I spent like a decade of my life doing that professionally as an academic. It's a curious thing about being an academic, where you're not really supposed to get emotionally involved with what you're working on. At least, not in how you write it. I have always been emotionally compelled by that whole suite of subjects. I've also always written science fiction and fantasy. So, there was a point, like, the summer after I finished my dissertation where, for complex reasons, I was living in Phoenix for three months. Which I don't exactly recommend, those three months being Jun, July, and August in Phoenix. Yeah, I decided that I clearly needed another enormous project. That was getting kind of annoying that I was one of those people who had never successfully written a novel. So, clearly, I was going to try that. Having just put down the 250 page nonfiction thing I had written.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] What came out of that was trying to figure out a way to work on and work through all of that fascination with Empire and assimilation and medieval frontiers and frontiers in general. And, like, seeing it through a science fictional lens. And then some stuff that I had always been fascinated by and had written some very juvenile early attempts at novels. Like, what happens if you have the ghost of the person who used to have your job in your head?

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] The first version I ever tried to write was actually fantasy. That did not go well. It did not last. You may recognize a bit of it. But, anyway, that got in there too. So, Byzantium, the medieval Empire in general, that's the deep basis. I pulled a ton of little cultural events out of that. The poetry contests in my writing come from that. The dilemma of the succession crisis comes from that. I kind of started with, like, the succession crisis at Heracles in the, like, six hundreds and then it went… It doesn't follow. But it starts there. So I've used a lot of historical plot to inspire my plot.

[DongWon] Do you think that came from… You were studying this, you are interested in it, you are avoiding writing your nonfiction about it…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, did the impulse to write this novel come from that research and that knowledge, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just instinctively reach to the things that you knew? Like, was there a chicken or an egg there?

[Arkady] I feel like 60 percent egg, 40 percent base. I really knew I wanted to write about the scenarios that I had encountered in my research. Not a historical novel where I would, like, tell those stories. But, then where I found myself imagining the emotional impact of living through and experiencing historical events I had been studying. You can either write a historical book or you can just take that question and use what I love science fiction for, which is sort of expand it, explore it, it really up close to it. Then, as I was writing, because it took me a while to write the book. I had never done this successfully before. The longest thing I had ever written before Memory was, like, for Asimov's. So it took me about three years. I did find myself reaching for tools I knew. Those tools were sometimes things like, "Oh, right, I want to do political poetry contests, because I love them. I think they're very cool. I need something like that here." But there was a point also where I deliberately didn't make those choices, where I reached for other tools instead of the instinctive ones on purpose. I do want to mention, before we get away from, like, direct historical inspiration that Teixcalaan is not Byzantine in space, exactly. That's on purpose. Because if I had done Byzantines in space, I would have needed a monotheistic religion. I really didn't want to write a book about that. That's not this book. Someday, I'll write a book about God. But it's not going to be this one.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] I had too much going on. So I needed to get away from this kind of mono-ism, like one Emperor, one God, one, like, line through history, like this [detelogy?] that's in Byzantine texts. So, I was like, okay, I need a different source of completely outside of the kind of monotheistic Western traditions. I ended up being deeply interested in another very complex, very colorful, and quite simultaneous imperial power, which is the [Mehico?]. I pulled a lot of inspiration from [Mehico], the Aztecs in English, and the way that that Empire did assimilation and all of its cultural tags. Because I didn't want my readers to feel like… Well, I knew that my readers were probably going to think that space Byzantium was just space Rome.

[DongWon] Right.

[Arkady] Because that's the instinctive thing. I also wanted to make things weirder than just [people one?]. So, I, like, I very much deliberately combined cultural myths.

[DongWon] I mean, I guess what you're saying is that you didn't want to write a historical novel. Right? You wanted different aspects in there. So… Was it a challenge to find a way to pull different elements from two different histories, two different cultures, and blend them, or was it a pretty straightforward process of, like, oh, the names are coming from here, the religion's coming from here, the poetry battles are coming from here?

[Arkady] It felt pretty organic, except for the languages. Which I made some pretty stark choices early on. Because in my early drafts, I was using a lot more Greek in, like, the backdrop of the Teixcalaanli language. It just did not work. I'm not a con lang person. Like, I don't do this for real. Like some people who come up with vocabularies. No. But I am a person who unfortunately spent a while taking historical linguistics courses and I care about phonology. So, everyone had to sound like it went together and sound culturally appropriate when I use, like, [poems?] and metaphors. But, aside from the religion choices, which is probably where I had this moment of, okay, I'm going for a more Mesoamerican feel, it was pretty organic. That's partially because a lot of medieval empires actually work in very similar ways. So there's more commonality than you expect. Secondly, because I'm absolutely working off of my own aesthetic sense, like, the things I wanted to have. I love flowers. I don't think we do enough in science fiction in general, like, everything is all chrome and steel and glass. It's all very like iPhone. I find this boring. I like flowers, I like declaration, I like weird architecture. I like a kind of [Romanticism?] to my science fiction. All of that led me very easily to meso American cultures, which I have not spent a decade of my life immersed in the study of meso American cultures, I have, and am still doing a ton of research there as well. So…

[DongWon] I mean, obviously this question doesn't apply to the Byzantine component's so much, because of how much you did there, but, like, when you're doing research on meso American culture, on [Mehico] and like these ancient empires, how do you find the line of, like, this is enough research? I need to stop researching, and start writing. Like, was that a difficult balance for you or did you just sort of naturally find that flow?

[Arkady] Well, this is why I don't write historicals. Because if I wrote a historical, I would have to be able to re-create a depth of field in my [garbled] bank that matches what we actually know. When I'm working in science fiction, I do a lot on… I don't want to say just on vibes, because that's not enough. But I do a lot on defaults, I do a lot on in… If I'm pulling this kind of influence that got me interested in, like, sacrifice rituals. Why do people do that? I don't need to reproduce the argument of what scholars have come up with about why people use sacrifice rituals to accomplish political things in a particular culture. What I do need to do is understand that myself, and get a feel for it, so I get my characters to reproduce that feeling for my audience.

[Erin] Yeah. I'm curious. You were talking about the difference between, basically, the complexity of actual history and the complexity of worldbuilding. Which is, I think, naturally just less complex, because there's only so much you can bring in. I wondered, are there areas where you felt like you decided to go, like, for more complexity versus, like, more of a… More vibes? How did that intersect with the story that you were trying to tell?

[Arkady] So, the places I ended up with complexity that I hadn't originally planned to do are where the story that I was writing demanded that I knew things that never went on the page. This meant that I had… Several. Several lists of, like, okay, how does the government work? Who works in what department? How are they related? What is their history? When did they develop? None of that needs to be on the page for the story I was telling. All of that needed to be in my head so that I didn't contradict myself, and so that at some point, hopefully, some of the political intrigues stuff resolved into understandable lines of action. I did a similar thing in Desolation when I was trying to work out how the Teixcalaanli army worked and how people were promoted and how they work through it and like how… Just like the practicalities. I did a lot of, I guess what I would think of as traditional worldbuilding for that. Where I sat down and was like, "Okay. There are this many regions. Why are they called regions? Because I don't want to deal with coming up with another name for them."

[Laughter]

[Arkady] "How do you become commander of a region? What happens when you retire? What happens with training? Do people swap jobs? Do people swap, like, different parts of the military? Like, if you are a fighter pilot, are you always a fighter pilot? Or could you end up, like, a logistics officer?" All of that stuff I thought about on purpose, and sort of like brainstormed to myself and wrote down so I didn't end up making up something else later on impulse. But in terms of some of the other places where it looks like I did that, like, on the poetry contests, all of that was pretty much it should feel like this and I know there are historical examples where this worked. So I can do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] It's so interesting. It almost sounds like… Sorry, it almost sounds like the things that you were more emotionally tied to, you didn't feel as much the need to, like, research is the things that were like, intellectually… You know what I mean, like, you love the poetry contests, so, like, you knew how they needed to feel and didn't need to do as much, like, notetaking. Maybe I'm wrong there, but…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] particularly deep, but…

[Arkady] There's a hidden thing, which is that I had already done the research. I just didn't do it for this project. I didn't do it [garbled] I knew it already. Although I think something like a poetry contest is like anything that becomes more plot or aesthetic or theme. You can kind of, like, let it exist on its own without having to justify it. You can just decide that's true. Then the question… The worldbuilding question to ask afterwards is given that this is true, what else is true? What else must be true? That's actually how I do a lot of worldbuilding, like, when I'm doing it on purpose. Like, there's a ton of edible flowers in [pig plot?]. That was a… I think, this is cool moment. But in response to that, I thought a great deal about how do these people get their food? What kind of cultural signifiers are there between eating plants and eating animals? That got more interesting for me because I have characters from place were eating luxurious food is commonplace and others from a place where eating luxurious food is exceedingly rare, if it ever happens at all, and eating animals is weird, because where would you get a whole animal just to eat it?

[DongWon] I love that moment of her horror at watching somebody eat something that was cut from the side of a cow. Right? Like, just like this idea of…

[Arkady] [garbled] turnip space sandwich.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled] more… Oh, that scene is an absolute delight. I want to dig into some of the more mechanical things about how you take that amount of worldbuilding and make it feel felt and relevant to the characters. But before we dig into that, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

[Arkady] My thing of the week is a relatively new novel by Paz Pardo called The Shamshine Blind which I just finished reading this past weekend, actually. It is a kind of classical noir, but with a deeply exciting science-fiction premise. The premise is during the Falklands war… So the war over the Falkland Islands off of Argentina, between Argentina and the UK, the Argentinians came up with a method to kind of by spraying this special powder on people, they can feel emotions. Those emotions are actually, like, weapons of mass destruction. This changes the whole course of history. The book is set 30 years after that, so it's all part of the backdrop of the world. It is… I love noir and I love, like, noir detectives and how broken down and brutalized they are by the world. Having that incredible twist and having the entire noir be rooted in is this character going to feel emotions that are hers or is she always going to rely on thinking that emotions are something that are externally imposed, like, took all of the stuff that we love about noir and made it both incredibly thematically obvious and incredibly thematically hidden, and also just incredible.

[DongWon] It's a great pull for an episode on worldbuilding, because it… The worldbuilding… It ties into the central question of noir, which is this really shut down emotionally unavailable hero, and then, it's like all the world is about these big emotions. I think that's super cool.

[Arkady] I loved it. I think you all should read it.

[DongWon] Thank you so much.

[Erin] All right. We are back. Before we get into sort of the nitty-gritty of the mechanical tools, I have a nitty-gritty process question which is you mentioned all these things that you documented and thought about, and I'm kind of curious, like, how did you actually keep track of all that? Like, how did you actually know what you had investigated and what needed to be investigated as you were doing your research?

[Arkady] So… I'm not anybody's poster child for how to do this in a sensible way. I have a Word document labeled what is everyone's motivation? That was an editing artifact, but I still only have a Word document labeled The Teixcalaanli Military which is just everything I ever thought of, but didn't really go on a page about the Teixcalaanli military. In terms of like research research, when I wanted to go find out about something, I basically used a lot of the same methods that I've always used for doing academic or policy work, which is I have a physical notebook and a pen, and I underline things in a document that I'm reading, or take notes and mark page numbers. That just… I just have a million of those. But I didn't do a ton of that. At any point. For Memory and Desolation. Some of the things that like look a little bit more like I must do research questions, like, some of the biology stuff in book 2… And I know you guys haven't talked about book 2, but there's, like, weird alien biology in book 2 that matters. A lot of that involved medical textbooks and like zoology textbooks. I didn't exactly take notes so much as, like, stick post it's all over them. I'm not actually organized. Except the lady inside my own head.

[Chuckles]

[lovely]

[DongWon] I love the simplicity of that process. I love just having Word documents that are like this is about this topic, and I know I reference it. How often do you find yourself going back to, like, those underlined passages or marked passages? Like, how often do you find yourself having to look stuff up? Or was just the act of writing down the military structure enough that it stayed in your brain when you needed to call it up?

[Arkady] The big structure stayed. Right. I understand it, I could explain it right now. Although I haven't written about it directly for a couple of years. But the thing that I always have to go back to is if I have named something, I have to write down what I named it. This can even sometimes extend two characters who actually have speaking parts. The number of times I've called… Well, the guy in chapter 3. That guy.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] But especially if I've done cool names, like names of spaceships, names of continents, names of planets, all that has to get written down somewhere because I will forget it and I will make up a new cool thing. And confuse people, including myself.

[DongWon] Suddenly you just have 10 cool things, 10 cool planets you didn't need, you know.

[Arkady] Yeah. Or you've named absolutely everybody in book 2 the number sign 2 and then a word starting with steam and you hadn't noticed.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] Intel you did the dramatis personae at the end.

[DongWon] Hum... Yeah.

[Erin] I often wonder how… This may be the question we were getting at before we went to break, which is, so you've got all of this stuff. Because I find sometimes people do a lot of research and they know a lot of stuff, but then it's hard to, like, translate it into making the overall come alive. Which your world absolutely does. So how do you take all these things that you know, and then, like, make it exciting and juicy and wonderful for all of us readers?

[Arkady] It's character work which is to say it's theme. I know that sounds weird, but they are, for me, very, very close. The things that I want to show the reader, I'm going to show them through either a close point of view with a character or through a deliberately selected broader point of view, like an omniscient, or one of the more fun ones, like second person or like an unreliable person narrator who's telling you a story. So the secret of… The voice is always going to point out specific things about the world. Those are choices that I'm making that guide the reader's like mental eye, I guess. What do I want the reader to notice? Because the reader doesn't need to know what research I did in 99 percent of the cases. I mean, I love footnotes, but most of the time, fiction doesn't need them. The reader has to want to come along with me, so I need to give them a reason to keep looking in the direction I'm pointing. That's usually the inside of the character's head. Why is that character looking at the thing? Why do we need to know? Or, it's a POV voice that is also pointing something out to the reader, that it's doing a frame. I'm a very structure and theme oriented writer. I like playing games. The Teixcalaan books are actually pretty straightforward for me. They go in one direction, and while most of the characters are unreliable, they're not unreliable on purpose. They're trying to tell you what they see. In a way, that directness let me do more with the world. Because I'm not ever letting or making the character voice, or the authorial voice, deliberately misdirect the reader. So the reader is… If I tell the reader to look at something, like, look at these buildings, look at this edible flour, look at all the strange clothes people are wearing for a reason that are political, I'm telling them that because it's story important or character important or creates a sense of thematic community. That keeps the reader with me, even when I'm doing a bunch of fancy footwork.

[DongWon] You immediately tie character and theme together. Right? You're also underlining the way that worldbuilding and theme are connected. When you're thinking of a character, are you thinking of, like, them being your lens on a specific thematic element, and therefore a specific worldbuilding element? Or is it more scene by scene, oh, this is a good time for Mahit to illustrate this aspect of assimilation or how language works or… Like, are you looking at it on like a very granular level or are you starting at a very high level of, like, this character's about assimilation, this character's about succession, this character's about whatever it happens to be?

[Arkady] Well, they're all about assimilation and they're all about succession. But some of them… Well…

[DongWon] I picked the broadest ones, I'm sorry.

[Arkady] Sorry. Mahit is in some ways… I suppose I'm glad I set this only in her point of view, except for little tiny interludes in the whole book. The whole first book. Because she has a very narrow thematic lands that… And that lens has a very wide scope. Her lens is she is… She is from the border and she wants to be assimilated if that means something different than what it does. That sounds complex, but it's actually kind of like a pretty focused thematic lands. But that touches practically everything she sees. So I just pick that up whenever I need it and pulled back to it whenever I want to sort of ground the reader in it. It also lets me show off all the world because Mahit loves it. But it's also new to her. It also is going to make her think and be uncomfortable. So I get to do all those things while I'm showing the reader what I've made, and all, hopefully, stay with me, because they care about how she is seeing what she's seeing.

[Erin] I love what you said about the, like, the width and the depth of the lens the thematic lands and the character lens. I'm wondering if there's an example that comes to mind for you of somebody who has a very different set of lenses and how that impacts the way they see and you portray the world? If that makes sense.

[Arkady] In Memory specifically, or anywhere?

[Erin] Ummm...

[DongWon] I mean, I think you can talk about Desolation if you wanted. I mean, our readers won't be as familiar with it, so be a little bit more careful about spoilers, but, like… That's one that has more POVs.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I can see that being…

[Arkady] It's easier to talk about in Desolation, but I think it might be more interesting to think about it in Memory. Because… Well, there's one scene in Memory that I desperately wanted to write in someone's point of view that wasn't Mahit. I didn't do it. I actually didn't even let myself do it for fun, because it would have not… It would have ruined it for me if I had done it, like, the way that I [garbled view it like the squibs in your id?] for me, which is… So, the poisoning scene, the aftermath of the poisoning scene, with the flower and the hallway and 19 Ads and Mahit. I wanted so much to write that from 19 Ads's point of view and it would have ruined the book. The book does not work when you do that.

[DongWon] [garbled that] would have been…

[Arkady] But, all my God.

[DongWon] That doesn't… I do want to see it, though.

[Arkady] But that scene played through my head from her point of view, and I kind of like had to write it deliberately. Like react against that instinct. 19 Ads has a very different lens. [Garbled] 19 ads That's lens is actually… Well, in Memory is about dealing with being in charge and being deep middle-aged and also grief. Also, like, deliberately not making choices that you might have made before. Like, not repeating your own mistakes. That's what she's thinking about all the time. Which [garbled] making new mistakes, which is always fun. But the way that she approaches that scene is from a position of a lot of knowledge and a lot of power and also a position of incredible amounts of emotional stress. Which [garbled] the book, you have figured out why she's under that much emotional stress, because it very nearly is the [garbled] commit murder again and doesn't and then has to deal with it. Like, also, there's like a different sense about sex and desire and death. So that scene would have been completely fun from her point of view. But very different. Thematically very different. It would have pulled the thematic lands of the book to be about questions of rulership rather than questions of assimilation. Like, what do you oh people? What do you oh people when you have power? Which is, like, one of my favorite questions in the world to write about. It's a lot more there in Desolation, like, on the surface. In part, that's because of who else gets point of view in Desolation. But it is an undercurrent in Memory. Where the question of okay, who has power? What can you do now? What responsibilities do you have? Can you abdicate them? Those questions are there for Mahit, but they're underground.

[DongWon] When you conceived of the novel, was it always from Mahit's perspective? Like, where you always intending it to be from the perspective of this outsider whose new to this place who loves this place. Like, she has, you're right, that super wide lens, but also all of that depth. Which is almost like very impossible to get in a certain way. Did she come to you at the beginning or was that a thing that arose part way through to solve a problem?

[Arkady] She was there from the beginning. The question I had about midway through writing was whether I was going to add anybody else. I thought about that a lot. It would have been a very different kind of book had I, because, structurally… At least the very first draft of Memory is a information control spy novel, which means that the audience and the characters… Main character, should find out about what's going on at approximately the same time. The questions about what is happening in the world are hyper dependent on who knows what. If I added more people, I could have shown a lot more things, but it would have been a novel that wasn't about what does Mahit know and when does she know it. It would… That would not have been the plot driver that allowed me to move the story forward. So I thought about it a lot, and I did not do it, because… In part, because I was absolutely terrified of what that would do. Remember that I had never written a whole novel before. It seemed difficult enough to deal with one person, and also to try to, like, go back and layer in more people. I also thought about that in some of the revisions that I considered. Essentially, voted against it, except for very, very small bits, the interludes are not, in fact, in tight third like everything else. The interludes are in a kind of omniscient third on purpose. Because of…

[DongWon] Those were a late, late addition, right?

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Like, not the first revision I did, which got me the manuscript that I submitted to you, DongWon.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Arkady] But the… I think, like, maybe not even the first revision I did for my editor. Might have been there, might have been the second one when I realized I had accidentally… I needed a second person.

[DongWon] I think it was in the first or second revision. Yeah.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Arkady] I collapsed too much motivation into one character and needed him to be two people. I still think I probably could have ended up with three people, but it was getting hard to get them all on stage.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's already a big book.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Amazing. Thank you so much. I believe you have some homework for us as well?

[Arkady] I do. So this is a prompt about worldbuilding through observation. I actually, to my delight, I think there's set it up as a conversation. It is using the character in the story that you are currently working on, could be your main character or somebody else, look at the nearest building you can see out your window and describe it from their point of view. What does that say about the world that you are in and the world that they are in?

[DongWon] I love that. I love returning to that idea of the lens and the few focus and all of that. Arkady, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was an absolute delight.

[Arkady] It was super fun. Thank you for having me.

[DongWon] With that, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.22: Technology and Identity (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-22-technology-and-identity-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding

Key points: Technology of identity, how identity works in the story and in your work! What is your concept of you, and of other people as individuals? Imago technology, ancestral personal knowledge. The cloud hook. The city AI or algorithmic intelligence. Gee whiz, what a cool technology versus technology tied to and integrated with character and theme. Think about what you want to communicate in your book, what are the themes, and how does the technology tie into that. Remember that different characters will have different perspectives on the technology. Take an idea, and then push it, consider variations on it. What kind of complications, stories, problems, and recipes does it create? What happens when it goes wrong, when it fails, when it is abused, when the protections slip?

[Season 19, Episode 22]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding, Technology and Identity

[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.

[Howard] We are talking about A Memory Called Empire. During this close read, we're exploring the technology of identity and how identity enters into the story and how these things, most importantly, really, will enter into your own work. I would like to lead with one of my favorite moments in the book. Gonna paraphrase a little bit, and then read a line. They're talking about the imago technology on Lsel Station, where someone else's memories, multiple generations of someone else's, can be embedded in you. You have these people, these identities, as voices in your head, for lack of a better term. Someone asks the protagonist, Mahit, "Are you Yskandr or are you Mahit?" After a bit of navelgazing, Mahit says, "How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of you?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I love that question. Ask yourself, fair listener, how wide is your concept of yourself? How wide is your concept of another person as an individual? Because when we start talking about technological modifications to our minds, and it is entirely possible that you are holding in early generation of one of those in the form of your smart phone, the question of what do we mean by you, what do I mean by me, becomes super fun to explore. Arkady Martine does a brilliant job of it.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to just briefly pause, because I realize that we've been so embedded in this book that we actually are using imago as if it's an everyday term.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Imago is basically, it's a small machine that nestles in the base of a person's head and it carries the memory of their predecessors. The id… Some of that memory is personality, and they're matched with someone who has a similar personality. The idea is that you get… It's like having a mentor that just goes with you everywhere. One of the things that I love about this, and this idea of you, that you're talking about, is that they have very clear ideas of what an appropriate use of this technology is. That you are trying… The people who pick someone to be added to this imago line… So you may have, like, 14 generations of people giving you their advice and wisdom. But each one becomes… They integrate. So… They spend a year integrating so that they're working altogether. They're carefully selected so that they have similar personalities. There are also these very clear ideas of what is appropriate use for this and what is taboo or gross. It's… It is a lovely piece of worldbuilding. Because the other thing that happens is that then we see what the Teixcalaanli reaction to the imago is, that they find it quite appalling that you would modify yourself in any way, shape, or form. But then their ideas of what to do with it are, in turn, appalling to the L… The…

[DongWon] People of Lsel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Lsel.

[DongWon] I think it's been pretty clear, my lens on reading this book has come up over the course of this close reading series, has been one where I'm really thinking about this in terms of Empire and immigration and assimilation. Right? One of the things I love about the idea of the imago is it is about generational knowledge. It's about a connection to your ancestors. On Lsel, that's literalized. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The things you learn from the people who came before you is literally embedded in your body. Right? What we see in this book is Mahit arrives at the heart of the Empire, immediately is severed from that ancestral knowledge through a traumatic event. Like, literally, we have generational trauma happen inside her head. Then she loses access to the knowledge of her forebears. It just is this really rich metaphor of the knowledge that we carry with us, the knowledge that comes from our predecessors, what happens when we don't have access to that inside the heart of an empire that wants to erase us, and is horrified by the idea that you would carry that with you. Right? It's a memory called Empire. But the thing is that, because the Empire wants to erase your memory, it wants to erase the memory that connects you to your own people, and to your own culture. All of that is embedded in the idea of this technology. So, how expansive is the definition of you? Does it include your ancestors? Or is it just you, the person who is here now? Boy, would Teixcalaan like to say that it's just you that's here now.

[Erin] Yeah. What I love about this is all of this has to… What Arkady Martine has to do is establish what this is really early on, before the trauma happens, before all the reaction to it happens. I think we need to feel sympathetic towards its existence, that imago is generally good, that we're sort of on the side of Mahit having this. I was thinking about sort of a line, someone's really early on. I'm going to read them… I'm not going to read them. But in the very beginning, she… They're making their way through the city and Three Seagrass starts, like, whispering a poem.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Then, like in the back of Mahit's mind, Yskandr's also, like, the imago voice is also whispering the poem. She finds it really, really assuring. I think what is great about that is we've all been out of place at some point in our lives, right, so this is a completely, like, a world we don't know, but it centers us in an experience that we're familiar with. We are out of place, we're looking for something that will make us feel comfortable, and in this case, it's his voice in the back of our head, it's this memory, this generational memory, that makes Mahit feel comfortable. I think that makes us feel this is a comforting thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Getting this ripped away is going to be bad, is going to be traumatic. The ability to do that worldbuilding really early on, I think, is just one of the great strengths of this.

[Howard] There are two other technologies that enter into this discussion. The first of those two is, for me, the obvious symmetry, the cloud hook that the Teixcalaanli use. When I think, from my other outsider standpoint, of how the Teixcalaanli react to the imago technology, I look at the cloud hook and think, "You hypocrites!"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because if the cloud hook is not a voice in your head, I don't know what else is. Like, if your smart phone had an AI in it and knew the kinds of things that you always needed to look for and presented you with that information… Oh, wait. That already happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Well, the AI is explicitly malfunctioning. Right? It's explicitly attacking people, or marking people as inappropriate who theoretically aren't.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Who haven't done anything that violates…

[Howard] That's the second piece of the technology, which is the fact that the city itself has AI, or at least algorithmic intelligence, mimicry, going on in it, which has biases, and as we find out in the story, some of those biases are perhaps a little more deliberate in a little more malicious than perhaps they should be. When I think of the cloud hook, I'm reminded of a change that I have seen in my lifetime, which I sum up in the question, "Who is that one guy in that one movie?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] We do not have that argument anymore. Any… Unless we explicitly lay down rules and say, "No, no, no. Don't pick up your phone. Where have we seen that actor before? Not the main actor, the other actor, yeah, the guy who just died. Him. Who's that? Uh…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] But… Now, Sandra and I do this all the time. We'll pick up our phones. The moment we get the answer, the other movie comes flooding back to us.. Our phones have already changed who we are, in that they have changed the sorts of information that we have readily available to us. In this story, the way the cloud hook… We have people severed from their cloud hooks, people severed from their imagos. Looking at the way they cope is plot important. And it's handled much more effectively than all of those movie scenes where somebody holds their phone up and says, "Oh, no. I have no bars."

[DongWon] Right. Well, it's also the cloud hook is connected to citizenship. Right? The way that imago is Mahit's connection to her people, the cloud hook says you are or are not a citizen. Only citizens can have cloud hooks. You literally can't open doors without it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Like, you are so considered alien, so disregarded by Teixcalaanli's society, that without this thing that marks you, without this technology that connects you to the AI that runs the city and all of these different things, you aren't a person. Right? So identity and technology get so blurry in all these different directions at the same time. Which I think is such a fascinating way to build out this world.

[Mary Robinette] So, I just want to share with you the language that she uses the first time she introduces the cloud hook.

Over her left eye, she wore a cloud hook, a glass eyepiece full of the ceaseless obscuring flow of the Imperial information network.

That ceaseless obscuring flow does so much beautiful lifting. This is a really good example of using point of view for Mahit's… Mahit's experience of what that's like. Ceaseless. It's that going back to that ceaseless…

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] At the beginning, that opening line. Ceaseless obscuring flow, and Imperial information network. It is an impersonal thing. It is something that is part of connecting you and making you even more of a cog in the Empire, versus what she carries, which is the imago, which is a person and their experience.

[Howard] Well, we are not ceaseless. We need a quick lacuna for a thing of the week.

[Erin] I love watching documentaries. Because I think they tell us so much about the world around us, that we can then use in the worldbuilding that we're doing when we're building new things. So I'm recommending the documentary series Rotten which is this deep dive into the food supply chain on Netflix. Each episode focuses on a different food. There's garlic, there's chocolate, there's avocado. Just in general, I always recommend watching documentaries and thinking about how does… How does their world work? How do their systems work? Then, how can you just basically steal from that for the thing that you're writing next. In particular, I love the avocado production episode of this particular series. It really made me think about how changing complexity or changing the demand for a technology or magic or food in one area can affect something somewhere completely across the world. So, check that out, it is Rotten on Netflix.

[Howard] Welcome back. Let's talk about how you as writers can use some of these concepts we've talked about as tools in your own work. Because who are you and what does technology mean are questions that have been at the root of science fiction since its very inception.

[DongWon] Well, there's such a big difference between geewhiz, what a cool technology, and introducing technology that is closely tied to and integrated with character and theme. Right? So, the imago ties so closely to who Mahit is as a person. Then, as Mary Robinette was talking about before the break, how the cloud hook connects to the thematic ideas of what makes up an empire. Right? So when you're thinking about what technologies do I want to introduce into my world, think not only about how do these affect material things in this space, but also, what are you trying to communicate with your book, what are the important thematics, and how does the technology speak to that?

[Erin] Yeah. I would… You took the words right out of my mouth.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I've got new ones. Which is that also I think it's about perspective on technology. Thinking about that ceaselessness, the voice in the head… The imago is also ceaseless, but Mahit would never see it that way. So one thing to think about is that not everyone in your story will have the same perspective on the same technology. Something that could be a cool exercise, for example, would be to look at one big piece of technology in your world, and have three different people from three different points in your story, or three different perspectives, view that technology. How would they describe it? That gives you a better sort of 360 view of what it is beyond just what it does.

[DongWon] Well, then we see the Empire's idea of what you could do with an imago, which is this sort of extractive and way of extending their power of, like, oh, this could be a way for us to live forever. It's not about honoring your heritage, not about connecting with your ancestors. It's about hijacking future generations. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, again, we see this perversion of the technology. We've lived in Mahit's head long enough by the time we discover that that we understand how horrifying this concept is, and why. Also, what deals Yskandr made to get to the point, to protect his station, how far he was willing to go to protect his culture, but what does it mean if they forget the core thing that makes them them?

[Howard] We've talked a lot in… Over the last 15 years? How long have we been doing this?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] About the importance of extrapolation of whatever your cool idea is. One of the things that's really challenging for us, in many cases, is to accurately or at least effectively imagine what life would be like with a thing. As I was thinking about the imago, I realized that I had an analog in my own life. Every book that I have read and loved enough to reread has become a set of voices in my head that affect how I answer certain kinds of questions. It may shape the phrasing. It may shape the way I think about the problem. It may shape my… Just my opinion out right. Leaning me in one direction or another. Books, and this is why some people find them so scary, books create biases. So, for me as a writer, I am able to look at imago technology and say, "Hum. Maybe this is like reading the same book hundred times so that that is now a voice in my head." Now I have that in my toolbox as a way to think about this.

[DongWon] Every scene that we read last year… Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I had this experience of I don't know whether I read it at such a formative age that that book imprinted on me so I now think the same things or if I loved that book because I thought this way and then I read the book. I don't know where I end and the book begins. That is such a wonderful experience to have with the work that means something to you. And how… Again, I don't know whether she shaped my worldview or I found something that just so perfectly matches how I see things. I think that's such a great experience that we can have with art in this way and with the stories that we live with and the cultures that we come up in. Again, like, the imago is a reflection of that in really interesting ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that she says when she… Early in the book, "He behaved exactly like an imago ought to behave, a repository of instinctive and automatic skill that Mahit hadn't had time to acquire for herself." I'm like, yeah, I would love that.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, I would love having that in my life. I think that that's, again, one of the world building things that she's doing with this is that she is trying to make this comfortable for us. She is using familiar experiences that… Uncomfortable situations that we've been in. It's like, yeah, I would love to have that. That's one of the ways that she makes this technology feel familiar to us, is by tying it to familiar experiences that we have had. He knew when to duck through doorways that were built for people who were shorter than she was. It's like, that's… That kind of instinctiveness of which fork do I use? I don't know. Where you quietly watch the people around you. If you've just got someone in the back of your head who just… Will you take it right now? I don't know what's going on.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled Ember loss] of that, I think.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] There's a phrase that I've been seeing more and more online, we're losing recipes. Which is the theory that, like cultural things are not being passed down to new generations, and the idea that you can, like, lose those recipes when you lose… If the imago's not working or if it's lost or…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Corrupted is… I think that's something. For me, that felt really resonant, and therefore, I felt… I was like, "Yes. This technology could prevent something that I see as something that could happen in the real world."

[Howard] One of the critical story points… Spoiler alert, but guys, you've had a month. Please. We can't say enough about how much you need to read this beautiful book. One of the critical story points is that Mahit's imago is 15 years out of date. So the person, the voice that she has in her head, is not the person who died on the job she's going out to replace. He is the person who might under one set of circumstances, become that person. Later in the story, she gets both of them in her head. I love that fulfillment of the promise in that this is not something that the… Lsel ever would have done. They would have seen this as just awful. No, don't do that. It's dangerous. It'll make you sick. Also, it's immoral. There are probably taboos against it. Of necessity, she does it and you have three people in one brain at once. A young version and an old version of the same person arguing with one another as arbitrated by the person whose body they're in.

[DongWon] On a technical level, I think one thing that Arkady does that is essential to the example is you can take one core idea. Right? What if you had connections to information? Then instantiate it in the imago, and then keep pushing on that idea over the course of the book. Finding new iterations. Okay, what if it's outside your body? The cloud hook. What if it breaks, and then you have the first issue with Yskandr. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What if you had two of them? Then, later in the book… Just… It really is one idea that carries through the whole book that she keeps fiddling with.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's also a point deeper in the book where she talks about imago technology as it appears in bad daytime drama.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Where someone is… Someone has taken the imago of their lover and carries it around with them, but their personalities aren't compatible, so that they fracture and then they're both lost. It's like, yeah, that's exactly what we as writers would do. She's like, yeah, this is an idea that a writer would have, but a society can't sustain that, so it's not the way society works. The imago who shows up to the widow… To their widow. It's like, oh, yeah, that's really messed up. We don't do that.

[Howard] Horribly inappropriate. No, we don't do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Totally inappropriate. So that's… That is, I think, something that can be fun for you when you're doing your writing is to think about how the storytellers in your world are thinking about the technology…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That you have, or the geewhiz, the magic, whatever it is. Like, how do they… How do people who fundamentally don't understand how it works describe it to other people?

[Howard] The meta gets so thick when you begin considering that much science fiction is cautionary. We should avoid going down this route. But in your cautionary tale, you're talking about this technology, are there cautionary tales in that universe? That these people didn't pay attention to? Oh, no.

[Erin] I love that these are all facets, like DongWon was saying, of the same idea. I remember being cautioned once earlier in my sort of writing life about just throwing something new in, when you feel like you've run out of ideas, or you feel like you've run out of plot. You think, I'll add something even more to the world.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, not only is there an imago, but there's zombies. I don't know, something that will…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Add the drama. But, actually, the truer, more resonant drama, is often seeing how the same thing can be viewed differently, can cause new complications, can create its own stories, can create its own problems and recipes. I think that is really where worldbuilding becomes so rich.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled]

[DongWon] That's the difference between going wide and going deep. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] But worldbuilding is wide because you get a sense of all these things, but she communicates that wideness primarily by digging really deep into certain specific channels. Right? This technology, the way the poetry works, the way names work. She picks these specific lanes and then just digs and digs and digs until oil is found there. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like… It's really thrilling to watch.

[Howard] One of the tools that… As we wrap up, one of the tools that you've got in your toolbox already is asking yourself, "And what happens when it goes wrong? What happens when the technology fails, when the technology is abused, when the protections slip?" One of the most terrifying movie moments for young me was Robocop, when Ed 209 says, "You have 15 seconds to comply." The guy drops the gun. And then Ed 209 says, "You have 10 seconds to comply." You realize, oh, that robots not working right. Oh, a very, very bad thing is going to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Let's wrap this up with some homework for you. I want you to think about… Do some brainstorming, some spitballing. Come up with three technologies or magical approaches that would raise questions about what it means to be you. About what it means to be an individual. About… You can be talking about a soul or a whatever. Three examples. Then take one of those and have two characters write a scene where two characters argue about it.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-51-so-you-wanna-play-with-format

Key Points: Playing with format? Short fiction often is more experimental. Epistolary, a story told in letters. For verisimilitude, the feeling of reality. 2nd person POV -- You are there! Stories in nonstory formats. Research papers, etc. Helpdesk responses. Chapter bumps, aka epigraphs. Footnotes!

[Season 18, Episode 51]

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

[Seaons 18, Episode 51]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, So, You Wanna Play With Format.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] 'Cause you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] This is a fun topic to talk about, because I didn't do it, really, in any of the stories that I had y'all read. Do anything really spectacularly different with format. But I think that short fiction is a place where you see people play around with format and put stories into different forms that you don't see necessarily as much at the novel length. So I thought since we were talking about short fiction, it's a perfect time to talk about format. So, what do y'all feel about it?

[DongWon] It's one of the things I love about short fiction as well, is you can be more experimental. You can push the boundaries. It's almost an expectation of playing around a little bit when it comes to short fiction. Not that every author has to do it with every story. But it's a thing that when we see it can be really exciting. One limitation, just from the publishing perspective, is that when you're publishing novels, it is pretty difficult to be experimental with format. Readers have certain expectations, booksellers have certain expectations, and publishers are trying to meet that, and so, often default to being very conservative about it. Trying to get a book published that has lots of different formatting or style or is in a different mode or a different length even can be difficult. That said, I've really had great success with certain books that have an unusual trim size, for example. Seanan McGuire's Feed, we did an unusual trim size, that helped it stand out. Right? I've had great success with epistolary books. Some… But it is an uphill climb. Whereas in short fiction, you're sort of given carte blanche to be a little freer with it. Publishers aren't as concerned about it, and you can definitely do a lot of fun stuff.

[Howard] Two of my favorite things are, on Netflix, Love, Death, and Robots, and on Hulu, Bite-sized Halloween. I like these because both of them are collections of short, unrelated except in the most general thematic sense, things. I don't know what I'm going to get, but I know that I'm only committing about 15 minutes of my life to getting it. Short stories are the same way. You sit down with a novel that's doing something hugely experimental… That's a big ask for a reader is to dive into this and just be completely unaware of how the format may shift, what may change. Whereas with short fiction, a lot of readers love short fiction for this exact reason. I want to see something new. Short fiction was where I first discovered 2nd person POV. I would have struggled trying to read an entire novel in 2nd person POV. But now I've read enough of it in short fiction that it feels like, oh, that's a thing. That's… Yeah, that totally works.

[DongWon] Yeah. Earlier this year, we got to have a really big viral moment for This Is How You Lose the Time War from our dear friend Bigolas Dickolas, a tri-gun community member who posted about it. The main thing about their appeal for this is you can read this in one sitting. It's a short book, you can read it in a night, you can listen to the audiobook, it's only a couple hours. So I think that…

[Mary Robinette] It's important to say this is an epistolary novel.

[DongWon] Yes. It's an epistolary novel. So the fact that it was very short made it possible for a lot of people to get very excited about this unusual format. The epistolary novel, it was cowritten, it's experimental in several different ways. Going back to voice, the voice is very elevated, very distinct. There's a lot of things that are boundary pushing about that book. I feel a large part of why we were able to get away with it… Not just get away with it, but have enormous success with it, was in part because it was a very tight experience. You're in and you're out before it over stays it's welcome.

[Mary Robinette] I'm also going to quickly define epistolary…

[Erin] That's…

[Mary Robinette] Which…

[Erin] Yeah. Go for it.

[Mary Robinette] You do it…

[Erin] No, no. What I was going to say is we've been dropping some terms, epistolary, 2nd person POV, and I thought what a fun thing to do might be is to take like a bit of a Godiva chocolate box approach to…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Nontraditional formats, which is to talk about them, say what a couple of them are…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] What are they doing, well, when might you want to use them, and when might you want to throw them away. So let's start with epistolary. What is it, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] It is a story told in the form of letters.

[Erin] Yay. What… Why tell a story in letters? Like, what… Why would I want to make that choice if I can decide to write a short story, do you think? Or a longer story.

[Mary Robinette] So, there's a couple of reasons. Many of the early novels, back in… Back in the day. People were very concerned with verisimilitude. Convincing people that these were real things that really happened. So, putting it in the form of a travelogue or an epistolary convince people… Was to convince people that this is real. This is… Someone actually had this experience.

[Howard] The book version of found footage.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It is… That's a great way to describe it.

[DongWon] Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an early classic example.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. So the… One of the things that that does is it allows you to bring in multiple voices, it allows you to actually be pretty telling with the story. So you can cover a lot of ground in a very compressed area. Also, if you want to do unreliable narrators, they're just baked in… Baked into that. What are some of the reasons that you think?

[Erin] I think… I was thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War, and I think part of what's really fun about that book is that part of it is the actual letters themselves, but it's also how are the letters getting from person to person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, the actual act of sending letters is not something we do as much… I don't know, maybe you all do… As we used to. So, thinking about the way that you present yourself to others is, I think, a big thing that happens in epistolary. How is this person… Who are they sending the letter to? Why are they sending it at this time? What has happened in the interim between the last letter that they received? Or if it's back-and-forth… Or, since the last letter they sent? So there's a lot of really interesting things that you're learning about the broader world even in just the dates…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Between letters. There are a lot of ways to do a lot of little, like, tiny detailed worldbuilding.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That says a lot.

[DongWon] Going back to our conversation last week about unreliable narrators, epistolary is such a wonderful way to just reinforce and remind the reader of the subjectivity of who's telling you this story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Also, because it's telling it to another person, you can feel them shaping their worldview to meet the other person's expectations. Right? So, In Time War in particular, the story… The letters from Red and Blue, they start opposed and end up together. Really, as that journey progresses, you can feel the change in the relationship by how they are talking to each other. So it just gives you, like, all these extra levers to play with. It's very hard to pull off in an engaging way, because, sometimes, if it feels like reading someone's letters, that's not always the most exciting thing to do. But when you do it right, it gives you such a way to embed you in a world, embed you in a voice, and a perspective that is hard to do with other tools.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to go out on a limb here and invent a term because I don't know the term. I don't know that a term exists. It is the semi-sequitur sequential art. John Rosenberg's Scenes from Multi-Verse, every installment of Scenes from Multi-Verse is a new little universe, in the name of the universe is usually part of the joke. It's 4 panels in which we explore often some sort of political issue about which John Rosenberg has strong opinions and we get a punchline and we get ridiculousness and it's comic. I think semi-sequitur because you rarely come back to these universes and get what happens next, but every so often you do. When you do, it's completely unexpected. I just picked up several collections of these, and it's a weird format. John, why didn't you just take all the ones that are from this one universe and put them together? Well, because you needed a palate cleanser. You needed to forget that was a thing, before you could come back to it. It's a weird format, but…

[DongWon] Juxtaposition can be such a powerful tool.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] To highlight… Right… It gives you that parallax of being able to see it from one perspective and then another perspective immediately.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that epistolary in particular…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Offers you. That juxtaposition.

[Erin] Nice.

[Howard] Can we…

[Erin] I was going to say, before we go to break, I want to pull one more chocolate out of the box. This one was mentioned earlier by Howard which is 2nd person. So, you know, you are listening to a podcast. Using the you directly, either directly to the reader or to an unknown kind of 3rd… Another party within the story. We don't have a ton of time before the break, but any quick thoughts on 2nd person? Love it, hate it, want to marry it?

[Mary Robinette] So, I think it's a form that is a natural way that we tell stories. You know, like… So imagine, you're standing in the grocery store line, and then, what do you see in front of you? You know, this is the thing that we do all the time whenever we're talking [garbled] where it falls apart, when it's… Where it becomes difficult is that you… When you're telling that story, you're deciding for the reader what their emotions are, so… If it is not in sync with the emotion that the reader is actually having, then it can be jarring for them, they can be like, "No, that's not how I feel right now." So, walking the line between creating this world where you're telling the reader this is the thing that happens and adjusting it so that you're not throwing them out of the story by having it be not in sync with their own experience of the story can be a real challenge.

[Howard] The reader has to let go. A line like, "And you draw your pistol," and my first thought is, "Wait, I'm carrying a pistol?" No, I need to let go of that.

[Erin] And you will experience a break right now.

[Howard] during 2020, 2021, I, like tens of thousands of other people, was privileged to discover Dr. Sayed Tabatabai on twitter as he was writing stories about his experiences in the hospital in tweet format. These Vital Signs by Dr. Sayed Tabatabai is these tweets in book collection. Think of it like a book of poetry, where each poem is a poignant wonderful true deep story about… I don't know… Life, death, medicine. It's amazing. I love this book. Love this book. These Vital Signs by Dr. Sayed Tabatabai.

[Erin] All right. We're back and we're still talking about 2nd person.

[DongWon] the one thing I really love about 2nd person, to just sort of pick up on what Mary Robinette and Howard were saying, is… There was a period a few years ago where I noticed I was reading a lot of short fiction that was using the 2nd person. There was like a mini, like, little trend of it. A lot of it was coming from marginalized authors. I had this thought that one of the beautiful things about 2nd person, and one of the things that readers sometimes respond badly to, is it, in the way that unreliable narrators are about the subjectivity of the narrator, the 2nd person forces you into a particular perspective, into someone else's subjectivity, because you are being brought into the story in that way. You are doing the thing, you are experiencing the thing. So what I saw was a lot of people who were trying to write about experiences that were not of the quote unquote mainstream audience, where using 2nd person as a way to sort of almost, like, forcibly grab people and bring them into their world. Right? So Violet Allen uses this super effectively in The Venus Effect, Elisa Wong has a few stories in this mode, N. K. Jemison's The 5th Season uses this in particular moments. Sometimes that 2nd person direct address can really loop someone into an experience in a way that would… They would struggle to relate to in another format.

[Erin] I also think if you want to be more antagonistic in some ways…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] With your 2nd person, it can be a way to mirror of feeling of marginalization.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] You are being told what you do and how you feel, and I am going to make you feel that way with this narrative. That can be a hard line, because you can lose the reader, but if they stick with you, like, it can create that sense of being off balance that I think is a really fun one that 2nd person sort of makes available. Some… A theory that I have about 2nd person as well is that games have actually made people…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] A lot more comfortable with 2nd person. Because games spend a lot of time telling you that you have a pistol, and even though your character does, there's a certain amount of having to like lose that, "But what about my id?" feeling, and my ego, that I think we've gotten used to…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Because that's now a storytelling [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's part of the change from doomed guy never gets to speak to [garbled master shave and halo?] has dialogue. Right? We saw like Destiny famously started with dialogue, they took it away, and then they put it back for your character, in part because there was this debate over what gives you subjectivity of the character, what can you tell people to do? I think we have all found that letting your character speak makes a more engaged experience, that people are sophisticated enough to be able to ride with some of these things that we sometimes assume is too much for the audience.

[Mary Robinette] You've just made me realize that in much the way that geeks are coming into the mainstream now, because all the people who consumed it as kids are now in power, all of us who thrived on choose your own adventures are now adults, writing fiction.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, oh, yeah.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I remember, kind of vividly, playing SkyRim and playing as a Khajiit and playing as a female. The enemies would sometimes use derogatory terms specific to me being female, or me having for. Because I was in first person camera, I would forget that that was what I looked like, and it was kind of a slap. Yet, I looked back on it and realized, no, this is a valuable experience for me. Because this is the way people other than me often experience the world.

[Erin] Love that.

[Mary Robinette] What's our next chocolate?

[Erin] I was going to say, time for the next chocolate. The next chocolate is stories in nonstory format…

[Oooo…]

[Erin] So, stories that are pretending to be research papers. Stories that… Anything that, like, it seems like something else, but really, it's a story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of my very favorite things I ever wrote, it's in the Planet Mercenary books, in the liner notes. It is a story being told in the comments section of a document. The comments section was not supposed to go into print, and in the very beginning of the book, we see the miscommunication where they decide, "Oh, okay, the document comments are going in the margins." It is a 12,000 word white room story about a group of people trying to finish the book you are holding. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and a murder and kittens. It was so much fun to write, and it's one of my favorite things I've ever done. Because I played with format in such an amusing way.

[DongWon] Yeah. Because it's not clear how much I love nontraditional formats, I'm going to continue to talk about client books or client stories. There was one from a client, Sarah Gailey, who wrote the story called Stet. Stet is… The basic format of it is it's an abstract of an academic paper, and one of the authors is leaving notes on the paper. In the marginalia, in the footnotes, is where the action of the story is happening and you begin to feel the unreliability of the character and start to understand what happened to her as related to the subject matter of the academic abstract. I'm very biased, but I think it's an incredible piece of short fiction, it's heartbreaking, it's thought-provoking. If you have any concerns about AI, I recommend reading it. There's so much that you can do with that format. I think again it's a very short story so sometimes that experimental format lends itself to being like a quick… A single bite of chocolate…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] To really continue with the metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] There's a story, and I cannot remember the title. So I'll see if I can find it to include in the liner notes. But it is told from someone who's like in a Mars rover and it's broken down and the entire story is just the auto responses from the helpdesk. So it's like, "How to use emergency oxygen."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Then… It's just hilarious because you can see exactly what is going wrong, and "I'm sorry, we don't recognize those words."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I also do want to sort of argue with myself for a 2nd. I've been continually saying that this really works in short formats, and I do think that's true. It also can work in long formats. It's difficult to pull off. Very famously… I'm blanking on the author's name, but House of Leaves is a very long novel that uses a variety of found format documents. It is printed in a very unusual way. It's full-color. There's a fully epistolary section, there are journals, there's descriptions of movies in there. It is a brilliant novel. It is one of the most terrifying and unsettling things I've read, even though… I'm not sure I would actually call it horror. It just… I found it to be a very dis-orienting read. It's a brilliant novel. I absolutely adore it and highly recommend it for anyone who's interested in how can you push the boundaries of what you can do in a printed book.

[Howard] When you've got a novel that's got chapter bumps, lots… Lots of authors find ways to tell stories through the sequence of chapter bumps.

[Mary Robinette] Will you define chapter bumps?

[DongWon] What's a chapter bump?

[Howard] Oh. Chapter bump. It's the little blurb at the beginning of a chapter that might be a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica at the head of one chapter…

[DongWon] Oh

[Howard] At the next chapter, it's another thing. Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I just call them something different.

[DongWon] What is the word that we use for them? I'm blanking on it now… Epigraphs!

[Mary Robinette] Epigraphs.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] I was like… Epithet was coming to mind…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, "It's not that."

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Howard] Telling stories in epithets is fun, though, too.

[DongWon] You can have an epithet as an epigraph. The author of the book is Mark Z. Danielewski. Sorry. [Mary Robinette] So… But speaking of that, a lot of the techniques that were talking about here are things that you can mix-and-match.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly. I was going to say, like, you don't have to dive all the way into the pool, you can dip your toe in the water.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I was thinking about, like, those types of epigraphs are great way to, like, practice with a particular form of thing. You can have a recipe, for example. I was thinking of…

[Mary Robinette] The Spare Man. Yes.

[Erin] The Spare Man, like, in between the chapters. Sometimes it's just something that's fun. It can be… One thing to think about is why are you doing this format...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Non-traditionally? You can just do it because you want to. So, you don't have to have a reason. But it can be something where you're like, the reason those Encyclopedia Galactica things exist is to tell you something about the world that there's really not a good place for within the narrative, but the author still thinks that you should know.

[Howard] The… There was an update to WordPress a few years ago where they introduced what they called the block editor. Which I absolutely hated. They took away my big free-form editor and they forced me to write in little blocks. I realized what they were doing is saying, "Look, you people have been using Twitter to tell longform blog posts. You've been thread in these twitter things. So here is a writing tool that will let you write in the same way that all of you have been thinking anyway on social media." I remember looking at it and taking a further step back and realizing, "Oh, my gosh. Twitter is… It's like a poetic form now. I am telling a thing in tweets and there is a character restriction on how much I can put, which is as rigid as any poetic forms."

[DongWon] I'm going to sneak one last chocolate from the box. That's because I want to talk about footnotes, which…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Is one of my all time favorite modes of doing something experimental. They can do all kinds of things. Terry Pratchett used them throughout his entire career absolutely brilliantly. It's… The way he does it is so funny, but also cutting and revealing. More recently, Babel by R. F. Kuane uses them to great effect.

[Mary Robinette] Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell uses them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I use them?

[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Why footnotes? What do you guys like about them?

[Mary Robinette] I like them because they are an aside to the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that… While they break the flow of the story… They can break the flow of the story in some ways, but it's also… It also feels like you're being invited a little bit further in.

[Erin] Yeah. They're both… It's like a little Venn diagram. I feel like they're both explicitly in conversation with the story and explicitly in conversation… Implicitly in conversation with the reader.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So you're getting this really cool thing where you're getting just a little bit closer and seeing sort of how the sausage is made in the way that the writer wants you to…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] See it. Which is great.

[DongWon] You're not going full epistolary, but you're going a little 2nd person. It's like a little bit of, like, have your cake and eat it too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The footnotes in Pratchett and Gaiman's Good Omens… The footnote about "Well, this is what might have happened to the 3rd… The extra baby. That's much nicer than what would have happened." They talk about tropical fish, whatever. Then, much later in the story, we meet this character who… This young boy of the right age who plays with tropical fish, and the footnote says, "We liked your version better."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It's so delightful, having been invited in…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And told, "Yeah. This is a more pleasant version of the story."

[Erin] All right. We have gone in, we've explored our chocolate box of nontraditional formats, and now it's time for your homework.

[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, what I want you to do is take a scene from a story that you've written or you're working on, and put it into a new format. So if you've written it straight 3rd person, try turning it into 2nd person. Try turning it into epistolary. What did you learn in the process?

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

[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations! Also, let us know. We'd love to hear from you about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/13/17-46-monstrous-awakening/

Key Points: What does it mean to wake up monstrous? Body horror and body humor play with our fears of losing ability, of losing agency. That could be me? To be scared, to be horrified at helplessness, rope and duct tape could do it, too. Watch out for the sideswipe at disability. Think about ripple effects. Consider the metaphor of apartment life as a disaster! Pay attention to the point of view, and authorial empathy. Make sure your character keeps their humanity and agency. Don't grab that wheelchair, don't just help without asking.

[Season 17, Episode 46]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Monstrous Awakening.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are here to talk about this idea of monstrous awakening. One of the things that I'm going to ask you all to do before you listen to this episode is actually to pause and to go read an essay that Fran wrote that's called You Wake Up Monstrous. We will be here, and it's fine if you don't have time to listen to... to read that before you listen to the episode. Totally fine, you won't be lost, but if you have time, it will give you some important framing, I think. So, let's dive in and talk about this idea of body horror and body issues. Fran, and you kind of sort of for those who have not had time to listen, sort of sum up what we're talking about with body horror and body issues, using some of the metaphors that you use in your wonderful essay?

[Fran] Um… Yes. I can. I… So, body horror and body humor as well, and even a little bit of inspiration for it, all use these sort of there but for the grace of whatever universal entity is out there, that that happens to me. You see that in movies like The Fly, you see that in Kafka's Metamorphosis where the character wakes up and they are transformed into a bug. Or they are… They lose their… Not just their ability to speak, but their mouth disappears. In The Matrix, for instance. Those are all forms of body horror that play with and on sort of vestigal fears of losing ability, agency. They also play with the discomfort that we see each other go through when we become either ill or disabled.

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about these things, a lot of times, we see authors reach for disability as shorthand for evil or helplessness. But it doesn't have to be that way. What are some other choices that a writer could make?

[Chelsea] I have a slightly different angle for how to get ahead in advertising. I'm thinking about like the body thing. I was kind of just forming a thing in my head about Neil waking up with no mouth and that helplessness. Like, I was trying to connect it with something else. I was trying to connect it to, like, you can wake up and you can have no mouth and stuff, and all of a sudden, everything is very different and there's a bug on you, and all those other horrible things. It's like you're doing this because you want people to be scared and you want people to kind of be horrified at the helplessness. But I'm also thinking about like… If you want people to be horrified by the helplessness, that's fine. There's always like rope and duct tape. Then nobody is like missing a mouth. There isn't like this kind of this weird symbolism about other disabilities going on. But they are helpless, and it is scary, and that maybe thinking, "Do I need to do this in this way specifically or can I do this and not kind of take a sideswipe at disability?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. What you're talking about there is thinking about the area of intention, like, why are you making this choice? It's not that these choices are always forbidden and you can never make one of these choices. Because there are times and places where it's appropriate. But you have to think about it and not just default to it because it's something that you've seen in media, because you're not thinking about the larger ramifications of it. That's usually where people run into problems, is that they don't think about the ripple effects, and they don't think about those areas of intention.

[Chelsea] I honestly believe that if you take something like that, and you're like, "Okay, I saw it on TV," and you think about the stuff that is lying underneath it, and if that causes you to go, "Mm, no. I need to do this because this has entirely different things lying underneath it," you're actually going to end up with a story that you actually want instead of one that winds up going astray because you didn't think about, like, three layers of implications about a device that you're using.

[Howard] Let me approach this real quick from a different angle. If you totally un-ironically tell a story about a disaster in someone's life where they can no longer afford their mortgage and they have to move into an apartment and that is just a terrible disaster. You're playing it not for humor, absolutely un-ironically. Everybody in the world who already lives in an apartment and gets by just fine looks at this story and says, "Why is my way of life horrible or evil or whatever?" You've othered an enormous portion of your audience. I bring this up not to say that we should all live in apartments or we should all live in houses. I bring it up to say that this is how you need to think about these things so that you don't come across as age-ist or ablest, when you are trying to accomplish something else with your story.

[Fran] I think what Chelsea was talking about, too, about that implied helplessness, the lack of mouth, the lack of things, it does depend, in the story, on (a) the point of view, and also a certain level of authorial empathy. Not sympathy, but empathy. Because what a lot of horror tropes rely on is a sense of that other is not part of the human pattern anymore. They've lost their humanity, because they've lost their mouth or, to go back to a previous episode of Writing Excuses, they've lost their hand, and it's been replaced by another body part. But we have this opportunity to explore the fact that in… And this is something that actually Kafka does pretty well, is that because the point of view is internal, you don't see that character as, Gregor Samsa, as helpless. He's rationalizing how to get through this situation and just to have… Take a moment to think… When you're writing body horror or body humor, and think about what it feels like to be that other person and acknowledge their personhood, acknowledge their humanity, and the fact that they have agency in the situation as well, whatever the horrific situation is, they still have choice. They still have the ability to maneuver in different ways. And so does the audience who's reading this. Just like, to go back to Howard's apartment metaphor, in the essay I wrote a little bit about what it felt like to be wearing a back brace that was exactly the same as the back brace that was being joked about in the movie that I was watching. There's a character in Say Anything who's trying to get a drink of water out of a water fountain while wearing a Milwaukee-based brace with a neck support. I didn't have a neck support, but it's impossible. It becomes this long-running joke in the middle of the movie. I just sat there and felt like, "Wow. This… I was enjoying this movie until just this moment." Just like the apartment metaphor that Howard gave us, it really does not necessarily do service to your story to have a whole bunch of your audience suddenly feel like you're operating against them.

[Howard] Done well, it's R-rated for language and so much language, I Spy with Melissa McCarthy… I think. Maybe it's just called Spy. But Melissa McCarthy plays the chair guy, the chairperson, for a spy who is suddenly pushed out in the field. She is very competent, but she is very inexperienced. At no point in the show do we make fat jokes about Melissa McCarthy.

[Fran] I love that [garbled]

[Howard] People make fun of her clothing sometimes, because maybe the clothing choices are weird. But it is never about her being overweight. It is daring. It is a daring movie to make that choice. I love it because of how well it does it.

[Fran] Also, she's a fantastic actress.

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Fran] Her entire use of every inch of that screen is amazing.

[Howard] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we pause for our book of the week. That book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monstrous… Monsters and the Monstrous. Fran, you want to tell us a little bit about that?

[Fran] Sure. This is a collection of horror stories edited by Ellen Datlow. It came out in the late spring of 2022. It came out from Tor night… Nightfire. It contains a whole range of ways in which monsters, both familiar and new, interact with the world. A lot of them are intentionally horror stories, because that was the purview of the book. But some of them actually do some really interesting examinations of what it means to be monstrous in a human world. I really like that as well.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So that book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, as we come back in, let's talk about some things to do that are a little bit more interesting. One of the things that I have noted in stories where I feel like it's done a little better is that the person's disabilities are not the source of the horror, it's the people around them and the environment that they find themselves in. So it is someone else grabbing the wheelchair. That's the removal of the agency, it's not the chair itself, it's someone else trying to take control.

[Fran] Helping.

[Mary Robinette] Helping.

[Chelsea] Oh, it just gives me the shivers. The angry shivers.

[Fran] I had somebody without asking help me off of I believe it was a bus. I was just… I was moving slower than they thought I should be, and that I needed help. They pulled me by my arm and dislocated my shoulder. Which I then popped back in right in front of them to the most disgusting degree I could, because I wanted to let them know that they had not in actuality helped me at all.

[Howard] See, if you had a sword cane, you could have just [garbled] at them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Fran] [garbled] say, why does no one let me have a sword cane?

[Howard] The drubbing.

[Fran] But it really does… People think of themselves as providing assistance without asking. The grabbing of the wheelchair… The maneuvering of someone… It is a lack of agency is horrific. In… Again, in the point of view of someone who is experiencing a lack of agency, whether it is through cosmic horror or the deep and abiding horror of someone like Steven Graham Jones's stories where every house sort of seems to build out horror around his characters. I think that there are distinctive shifts in point of view and authorial empathy that can avoid some of the pitfalls and really build some… Like Chelsea was saying before, really interesting layers and depth in there. That's only going to make your story better and scarier, or, if you're doing body humor, funnier.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] A lesson I learned from Mary Robinette, gosh, eight years ago. It's one of the best ways to introduce that horror is not to make the removal of agency related to someone's weakness, you make it related to their strength. Their strength can serve them… It can do nothing for them in this scenario. The wheelchair is not a weakness, the wheelchair is a perfectly good mobility device. In fact, you're a Paralympic basketball player in that wheelchair. Then you are in a situation where that agency is removed.

[Mary Robinette] The… In The Spare Man, my main character's a cane user. She has chronic pain from an old injury. One of the scenes that I am… The day where she's like, "Oh, this is definitely a cane day," and she has to grab that, that's just part of her life. She grabs it, it's no big deal. When she gets to the set of stairs that is built to go up a centrifugal well, so they change angle every single step, and she has to climb them, that's when she's like, "Oh. No." That is the problem. It's not… It is coming from the environment and her need to interact with that environment.

[Howard] That is one spoon per stair. That's a…

[Chuckles]

[Fran] One of the things that I think about is… This is sort of elevating out of body horror a little bit, is something like Pat Cadigan's The Girl Thing That Went out for Sushi, which has body augmentation which we talked about last time and a little bit of body horror in it, in that these are people who are working in space and have augmentations done so that they can better work in space, so they become starfish and they become… They have… Different ways of gripping or different ways of appreciating which way is up that is really phenomenal. So I think that's an interesting thing to look at. Horror, especially, tends to end up with the characters and the reader trapped in a situation or trapped in that like depth of imagination where you're not sure if they're ever going to get out. Whereas sci-fi and fantasy find a way out quite often. Howard, you were going to say something there?

[Howard] Oh. Yeah. It's just I… For those of you not benefiting from the video feed, sometimes I raise my hand to let people know that I'm ready to talk when they're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was not trying to interrupt. Lois McMaster Bujold, I mentioned her in a previous episode, the novel Freefall. In which there is a whole race of people who have been engineered so that their lower legs are arms and so that their hearts and metabolisms and everything function really well, just fine, in zero gravity. This group of people, genetically engineered, and they have their own little space station and everything's cool. Then, artificial gravity, energetic artificial gravity is introduced, and they are sort of this little evolutionary dead end. They're still perfectly awesome in their own little world. When, in one point of the story, a couple of them end up on a planetary surface, yes, there is our lack of agency, there is our body horror, and it is from people who… Or it is experienced by people who, in their own environment, are perfectly suited and beautiful and wonderful and awesome. I like the way… I really love the way Bujold handles that.

[Mary Robinette] This has been a great discussion. Let's go ahead and talk about our homework. Chelsea, do you have our homework?

[Chelsea] I do. Your homework, if you should choose to accept it, is to rewrite a scene with body humor or body horror. It can be one of yours or it can be somebody else's. So that the character with the disability is not the butt of the joke or the source of the horror.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great homework assignment. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.20: Basics of Ensemble Characterization

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/15/17-20-basics-of-ensemble-characterization/

Key points: What is an ensemble? Everyone has their own weight, emotional or physical. Everyone matters, and they play a part. One hallmark is multiple POVs used not to change locations, but because other characters can move the story forward. A story with a lot of important characters in it. Where do you start? Start with the protagonist protagonist, the leader of the group. Why does the story need the ensemble? Answering this question separates an ensemble from the story of a single person and the people who assist them. Are the other people just spear carriers or are they real characters?

[Season 17, Episode 20]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, the first episode of our new masterclass about ensemble casts. This episode is the Basics of Ensemble Characterization.

[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.

[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are very excited to have Zoraida Cordova with us. Kaela Rivera is also on the show, and you've heard from her before in one of our previous masterclasses. Zoraida, tell us about yourself.

[Zoraida] Hello. I'm Zoraida Cordova. I am the author of several young adult, adult, and romance novels. I predominantly write YA fantasy. I have a series, The Brooklyn Brujas series. My latest adult novel is The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina, which is more magical realism. I'm trying not to write the same thing twice. But you never know. I also write for Star Wars.

[Dan] Cool. Well, we're very excited to have you. You're kind of the leader of this class about ensemble casts. So let me ask the very first question. What is an ensemble? Lots of stories have more than one character, what makes it an ensemble specifically?

[Zoraida] The thing that makes it an ensemble to me is everyone sort of has their own weight. The story couldn't function the same without every single one of these characters. Sometimes it's emotional weight, sometimes it's a physical presence. I like to think of things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Friends. I'm just using those as big shows that people already are familiar with. Every single person almost matters in those stories, and they play a part. There's really interesting dynamics. Obviously, The Avengers movies are a big ensemble cast. But when it comes to books, it's almost harder to navigate those waters, because the text has to do so much work than the visual. So that's what an ensemble cast is to me.

[Dan] Yeah. So, like Orquidea Divina, your book, I think has a really great ensemble cast, because it's specifically about a family, and eventually narrows in very tightly on three of those characters, but you could not tell that story without discussing everyone and how they relate to each other and kind of letting them bounce off of each other.

[Zoraida] Yeah. Thank you.

[Howard] I think one of the hallmarks of… Hallmark… The flag that goes up that says, oh, this is actually about an ensemble, is when you have multiple POVs, but you didn't switch POV because they were in different places. You just switched POV because this other character needs… The way they are perceiving what the group is doing is what is moving the story forward right now. It's… I mean, that's not hard and fast, but anytime I see that, I expect, oh, this is an ensemble. The Powder Mage books by Brian McClellan, he introduces I think three POVs in the first three chapters. But all three of those people are in completely different locations, and it doesn't read like an ensemble book. I'm not knocking it. I loved the Powder Mage series. But, just because there's lots of POVs doesn't mean you're writing an ensemble.

[Dan] Yeah. There's a difference between telling multiple stories under the umbrella of a single book and telling a story that has a lot of important characters in it. So, if someone is writing or wants to write about an ensemble cast, where do they start? What are some important considerations for doing the characterization?

[Zoraida] I think it's important to look at the protagonist protagonist. I always call… I call my hero that, or my heroine that. Because sometimes, even though you have a group of people, there is still a leader. To me, they shape the relationship between themselves and everybody else. That is the beginning of characterization when I start writing a book.

[Howard] Yeah. You've got the pro protagonist and then all the other protagonists.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I…

[Zoraida] The co-protags.

[Howard] Yep.

[Dan] The co-tagonists.

[Howard] I think of… I mean, we've mentioned the Avengers film. Analyzing that, the first Avengers movie… Analyzing it is a lot of fun, because part of what makes it work is the realization that this is kind of Tony's journey. Everybody has brilliant character moments, and it's great fun all the way through. But you begin picking it apart and you realize, oh, Loki picked the top of Tony's tower, which is where Tony got dragged into this. When… Oh, what's his name? Phil Coulson…

[Laughter]

[Howard] He has a name. He was dating a cellist. He's a real person. When Phil shows up and Tony's the one at the end who does the thing that Captain America said he wouldn't do… Jumps on the grenade for everybody else. So… That thread is not a strong thread throughout the film. But nobody else has a stronger thread. So, Tony's our pro-protag, and everybody else is just one step below that. That's a useful… For me, that's a super useful consideration.

[Dan] Yeah. Another example that is coming to mind is Star Trek. Most of the Star Trek series are very strong ensemble casts. In Next Generation, Picard, if anything, is our protagonist protagonist. He's the one that is kind of at the center of a lot of the stories. But we get to know everyone on the bridge, everyone in other parts. They play poker together, they do sports and other games together. The stories are not about just a thing happening, but how does this group of people respond to the thing happening. Compare that to Star Trek Discovery, which is very specifically about Michael Burnham. The first few seasons, most of the characters in the show didn't even have names. It was Michael, it was Saru, a handful of others, and then a bunch of nameless nobodies on the bridge, because it was not an ensemble show. It was the Michael Burnham show. So the same kind of story, but told in two very different ways.

[Kaela] I think one of the things that distinguishes a protagonist protagonist for me is the fact that, like, the most essential, in that, like, all of the ensemble are important, but it's like all of them are sort of threaded through the protagonist protagonist journey. Like, they all have touch points in there. As an example… You'll have to forgive me, I'm a middle grade writer, so cartoons are the first thing I think of when I think of media.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] But I loved Hey Arnold! growing up. If you look at Hey Arnold!… Yes, thank you. Hey Arnold! was so good growing up. Still watch it. Like, Hey Arnold!, Arnold is the key character, he's the protagonist protagonist. But at the same time, throughout like the several seasons it got, he only has like four episodes really that are focused solely on him. Most of them are like people have touch points with Arnold, that is about Arnold's heart. Like, his heart, his themes, his character journey as a person. But they thread in Arnold's experience and he becomes an important touch point for them on their character journey. So, I think that's also an important part.

[Zoraida] I think while we're talking about cartoons, for me it was Sailor Moon.

[Laughter. Yes!]

[Zoraida] That I sometimes when people ask me, like, why do you like this? I feel like a combination of Sailor Moon and Gargoyles. Both of those are the touch points for me as a creator. I feel like Sailor Moon is a story of these girls fighting against evil, fighting for love and goodness in the world. Right? They're the guardians of love. One of the things that separates them, for me, is, without her group, without the other sailor scouts or sailor sun shields, Sailor Moon is just a girl by herself. But with them, this group together, they're… The dynamics of the group change as she finds each one and the story progresses.

[Dan] Yeah. Let's pause here. Do our book of the week. This week, that is Valentina Salazar is Not a Monster Hunter. Zoraida, can you tell us about that one?

[Zoraida] Yes. Speaking of ensemble casts, Valentina Salazar is Not a Monster Hunter is my second middle grade novel. It comes out on June 28th of this year. It is about a young girl named Valentina Salazar who is a monster protector. But her family is descended from a long line of monster hunters. After her dad dies, her family gets landlocked. They no longer travel around the country saving monsters. Instead, they're just living in upstate New York. One day, she finds a viral video of a very, very rare monster egg. She convinces her siblings to steal the van, called the Scourge of land and sea. They take the van and they go in search of this monster egg before the hunters get hold of it. So, it's about family and not all monsters look monstrous. That comes out this summer, so… I'm very excited.

[Dan] Awesome. Yeah, that one will be out end of June, so you can go and preorder it right now. Which we strongly encourage you to do. Again, that is Valentina Salazar is Not a Monster Hunter, by Zoraida Cordova.

[Dan] So, let's get back into a couple more questions about what an ensemble is and how it works. In future weeks, we'll talk more about how to do all of this. But I do want to ask kind of a crunchy question. When you are working with an ensemble cast, we know that the protagonist protagonist is kind of… They're the lead of the ensemble, so to speak. But every part, every other character in there is important. Why does the story require all of those extra people? Why can't the story or the main character function without that ensemble behind them?

[Zoraida] I think answering that question is what separates it from… An ensemble and then just a singular journey. Right? Then just a journey of one person and the people that assist them along the way.

[Howard] I'm going to state the super unpopular opinion that I have. Which is that I loved the Hobbit movies…

[Me too]

[Howard] Because they took a story that made the dwarves just faceless short angry dudes with beards…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I'm a faceless short angry dude with a beard.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm sorry, I want to be a person. It turned them all into people and it created an ensemble. Now, we could argue until the rock trolls come home about whether it created an effective ensemble. But for me, it worked. That was… For me, that was the principal difference. A lot of people say, "Well, Tolkien was able to tell that story in one little novel. Why did you need three movies?" Because we wanted to tell the story… Pieter Jackson wanted to tell the story in a way that turned all of these into people. Honestly, when you're making a movie, and you have a dozen people on the screen and they're just all spear carriers, that's a waste of camera angles. That's… you can throw those people away easily in a short story, in a novella, in a novel. But if you're trying to build something where we actually look at the characters, we have to justify their existence.

[Dan] Absolutely. So. We are going to get into that a little more in future episodes. We'll talk more about how to do this, how to make the characters unique, how to establish your ensemble.

[Dan] But for now, we want to give you some homework. Okay. This, we're going to look at your main character. At your protagonist protagonist. We want you to free write just a little short thing in which they are applying for the job… Applying for the job of being the protagonist of your book. They get to talk about why they are going to be good at overcoming the challenges, why they're going to be bad, and therefore interesting, at overcoming the challenges. Whatever it is you want to do. Just free write that. Get a sense of who that person is.

[Howard] Hey, what's this blank spot on your resume? Oh, that's when I was one of the dwarves in The Hobbit.

[Laughter]

[Dan] [garbled]

[Howard] I wasn't really employed.

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

[Mary Robinette] Put the go in go write at one of the Writing Excuses 2022 retreats in Capital Reef National Park in Utah and aboard the Liberty of the Seas in the Western Caribbean. Go to writingexcusesretreat.com for more info.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs

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

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

[Season 17, Episode 10]

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I've got the B plot.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to…

[Peng] Mary Robinette, you…

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

[Peng] Oooh!

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That's wonderful.

[Howard] Well played.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Howard] Oh, that was me.

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

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

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

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

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

[Peng] That was such a good book.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Multiple… Three? Is it?

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

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

[Peng] Yeah.

[Dan] Definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity

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

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

[Season 17, Episode 8]

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

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

[Yeah. See, this is…]

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Emptying the head is hard.

[Emptying is hard]

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

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

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

[Yes]

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

[Awesome]

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

[Megan] You need to.

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

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

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

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

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

[Howard] Write the homework first.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] That is me and revisions.

[Chuckles]

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

[Whoa!]

[Megan] And they all work.

[Sandra] They do. That's…

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

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

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

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

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

[Kaela] Yay.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Howard] Oh, my.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Sorry, guys.

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

[Sandra] Oh, so much joy.

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

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

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

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

[Safer]

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/31/16-44-world-and-character-part-1-all-your-characters-are-biased/

Key Points: You only need to create the world your characters live in. Point of view is the great determiner of worldbuilding. Focus on what the character cares about. You may do it in layers, working out plot specific ones ahead of time, but decorative ones when a scene needs them.

[Season 16, Episode 44]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased.

[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] I am… This is quite a bold statement in our title. All your characters are biased. Fonda, what do you mean by that?

[Fonda] Well, often times, writers have to do… When they're doing worldbuilding, they get asked the question, "How do you do it all, like, how do you create a whole 'nother world?" That just seems like such an overwhelming, daunting, gargantuan task. My answer to that question is it is less daunting than you think. Because you don't actually need to create the entire world. You only need to create the world that your characters live in. Because none of us have a complete view of the world. We all live in our different worlds, and those worlds are determined by everything from our family background, our class, race, gender, culture, occupation, our position in our family, all these different factors create the world that we live in. Someone else may be inhabiting a world that is entirely foreign to us. So I like to think of the world and your character's view of the world like the analogy of the blind men and the elephant. Probably everyone has heard of this analogy, but if you have not, it's the idea that there's blind men feeling an elephant, and the one who standing near the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a tree," and someone else near the… No, the person standing near the leg thinks the elephant is like a tree. The person holding the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a snake." Everyone has a different mental image of what the elephant is because they are only experiencing their section of the elephant. This applies to characters in a world as well. That is why point of view is truly the great determiner of worldbuilding. You first need to understand who your character is and what their place in the world is and what the story is around them. That determines your worldbuilding needs.

[Howard] I just realized that I want to retell that story from the point of view of the elephant who has now decided human beings are all ignorant.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And they grope me all the time.

[Howard] And stop touching me!

[Dan] I think this is a really fascinating way to look at worldbuilding. Honestly, one of the things that I really love about the Green Bone saga as a great example of worldbuilding is the way that you were able to show the different cultures. There are the people who live in Jade City, and then there are the other people, the Kekonese who live in Espenia who are the same but also fundamentally different at the same time, because they see the world in different ways. Knowing then that point of view is, as you said, the great determiner of worldbuilding, how do you bring that across in your writing?

[Fonda] Yeah. So, a good example of this is actually my debut novel, Zero Boxer. So it takes place in the future in which the inner solar system has been colonized. There is a political conflict that is occurring between Earth and Mars. There are issues involving genetic engineering and whether or not that should be legal or illegal. But that doesn't actually matter all that much to the protagonist, because he is an athlete, and he's competing in the sport of zero gravity prize fighting. So the world, for him, revolves around athletic competition. So as a worldbuilding, as a world builder, what I needed to focus on were all the details of his life as an athlete. That included things like his supplement routine, his exercise routine, is training, all the, like, details of how those fights happen in zero gravity. All the stuff involving like Earth and Mars and like the tech in the future and how spaceships work, like we didn't need to know how the drive of the spaceship worked. Because that is not something that he cared about, he just needed to get from one competition to the next. So, of course, he gets on a spaceship and he moves through time, but for him, what was most important to the story were those details of his day-to-day life. So a lot of the other stuff is kind of just sort of hinted at, or implied in the background. It is… Still feels like it supports and it exists, but I didn't need to go deep into all that stuff. Where I needed to go deep was in the areas the character cared about. One of the benefits… That was a single point of view story, but one of the benefits of having a multi point of view story, which I had in the Green Bone saga, was each of the different characters then has their own priorities and their own experiences and circumstances, so you get a more fully fleshed out and developed world because you are seeing characters who have different views of it. It's like putting all those blind men who are touching the elephant into a room and they're all drawing out their own little section and slowly the whole elephant comes into view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The way I think of this is about the decisions that I'm making about the things that my character interacts with. Which are the things that you're talking about. The supplement routine… In Green Bone saga, we learn a lot when we go to the school. We learn a lot more things because we're in the POV of someone who inhabits that… That's a good way… Like, when you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I have to do when I'm trying to…" How do I… When you're facing decision paralysis. It's like, "What is your character going to interact with?" So when I'm doing my worldbuilding, I'll do like… You've heard me talk about doing this in layers. Well, I'll think about the sort of broad layers that my… That I know that my character is going to interact with. But a lot of the specific details, like the supplement routine, I don't think about that until I get to… I mean, I don't have a character with a supplement routine, but were I writing it, I would not work that supplement routine out until I hit a scene where I was like, "Oh, my character absolutely is going to have supplements here and I need to know what they are." But otherwise, I don't sit down and work it out. I tend to think of it as sort of there are… The ones that I need to work out ahead of time are the plot specific ones, the ones that are going to shape the way the plot works. Then there are other ones that are kind of what I think of as the decorative ones that are the ones that affect the way maybe my character interacts with the plot. But doesn't necessarily shift the course of the plot.

[Dan] Let's pause here for our book of the week. Which is, actually, you, Mary Robinette. You were going to tell us about Craft in the Real World.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses is a craft book. Normally we're giving you fiction to read, but I actually think that every writer should read this book. It's looking at the biases that we bring to fiction based on the ways that we… The fiction that we have read and the societies that we move through. You think, "Really? Biases? Do we have them?" One of the examples that he gives in this book is how we've all been taught not to… When we do dialogue tags, to do like said or asked, and not to do things like inquired or queried. He says the problem is if someone grows up in another culture and they are taught to write… That queried is the invisible one. So they are always like, "my character queried, queried my character." If they come to a writing workshop in a culture that is an ask culture, and they write queried, everybody in that workshop is going to be like, "Why do you keep using this word? Go with the invisible word." One of the things he talks about is how ESL writers will often read something like written by a native English speaker and be like, "Why do they keep reusing the same word? Why do they keep reusing said? Don't they know any other words?" It's about the inherent worldview that they're approaching their writing with. So this is, I think, a great book to read in general, and specifically a good book to read when you're thinking about the biases that your character is carrying, because a lot of those biases are biases that they're inheriting from you as the writer.

[Dan] That's awesome. So that is Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses.

[Dan] A lot of what we've been talking about reminds me of a funny thing that a creative writing professor showed us one time where someone had taken a story set in the modern day, but written in the style of Isaac Asimov. Where he is explaining the technology behind everything that he encounters…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Including wooden doors and door knobs…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And automobiles and all of this stuff. Which, in a science fiction book, we kind of accept as well, yes, you need to explain to us how this door opened by itself, but putting it into the real world really gave it that context of, "Well, duh, we don't need to know this. Why does this character feel it important to tell us about how a car turns on when you turn the key?" That's a lot of what you're talking about here, where the point of view that we're getting the world through is going to change what details about the world we get. I find that a really valuable perspective.

[Fonda] Yeah. I think that if you think about the genre of dystopian fiction, dystopia is a point of view. So if you rewrote the Hunger Games from the point of view of a middle class to upper class person living in the capitol, it would be a completely different story. I mean, they would be, "Who are these district 12 rebels? Insurgents, insurrectionists, who are here to destroy society?" So if you take that perspective of, like, everyone is living in their own world and there are people in our world who are living in very dystopian situations, every… If you decide you're going to tell a story about a… let's say a fictional city that you have made up. Is that story being told from the point of view of someone who has power and is privileged or somebody who is living in the sewer system? Those lead you to completely different stories. Neither one is correct. There's no right or wrong in terms of which perspective that you decide to write about. But that choice is going to fundamentally drive your world building needs. There is a minor character in the Green Bone saga who's the most hated character in that trilogy. But he plays a really valuable role from the perspective of the narrative because he is outside of the system that all the other main characters inhabit. Now, 90% of the time, you are spending time with the characters in this one family that they are very entrenched in their world and their culture. There is this one minor character who is not. Every time you step out into his point of view, you get a very different view of the world.

[Dan] Is that Bero?

[Fonda] It is.

[Dan] I actually love that character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I do too.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] This is, I think, a super important thing to bring up. Because I worry that some of our listeners are hearing us talk about this perspective driven world building, and finding it limiting. Really, this is an opportunity for you to expand your world in whatever direction you need it to go. One of the problems world builders have, we call this world building disease, where fantasy writers and science fiction writers, we just craft this enormous gargantuan world, and most of it, we don't actually need to put into the book. This is how you can put some of that into the book. If there's a part of your world building you find especially compelling or interesting, but your main plot doesn't necessarily focus on it, you can add in a side character who does or a subplot of some kind that will interact with it. That is how you can get that cool thing you're excited about into the book.

[Mary Robinette] Or you can write a short story that is set in the same world if you don't want to have story bloat.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled]

[Howard] One of the things that I fall back on all the time is the unreliable narrator. This is not the unreliable narrator of literary fiction where do I believe what this person is… No. This is the person who just says something in order to fill us in about some world details and I, the author, do not know whether they are right or wrong. I only know that they think they're right, and I might be wrong when I first wrote that dialogue for them. I'll find out later. This principle, the unreliable narrator, the… Oh, I forget his name, he was the story bible guy for Elder Scrolls Online from 2014 through I think almost 2020. He looked at the old Elder Scrolls games and was like, "Oh, no. Your stories are so inconsistent. You contradict your… Well, I have a solution. The solution is nobody says anything about the world except through the eyes of a character who might be wrong, might be right. Tada! Everything has now resolved itself. How old is the city? Eh, the city's about 500 years old. No, the city is 750 years old. No, the city is 2000 years old. It's built on another city that was built on another city that was… They're all right or they're all wrong." It doesn't matter, and it makes the world building so much easier when I let go of that and just allow myself to make mistakes, but my characters take the blame.

[Dan] Well, that is going to lead us right into our homework. Fonda, what homework do we have today?

[Fonda] I would like your listeners to take a favorite story of yours and reimagine it from a different point of view. Take a side character, a non-POV character, and imagine how your world building needs would be different if it was told from someone else's point of view. So, as an example, let's say you wanted to tell the story of Harry Potter from the point of view of the Minister of Magic. So what different world building needs would you need, would you have as a result of that story being told from a completely different perspective?

[Dan] Sounds great. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes

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

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

[Season 16, Episode 34]

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Whem]

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

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

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

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

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

[Wow]

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But it's something, right?

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

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

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

[Howard] Three, 14.

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

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

Whereas free indirect speech is something more like:

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Okay, then.

[Dan] [Oooo]

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/13/15-50-juggling-ensembles/

Key Points: How do you manage a large cast? In outlining, include the characters who are NOT going to be in the foreground, who are going to be left out. Start with a few, and then expand out. Don't try to treat all point of view and ensemble characters equally. How do you connect multiple different POV's in different places into a cohesive narrative. Common bits, e.g., dialogue. Groupings and teams! Don't exceed the reader's threshold for people and lines. Make sure every member of your ensemble serves a purpose in the story. I use multiple POV's for different places. Make sure your story is big enough to justify multiple POV's in different places. Switch to the POV who is in the most pain. Be careful of cliffhangers. Make sure the reader can follow your narrative, don't shift too many perspectives and timelines at the same time. How can one primary viewpoint character interact and build relationships with a large ensemble? How do you develop relationships without sending all the other characters out of the room? Don't treat all characters equally. Treat your ensemble cast like a group of real people. Use shorthand and cues to remind the readers who certain characters are. Sometimes caricatures work. Give the readers space for their imagination. One or two weird idiosyncrasies of character go a long way.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Juggling Ensembles.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We have questions from you guys about how to manage a large cast. This is tricky. I was not good at this early in my career. In fact, I have a story, I think I told you guys before, but when I first sat down to write the first Stormlight book, this was in 2002 before I sold any books, I failed because of the large cast. I wanted to do a big epic, like George RR Martin, like Robert Jordan, that had a large cast. I, even though this was my 13th novel, still crashed and burned trying to write this one. It didn't work until I had been handed the Wheel of Time and had to get up to speed on juggling a large cast very, very quickly. 2600 named characters in the Wheel of Time. That was like going to the gym and being like, "All right, personal trainer…"

[Howard] How many point of view characters were in the Wheel of Time?

[Brandon] 50, I think. Somewhere around there. How many main viewpoint characters? A dozen or so is what I would say. Maybe two dozen, depending on how you count main. So there were a lot.

[Howard] Using your gym metaphor,

[chuckles]

[Howard] There are people who go to the gym and overhead pressing 45 pounds, boy, that is a lot. Then there are the bodybuilders overhead pressing 450 pounds is also a lot. What you're talking about here really is the ultimate bit of heavy lifting. I don't… I haven't counted how many point of view characters there are in Schlock Mercenary, because the point of view is the camera instead of the character. But I think I realized around 2008, 2009, that my nascent outlining process needed to include which characters whose names I know, whose backstories I love, am I going to leave out of this book except for we get to see them in the background so that we know that they're not dead. Because unless I did that, my brain would latch on to the fact that oh, we haven't talked to so-and-so for a while, I should put them in a scene. That was a disaster. So, for me, large cast was about taking the huge cast, and then for an entire book, setting a different set of limits.

[Victoria] I mean, this is interesting. So, in the Shades of Magic series, I think I have four point of view characters in the first book, eight in the second, and 12 in the third. I like an expansion project. I like the idea that we can root in a few first, and then expand outward from there. I think it allows for focus. I also, though, and I think this will come up a few times, I'm a really big fan of not treating all point of view characters equally. They do not all get the same amount of pages. I have a primary cast, a secondary cast, and a tertiary cast. The primary cast always gets point of view time. But I'll throw in some secondary and some tertiary just to break it up. I don't think you have to treat all members of the ensemble equally from a perspective.

[Brandon] Do you get fan anger from that? Because I get a lot of it. From not treating my tertiary characters… People will read it and they'll write me notes and say, "I feel like I've been promised much more from this character, because my brief glimpses of them were so evocative. Why are you ignoring this character? Why do you hate this character?"

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] You know, that's one you can't win. Like, I love writing characters who are on page for maybe a page or two, and feel holistic enough, complete enough, that you can imagine that they're the protagonist of a different novel. I want all of the characters in a book to feel like they have legs in that way. But no… I mean, I get people who are like, "I want more of this person." I've been lucky in that I don't get the anger of it. Maybe when I… It's because in each subsequent book, I shift that a little bit and I give more space to the ones that I've established. I like having this almost ripple effect, where if a person is a secondary character in one book, they will have a primary status in the next book. So I'm almost seating them, letting you get accommodated to their presence in the room, so that then when I focus on them more, you already are like, "Oh, yeah, I know that dude. I'm really excited to learn more about them."

[Howard] That was the second season of Community, we're introduced… In one of the humanities classroom scenes, we're introduced to Fat Neil. Where John Oliver says, "Oh, Fat Neil." Neil says, "Neil is just fine." Then it's two or three episodes later, when we get Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where Neil's character arc is super important, and the fact that people are calling him Fat Neil is super important. But for that episode, he's… I thought… When I first saw that episode, I thought, "Who's cameo'ing? Why is that person important? He just now showed up, we called attention to him, I don't think I've ever seen him before."

[Brandon] So, one of the questions here is how do you connect multiple vastly different POV's into a cohesive narrative, especially when some characters might be in totally different places in the world.

[Howard] Common tone modulation. It's a cheat that I use all the time, where I will take words from somebody's dialogue at the end of a scene and I will work them into someone else's dialogue. They are literally an entire galaxy away doing something different, but I have picked this tiny thread that shows that there is a similarity between the two of them and away I go.

[Victoria] I like the groupings. I like physically grouping different teams. I like to think of them as my A Team, my B team, and my C team. Because we… Like as readers, we are trained that if you start showing different teams, we're waiting for the coalescing. We are expecting that at some point in the narrative, the teams are going to begin to physically cross, or they're going to begin to come together. I think that it is… There's a threshold for reader balance, where they can hold a certain number of people and lines in their mind at a time. You have to be very careful not to exceed the threshold for reader balance. That's why there are whole sections of George RR Martin books which focus on a narrowing slice of the cast. Because to ask them to hold all of the cast in their mind for a long time… One, you're diluting the impact of any one of your cast members. So I always encourage when people want to have a large cast to make sure that every member of your ensembles are serving a purpose in the story. But I love a good physical grouping.

[Dan] See, for me, the question about how can you handle multiple POV's when they're in very different places… That's when I use multiple POV's.

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Dan] Right? Because if they're all in the same place, then I'm just going to stick with my main character, and we're going to follow her. But in the Partials series, this is how I eventually started using multiple POV's. The first book is all Kira. The second book had to have a second one because we needed to know what was going on and she was in a different part of the world. Then, by the time we got to the third, I think I have five or six POV's because that is how I can show the different parts of the world. So, for me, this is less a question of POV than it is of is your story big enough to justify having people in all these different places at once.

[Howard] One of the most important things I learned recording Writing Excuses with Brandon and Dan during season one back in 2008, was the discussion of… I can't remember whose writing book it was, but the idea that the point of view character that you want to switch to is the one who is currently in the most pain. Because I'm writing comedy, and pain is funny. That is, it is a conflict from which I can always exact a punchline.

[Brandon] Another thing that's useful here is determining just how you use cliffhangers and not, particularly if there's going to be large spaces and large gaps. Different authors do it different ways. I'm not going to say there is a right and a wrong way, but I've found as a reader that having to keep track… Like if you… If the author doesn't tie it up somewhat neatly, before leaving this character for a long time, it's going to be much harder, because you're going to feel like this is dangling over you. Now sometimes you can be neat and still have a cliffhanger. Right? You can sometimes be like, "All right. This character, this thing's happened, you only have to remember they have fallen off a cliff." But if you have to remember they have fallen off a cliff while there in a political negotiation that has not finished and their loved one is over here with… And keep track of all that, and you're going to leave them for 100,000 words and come back, then you're setting yourself up for some failure.

[Victoria] This is really interesting. I learned this lesson through timeline. I tell a lot of alinear narratives, and I also have multiple perspectives in them. So I have multiple perspectives, multiple timelines. I learned that basically my reader could tolerate shifts between perspectives or shifts between timeline. Could not tolerate a shift from perspective and timeline. So if I wanted to follow a character's present and then into the past, I needed to come back to the present for I switched to somebody else's present. It's a matter of sandwiching. It's a matter of understanding that threshold for pain that a reader has in terms of like being able to keep track of the narrative. It's the worst reason to lose your reader is that they can't actually follow your narrative. They're like, "There are too many threads here. Those quote

[Howard] That is a great exploration of the difference between prose and other mediums. Because in comics and TV, visual medium, we can make this sort of jump and take the reader with us because we have text and we have video and we have audio and all of those things can be used to cue the change.

[Victoria] And you have palletes and you have everything.

[Howard] Color palette… All of those things can be used to telegraph it. But, yeah, in books, I really like the idea that you've limited yourself. You need to switch between all of these things, you're just not going to throw all of the switches at once.

[Victoria] You have to be very careful which switches you throw in which order, or else you genuinely will end up with a very confused reader.

[Brandon] Let's talk about a book this week by one of our favorite people ever.

[Victoria] This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, is one of the strangest, most beautiful examinations of perspective. I think it fits perfectly into this theme. It is an epistolary love story between two characters, Red and Blue, two women on opposite sides of an alinear, intergalactic, inter-spatial, interdim… Inter-everything time war. They begin leaving letters for each other. It is almost impossible to describe, and that is all right, because it is only… It is novella length. I read it on a single plane ride. I would recommend to everybody just carve out an hour or two in their evening or in their morning or in their lunch, at some point, and just sit with it and just devour it. There is something so powerful about it.

[Howard] Structurally, it's fascinating because you have two third person limited points of view and you have two epistolary points of view. So there are four POV, and they alternate very… Mechanically is the wrong word. Formulaicly. There is a formula for the delivery of these POV's. On my second iteration through that formula, in that book, I realized, "Oh. That is letting me perfectly keep track of where I am. That is brilliant." They used the pacing structure of chapter breaks to tell me who was talking and when and why and how.

[Victoria] It's a master class on a lot of the things that we discuss.

[Howard] It is so awesome.

[Brandon] So…

[Howard] This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and…

[Victoria] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Brandon] So, another question we have on POV takes this a slightly different way with these ensemble casts. One of our listeners has a character who is going to be the main viewpoint character. This character needs to interact with a lot of different people and build relationships with all of them. How do you give time to a large ensemble when you're using one primary viewpoint character and you need to characterize all these different people? One of the things this listener says is, "How can I isolate certain relationships for development without always having to send the other characters out of the room?" Which actually is a thing I think about a lot. Because I find that personally, I don't know if it's the same with you guys, if I have too many characters in the scene, I will naturally start to forget about some of them, and they just won't participate. If I get beyond about four or five people, characters start slipping, and I've realized I have to create scenes where if I have more than that, I have to use other tricks to tell the story.

[Victoria] Two things for me. Hierarchy. I don't treat all those characters in that ensemble equally, and I don't think in a relationship or any group of five or six or 10, that we all would have equal relationships and equal time. Two, one of my own personal favorites. I write characters who hate each other. The nice thing about writing characters who hate each other is that they're not terribly enthusiastic, even if they're on a spaceship or on a boat, they're not really great at being in the same room as each other at all the same times. So, remembering that in any group of 10, most of those people probably don't like each other equally and are going to gravitate into their own almost small subgroups. You have to remember to treat your ensemble cast like a group of actual people.

[Howard] I would ask our listeners to think about a time when you've been super happy that a friend of yours has fallen into a wonderful relationship. You are now the POV character for their love story. How do you write that? Because that's… If you have a single POV in your novel, and other people are falling in love, that is exactly what you're describing.

[Brandon] One of the other things here is the larger your cast gets… This isn't always the case. But the more often you're going to have to use shorthand to give readers reminders on who certain characters are. Some of these characters who don't get equal time with all the others, you're going to have to be okay the fact to just aren't going to have a lot of time to develop them. A great writer can take a short amount of time and characterize someone in a really interesting way. But then one note of that is going to stick in the reader's mind, and you have to remind them who that character is when they come back, and not violate what that note is.

[Dan] So, the novella that I wrote for Magic, the Gathering, has a fairly large cast of… By the end of it, six or seven main characters. They're… I did this trip with them. I gave them… Here's one or two identifying traits that will just be shorthand, because they're not main characters, they're there because they need to be there and they're flavor. It was really fascinating to me to read the editor's notes, because one of those, who's just a very thinly drawn character with one or two traits, that was the editor's favorite character. He's like, "I love every scene that this guy's in. His characterization is so strong." I'm like, "That's because he's a caricature." But that works. Don't feel like it doesn't work.

[Victoria] I'm going to say as well, I think that we don't always give readers enough credit or space for their imagination in these things. We feel the need to dictate all the details of characters, when the truth is, like, sometimes you really just do need a few cues and shorthand, and allow the reader to fill in, and kind of fill-in like smoke, spread out into that space. I am somebody who I'm not great with spaces, personally, and so I love the visual cues shorthand. I will use an article of clothing, I will use a color, I will use a piece of jewelry, and that will be the thing that tethers an entire primary cast in my readers minds to each of those characters. Yet, when I look at the fan art that comes in for the series, they're all identical. There's just enough there that they get the main pieces of it.

[Howard] Back in September when we talked about writing under deadlines, I mentioned the importance of falling back on craft. Dan, what you've described, that is absolutely a craft trick. You know you've done it right when your editor can't see the trick.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You know this is a very well painted cardboard cutout. But a trick of the eye, from the reader's perspective, ah, it's fully fleshed out.

[Victoria] Also, to that, beyond the physical details, giving one or two like kind of weird like idiosyncrasies of character can go such a long way with characters that don't spend a huge amount of time on the page.

[Brandon] It really can. It can be really, really handy. Sometimes I feel bad about doing it, because I'm like, "This character deserves their own book." But these are the things you have to do, if you want to have a large cast.

[Howard] This character deserves their own book, but I deserve to be able to write The End and turn this in for money.

[Victoria] Yep.

[Brandon] So, we're out of time, and this is our last podcast with Victoria.

[What? Oh!]

[Victoria] I've had so much fun, though.

[Brandon] But we're going to give you a last homework.

[Victoria] Yeah. So. This is a good old favorite of mine. I want you to take something that you've written, preferably something with an ensemble cast. Let's say a cast of at least three. We're not… It doesn't have to be a whole gathering, a whole gaggle. Take a cast of at least three, if you have a viewpoint character, or even in your mind a main character in this group, I want you to pick one of the other two or four or six or however many you're choosing from. I want you to think of how you would tell the exact same story, and, by shifting the leadership role, shifting the primary and secondary and tertiary roles around, so that this new character, hopefully a minor character you've chosen, is now at the center of the narrative.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Victoria, thank you so much.

[Victoria] Thank you.

[Brandon] You're all out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/06/12-32-structuring-a-short-piece/

Key Points: Flash fiction and short stories. Short fiction is usually just two MACE elements. Flash fiction is usually a single MACE element, often one problem to solve. Introduce the problem, a couple try-fail cycles, and solution. Often MACE elements get nested, or form frames. Also, changing POV often changes MACE elements, because they are all about affecting the primary character. MACE is often useful for pruning -- focus on what you really want to tell, and remove extra threads. Sometimes flash fiction, short fiction, implies questions or endings for the reader, instead of explicitly describing them. This is good for issue stories (elemental genre).

MACE: Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character, Event.
Milieu: starts when a character enters a place and ends when they exit (often returning home); main conflict is getting out, returning, stopping the main character from getting out of the milieu; journey, quest, man against nature.
Ask/Answer: the character asks a question, ends when they find an answer; main conflict is stopping the character from getting the answer: mystery, puzzle, trying to solve or find an answer. Sometimes getting the answer introduces a bigger question.
Character: internal conflict, starting with dissatisfaction with self, end with new self-definition or acceptance of self; conflicts block the character from finding satisfying self-definition; love, romance, coming-of-age.
Event: external conflict, status quo has been disrupted, ends with new status quo or resolution of some kind; conflicts block character from achieving new status quo.; action, adventures. Often event story introduces character story, as the disrupted status quo causes the character to question their self-definition.
(For more details, see the liner notes!)

( Swing that MACE, hit them in the gut... )

[Brandon] We're out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework to help us practice the MACE quotient?
[Mary] Yes. Now, ironically, this is probably the longest description…
[Laughter]
[Mary] For a homework assignment. What I want you to do is, I want you to take either a new idea or something that you're working on that you'd like to be a short story. I want you to write… Pick one of the MACE elements. Whichever one you want to pick. Whichever one you feel like is your major driver. I want you to describe that in three sentences. So the first sentence is where the story opens. The second sentences what your major conflicts are. What your major conflict is, or the type of conflict. Your third sentence is where that winds up. All three of those things should match. Then, I want you to pick a second MACE element and do the same thing. So you've got two things. Say you've got one that's character and one that is ask/answer. So that's part one and part two of your homework. Part three of your homework is to nest them. So that you start with the ask, then you introduce the character, then you close out your character tag, and then you close out your ask tag, so it's nested. Part four of your homework is to flip it, so that the character is on the outside… It doesn't have to be character, whichever of these you picked. Character is on the outside, ask/answer is on the inside. I have this written out in full detail, you'll be happy to know. It is in the liner notes. So that you don't have to remember all of the things that I've just told you. And all of the description of the MACE elements is also in this.
[Brandon] You get a worksheet this time!
[Mary] You get a worksheet.
[Whoohoo!]
[Mary] This is the benefit of the fact that I teach classes sometimes.
[Brandon] Excellent. That actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys should all totally do that. But for right now… This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 5.3: First-Person Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/09/19/writing-excuses-5-3-first-person-viewpoint/

Key points: first-person let's you really get into the character's head. With first-person, the reader doesn't know how reliable they are. First person is very immediate. Beware of dropping out of that immediacy, especially to describe appearances or other things that the character would not stop to think about. Think about how the character would tell the story. Be careful of getting so wrapped up in the voice that you lose the story.

( Out of the character's head? )
[Bree] Your character has a secret. We don't know what it is, but how would they get around hinting at that secret without giving it away?
[Brandon] All right. That's your story prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: stuffy

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Five Episode One: Third Person Limited

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/09/07/we-5-1-third-person-limited/

Key points: third person limited let you have multiple viewpoints. Also, you can portray characters sympathetically because you can show the reader their thoughts and their view of the world. Third limited is less biased than first-person narration. Avoid having too many characters too early. Be careful about withholding information from the reader -- third person limited is expected to be honest. Watch for point of view errors! Keep it limited to what the main character knows and feels. Realize the strengths -- third person limited lets you show different perspectives. Think about which viewpoint to use -- who has the most pain, who has to make the biggest decision, who's got the most at stake, or who can show us what is happening best?

( vampires, werewolves, parasols, and bodice rippers? )
[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. I'm going to go ahead and give us our writing prompt this week. I want you to write a scene where Howard and Dan and me and then Producer Jordo do all walk through a room, and it's in our perspectives, and we are all going to think differently. You have to write this just knowing, having listened and knowing...
[Howard] You just ask people to write HowardTayler fan fiction
[Brandon] Yes, I did. I do it every time. It is accepted practice before I go to bed.
[Dan] Nice. Yeah. We do it anyhow.
[Howard] Jordo. Stop recording, quickly.
[Brandon] So, I want you to do this, and see how the four of us see the world differently. This has been Writing Excuses.
[Dan] What are the bets that my perspective is soaked in blood?
[Howard] My blood!

Current Mood: unwrapped

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

July 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.14: Third Person Limited
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.45: A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All Together
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.43: A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and Inversion
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.22: Technology and Identity (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.20: Basics of Ensemble Characterization
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.3: First-Person Viewpoint
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Five Episode One: Third Person Limited

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with point of view

Writing Excuses 20.14: Third Person Limited

Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who

Writing Excuses 19.45: A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All Together

Writing Excuses 19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

Writing Excuses 19.43: A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and Inversion

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

Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine

Writing Excuses 19.22: Technology and Identity (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

Writing Excuses 18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format

Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

Writing Excuses 17.20: Basics of Ensemble Characterization

Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs

Writing Excuses 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity

Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased

Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes

Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

Writing Excuses 5.3: First-Person Viewpoint

Writing Excuses Season Five Episode One: Third Person Limited

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