Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

Sep. 24th, 2024 04:10 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion
 
 
Key points: Anticipation and subversion. Set something up for the reader, then send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. You don't have to go the exact opposite. Lateral! Lean into it! Support your subversion with something else in the text. First show you know what you're doing, then start subverting. Mini-subversions and Chekhov's whiskey bottle. Humor and horror. Mix it up, sometimes follow the trope, sometimes subvert it. Widening the lens can be a subversion. Use in text subversion. Use the POV character's attitude. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion.
[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] I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite forms of tension is the thing where you set something up for the reader, and then you send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. It's something that P. Djèlí Clark does again and again in Ring Shout. An example from a different property... It's one that DongWon mentioned earlier in this series when they were talking about the... in The Candyman... 
[DongWon] The Candyman.
[Mary Robinette] The Candyman remake with the opening the door, the long set of stairs, looking down it, and going, "Nope!"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, we are anticipating that, and that just subverts it. It's like, nope. We're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to go in a completely different way than you expected. So, when we're playing with anticipation and subversion, is it necessary to always go in the exact opposite direction when you're subverting or are there other options?
[DongWon] Yeah. I think there's so many ways to subvert. Right? There's the complete inversion. Right? But then you can also just sort of sometimes make a lateral move. Right? Like, the nope example is the complete subversion, but to stay on the Jordan Peel tip for a second, the movie Nope make sort of a right turn instead of a complete inversion. What originally feels like an alien invasion story is still about aliens, but it has morphed into a monster movie instead. So he is very carefully subverting our expectations over and over and over again throughout that movie. In general, he's a complete master at this. But the turn into the more adventure and monster tone that that movie goes into, I think is such a great example of how to be very playful with your audience while still honoring the core experience that people showed up to your movie for.
[Howard] Another really great example of that is the hotel desk scenes in the original Beverly Hills Cop and in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F where Eddie Murphy pretends to be someone he's not in order to get a free hotel room. In the second movie, he starts into it, and then stops, and says, "Oh, I'm too tired. Do you have any open rooms?" The woman says, "I do." "I would like a room, please." Yeah, complete subversion. Then she quotes the price, and he gives us the same deadpan I'm going to accept this price that he gave us in the first movie. So it's a… It's almost like it's a double subversion.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I think is fun is that you can subvert something by moving away from it, but you can also subvert something by leaning into it more. I'm going to go back to that butcher shop scene. Because we get… We get this… She has this really horrific nightmare, where she sees this butcher and he's this redheaded man and he's got mouths all over him, and then she wakes up and it's horrifying. You're like, "Well, that's a really bad dream." Then she goes to the butcher shop and what I'm expecting to happen is for that dream to have been a metaphor for something else. It turns out, no. In fact, he is a redheaded butcher who is covered in mouths, and then we lean into it even further because each of those mouths is a separate individual creature. That is all composing this one horrific person. So it is… It's not the thing that I thought it was going to be. It is setting it up and then it's going I'm just going to take it further than you thought it could go. That's another way that I think you can subvert something.
[DongWon] Well, the subversion can lean into the thematic core…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Of the things as well. Right? Because thematically, it's not one evil person. It's not one dude doing this. It is the host, it is the collection of all the different perspectives, all the different people that that represents, all the different intelligences that make up the butcher. Just the sheer horror of realizing you're not dealing with one guy, you're dealing with a system of people, a way of being.
 
[Erin] I think when subversion works really well, it's when it is supported by something else in the text.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] So it doesn't feel like you've just gone out completely on a limb. But it's a limb to a tree that is being supported by your story. In this case, it is that her sword is also a multitude of voices.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So you've got the multitude of voices that are good, or not good, but that are in support and the multitude of voices that are apart. That becomes more and more apparent over the course of the story until it eventually, like, in the climax, that becomes, like, the song versus anti-song, becomes like a huge part of the climax. So, leaning into it and subverting it also is the story that's being told here on purpose.
 
[DongWon] Also, it's very important to think about patterns here, too, because when you want to subvert, you kind of have to show that you know what you're doing first. If the first move you make is a subversion, then it sometimes will just feel like you don't know what you're doing. Right? But if you look at Ring Shout, that opening fight is a sequence of promises that are delivered on. Maybe not delivered exactly how you expected. Like, he knows how to draw the beat out, draw the tension out. Right? It's not the bomb that kills them. Because the way that scene unfolds, where the explosion is the start of the fight, which then resolves inside the warehouse. Right? So, what he's doing, over the course of that scene, is setting up all these beats, all these reveals, by making us promises, and delivering on them. Right? Setting up the anticipation, and then saying, here's the thing. So that when later he wants to start messing with us and providing that subversion, which is adding extra layers to it, which is pushing the book in different thematic directions, where it's like, "Oh, this isn't just a we're going to have sword fights with monsters book, there's more going on here," we're open to it because we have the competence, he's proven to us that he knows what he's doing.
 
[Erin] I also think there's some interesting mini-subversions in that scene. Like, for example, there is a whole, like, we're in a cotton warehouse, like, in a story about the South…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it's not important. Like, it's just that's just what's there. And they find the whiskey, and I was like, "Ah, this will be key to everything, this whiskey." It's not. It is just…
[DongWon] No, they're just mad because they're competitors.
[Laughter]
[Erin] They're just like, "No." It does actually matter in the course of the story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it isn't like, oh, this is going to be the key to figuring it all out. What I like about that is it says, "Oh, like I need to pay attention. I can't just check out and be like, oh, this is going to check these boxes…"
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] It's going to follow the steps. I don't need to worry about it, and I can kind of half pay attention. It's like, no, the things that you think may be key are not. The things you're maybe not paying attention… As much attention to are in fact important. I love that because it makes you lean into the text.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like it's going to be Chekhov's whiskey bottle, but… Like that is a thing that you expect. It's like you set it up in Act I, it's going to go off in Act III. And Chekhov's whiskey bottle does not, in fact, have to be consumed.
[DongWon] Sometimes a whiskey is just a whiskey.
[Chuckles] [laughter]
 
[Howard] Okay. So we're laughing… We're laughing at this. I want to point out that the whole principle of anticipation and subversion is one that horror and humor rely on incredibly. I'm going to put a stake in the ground here and say if you want to write good humor, become a student of horror. If you want to write good horror, become a student of humor. Because learning how people use these tools for things other than what you plan to use them for is how you'll get better at using them.
[DongWon] Horror writers are some of the funniest people I know. Like, their ability to dig into on the one hand, very dark material, but also that gives them so much of the toolset to deliver a great punchline, tell a great story, and things like that. So…
[Mary Robinette] Which reminds me of this really important point. But we're going to take a break right now.
[Laughter]
[Erin] No…
 
[DongWon] No one writes a story like Kelly Link. There's such an odd pacing to them, and I find in that to be endlessly enchanting. Her worldbuilding, character work, and deep interest in what makes people people keeps her at the top of my list of writers of short fiction. She has a new collection called White Cat, Black Dog. This shows that she remains at the peak of her abilities. Rife with creepy encounters, fairytale retellings, and even just strange creatures, this is a unique and rewarding read that I cannot recommend highly enough.
 
[Mary Robinette] Now, the pattern from Writing Excuses over the years is that coming back from the break, I'm going to tell you what that important point is. But I have another question for you. When we are looking at Ring Shout… I'm certain that someone out there is like, "No, she's making this up." No. When we're looking at Ring Shout, and one of the other things that we had talked about with that, that anticipation and subversion is the thing with the girl. That we keep anticipating that this is going to be important, and where it finally is revealed, it is in a different way than we expect, and also exactly the same way. Do you think that there are ways that he could have subverted that more than he did, or do you think it's important that he follows the pattern there?
[Erin] We're stumped.
[Howard] That's a difficult question, because I was so enamored of the beauty of the resolution of that scene that I'm reluctant to suggest any possible change.
[Mary Robinette] So, this is one of the things that I wanted us to be thinking about for our listeners is that when we're talking about this anticipation and subversion, that a lot of times someone can see a tool and be like I want to use that all the time, and that actually the reason it works is because there are patterns that are set up and followed through.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So you don't know which ones are going to be subverted and which ones are going to be like oh, that's kind of the payoff I was expecting. Which means that everything then becomes tenuous and tense.
[DongWon] Exactly. It's how you keep it from feeling quote unquote trope-y. Right? Like, I get a little frustrated when people say that a book is trope-y as a criticism. In part, because, again, returning to my whole patterns thing, books are made up of tropes we've seen before. They're all just combined and recombined in different ways. But those little subversions, having the little subversion of, like, the girl isn't the age that she was when that event happened reveals itself to mean something else in that moment. But those little moments helped disrupt the sense of oh, I've seen this pattern before, even though we absolutely have. Right? I think including small moments like that, not fulfilling every single pattern you set up, having some make a right turn, having some of them invert, I think adds the kind of texture and nuance that people are looking for from a book that make it feel like it's not just paint by numbers.
 
[Erin] I think in that particular example, like, the subversion is in the widening of the lens. So, sometimes the way that you subvert things is that you create a pattern, and then you're like it's a much broader, a wider pattern then you even realize. One of the things that I love is that I had the same thought twice during that sequence of the girl. There's the one where she is a little girl, like, I think, like hiding under the floorboards. And she feels guilty, and I think, "Of course she couldn't do anything." Then you realize she's 18 and I thought, "Of course she couldn't do anything."
[Mary Robinette] Ooo...
[Erin] Like, that difference in context, nothing has changed in my understanding, really, but the broader context just made it like hit me so much more.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think having that…
[Mary Robinette] Yah...
[Erin] Earlier moment of sympathy made that sympathy carry through, and made it so much more tragic when I understood.
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a really good example of that kind of widening of the lens, of different ways of subverting. What are some other ways that we can… That we saw this being subverted?
 
[Erin] I have one other one which is I love that there is an in text subversion. So I like when subversion is happening, it's happening in our minds, it's happening in context, but the belief that what she would be offered was to have her family live again…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is a belief that I also considered as one that the story would do. But I love that she considers it on page and is told her beliefs and her anticipation is subverted in the text. Because it is an interesting way, like, it's subverted for me as well, but then I also get to see the emotions play out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] How do I feel about that? How does she feel about that, is an even better question may be to be asking. By subverting it on the page, I get a chance to experience it, both from my reader perspective, and also from, like, the parts of me that is identifying with her as a POV character.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, the fact that as we go into that scene, we are not told what her decision would be. For that… That she thinks she's already made the decision. I'm like, "Oh. Are you going to turn that down?" Then, when she gets the actual decision, and is… Like, the actual offer, and the temptation that she has… I'm also, like, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the temptation that you're having right now.
[Erin] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think the core inversion of the question of what does it mean to be a hero in that circumstance. Right? The question of is the sword good or is it a curse? Right?
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] Is really core to it. And her relationship to the haints and things like that… Like, we are so conditioned as the reader to be like, "Oh. You're the chosen one. You're getting all these cool magical powers. You have the magic sword. You're the hero of this." But we can see how corrupting that is on her. Then, when the offer itself is subverted, that leads to us recontextualizing and questioning all of her choices about the story and what future she represents for this community, for herself, for all of these… All of the people that she holds and represents in a very literal way.
[Howard] There's also a subversion of the overall meta-, which is… This looks like a story about good versus evil, and when we get to our resolution, it's… Well, there's good and there's evil, and there's something else. All of these things are on the table and in play. That was the point where I got chills…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Like, oh, this is neat.
[Erin] Yeah. I think it's also, just like the subversion of good versus evil. One thing that I… Not my favorite thing is that you will have like forces that like all evil forces line up together and they all agree on…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I guess the evil of it all. But what I like here is that each set of folks, like each group here, has their own perspective on each other.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Like, the haints are like, "I don't know about this, like, lady."
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] And the woman is like, "I don't know about going to the night doctors." They're all sort of, and in some ways, she needs them all. I think in a story that's ultimately about communities…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Communities for good, communities for ill. The fact that there is a community of people working together, none of whom are quite good or evil, but each have their own perspectives and needs that can align for this moment is something that's really power subversion of the overarching trope.
[DongWon] Like her going to the night doctors is such a hero's journey in a certain way. Where we're expecting her to, like, go on this quest, rebuild the sword, like, she's literally like reforging whatever Aragorn's sword's name was, I forgot it all of a sudden. But, like, whatever. She's off to the quest of re-forge the magic sword, all of these things we're expecting in this regard. That just takes such a hard right turn into something completely different. The night doctors scene was probably my favorite in the book, just because it is… It just feels almost like it's from a different story. But still is so in conversation with the thematic's, with the characters, with the world, that it felt like it's from a different story, but in a good way. Not, I mean, parentheses complementary. Right? Being able to subvert expectations that way, of just like making the hard 90 degree turn into something else for a second, I think made the world feel so much more expansive and rich and nuanced than if we just stayed with the haints and the butcher.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As you were saying that, it made me realize that there are two places, two different worlds that she portals into.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The contrast between those two is really interesting and fun to play with. Something else that I was also thinking about in terms of subversion is that one of the ways you can subvert something is with the hero's attitude towards what they get. So that sometimes your hero achieves the goal that they were going for and they're unhappy about it. That's a way to subvert a victory. Sometimes they lose something, and they're like, "Oh, thank heavens I lost that thing," and they're happy about it. That's… The attitude of your POV character is one of the ways that you can subvert things.
[Howard] That sounds like it might be homework.
[Mary Robinette] Ah, it's pretty close to homework. So, this is a time in Writing Excuses when we normally offer you homework. This has been Writing Excuses…
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] The homework that I have for you is I want you to take a trope and I want you to write for different outcomes for it. One of it doesn't deliver the trope outcome. Just like the nope. Just doesn't deliver it. One of it inverts the trope. It goes in the opposite direction of what you're expecting. One of them has an unexpected kindness. And one of them has an unexpected cruelty. And now…
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go subvert something.
 
[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. Private instructions here includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.31: A Close Reading on Character: Tying It All Together

Aug. 10th, 2024 05:08 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.31: A Close Reading on Character: Tying It All Together
 
 
Key points: Recap. Personal stakes engage readers. Specificity. Embodied. Sensory details. Voice. Muscular prose can be both forceful and sensory oriented, with poetics and imagery and rich language. Ability, role, relationship, and status. DREAM: denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, manifestation. Make a choice! Pick the protagonist who is least suited to solve the problem. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 31]
 
[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.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 31]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: 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] So, we have been looking at the short stories of C. L. Clark. We've looked at three of them, and we've been using them to examine character. This is the episode where we take the kind of higher view and just talk about the techniques that we've been looking at and how you can apply them to your own work. So, kind of think of this as a summary recap. What are some of the techniques that you were kind of most excited about as they are embodied in these stories?
[Howard] The first, and it's probably the most concrete for me because I actually have an example for it, is the blending of tools about agency and choice and barriers versus stakes. Because when you talk about a character choosing a thing, the stakes have to matter, not just to the character, but to the reader. At the end of the lighthouse story, our Sigo has chosen to return to the lighthouse with medication for the lighthouse keeper, for Audei. This has two sets of attached stakes. One is, yay, ships won't crash, and the other is, oh, Audei won't be lonely. I'm making light of both of them, but only one of them resonates with me. That is that Audei won't be lonely. It's the personal stake that resonates for me. The lesson that… The piece of tape that I would use to label the tool for myself is that personal stakes will engage the reader. Impersonal stakes might be fun for worldbuilding, might be cool for scope of story, but if you want to engage the reader, making… Letting characters make choices that have personal stakes is… That's the tool. That's…
[Mary Robinette] It is about the specificity, I think. The specificity and tying it to individuals. As humans, we tend to respond to stories about people. So if you read about there's a war that's going on in another country, that's very sad. But when you see the photo of the child who has been orphaned, that makes it much more immediate, because you can imagine that child. That a specific child who's lost specific parents. You can also, I think, tie it to an experience that you have yourself. So any time you can kind of create space for the reader to insert themselves by having those common experiences, those are times when that specificity of the author choice is going to make the character seem richer and more alive.
[DongWon] Well, this is the thing that Clark does so well. I've mentioned this a few times on past episodes, but the way that they write embodied characters, the way they use sensory details, physicality. Because those things are very relatable. I don't need to have been a warrior going off to war to understand the pleasure of smelling rosemary in a kitchen, of tasting a beautifully cooked potato, to have exercised to the point that I'm having trouble walking down the stairs. Right? These are all things that we can experience in our own lives. Those sensory details carry us into these fantastical situations. The way they use external information to give deep, deep interiority into the character is really fascinating to me. For me, because we have very little access to what these characters are thinking and feeling necessarily, but a lot about what they are doing.
[Erin] What you said about embodiment also made me realize that all three stories, I believe, have a sex scene.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] But they're all in… some are very embodied and there's sex happening, which is a very embodied act…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] And yet it feels so dreamlike in its own way…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] In each of the stories.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It feels, in some ways more to me personal, and it resonates more than an… A really explicit scene might. Because it… The way in which each of these characters view their bodies comes through in the way they view using their body in that way. So, you have the… In You Perfect, Broken Thing, it's about the stretching and the concentric and the muscles, because this is somebody who's actually going up and using their muscles. For The Cook, I think it's a lot more of, there's like food involved…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because it's about feeding someone. So each of these things are about the way… In the lightkeeper, it's about the light in some ways…
[DongWon] And the burn.
[Erin] And the fire and the burning. I love the way that it's not just embodied, but it's embodied in different ways. In seeing the same act take place in three different stories really shows you how different those characters are, and how embodiment can be different from one story to the next.
 
[Mary Robinette] The other thing is… That I just want to point out is that C. L. Clark is using a tool that we've talked about in our first series, which is voice. The specific language choices are underscoring the choices that the characters are making, not just the now we're going to be talking about food, but in You Perfect, Broken Thing, that wonderful section when the character is actually running the race. We're just like, "Punctuation? What is that even?" Like, we are breathless, we are… It is nonstop, it is completely in the moment. I love that. It's again, one of those things where I'm like, am I being too… Is there someplace where I should just pull all the punctuation out?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It is something that I got very excited about.
 
[DongWon] I think when we talk about muscular prose, people have this idea of, like, Hemingway. Six word sentences. Very short sentences, that are very to the point and very grounded in literal. I just want to point out the way in which C. L. Clark has incredibly muscular prose. Like, very forceful, very clear, very sensory oriented, but still incredible poetics in it, incredible imagery and richness of language and word choice. These stories are incredibly beautiful on in imagery and sense level, and the fact that those things don't have to be in tension with each other. I think sometimes people talk about it as if they are.
[Mary Robinette] So, since we've just drifted over into language, because we get very excited about it.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Some of the tools we've been talking about our ability, role, relationship, and status. The thing that I… This is a tool that I find so much fun, and that they use in all of the stories to shift kind of what the characters focus is, what their motivation is, by shifting which aspect of self is most important to them, which one is highlighted on the page, at any given moment. That's something that you can do. Look at your work in progress. This isn't even homework. This is just like a good practice. Look at your work in progress. If you're stuck in your scene, take a look at it, and just jot down, like, what is challenging my character's ability right now? What is challenging the tasks that they have to do? What responsibilities are they feeling like right now? How can that break for them? Which loyalties are being tugged on in this scene? How is their status affected? Just… By… A quick reminder for you, status involves a lot of different things. If you have imposter syndrome, that's a status issue. That's where your internal status does not match the external status. Where your idea of what you can do is very different from what other people think you can do.
[Howard] If you turn that upside down, imposter syndrome, you have Dunning-Kruger effect.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So those are things that you can play with in your own fiction, whether writing short form or longform. These… This is a tool that works at any length that you're playing in.
[Erin] What I also liked in looking at all these, because a lot of these are tools that are, like, newer to me, so I'm always like trying to figure out how they work and like get inside of them. I think thinking about that, you can… It's like twisting the facet like of a diamond, and looking at different facets. But also, that you can create, when we were talking about barriers, I was thinking, you can create different barriers on all of these axes, you can create different stakes on all of these axes. You can have them, like, fight each other. You can have a story where it's my ability against my status, and I've got to pick one or the other, and that's the choice that I'm making, and that's the agency that I have in the story. So I think with all of these tools, no tool is static. It's, like, you can take a tool and use it to do a lot of different things. So I've had a lot of fun thinking about how can we use these tools in very different ways and think about them in our own stories.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually just made me go, oh, yeah. Actually, one of the things that's happening in the lighthouse is that we have the role of I am a pirate in the relationship of Audei, and these are in direct conflict with each other. Yeah. That's smart.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Well, let's take a moment. We're going to pause, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some more of the tools and how you can apply them to your own fiction.
 
[DongWon] I've talked before in our thing of the week about Rude Tales of Magic. But it's one of my very favorite podcasts. It's nominally a D&D actual play show, but the cast takes D&D more as an inspiration and runs from there, and tells hilarious improvised stories that still find a way to have deep character work and heartfelt storytelling. I'm talking about it again because we just started a new season last fall, so it's a great time to jump in and discover how delightful a rude tale can be.
 
[Mary Robinette] Welcome back.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Okay. We are back now. So, one of the things I got so excited about I didn't even know how to express it in words was the DREAM…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I think this is the first time that I've been hearing about it. My bad, I'd forgotten about it and having it come back was really exciting for me. I was thinking about how that all works. So, that was a tool that I think… I know it was just in our last episode, but… What was it again?
[Mary Robinette] Denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation. I learned about this from Elizabeth Boyle, who was describing romances. So you… The thing that I have been enjoying about this series is that previously when I have talked about it, I've had to use really, like, very loose examples of it, but I think seeing it applied to a story makes it much more concrete. I got super excited when I was in Elizabeth's class and learned about it. So, denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation.
[DongWon] Yeah. I love this framework, because I can see how it came from romance. Right? I can… When we talked about it last episode, we were applying it to a romance arc. But I can see this applying to so many character arcs. Right? Because accepting your role in the world, accepting your limitations, accepting the various aspects of the other framework we were talking about in terms of… accepting what your status is, what your ability is. Then, getting to that point of manifestation. All of these things are stages of any character arc along any of the axes we've talked about before. Right? So, again, we're not talking about these tools in isolation. They are all mix-and-match, and you pull from different aspects and apply them to other aspects. That's how you get a rich nuanced character, like the ones that we're meeting in these stories.
[Mary Robinette] You'll see that again, also, in You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, yeah, I can totally do this race. I'm going to be tired and exhausted, but I will do it. Then, oh, actually, no, maybe I can't, maybe I in fact dying. Okay, what happens if I run this race for someone else entirely? Yes, that is what I am doing, I am going to win this race for someone else. Then, the manifestation of you take the shot.
[DongWon] Then in The Cook, it's the same thing. The stages are externalized into we're going off to war and coming back, more and more traumatized, more and more injured, as she's forced to accept the condition of her life until she can get to a place of manifestation.
[Howard] At risk of briefly confusing and conflating the tools, it's easy to look at DREAM and to see symmetries between that and the very popularized stages of grief. What I love about DREAM is that we don't and with acceptance. We and with manifestation. Because this isn't for how to recover from grieving, this is for a writer who wants to make that plot turn or that character turn or whatever towards the end of the story and then and the story with something that is hopefully satisfying.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Acceptance, in and of itself, can be satisfying, but a manifestation of it that meets… Surprising yet inevitable or that mirrors… Creates a bookend from something at the beginning of the story… That's where I start blending these tools together.
[Mary Robinette] I should say that Elizabeth actually got this from an anger management class. She tells this when she's teaching the class.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That she was forced to go to an anger management class while she was working for Microsoft, and she's like, "Well, this is ridiculous. I don't need to be here." Still in denial. Then, as soon as the teacher put that up on the board, she's like, "Hum, I suddenly became the best student. Sat in the front…"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Because it's like that is a romance arc right there.
 
[DongWon] Well, what's great about the manifestation point, as you were talking about it, Howard, is it's a framework to getting the character to make a choice.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Because manifestation is about claiming one's agency, claiming one's choices. So that is a character arc. An arc has to end with a character choosing something. That choosing may be accepting their fate in some way, in which case acceptance and manifestation are very close together. But it's getting a character to make a choice is the thing that you're really trying to do to get us to understand and empathize with a character's journey.
[Howard] In You Perfect, Broken Thing, the acceptance is I will choose to give my prize to others so that they can live. The manifestation is, for me anyway, the surprising yet inevitable of somebody else did the same thing. Other people are now looking at this, and are now sharing the gift. The character already made their choice. They are now helpless to further influence the story. But other people begin choosing things that carry that choice even further, that make it manifest as a satisfying ending.
[Mary Robinette] You made me think of a thing that I'm going to talk about, because one of the things that people ask me about when I teach this elsewhere is how it applies to series. We've been saying all along that you can take all of the tools that we've been talking about and you can use them anywhere. So we've been talking about a tool in short story. But DREAM will work for novel length, but it will also work for series. Basically, whatever manifestation point your character winds up at at the end kind of becomes the problem for them for the next thing. Or, another way to look at it is, they think they've solved the problem, but it only lasts for a moment. The best example that I can give this for you is extremely rude.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, denial. I'm not a writer. Resistance. Well, okay, so I've written some things. But I'm really not a writer. Exploration. Okay. Maybe I'll try finishing something. Acceptance. Oh, I finished it. I finished. I think I a writer. Manifestation. I'm going to show it to somebody. But I'm not really a writer, because I haven't submitted anything yet. Okay. So maybe I'll submit it to a market, but I'm going to get rejected immediately. Okay, fine. So I submitted it to a market. Then acceptance, I got rejected. But I'm going to submit it again, because getting rejection means I'm a writer. Manifestation. I sent it out again. But I'm still not a writer. This is a thing where every time you think I have solve this thing, you haven't. Because what you're shifting here with this DREAM are these things we've been talking about before, this ability, role, relationship, and status. You level up, but then there are new monsters in front of you.
[DongWon] Think of this as a try-fail cycle.
[Howard] You level up, but…
[Mary Robinette] Exactly.
[Howard] So your imposter syndrome leveled up with you.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. So you can do that over a series, that every time they level up, they… That core problem in them, that hole in them, is still there.
[Erin] Something that's really relatable about that is that this is… Like, you're saying this is what humans do. We tend to, like, go through something, it's like extending a long rubber band. Then, the minute you get to manifestation, you kind of forget…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, all of the difficulties that happened. You snap the rubber band back and you're like, "Oh, I manifested it. So it couldn't have been that hard to do. All that stuff I did was obviously meaningless. Like, now, I'll never be able to stretch this next rubber band." So, when characters are doing that, there's something that, even if they're going through something will never experience in our lifetimes, we understand it a little bit and it feels very human. It keeps people wanting to be invested in your character and in the story.
[DongWon] Giving your readers these micro arcs are the things that are so satisfying that ultimately, as you stack those arcs on arcs on arcs, ends up feeling like a fully realized three-dimensional character, as we call it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You can also… I'm glad you said the word micro arcs, because you can also use DREAM within a single paragraph.
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It's a lovely tool. I… It's… I… Also, I'm not going to pull them out in the text, I'm going to let you all do that. But there are multiple examples in all of these stories where there are… The DREAM arc happening within a single paragraph. Also, things where the different ability… Different aspects of self are tugging on each other. It's… These stories are just fun. I really enjoyed this.
[DongWon] They're wonderful stories. I found them also meaningful in the way that the characters always come back to community and connection over everything else. Right? As we were talking about last time, seeing that resistance to the call to adventure and sort of that disruption of traditional fantasy narratives, you can get there by routing it in character. When you root it so deeply in a person's perspective and wants and needs, then when they're making those choices that run counter to our expectations of here's how a fantasy story is supposed to go, it feels organic and exciting. Nothing is more thrilling than in the lighthouse story, her choosing to come back to the lighthouse, her choosing not to be living the life of adventure. It is… And then she has to do this difficult task. She has to prove herself, by climbing the wall and getting the herbs and things like that. It really rewards us for that journey that were going on with her, even though it's a nontraditional one.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned from a class on writing middle grades was that you should pick the protagonist who was least suited to solve the problem. That was fascinating to me, because previously, I had heard that you should pick the protagonist to… Only they can solve the problem. But thinking about who is least suited. It causes the character to have to make different choices that constrain to the agency that you were talking about. So who is the least suited to win a race? Someone who is dying of a disease. Who is least suited to stay in the lighthouse? An adventurer who is… Who chooses to go from place to place. Realizing that by introducing these characters and this… The people who are least suited to this thing. Who is least suited to stay in a kitchen? Barbarian warrior. But those…
[Howard] Hygiene? Come on.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Those… That kind of shift of discovering that something is more important to them, to me, is significantly more interesting than the stories where we start with a character who is deeply flawed, so flawed that they are an ass hole that I don't want to spend any time with…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] On the page. That's something that I love about these, is that these are complicated characters, but it's about them learning what they value.
[Howard] And there's more to it than just us connecting with the story. There's also the fact that you as a human person, us as human people, we were not cut out perfectly to be the best possible person to solve the problems that will face us. Life does not follow that sort of narrative. So these kinds of stories where a character makes choices, where they choose between different sets of stakes, where they exercise their agency in ways that hadn't occurred to them earlier, in order to bring about positive change. Boy! I would like us all to be able to do that kind of thing, and… This, there might be a little bit of envy speaking here… I want to be able to write the kind of story that makes other people feel that way.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I want to be able to write things that make you feel like you can change in amazing ways.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, you'll be happy to know that I have homework that's going to feed into that. So, for your homework, I want you to write a character study. This does not have to be a full story, but, as you've seen with The Cook, it can be. Write a character study in which two characters meet twice. Something momentous has happened in between the meetings. It's offstage, and I want you to imply it by the way these characters have changed, using all of the tools that we've been talking about.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now? Go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza

Oct. 12th, 2023 06:44 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza
 
 
Key points: I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story. Genre can be bookseller's version, where do we shelve it, the critic's version, what is the cultural lineage of this, and the reader/writer's version, what's useful, important, what does it feel like? Is it horror if the writer didn't intend to scare you, they just wanted the character to do a horrible thing? What drives speculative fiction in short form is the power of clear and simple metaphors. There are horror stories where the protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens. In these stories, our protagonist is the horror, doing things that we are horrified by. The antagonist is trying to prevent bad things from happening, and fails. Short fiction packs a lot in a small space. In a Myers-Briggs of writers, there are long and short writers. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 41]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza.
[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] I have managed to put off my deep dive until the very very very last, but the time is here.
[Dongwon] You were very very determined to go last.
[Erin] Right.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Very determined to go last. I have no idea why, but I'm really excited to talk about my work, I guess…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But also to just give a… To shine some light on short fiction as a whole.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I am merely a conduit for the love of short fiction. But I want to talk a little bit first about why I picked the 3 stories that I asked you all to read, and then see if you have any questions for me, otherwise I'll just ramble about them at length. So, the 3 that I picked are Wolfy Things, is the first story that I ever had published, so I felt it really represented the beginning of the extravaganza when I was really just kind of getting things off the ground. I was just saying before we started recording that I can tell it's my first published story because I just can. Something about the way that it's constructed, I'm like, "Oh, it's early on." But I still love it. I picked Sour Milk Girls because it is my buzzy-ist story, I would say. It's the story that ended up in year's best collections and like almost made the Hugo ballot. So it's the story that sort of people know me the most for and were most excited about. Then, I picked Snake Season because I think it is the closest to where I'm going as a writer. I think it's like sort of the truest to…
[Howard] Oh, no…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, "It's the truest to my voice of murder."
[Dongwon] Let's go.
[Erin] Weirdly, it's also the one that's been translated into the most languages. It's been translated into, I think, Spanish and Portuguese and… Anyway. So, people can be horrified, I guess, in many different languages.
[Mary Robinette] Ha. You said horrified. You… I was saying earlier, we were having this conversation about whether or not Erin writes horror. I was like, "I think you do." She does not think she does. But, ha ha…
[Erin] It's you all. You brainwashed me into thinking it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I think so much when I write, I think about what I'm writing as, just like one individual person's like troubled story, that I don't see like… What they're doing may not be… I would not use my protagonist as like life lessons. I wouldn't follow in their footsteps.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] If they told you to do something, I would say, "No." I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story.
[Laughter]
[Erin] That I just decided not to write.
[Howard] Oh, man.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I…
[Mary Robinette] Accurate.
[Erin] I just… Even though that's the case, for me, it's really, I think I get so much in their head and have to understand them in order to make them somewhat sympathetic on the page, that I can't think of what they're doing or what I'm doing as horror. Because I get why they did it, and I decided to make them do it, even though it may be something that is beyond the pale in the normal, like… In the normal life of things.
 
[Dongwon] I love this as a way of thinking about genre. I think one thing with conversation about genre get so muddy in a certain way, because there's almost 3 different ways in which we use the term. One is how I use it, which is very much the book selling side. Where do we put this in the store, what bisac code do we put on this, what gets… What comp titles do we use? Right? Like, how do we sell this? Then there's like the way critics use it, which is… I'm not even going to dive too deep into that, but it tends to be more about what's the cultural lineage of this. Then there's like how readers and writers use it, which is much more like what's useful to you, what's important to you, what does it feel like? So I love this idea that you separated out so much of your process from necessarily what the bookstore genre of it is because you need to access a space where you can look at it in a way that these are just people doing things. Yes, the things that they are doing are very upsetting, but they are doing things for relatable reasons. Right? So, I mean, even Sour Milk Girls where she does one of the worst things I've ever seen a character do in a story to another character. It's so upsetting the thing that she does to Princess, but it's so understandable and relatable, even if I wouldn't make that choice, I can understand why she does it in a way that I think, for you, I can see how internally, that's not horror, that's just a person. Right? That's a flawed person who lives in a deeply flawed world trying to survive in whatever ways that she can. Her experience and trauma and psychology all lead her to this place of doing this upsetting thing.
[Howard] The context in which… Ghost does things to Princess. Ghost is not doing anything to Princess that society has not already done to Ghost.
[Dongwon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] In reading that story, there is horrific revelation after horrific revelation. At first it just looks like they live in an orphanage. No, this is worse than an orphanage, this is… Something's being done to these kids. As we learn more about it, it gets… You experience horror. So in talking about genre, I always go back to our Season 11, Elemental Genres. I keep turning the page because I keep looking for the next horrific reveal. I experienced dread, but I'm sort of thrilling, reveling in it. It grows so nicely out of that symmetry between what society is doing and what the character is doing that when we get to the end, it is the perfect horrific inevitability. So, yeah, circling back around, yes, Erin, you're writing horror. Are they going to shelve it as horror? I don't care, I just want to read it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Something that I just want to circle back to, you said that your antagonist… Your protagonist is the antagonist in someone else's story.
[Dongwon] Great line.
[Mary Robinette] It's like… When I think about all of these stories, I'm like, "Oh, yes." One of reasons that these work, I think, structurally so well is that you have a character who has set out to achieve a goal. They come up with a plan, they have obstacles, they have all of the markers. It's just as a reader, I do not want them to achieve that goal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, that is… I can see why actually you would make the argument that it's not horror, because in horror, generally speaking, bad things happen to the protagonist. In this case, you're like, "Oh, no, your protagonist is absolutely…" And I can see all of the stories that are written from the other character's point of view.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It is… I'm like, "Oh. Yes." Okay, I will grant your point about how these may not be horror.
 
[Erin]'s Thank you. I think it also comes back to, like, what… Intentionality…
[Mary Robinette, Dongwon chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] So we were talking about, just before hand, in all the fascinating conversations we will reprise here, about that there's 3 different genres of the body. Humor, erotica, horror. They all try to make you feel something in a very visceral level. So, to me, to set out to write horror is to say I want to scare you. I want you to feel dread. I never intend… That's never a thought that goes through my head. I just want my characters to accomplish a horrible thing which might make you feel horror, but I'm not thinking. At the end, if you said, like, "I was totally fine with everything they did and I felt like I was like I'm cheering them on," I might have some questions about your moral compass…
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I wouldn't feel like I didn't accomplish my goal as a writer. Whereas, I feel like in a horror story, if you say like, "I wasn't scared at all," that you've missed something.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The same way that if you didn't laugh at humor…
[Dongwon] [garbled]
[Howard] Last night we joked during D&D, we joked about you being chaotic evil or what… This is more like chaotic IDGAF…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Chaotic WTF. I just… I am doing a thing and you're going to have experience, but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the thing.
 
[Dongwon] I will say… I will grant you what you're saying on Wolfy Thing and Sour Milk Girls. I will say I made the mistake of reading Snake Season…
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Right before I went to bed.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yes. Bad choice.
[Dongwon] I was upset. The image of Sarah, the image of the donor, is just so upsetting to me. It's so emotional too, though. I mean, what drives speculative fiction in short form so well is the power of the metaphor. Right? One of the things I love in short fiction is it's so clear and simple about what the metaphor is. Right? In Sour Milk Girls, it's the state is robbing them of their identity and memories, because that's kind of what the foster system is invested in doing, is erasing who you were to be this person that can be entered into new situations. Right? So, just this mother's trauma over her dead daughter, over this monstrous thing that she's afraid of in herself and in… I don't know how to unpack all the things in that because it's so rich and textured and dense, like, that's the beauty of that image. But, yeah, I'm very scared of that little girl. She's definitely haunting me.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that also happened for me as we got deeper into the story was wondering how much of Sarah's appearance was actually just Mary's view of her, like, was this just a normal little girl who just wasn't a baby anymore, and that that's something that she couldn't stand. Like, the fact that I don't know and there's just enough ambiguity in there? I mean, I feel like she's… It is… She is horrifying and also what if she's not?
[Dongwon] Yeah. Exactly. Because do you know something, maybe she's fine?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] On that disturbing note, we're going to take a slight break. When we come back, I have a question to ask you all.
 
[Dongwon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week and it's a way I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave you with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a whole meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty, time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.
 
[Dongwon] My thing of the week this week is Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap. In my personal opinion, I think Isabel Yap is one of the greatest science fiction short story writers we have in the game right now. She's an incredible talent and this is her debut collection of stories. It came out a couple of years ago in 2021 from Small Beer Press. The work that she does in here is so wide-ranging and delightful and engaging. She pulls from her Filipino ancestry in bringing in some traditional myths and monsters in the story, and the way she blends fabulism and horror and supernatural elements with grounded relatable concerns of contemporary characters is incredibly powerful and wonderful. I think this is a phenomenal collection and I would love for all of you to go check it out.
 
[Erin] We are back, and my question is ready, which is, who do you see as the antagonist of these stories? Because I've been thinking about it, and I actually think there's a slight shift in the antagonist… In who I see as the antagonist of all 3 stories that I think makes Snake Season feel the most horrific. But I'm curious…
[Howard] Wolfy, the antagonist is Erin. Sour Milk Girls, it's Erin.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Snake Season, it's Erin like 3 times.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm upset at you in particular…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah [garbled] statements.
[Dongwon] No, I mean I'm not sure who the antagonist in Wolfy Things is, actually. That's kind of an interesting one. It feels much more like portraiture than really like a strong… Like this intense metaphor about society in a certain way. Sour Milk Girls is definitely the state. Then, for Snake Season, it's almost just like the world. Like there's a… She just exists in a world that is stacked against everyone in the story in a certain way.
[Mary Robinette] Like, she's… She has decided that the conjureman is the antagonist. Like… I think from her point of view, from Marie's point of view…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The conjureman is the antagonist.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] But I don't think that he actually… He…
[Dongwon] I don't think he's a good dude, though.
[Mary Robinette] I don't think he's a good dude. But structurally speaking, like, he does serve the function of an antagonist.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] She has…
[Howard] There are horror stories in which our protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens.
[Dongwon] Yep.
[Howard] Just in general. In these stories, I think… In all 3 of them, our protagonist is the horror. The protagonist is the one who is ultimately doing the things that we are the most horrified with. So the antagonist is the one who's trying to prevent bad things from happening. I'm just… In broad structural strokes.
[Dongwon] Totally.
[Howard] There is… That is a flavor of horror in which we are sympathetic with, we are following a character who is on a path, their goals are going to lead them into the horrible place, and the antagonist is the one who is putting obstacles in front of them, and the antagonist is going to fail.
[Dongwon] There's no Freddie, there's no Candyman, there's no [garbled]
[Howard] You stop thinking of antagonist is villain, and start thinking of them as the person who's in between the protagonist and their ultimate goal.
[Dongwon] Well, this is why I think it's so useful in certain cases to really let go of genre expectations and not think of it as a genre piece in certain ways and just follow the story where it goes. Right? Tonally, and voice wise, I may look at this and say horror. I think Howard's right, and you're right, when I break it down to the core elements of the story, horrific things are happening. I think you're right, though, that is not a horror story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Aha!
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] You convinced me.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I also want to say that I don't think that every story has to have an antagonist. In, I think Wolfy Things… I've forgotten the main character's name. I remember Lee's name, but I don't remember the POV character's name.
[Erin] Nikki.
[Mary Robinette] Nikki. I think Nikki is the protagonist, and the antagonist. I think he is both.
 
[Erin] I think… What I would say is that for me, or what I think I was trying to do, and it's interesting to go back and see whether or not that work. For me, I think, society, culture, the world, as it is is the antagonist. I think that a lot… I think that all 3 of these stories, to a degree, are my kind of thinking about, ruminating on the idea that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's [garbled]
[Dongwon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] And that ultimately the reason the society is the antagonist is that the protagonist is monstrous, but they are only monstrous because they are in a world that creates monsters. Therefore, in them trying to figure out the world and where they fit into it, they start with good intentions, but they ultimately are kind of in like the classic tragedy sense, unable to escape who they are and how they've been made…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And what has created them. I think that Snake Season is the place where that is the least clear.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I love that.
[Erin] Like, the culture is like much more, like, hopefully like the culture of the town and their hatred of wolves is pretty clear, and the state's direct like manipulation of these poor girls is pretty clear. But in Snake Season, it's a lot less like it's just kind of the world in less of a directly antagonistic way and more just like how do you fit into the world as it is.
[Mary Robinette] But it's also like in Snake Season, at least to me, it was about how she only felt like she was supported after her child had died.
[Dongwon] Yeah. The only time people came out in a sympathetic way for her.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Instead, she had the conjureman who's like bossing her around, and her husband who's not there. And she's alone. She's alone with a child that she's trying to raise by herself while her husband goes off and works. The only way she gets people to come out is if a child dies. She's not conscious of that, I don't think. Not like… Or she's… That is the lie she is telling herself.
[Erin] She's not, like, waking up and journaling…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] No one has visited me for months…
[Dongwon] Time to kill a baby.
[Mary Robinette] Kill a baby.
[Erin] That would be horrible.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Erin] But you can't say that to yourself.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So you create a world in which that is what's happening for you, so you can get the emotional joy… Or not… The emotional comfort that you want.
 
[Howard] As we explore these structural interpretations... I love doing this. I could do this all day. It's important to recognize that a large part of this comes from us, within, what we bring to the table, what are reading experience was. When I read Wolfy, I at first thought the wolf was the antagonist. After reading it, I feel like Lee is the antagonist. Because there's a moment when I was reading, when I felt like, "Oh. Nikki's objective has changed." Nikki wants to talk to the wolf, meet the wolf, learn who the wolf is, and Lee prevents that from happening, by falling on his own knife. Lee, you klutz. Nikki's goals change and he follows through with the original plan. But that is an interpretation which… Okay, in critical senses, maybe it's wildly invalid, but based on what I brought into the book, that's the experience that I had. That's one of the things that I love about short fiction in general is that it's so tight that we have all of these experiences so close together within 30 to 45 minutes of starting the story. It's easier to unpack, easier to talk about, and I talk about it for way longer than I would on a 300,000 page…
[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to touch on this actually. Each of these stories implies a massive world. Right? World building, technology, magic, societal stuff… The amount that you get into 6000 words in terms of gesturing at a bigger world is truly extraordinary and breathtaking. But also, I think, especially Sour Milk Girls could sustain a novel length work, right, with what you have there. I could see something bigger possible in that space if you want it, but that's not what you wanted. You love short fiction. You like writing short fiction. You believe in it, as do I. I adore it. But I'm curious to hear more about your thought process, about why short fiction, why is that how you wanted these stories to unfold. Why do you like working in that space?
 
[Erin] So this is a great question, specifically for Sour Milk Girls, because of its origin story. So I actually wanted to, and maybe still do, want to write a novel about 5 different women whose lives have been screwed up by this memory, the memory as a commodity system. Ghost was going to be like sort of the protagonist, through which this larger thing happened much later in her life. Not much later, but like in her 20s. I was trying to get her voice. So, for me, as a writer, if I cannot hook into the voice of the character, I cannot write the story. Which is one of the reasons I'm extraordinarily slow writer. Because I will rewrite the first paragraph and the first page over and over and over until the character sounds right to me in my head and I have some sort of instinctive sense of how they see the world and then I can move forward. Then it gets much easier. But that process can take a long time. So I could not hook into the voice of Ghost. I kept trying and I kept writing these horrible things I didn't like. So I was like maybe I need to go back and do a writing exercise for myself of some pivotal moment in her life early on that turns her into the person that she was at the time that the novel that I was writing, which is kind of a compulsive kleptomaniac, a compulsive memory kleptomaniac. Why become a compulsive memory kleptomaniac?
[Howard] I forget.
[Erin] I was trying to figure out what is the thing? Like, why… Where did she start going down this path? So I wrote… Started writing this writing exercise. I was like, oh, this writing exercise feels a bit like a story actually. Let me finish it. Then I did. I was like I think I could publish this. So it's sort of an accidental story that comes out of me...
[Dongwon] I love that.
[Erin] Trying to understand the novel form. Because I don't get it. I have this theory that I've told people before that there should be a… Like a Myers-Briggs of writers…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Where, first, like introvert/extrovert, I think some people tend long…
[Dongwon] Yup.
[Erin] And some people tend short.
[Dongwon] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] As writers. I tend short. I think I tend to just… The way that my sentences are constructed, a lot of times, I try to jam a lot in there in a way that won't… Wouldn't work. It would be a lot for like a longer work. You need to kind of stretch things out and dole them out differently. So I… When I try to write longer works, I often end up coming up with ideas that I then break off into shorter things. Because I'm trying to understand and trying to get to a place where I could write a novel. I also… Yeah, I think like it is a lot of it's about natural tendencies and my own speed because I'm slow, writing a short story is a much easier…
[Dongwon] Totally.
[Erin] Kind of thing for me to set out to do. But I think even… I'm the opposite. We're going to talk later in this deep dive about what happens when all your short stories, people are like, "That should be a novel." Which happens a lot to my students. Like, they'll be like writing this short story, and I'm like, "This is not a short story, this is a prologue."
[Dongwon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I have the opposite, where even when I come up with novel ideas they sort of come out in short story form. Because I think I'm so focused on one character. Part of it is that I get so into the idea of the single character that you need a broader cast a lot of times in order to make a novel work, and I want to be so much in this one person's head that it's hard to think about taking them on such a long journey.
[Dongwon] It's funny, you and I were chatting before recording, and you… Just talking about an idea that you had. I was like, "Oh. That actually sounds like a short story…"
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Not a novel." I think you would need to do something to make it more novel size. So it was really funny to hear you say that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, I want to sidebar with you and talk to you about how to fix that, because…
[Erin] Oh, cool.
[Mary Robinette] Because I've…
[Dongwon] Would you, because she needs to write the novel [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I know, I would like it too. Yeah. It's… You're right. You are so… Because I also went from short story to novel. So I know the thing that happens. But I'm pretty sure we can talk about that at some point later in the deep dive. Right now, we should probably pause for homework.
[Erin] Yes.
 
[Mary Robinette] The homework assignment is take a line that you've written a while ago that you absolutely love and try rewriting it is the writer that you are now, because your style changes, your understanding of how language changes, your interaction with it changes, your taste changes. Take that original line, read it once, put it to the side, and then rewrite it as you are now.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple Podcast or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?

Sep. 21st, 2023 06:19 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?
 
 
Key Points: Deep Dive into A Function of Firepower. The title comes from a maxim, "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." AI, Oafans, Petey, all these guns versus "The pen is mightier than the sword." I.e., an academic conference. Mutual assured destruction. Fermi's Paradox. Comedy depends a lot on subversion. Petey is an antagonist, but not villainous. Being a villain and being sympathetic are not necessarily separate. Sympathetic and monstrous at the same time. Sometimes you need a new tool. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, A Function of Firepower.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Howard] And I'm in charge for this episode, and I have been for some of the other ones. Kind of in charge. Mostly, the questions from my friends here are going to steer what happens…
[Laughter]
[Howard] The title of this book, A Function of Firepower, title comes from one of the 70 maxims. The maxim is "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." Which obviously means sometimes who is in charge is not a question of who was elected to be in charge, who is most qualified to be in charge, it is who is the best armed. Which is, as I think we can all agree, a terrible way to decide who gets to run things. The story here begins with a crazy AI who has lots and lots of big guns and who is bound and determined to blow up anything that could cause the sort of mess that she's upset about. Then we have the return of the Oafan race, who own a whole bunch of spaceships that our heroes took because they didn't think the Oafans were still alive. But, hey, surprise, they are. Now we want our stuff back. Now, instantly, they are the largest armed force in the galaxy. Then, of course, throughout Schlock Mercenary, there's been Petey, where I always imagined as the sci-fi equivalent of an enlightened desperate. A benign god-king. Who is not as powerful as he used to be. Then I balanced those questions, all of those guns against the old saw… I say the old saw. It's Shakespeare, isn't it? The pen is mightier than the sword? That's Shakespeare?
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say yes. I don't actually know.
[Howard] It's probably Shakespeare.
[DongWon] Odds are high, let's say.
[Laughter]
[Howard] [garbled ballad] is Shakespeare. So, yeah. The pen is mightier than the sword. I wanted to drive some of the actual solutions from an academic conference where people are trying to answer the question, where did all of the civilizations go that came before this galactic civilization? Are we doomed to wipe ourselves out? Is there a great filter? What is it that's going on? I really enjoyed writing it, but it was a challenge, because I knew it had to be more than just a thing that keeps the conclusion from sitting right next to the beginning. It needed to be more than a spacer.
[DongWon] You managed to create in the way that middle volumes are kind of a really dark chapter of this story. Right? I mean, the thematics as you just laid them out, tapping into Cold War era of mutual assured destruction. There's, like, overtones of almost, like, indigenous reparations. Then, answering this big question about like Fermi's Paradox in certain ways. Right? I'm… I know you grew up sort of child of the Cold War in some ways. How much was that weapons of mass destruction, mutual assured destruction, finding other answers to that and asking that question in a slightly different way… How much was that [garbled driving]
[Howard] That's been… I mean… Sigh. People use the word DNA wrong in this way all the time. That's been part of my DNA my whole life. I grew up… Yes, child of the Cold War. Parents telling me how incredibly scary the Cuban missile crisis was. And I think it was Korean Airlines flight something or other… Seven… KLA… I want to say 007, but it couldn't have been that because nobody would name their plane, their flight, 007. Korean Airlines flight shot down by the Russians in the early 80's.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I remember that.
[Howard] I remember everybody at school thinking this is it. This is the thing that sets it all off. So, yeah, there… That's in my blood, that's the thing that my brain grew up with and grew out of… Not in the same way that you grow out of a pair of clothes, but in the way that a tree grows out of a given patch of dirt. So, yeah, I had to explore those themes. Also, those themes are… When you look at the various solution sets for Fermi's Paradox, one of them is the set that says intelligence always gets greedy and destroys itself in a way that leaves no traces. Which is a horribly negative thought to have, but it's fun to ask the question.
[DongWon] I think, because you've kind of created inverted war games here in certain ways. Right? Like, Chinook has decided that the long guns are bad, we need to get rid of the long guns, and she's going to do everything in her power to make that happen. Unfortunately, that also means the Cold War is now a shooting war.
[Howard] Yep.
[DongWon] And a lot of people are going to die as a result. Also, the actual problem is completely external to whatever is happening here. This is a misinterpretation of the data. But I guess I'm kind of curious, like, how did you get to that iteration of this? It seems like you took the basis… The base narrative that we see a lot, of the AI goes amok, decides humanity is the problem, but pushed it one step further in this way that she really is trying to save civilization in a certain way. Right? She believes she's doing the right thing. In a way that I found to be very relatable and kind of fascinating, watching her kind of go off the rails, even as she's editing herself and coming to some erroneous conclusions. But what was… I don't exactly know what I'm asking, but there's something very interesting in how your thinking about mutually assured destruction that I don't feel like I've ever quite seen in this way before.
[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because at some level, everything Schlock Mercenary is, is derivative of things that I've consumed. I named a book Big Dumb Objects because there's this whole sci-fi trope about big dumb objects. Better authors than I have gotten to many of these questions long before I did. So when I addressed them, I wanted to subvert or distort… Because comedy depends a lot on subversion, and maybe that's just… Maybe that accidentally resulted in something that from a philosophical standpoint is interesting rather than comedic. I'm so glad you noticed.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, like… Circling back to Chinook when we're talking about the goals. Like, there's the authorial goal of these are the things, the questions that I need her to take. Then there's the character goals of this is why she's doing that. When you were mapping it out, when you were doing that outline, how aware of her internal motivations were you, and how much of that did you discover in the process of writing it?
[Howard] Ah. I knew pretty much all of what was driving her from the word go. There were the overt motives which is that her creator, her jailer, and her savior were all killed at the same time. It was very emotional for her. She suddenly had no way to process it. But also, the event triggered or set off a trigger like a timebomb in the system that she was now inhabiting, because the intelligence that had all of the Oafans trapped was so unhappy with themselves for what they'd done that they built this thing that would let them rewrite themselves so they could forget having committed the crime so that they could continue to keep the Oafans trapped. Well, now Chinook was there, the AI that used to live there moved out because they were ready for a new life, and she has this horrible emotional event and trips a system that begins rewriting her psyche in ways that she doesn't know she's doing. I got… I mean, when I first described that to myself in the outline, I got chills. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. Oh, what a landmine you've created for this character."
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] "This is going to be fun." Then, everything after that…
[DongWon] Well, the core metaphor…
[Howard] Everything after that was just exploring the outgrowths of it.
[DongWon] I love the core metaphor of for these cycles of violence to perpetuate, for us to continue these wars, to continue these oppressions and genocides, we have to erase our own memory of what happened and rewrite our memory so we don't remember what we did a generation ago.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And then we will repeat the same error, which keeps people oppressed, which keeps people in these positions, which perpetuates this long Cold War and all of that.
[Howard] Yeah, that when I did do on purpose. But… And I can't remember when, but I recall at one point deciding, "Oo. You know what? I don't want to say that part out loud. I want to just leave that at that level as a discovery exercise for the reader." Speaking of discovery exercises, we're going to go discover something and come right back after the break.
 
[Howard] Hey, everybody. It's Howard. If you go to kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler spelled T.A.Y.L.E.R. all one word, you will find that we are getting ready to put Mandatory Failure, Schlock Mercenary book 18 into print, and you can get a copy for your very own self. We are super excited about this. I've done a bonus story for it that [Ethan Kozak] is illustrating. The book is glorious and wonderful. It's one of my very favorites. It's one of Sandra's very favorites. I'm sure that the moment we're able to put it into your hands, it will be one of your very favorites. Kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler all one word except not with the all one word part, I didn't need to tell you that, you knew that. Just spell it with the ER and you'll be fine. Thanks.
 
[Howard] And we're back. What are we going to discover next?
[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk a little bit about Petey and what Petey is going through here.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Again, like, by this point, we really like these characters. You're doing stuff to them that I have feelings about. Why? Why?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] For a long time, when I created the character of Petey, the trope that everyone expected and they been waiting for this shoe to drop for a decade or more, was, "Oh, yeah, he runs a galaxy. He's going to turn out to be awful. We're going to have to kill him, we're going to have to fight him. He's going to be a bad guy." I needed to set things up so that that didn't happen. The easiest way to do that was to put pressure on him where he has to do violent and unpleasant things, and he always manages to do it in as nonintrusive a way as possible, and actually to back away from the options that a true tyrant would have taken.
[DongWon] Do you consider Petey a villain?
[Howard] I don't, but I consider him frightening.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, he definitely serves an antagonist purpose, but…
[DongWon] Yeah, he fits the antagonist role, especially in volume 3, which will talk about in [garbled episode]
[Howard] He's an antagonist, but I don't see him as villainous. Does that make sense?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Which is, I think, why I'm like these are characters that I wind up caring about because it's not just the… It's like all of them.
[DongWon] I mean, Chinook is like the primary villain of this book. Right? I also find her probably to be the most sympathetic character in this book as well. Right? Those things aren't necessarily separate. There are ways in which I really like Petey. Also, I find Petey to be the scariest thing in these books. I consider the arc of all of this is… Or the fundamental arc really is as much what do we do about Petey as it is what do we do about these dark matter intelligences that are determined to destroy the universe.
[Howard] Well, the fact that… There's that… The UNS, they're having some High Admirality meeting and somebody mentions Petey and somebody else says, "What are you doing? You might as well just invite him in." Then he shows up and says, "I don't actually need to be invited."
[DongWon] I was already here.
[Howard] "I've been here the whole time." One, that's a fun joke to tell. Two, that's yet another cementing of, guys, when something is super intelligent and superpowerful whether or not it is super benign, it's scary.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Howard] That's actually echoed by something that happened very early in Schlock Mercenary, which is my discovery that from any perspective other than Schlock's, Schlock is a monster. So, placing a character we like in a way that you don't have to turn the book very much to one side or the other to realize, "Oh. You're really scary." That was very fun for me.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Well, I mean, you do such a good job of that, of so many of your heroes are also quite monstrous in certain ways and capable of truly mind-boggling acts of violence. Right? Like, even your human scale protagonists are often capable of truly astonishing acts of violence. Right? Whether that's pulling the arms off the enemy ship's captain or…
[Mary Robinette] I was thinking that that…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] When you were talking, it was like…
[DongWon] Or one person in power armor just destroying an armada.
 
[Erin] It seems like it's really on cue with the theme… Like, getting back to that kind of mutual assured destruction, like, I think there's something really… Wholesome is not the right word, but in realizing that monster… Like, everyone is… People are both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time, and that's what makes the whole situation so terrifying.
[Howard] Yeah. The… Again, coming back to the question of Fermi's Paradox, the idea that as civilizations developed technologically, their ability to destroy themselves permanently… Not just a portion of themselves, but to just wipe themselves out of existence, increases. That's an important theme here, and I wanted to illustrate it in a way that lets us explore a possible alternative. Which is what that whole scholarly convention was, and is… Elizabeth, who ends up running the scholarly convention, she was roped into traveling with the Toughs because her boyfriend was one of the mercenaries and she just followed him onto the ship and suddenly realized she was cooking for a group of professional sociopaths and wasn't sure she fit in. In this book, I wanted to put her in a position to steer things, to guide things away from all of the violence and disaster.
[DongWon] Well, she's really the antidote to the title. Right? Like, rank is a function of firepower, but also, we see her get promoted out of being a cook, just for being smart and competent and willing to say the thing that no one else is willing to say. Right? It's almost like your… In creating this hero organization of these mercenaries, the antidote to just taking power at the end of a long gun really is recognizing and rewarding competence and forthrightness. It's in a world where not only rank is a function of power, firepower, but ethics is a function of firepower, to have an antidote to that, I think, really essential to making this book work.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, along the lines of making this book work, it also had to function as setting up in the launchpad for the final book. So when you were… So let's talk about, since this is a deep dive and we're full of spoilers, let's talk about the ending.
[Howard] In the end of the previous book, the end of Mandatory Failure, the Pa'anuri, the bad guys, blow up one of Petey's cities. It was during this book that someone figures out, "Oh, I think I know how the Pa'anuri long gun works. They don't have a targeting mechanism… Their targeting mechanism… They can see certain kinds of power sources, and they are walking their shots. What are they aiming at? They're aiming at Petey. They're trying to destroy his core power generator, which, by the time we get to the end of the book, we realize that's the tool that he needs in order to fight back. They blow a piece of it up. I knew that was… That was part of the original outline, is that we blow up something that creates a puzzle in book 18, we blow up something that creates a disaster in book 19. Cueing that up was a lot of fun. Honestly, one of the things that was the most fun about it was… And this is going to sound silly, I'm sure. Using brush pens and circle templates to create some of the energy effect shapes that I wanted to create, and then sending them to the colorist and saying, "Look. There is no actual astronomical or physics analog for the colors that these things should be. Just make it look scary and dangerous and loud and hot and big and whatever." Travis ran with it.
[DongWon] Yeah. I was going to say, we… We're a writing podcast, so obviously we're talking about the narrative structure and the writing, but on the art front, you really pushed yourself to a different level it feels like here. You got on… I don't know, you kind of got on your Jack Kirby bull shit in the best way.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It was really fun to see some of these bigger scope, bigger scale intergalactic war things happening. You really start pulling out these big guns, no pun intended, by the end of this one.
[Howard] I leveled up the writing earlier in my career than I leveled up the art. That might be because I joined the Writing Excuses podcast…
[Laughter]
[Howard] In 08, and have never been part of an art podcast. Never. But I remember, it was a convention, it was at GenCon, I was talking to Lar deSouza and complaining about how much my hand hurt using this one pan trying to create lines. He looked at what I was doing and said, "Here. Take this." A [fidona suke] polymer nib short brush pen. I grabbed it and was like, "Oh, my gosh. A light touch makes a skinny line, and a hard touch makes a fat line, but it doesn't splay like a brush. Oh, this is amazing. This is so cool." Took it back to my booth. He gave it to me because he's a hero. Took it back to my booth, and drew a book cover with it. I think that was 2015. Just started to learn to use those tools and that piece of the toolbox was critically important for the finale, because now I could render some of these pictures that I just didn't have the skill set for earlier. Weird to talk about that on a writing podcast.
[Mary Robinette] But it's I think it's very much to the point, that there are… There is a tool that you don't know that you need to add to your toolbox. Like, that's… We talk about it as a metaphor all the time, and you're talking about it is a very literal real thing.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, here's a new tool. Physical tool." I think that that's something that everyone can take away. It's like you… Just getting the tool is not enough, it's learning how to use the tool that's really where the magic is.
[Howard] I think one of the things that Lar said was "When the student is ready, the master will appear." I had tried to use brush pens before and just couldn't. I tried several. Simply could not make them work. Then I sat down with him, and in 30 seconds, the lines were coming off my hand the way they needed to. I was like, "This pen is magical. I never…" Then he said, "When the student is ready, the master will appear. You are now ready for this tool. Congratulations." We are just about out of time. The conclusion of this book needed to set up the final story. That involved what I call like character arc blocking. Where I had to put chunks of the cast in different places. I had to scatter them because I knew that the final act, the next book, was going to come together with them in the very end coming together. I know that sounds shallow and silly and obvious, but shallow and silly and obvious… I've made the Schlock Mercenary joke already. Which of those words suggested that I would not do this? But sometimes those simple tools are the best. We work with those forms, and then, as you drill down on them and make them your own, they actually work. Hey, work. Homework. Who's got that?
 
[Erin] Yeah. I do. Speaking of tools you can make your own,what we're going to ask you to do for the homework this time is to work three words into your work in progress. They are expeditious, sock, and dragonfly. The best words. So, enjoy those and set them right into your work.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any questions that are on your mind.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.20: Basics of Ensemble Characterization

May. 19th, 2022 05:25 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.19: Intro to Roleplaying Games

May. 11th, 2021 09:14 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 16.19: Intro to Roleplaying Games
 
 
Key Points: A roleplaying game allows you to inhabit a persona (play a character) and live their life for the course of the game. The outcome of a roleplaying game, the course of the game, is not necessarily predetermined. When you're writing for a roleplaying game, you're writing a story, but someone else is writing the protagonist. You have to balance predestination, the writer as the invisible hand of fate, with free will, the characters' choices. You're turning a novel into an amusement park. Writing a tabletop roleplaying game is balancing between all games are physics simulations and all roleplaying games are improvisational theater. It has to be fun. Situations need multiple successful resolutions, a large possibility space. Game masters curate the experience the players want to have. The illusion of choice, or curating real choices? The choices need to be entertaining. A good visual model of narrative flow for tabletop roleplaying games is a pachinko machine. Pet peeves? Dead ends. Only one type for a gender. Long read-aloud sections. Other people telling me how my character feels. Game master versus players.
 
[Season 16, Episode 19]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[James] Intro to Roleplaying Games.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[James] I'm James.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are very excited to be introducing for you all another one of our intensive courses for the year. This one is about game writing and interactive fiction. So we've got two really incredible guests who are both experts in this field. They're going to be teaching us all about it for the next eight episodes. So, James and Cassandra, introduce yourselves. Let us know who you are.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra. I used to work in Ubisoft Montréal. I've worked on games like Hyperscape. I've also done indie work for titles like Fallen London, Sunless Skies, Wasteland 3, and I've done a little bit of tabletop work for D&D and World of Darkness. James?
[James] I'm James L. Sutter. I'm mostly on the tabletop side. I'm the co-creator of the Pathfinder and the Starfinder roleplaying games. But I've also done a little bit of videogame work. So, between us, we're hoping to cover everything folks want to know.
[Dan] Cool.
[Cassandra] [garbled… saying that]
[James] Yeah.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] We are very excited to have you with us. Mary Robinette and Howard and I also have a little bit, a tiny fraction, of game work, so at least we kind of know what we're talking about. But let's jump into this. Cassandra, our topic this week is intro to roleplaying games. What… Where do you want to start us?
[Cassandra] Well, let's go back to, like, the bare basics of this, the very simplest definition of it. A roleplaying game is essentially a game that allows you to inhabit a persona and sort of live out its life throughout the course of the game. In other words, you could be Bob the accountant in your daily life, but in a roleplaying game, you might be Somarian the Elf. What differentiates a roleplaying game from, say, an action game or an adventure game is that the outcome is not necessarily predetermined. There are ways to get to the end, but in between you have side quests with different possibilities, different ways they might go. It might end horrendously in an ending you might not have been expecting, kind of like real life. There are also inventories, there are stat-based systems, and, depending on what you're talking about, whether it is a AAA type or a tabletop game, those stats might come into play differently. It's something that I think James might be very good at discussing.
[James] Yeah. Well, especially because in tabletop roleplaying games, you have to do a lot of stuff on the fly potentially, because the nice thing about it is that in something like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, every… Your characters can do literally anything. That's the blessing, but also the curse. Because if you're running the game, you need to be able to account for all of that. So the thing to remember, when you're writing for a roleplaying game type thing is that you're writing a story, but someone else is writing the protagonist. So you've got this balancing act, because it's your job to make the story go where it needs to go, but it's the players job to make everything makes sense, make sense for their characters, to make sure the protagonist is doing what they think the character should do. Usually, you're playing with multiple characters at a time. So it's that question of how do you guide the players through choices that feel meaningful an independent and sensible for the character they've chosen to inhabit, but also is guiding them along the right general story path. So, I'm curious, Cass, what do you feel like are some good examples of that?
[Cassandra] At least in AAA games, I think Mass Effect might probably be one of the easiest examples to look at. Because you have the paragon and you have the renegade route. Even though you are still giving the player freedom of choice to go and do whatever they want, once you have it categorized as, all right, this is light side work and this is dark side work, you kind of teach them to go along the path that you need them to go towards to fit the conclusion without ever feeling like you're holding them on a leash. It's all about balancing predestination and free will. You are absolutely the invisible hand of fate.
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] Although occasionally you need to be a little bit less invisible, otherwise the players are just going to go off the rails. But what I think really is very interesting about writing for roleplaying games, especially, is that if you're transitioning from like say novel writing, you… Well, at least I did. I had the trouble of constantly wanting to make things linear. I expected the players would want to go a certain direction, they would need to follow the beats that I'd given them. But the trick about roleplaying games and designing them is you're giving them a setting, you're giving them a sandbox, you might be giving them a little bit of a map, like a toolkit, some directions on what to do, and you're kind of hoping that they will go in that direction. It is not necessarily true. To reuse a metaphor about novels, it's kind of like turning your novel into an amusement park, and then setting the boundaries along with it. But what's it like, doing similar things for, let's say, tabletop games, because it's so much more open ended with the game master's and so on? With video games, you have all those things preset by design, by audio, by the visuals… Man. I don't think those terms do exist with tabletop games.
 
[Howard] Years and years ago, 15 years ago, Steve Jackson said to me, "All games are physics simulations." That stuck with me. I keep coming back to it and asking, "Well, wait. This game isn't a… No, at some level, this is a physics simulation." The second one, and I can't remember who told this to me, "All roleplaying games are improvisational theater."
[Yeah]
[Howard] Talking about tabletop roleplaying games as improvisational theater. So, for me, writing or playing or game mastering a tabletop roleplaying game is a balancing act between this is a physics simulation and this is improvisational theater. I say improvisational theater rather than improvisational storytelling because we know we want the storytelling to happen, but the theater aspect is what suggests that this has to be entertaining rather than just narratively… Functional narrative. I want it to be fun.
[James] Yeah. I use that improv example a lot when trying to explain roleplaying games to folks. I often say, like, the game master, who's sort of running the show, is kind of like the director. Then, all of the players are like actors, each inhabiting a character. So you create a character and then sort of go through the story that the director's running, trying to just act as your character would act. Everybody's kind of building off of each other. That's what creates this loose fun story that can go in different directions. I think that one of the things about that is, like Cass was saying, you gotta be careful not to be too linear in your story. You want to make sure that situations allow for multiple successful resolutions. Right? Like, you want to think about… Even if you thought… Your first thought is, "Well, they'll fight their way through this situation." You also want to be ready for them to talk their way through the situation, or trick somebody, or cause a distraction. Really considering the whole possibility space, that's what you're creating as a game writer is sort of these situations. Yeah, Mary?
[Mary Robinette] So, something that occurred to me as you were talking is one of my favorite DMs, I'm going to do a shout out to David Spears, but he said something about roleplaying that I really… It resonates with me a lot, which was that as a DM, he felt like what he was responsible for was curating the experience his players wanted to have.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] For me, that made more sense than the improvisational theater director metaphor, because the director is trying to execute their own vision, and a curator is trying to shape it for the people, for the viewer. So, for me, it often feels more like that there's a certain amount of second person… Or interactive theater. That there is this path and that on one hand, you can do a thing which I used to do in theater all the time which is that you can give the audience the illusion of choice.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] On the other hand, you can say, "Okay. No, you do actually have a choice, and I will go with you on this journey and I will curate this." I feel like those are two different modes of roleplay.
[Cassandra] Definitely. I think…
[James] Yeah. I think they're both crucial. Right, Cass?
[Cassandra] They are, definitely. Sorry, I think Dan was going to say something. I saw a finger there.
[Dan] I… Yeah, I wanted to jump in with this illusion of choice. Two of the best pieces of advice I ever got when I first started writing for roleplaying games was, first of all, somebody said that as you're controlling this story, as you're presenting the options, you can… If the characters come to a two roads diverge in a yellow wood kind of situation, and you need them to get to a castle, either road is going to lead to the castle. But they get to choose which one they're going to go down. That's kind of a blunt force illusion of choice. But then what you can do is add on to that, and present… Just make sure that the choices that you're offering are entertaining. This is something that game master's can fall into accidentally, where they make a choice they don't want the players to make and they present it as being really interesting or entertaining, and then they're stuck and they have to improvise something. But when you're writing that, if you are presenting a scenario, you can just kind of fill it with a lot of interesting toys to play with that… And then the players are going to immediately latch onto the ones that are exciting to them. If they see there's a giant fruit cart in the middle of the street, then they might think, "Oh, we could turn that over," or we could do whatever. If you make sure to put interesting characters into the space, that will lure them into talking to them. If you make sure to include a bunch of security cameras, then they will think, "Oh, we might need to sneak around or find a way to disable those." Giving them interesting choices instead of just choices is a good way of guiding them.
 
[Howard] If you ever wanted a physical model, a visual representation of storytelling, good storytelling narrative flow, for tabletop roleplaying games, it's the pachinko machine.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The balls can bounce left or right, but they always go down. The balls cannot escape the machine. They start at the top, but then there are little decisions along the way. At the end, yeah, there's multiple possible places the ball could land. Tracy Hickman described this as narrative bumper pool. At any point, you have choices. But all of the choices are leading us in this direction, rather than in the open-ended, the world keeps getting bigger as my players running any possible direction.
[Cassandra] Oh, that makes me think of the first Walking Dead game, honestly. Which I think is a really good example of how that illusion of choice and that use of linearity just kind of worked… I remember articles just exploding after people started playing the game, because people were so infuriated that… With how they never really had a choice at all. The game would tell you that characters remembered what you did. It would set it up so that emotional resonance between one choice or another was just so harrowing. But, let's say a character you decided not to helping one situation, you would eventually see them later. They would play a role in another set piece. But the thing that struck me most with that game, and how it implements that illusion of choice, is the ending. I think the game has been out long enough that a spoiler is fine.
[Go for it]
[Cassandra] Essentially, the end, you have this 10-year-old girl seeing her surrogate father slowly transform into a zombie. You find yourself with two choices, and they're both incredibly horrible. One, you leave. Like, you run, you go as far as you can from this person you cannot save. Or you shoot him in the head. Mechanically speaking, none of this matters. The poor guy still dies. But the fact that this was presented to you with so much emotional weight. Like Dan was saying, like, these are toys. Very morbid [garbled] toys, but these are toys on each other side of the road. If you present things that are interesting and resonant enough with the player, it doesn't matter that they know they're still going to one ending.
[James] I think the big thing about that is that the choices need to be tied to the player. Right? Like in the example you just gave, both of those are things that really… Like, you're making the call to drive the story. I think that's something people often run into when they're not used to running a game is it's really tempting to make the players not the main characters. You'll have that GM insertion character, the like helpful nonplayer character, the sidekick, who just happens to be better than the players in all these different ways. The player tries to go one way, and they grab them and steer them back on course. Like, you can do a little bit of that, but you really always want to make sure that your choices are being made by the players and that they feel significant to the characters.
[Cassandra] We're all NPC scenario life, there's no reason to continue being one in a game.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's brilliant, and a little sad. But I love it.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] I want to interrupt here. I have let this discussion go on maybe a little longer than I should, because we should have paused several minutes ago for our book of the week.
[Oh, no]
[Dan] Or our game of the week is how we're going to do it during this intensive course. I believe our game of the week this time comes from James.
[James] Yeah. So the game of the week is going to be the Starfinder roleplaying game, which I was the original creative director on. That's all about… It's a classic pen-and-paper roleplaying game. It's all about space wizards and laser ninjas. It's science fantasy, so you can kind of do everything from Alien to Star Wars to Fifth Element, whatever sort of story you want to tell. If you want to be a lizard with a grenade launcher or a bug priest of the death goddess, do whatever you want. But I wanted to bring this one up because there's both the tabletop version that you can go find, and also there is an Alexa version, an audio single player version of the game that I got to write that is free that people can, if you have an Amazon Alexa device, you can just say, "Alexa, play Starfinder." I'm sure I just turned on a whole bunch of people's right now.
[Laughter]
[James] But I have no regrets. You should play the game, because it's produced by Audible Studios and has a full cast and it's really fun.
[Dan] Well, as of this recording, just yesterday or the day before, you want a bunch of awards for that, didn't you?
[James] Yeah, we won some nice industry awards. I think like best voice experience and best developers. So, yeah, it's really a fun kind of a new medium. So it was nice to be able to bring this game that I love in tabletop into a voice version that people can play without having a group. You can just be playing it by yourself in your kitchen while you're making dinner.
[Dan] Cool.
[James] Well, thank you.
[Howard] My first experience with the Starfinder tabletop roleplaying game book was opening it up and literally removing the pages so that I could use them as references, because I was illustrating the Munchkin Starfinder cards for Steve Jackson Games.
[Right]
[Howard] It was easier to have the pages of the book all over the couch and the floor in front of me.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Then to have to pick up the book when I was drawing. I felt a little bad about it. But not bad enough to not do it. I got another copy of the book for me, anyway. So…
[Dan] Oh, man.
[James] Officially forgiven.
[Dan] Well, I love this, and thank you for using this is our first game of the week, because I think it's a great illustration of the fact that these… This is viable writing, like freelance or career employment opportunities. This is not just us talking about games because we love games. This is a job that people have, that people win awards for, that people get paid for. So, that's kind of why we're doing this whole class, is those writers who want to focus on games or on interactive… You know that it's a real thing and that it can be made to work. 
 
[Dan] Anyway, we have gone a little over time, but I want to… This is our first episode of the course, so let's take a little bit of extra time. Because I know that Cass and James want to talk a little bit about pet peeves in roleplaying games.
[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, if we don't get to talk about pet peeves, I will…
[Laughter]
[James] Yeah. Absolutely. We should open this up to everybody. Maybe, Cass, you want to go first, but I'm sure that everybody here has something they've seen before that they feel like, "Oh. Never do that."
[Cassandra] Dead ends. I loathe… I grew up with the Sierra games, I grew up with King's Quest, and never lost my absolute hatred for how the game would just stop if say you looked at the mouse at the wrong instant. With roleplaying games, I feel like… I guess it should be failure, but the consequences should be interesting. It should be fun to die. It should be fun to see your kingdom crumble away. Just so you know you can see, like, an octopus kingdom rise up from the ashes of it. What about everyone else? What are your pet peeves in roleplaying games?
[Mary Robinette] Mine is… So, I played D&D all through high school. And one of the things that was frustrating is that in this game in which I'm supposed to have all of these choices about who I can inhabit, there were all of these different body types, and just forms for male characters. All of the women were this single, very sexy, scantily clad type. Like, everybody had exactly the same model body. As a highschooler who was already dealing with all of the body insecurities, that was… It was like, "But what if I don't want to wear a metal bikini?"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it's writers who are not thinking about all of the different types of people who want to play a game and therefore shut them out.
[James] Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like that diversity of choices can also be a thing, like people… Even if folks go, "Oh, okay. I need to make sure that I cater to people in terms of what their character looks like." You also have to remember to cater to all the different sorts of decisions that people might want to make. So, question your own things about like which characters get romantic subplots. Is it just the characters that you personally would be interested in? If that's the case, then you're making a mistake. Right? You need to remember that you are not your only audience.
[Dan] Yeah. I think Mass Effect, which Cass mentioned earlier, is a good example of doing that right. Because most of the characters are romancible, regardless of gender, regardless of species, regardless of anything else, and you can really kind of curate your own story that way as you go through it. Because they took the time to add in all of that extra choice. One thing that is a pet peeve of mine, I always used to think that I hated big read-aloud sections in roleplaying game campaigns, and then once I started writing them, I realized I actually like read-alouds, I just don't like long ones. If something goes on for more than a paragraph, it, in my opinion, might be a little too long. I remember I played a D&D campaign with James, and it begins with almost a full page of here, let me read you this gargantuan introduction. We were all just laughing by the end of it, because we couldn't even remember how it started. It was so long. Take the time… Use read-alouds to get across a mood or an ambience or to get across a really great character beat that you really want to be in there. But then, step back and let the game master and the players kind of tell their own story.
[Mary Robinette] That's right. I forgot that it's game master these days. I'm so old.
[Laughter]
[Howard] My own least favorite is, and this is a sin that can be committed by the game master or by other players. I don't like other people at the table telling me how my character feels about something.
[Oh, yeah]
[Howard] Don't… No. You describe what happens and give me the opportunity to react. Because that's why I'm at the table.
[James] I'd also just throw out, also, especially in tabletop where there is the game master and the players, there can sometimes be a feeling that it's the game master versus the players. Like we were saying before, like, that's never the case. Your job as game master is to make sure everybody there has a good time. That's the goal, right? So you want to… You don't want to be so easy that your players never feel fit… Never fear failure. Because that reduces tension. But you're also not trying to kill off your characters. It's not the characters versus you as the manifestation of their story. So, the number one thing is just make sure that everybody's having fun. Similarly, don't allow players to be jerks under the guise of, "Well, that's what my character would do." We're all still there to have fun and tell a story.
[Dan] Cass, what were you going to say?
[Cassandra] Oh. No. I was just going to say that autonomy is just, like, the imperative in this situation. Having jerks try to force their ideas on you, that pushes against a player's autonomy. Similarly, telling a player exactly how they feel… Nope. No. Those are just pet peeves of mine, too. I'm just sighing about them in the very short amount of time we have left on an episode that's already run over…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah. We do need to be done now.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] But I believe we have some homework.
[James] Yeah. So, homework hopefully will be pretty easy and fun for folks. I just want you to spend some time playing a roleplaying game. That can be a videogame, that can be tabletop. But, play a roleplaying game and take note of what's fun and what's not.
[Dan] Awesome. That sounds great. Okay. Thank you very much for listening to our episode. We are going to keep talking about game writing for the next seven weeks. We hope to see you again. Thank you very much. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

May. 27th, 2020 11:14 am
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale
 
 
Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Shannon] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.
[Shannon] Hello!
[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.
[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.
[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.
[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.
[Dean] Thank you.
 
[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.
[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.
[Dean] Awesome.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.
[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."
[Dean] Nobody would be like that.
[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"
[Dean] What are these, monsters?
[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.
[Laughter]
[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."
[Chuckles]
[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.
 
[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…
[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.
[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.
[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."
[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.
[Laughter]
[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.
[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.
[Dean] Right.
[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.
[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…
[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.
[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…
[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…
[Dean] Go, quote.
[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."
[Dean] It's finding…
[Shannon] Everything is still so new.
[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.
[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.
[Shannon] Yes.
 
[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?
[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…
[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."
[Shannon] Let's add a baby.
[Dean] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Dean] That's exactly what we did.
[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…
[Dean] Mom, we're watching.
[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"
[Dean] Pause.
[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…
[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?
[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.
 
[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.
[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.
[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.
[Right]
[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.
[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.
[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…
[Dean] It can be hard.
[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.
[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…
[Shannon] Phenomenal.
[Laughter]
[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…
[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.
[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…
[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.
[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…
[Chuckles]
[Dean] Day.
[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.
[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…
[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.
[Dean] Something…
[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.
[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.
[Dean] More coming.
[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.
 
[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'll sign them.
[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.
 
[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…
[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]
[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.
[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.
[Dean] They just really aren't likable.
[Shannon] But we love them in real life.
[Dean] Yes.
[Shannon] But you just can't show that.
[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]
[Chuckles]
[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.
[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.
[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.
[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.
[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.
[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…
[Mary Robinette] No no.
[Shannon] Between other characters.
[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…
[Brandon] Once in a while.
[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.
[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.
[Shannon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.
[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.
[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?
[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.
[Brandon] On set?
[Shannon] Well, you know.
[Dean] When they let you on the set.
[Shannon] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.
[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

Jul. 10th, 2019 09:45 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
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Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict
 
 
Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.
[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.
[Brandon] Yeah, we are.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?
[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.
[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."
[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.
[Brandon] That's a very good point.
[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.
[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."
[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?
[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.
[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?
[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.
[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…
[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.
[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.
[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.
 
[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.
[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] In a science fiction setting…
[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!
[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?
[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]
[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.
[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Coconut glass.
[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?
 
[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…
[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.
[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.
[Howard] Boy versus nature.
[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.
[Mary Robinette] Whoo!
[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.
[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.
[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.
[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.
[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.
 
[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?
[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…
[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.
[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.
[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.
[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?
[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…
[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.
 
[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.40: Fixing Character Problems, Part I

Oct. 9th, 2018 11:53 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.40: Fixing Character Problems, Part I
 
 
Key points: What do you do when readers say your character is boring? How do your characters relate to the plot? What about it matters to them, why are they hurting, what choices are they making? What is the role of the character in the story, and what unusual ways can they fill that role? When main, or point-of-view characters, are boring, they probably need something to be passionate about, while secondary characters need more external attributes developed. Make the character more proactive. Check for flanderization, and make sure you are using all their facets. Have you pushed yourself on a character and been rewarded? Yes. The hot girl who became a favorite main character. Sgt. Schlock growing a conscience. How did you do it? What are the steps? First, see the hot girl through someone else's experience. Show that she is an individual. Show that shopping is a hobby, and what is important to her.
 
( Here it comes! )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fixing Character Problems, Part I.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And this is going to take more than 15 minutes.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan. 
[Howard] I'm Howard. 
 
[Brandon] The reason this is a part one is, with our new format we started last year, we have different teams of podcasters, and I wanted to try something where we pitched some of the same questions at one team and then the next team, and see how the answers get shaken up and see how it feels different, because this is a… This is really a method podcast right here, this one, where it's like how do you go about this specific thing. In this case, it's how do you go about fixing problems with characters. So we're going to pitch most of these out Howard and Dan, because Mary and I will be next week in Chicago.
[Dan] Because we write really problematic characters.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Actually, you are one, so…
[Dan] It makes it easy.
 
[Brandon] So, my first question is, readers say your character's boring. What do you do?
[Dan] Make them interesting.
[Brandon] Ooo, okay.
[Mary] Well, thanks, Dan, for that insight.
[Dan] Yeah. Anytime. Okay. So, what I like to do with my characters is to figure out, and I've talked about this before, is how they are specifically related to this plot. Not in the sense that the plot is driving them, but what about this plot matters to them? What is hurting them? What choices are they making that no one else in the same situation would make? Often, when the character is boring, it's because those links are very soft.
[Howard] Oh, interesting. See, I'll often approach it from the more plot-driven way, which is to ask what is, in as clichéd terms as possible, what is this character's role in the story? Is it supposed to be a plucky sidekick? Is this the protagonist? Is this the grizzled veteran hero whatever? What is their role in the story? What are the things that they are supposed to be doing in order to move the story forward? Then, I follow that up with, what is the most interesting/destructive/unexpected way that they could fill that role? Even if it breaks the story, it's those… I put those answers on the table, because often, as I'm coming up with that, something will shake loose and I'll realize, "Oh, wait. That is… That's so crazy it just might work. Because that's not clichéd at all."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So, that's interesting, because when I've had this problem, sometimes it's the opposite problem. Meaning I have confined a character too much to a role, and I'm not allowing them to grow. In fact, the reason…
[Howard] That is absolutely… That is spot on. There are so many kinds of problems I can have with a character. Usually, when they're boring, it's because they're not doing anything interesting, and I start with the interesting things they have to do. Sometimes, they're boring because the things they're doing are predictable. Even if they're interesting things, they're predictable because they're fitting the story role too closely. Then, I ask the same question, what's the story role? What sort of extracurricular story roles can they fill in interesting ways?
[Mary] I think, for me, the way I handle it depends on whether I'm talking about a main character, a point of view character, or a secondary character. Because I don't handle it quite the same way for the two characters.
[Brandon] Well, talk us through the different ways.
[Mary] With the point of view character, I find when they are boring, it's usually having to do with the reader is not enjoying being along for the ride with them. So this often means that I have to give them something that they are passionate about that isn't directly related to the story, or I have to look at the ways that they are connected, as Dan was talking about, to the story. That I haven't sufficiently developed those. When I'm dealing with a secondary character, what I'm looking at are the external attributes of the character. Whereas, with a main character, it's all the internal attributes that are… That I think the reader is primarily responding to. So with a secondary character, there I'm looking at trying to make sure that I bring out a quirk or do something to make them more specific and distinct. But it's much more dealing with the way they are expressing and moving through the world, rather than the way they are experiencing the world, which is the way I tackle it with the main characters.
[Brandon] So, the times I've had the most trouble with this, I found the solution for me either is to make the character more proactive. This character doesn't… Often times, they just aren't doing enough. Everybody else is doing things around them, and they need something to work on themselves. Or, as the story I've shared before, when Dan read one of my more recent… It's been a few years now, books, and said, "The main character's the most boring one. Everybody else has passions about life and has character arcs, and your main character is static, and is playing a straight man for everyone else to bounce off of." Which, it's okay to have someone play the straightman for people to bounce off of, but when it's your main character and most of the viewpoints are from that person's viewpoint, it's going to be… End up being a boring story with this kind of hole at the center of it with all these active things happening around them.
[Dan] Another thing… We talked a few months ago about flanderization, and… Wear a character just becomes a quirk or a caricature of themselves. So I find… I don't do a lot of pre-work on characters all the time, but I try to, if I know I'm going to have a big cast, write up a quick sketch of who they are and try to make that is round as I can. Because if a character's boring, what's often going on is that I am just writing them the same way in every scene. They're not who they… They're not themselves, they're just that version of themselves that was in chapter one. So going back to that initial pre-write and saying, "Oh, there's all these other facets that didn't show up in the first chapter and I've been ignoring them, I need a way to pull those in."
 
[Brandon] Let's stop and talk about our book of the week, which is the Heroine Complex.
[Mary] Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn. This was pitched to me as The Devil Wears Prada with superheroes. It is a fun, kicky, literally often, story about the personal assistant… Told through the point of view of the personal assistant to a superhero. There are demons from another plane coming through, and the demons imprint on the first thing that they see. The story opens with them having, into a cupcake shop. So she is fighting demonic cupcakes. Which kind of tells you the tone all the way through. The thing that I love about this is that while it is about superheroes, it's actually about the interpersonal problems between the characters. I think that Sarah does a really good job of having characters that are very extreme, larger than life, but also very rounded.
[Brandon] Excellent. The Heroine Complex.
[Mary] By Sarah Kuhn.
 
[Brandon] All right. Question for you guys, and I'm going to ask this to the next week's podcasters as well. Are there times you've pushed yourself on a character and been rewarded? Meaning, the character was okay, but some of the feedback came back, maybe this character's little bland or you thought this character's not living up to what everyone else in the story is doing, and you pushed yourself, and it worked?
[Dan] I've got a great one for this. So, in the Serial Killer books, in book one, there's one character whose entire job is (A) to have a father who's a cop because I needed that particular thing to come out in a scene, and (B) to be really attractive so that my obsessive stalker main character could fixate on her. That character was Marcy, who, by the end of the trilogy, became many people's favorite character. That's because the writing group kept saying, "She is so one-sided and cliché. We need her to be more than just the hot girl." So pushing and giving her extra sides and giving her more to do really paid off.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Howard] One of my favorite moments… And this wasn't something that grew out of reader feedback. It was the realization that… And I realized this 5 years ago. Sgt. Schlock is an iconic character. He's a character who doesn't get much of an arc. If you look at who he is in book 8 versus who he is in book 10, book 2, he's always just kind of got a 4 point moral compass. Kill it, eat it, talk to it, take a bath in it. Those are what he does. In book 13, I killed him. And brought back a clone that had lost 4 days. A lot of people were kind of shocked at that. "Oh, my gosh, you've upended your whole story, how does… this changes the whole dynamic of… How can you kill characters?" What I was setting up was something that I really wanted to do in book 16, which was Schlock growing a conscience. Where he is in a prison cell and is actually mourning over having killed people. Because he's killed a lot of people. It set up one of my very favorite scenes, which a lot of people have emailed me about, and said, "Wow, I was not expecting this amount of power in a story." It was the concept that a soldier's sacrifice is not dying, a soldier's sacrifice is killing so that other people don't have to. Because killing hurts. I couldn't tell that with any of the characters other than Schlock because it would ring too heavy. With him, I sort of trick people into thinking it was jokey, and then it was heavy, anyway.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But that… That was incredibly pushy, and I remember one of the… Actually, a neighbor kid came over and asked me, "Why did Schlock have to grow a conscience?" I had to tell him, "It's okay. He'll kill things again someday."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Just not in the same way.
[Brandon] How did you make this decision? Like, was this early on, or…
[Howard] No, it was about… It would have been… During book 15, maybe book… Actually, during book 12, Force Multiplication, where I realized he's just… Whoever he's with, he is the commanding officer's… He is their sociopath. They know… I mean, he's an alien, and his alien mentality is kind of sociopathic, but not in the way that human doctors would describe it. I wanted to move away from that. How do you move away from that? Well, you make him feel bad about things he's done. How do I make that happen? I spent several years thinking about it, on and off. It's not like I was sitting there staring at the wall. But, when it happened, one of the things that I had to do, and this is one of the reasons it was so challenging, I can't just go back. I can't just have Schlock be all excited about going into combat and killing things. I have to have… There has to be… There's a governor on that now. There's a temper. There is a gauge, and it's a little bit different. I have to keep track of that.
[Brandon] Dan, with your character, Marcy, how did you do it? There, first person there is from John's viewpoint. How did you say I'm going to take this character and like, what were the steps that you took?
[Dan] The first big step is in book 2, where John goes to a high school event with Brooke, one of the other characters. That is the first time he really sees Marcy through the lens of somebody else's experience. He's… She's not just the girl he stares at, she's an actual person. She carries on conversations, and she has things that she likes, and things that she doesn't like. Kind of the very simple conceit of let them talk about the town. Some of the girls love living in this little town, some of them hate it. Some of them want to escape it. So showing 3 or 4 opinions all about the same thing is a nice shorthand to say, "Look. She's an individual. She's a person that stands out from everybody else." So, starting there and then building into book 3 when I just made her a main character and kind of built everything around her…
[Mary] I think one of the other things that I saw you doing as well is that she had interests that were not connected to the plot. You let us see them as glimpses… And her relationship with her family as well. A lot of times, when there's a character in this role of the super hot girl, which is a problem character a lot of times… The love interest to doesn't exist except as a trophy. They don't exist except in that role. They don't appear to have an arc of their own. Which, you set her up to have an arc of her own, and then brutally murdered her. Which is…
[Dan] Spoiler warning! Yes.
[Mary] The book's been out long enough.
[Dan] I know, I know. One of the things I did specifically with her in book 3, because I knew I had set her up in that problematic space of she's just the hot trophy. So I immediately tried to undercut that with giving her… What's the right word? One of her hobbies is shopping, because she's trying to get a good deal. That takes the specific aspect of her appearance and then re-contextualizes into this completely other thing. She's not trying to just look good for the sake of looking good. She just likes finding great deals on clothes. That's what's more important to her.
 
[Brandon] All right. We're going to have some homework, which I think is one of the most amusing pieces of homework we've come up with. Howard, you're going to tell us about this.
[Howard] Okay. Take your very favorite character that you have created. Hopefully, something in a current work in progress, because it might be more useful to do this in that context. But someone who is just interesting and dynamic and works well for your story. Take that character and write a couple of scenes in which you absolutely break them. Make them boring, make them non-proactive. Make them stale, make them cliché. Wreck them. Do everything wrong. Yeah. Just wreck them. I mean, you don't need to actually kill them. Because we'll talk about that later.
[Brandon] The point of this being that sometimes in order to diagnose problems, you need to break them down into their compliments, and see what your natural instinct will be when you're making someone boring, so you can better recognize it later. I'm really curious to see if this works for you guys, so post on the forums and let us know. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.36: Confronting the Default

Sep. 12th, 2018 11:12 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.36: Confronting the Default

 
 

Key Points: What do you think is normal, what are the ways that you think things should be? Seasons in LA, or Australia? Matters of faith? Gender, race, and all that? What about writing a strong female protagonist, except she's the only female in the book? Be aware of your biases! Think about where they came from, why do you have them? Fail better the next time.
 
( Mirror, mirror, on the wall... )
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
 
[Brandon] We are confronting the default. What does this even mean? Mary, you titled this podcast. What do you mean by that?
[Chuckles]
[Mary] So, this is all the things that you think are normal, that you just don't even see in your real life, the ways that you have been programmed to think things should be. So one of the examples that Amal used when we were getting ready to start was that you might think that seasons are normal. But if you live in LA, seasons are…
[Amal] Something that happens to other people.
[Mary] Yes. You have the mudslide season, and you have the California is on fire season.
[Brandon] I've had so much trouble with this recently, just because my books do very well worldwide, and I always post, "This fall, my book is coming out."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] And someone will say, "Your fall or my fall?"
[Ha! Ha, ha, ha!]
[Brandon] They live in Australia. I'm like, "Oh, right." The word fall is a default term for me that means a certain thing. It's really crazy.
[Amal] No one even calls it fall in the UK. It's always autumn. But I had an experience with that where I used to… I still do, but it's on hiatus… Edit this poetry journal called Goblin Fruit. Our art director, Oliver Hunter, for a while was living in Australia. We were very seasonally focused, very four seasons. Like literally, the seasons got woven into the themes of the poetry, and we'd always be asking Ollie to illustrate it accordingly. Which we didn't realize until literally three years into the project…
[Laughter]
[Amal] That this meant that he was always drawing the autumn stuff in his spring and so on. At some point, he pointed that out, kind of bemusedly, and we felt terrible. I mean, just never thought about it.
 
 
[Maurice] I'm really just struggling here. I'm just like, "Man, do I have sort of a default that I'm just blind to?" Then I go, "You know what, I… For me, it's actually a matter of faith." Because, and I didn't realize it until recently, I'll always write characters with a certain faith. And they're always questioning their faith perspective. But their faith perspective, for a long time, was always default Christianity. I was just like, I'm going to go out on a limb, and believe that people don't necessarily worship in Christianity.
[Mary] Well, and even within that, there's multiple…
[Maurice] And there's multiple… Right. So I've been very conscious about the faith perspectives that I'm portraying and that I'm examining in the stories, because there are obviously other default… Other faith perspectives. I'm like, "Isn't this great for me to start to explore those in my characters?"
[Amal] I love that example, because it is so useful, especially when talking in genre. Because I think that it's equally possible and happens a lot that geeky nerds who come from science backgrounds will assume a default of atheism for everyone. Because it's what… it's their belief. It's like, "Well, how can you be rational and believe in God?" And stuff… Like, we talked about in the conflicts episode before. But in doing that, they miss out on like, "Well, but wait… But people are religious. People do in fact believe things. How are you going to get at that and represent that and do so specifically in a way that doesn't cater to your biases?" Like, are you going to, if you're an atheist, put religious people in your books who are sympathetic and who aren't just deluded?
[Brandon] Nothing… I've mentioned before, nothing bothers me more as a religious person then reading a book and finding the one religious person is the idiot who needs to be taught the right way of things. One thing I really like about this concept, confronting the default. While we're bring… Why we bring it up is number one, if you do this, you'll become a better writer. You'll become a more excited writer, because you'll find things to explore that you haven't thought about. Plus, you can play in really fun ways with the reader biases. The book is out now, and so I can talk about this, but Stormlight Archive, my big epic fantasy series, a little bit of a spoiler. Humankind is not native to the planet that they're on. So, from the first book, I've been able to really play with this, by, for instance, they referen… The linguistics has shifted, and they call all birds chickens. Because chickens is the word… The loan word that made it through to their language. Seasons to them… They're on a planet with no axial tilt. So a season is just when the weather gets cold for a while, they're like, "It's winter now."
[Huh!]
[Brandon] Readers are like, "Why… They use seasons so weird in this book. They said it's winter last week, and now it feels like summer. What does that even mean? What's going on with the weather?" When they start to put together that all these people have come from another world, brought all of their language for describing the world around them to a planet where a lot of this is different, and have misapplied it, you get really fun things that you can play with in the book.
[Amal] That is awesome. That reminds me of Ursula Vernon's Digger comic. Where the main character is a wombat. It's amazing. Everyone should read this book. The main character is a wombat, and… Like an anthropomorphized wombat. It takes several pages before there are any pronouns applied to this wombat. But this wombat is also from an atheist engineering Society, and something about the fact that they're being portrayed as an engineer, and as someone who's working with a pickax and stuff absolutely cued me to assume that the wombat's male. But no, the wombat is in fact a woman. A woman? A female wombat. It was just like, "What? Oh, I guess those bumps were supposed to be mammary on this character." I totally didn't realize that.
 
 
[Maurice] So, I have an interesting experience about that whole reader expectation thing. So I talked a while back about my novelette that's coming out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies… Or out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, called El is a Spaceship Melody. It's an Afro future story, and I'd let one of my pre-readers… I gave it to one of my prereaders, and so he's giving me the feedback, and he's like, "Oh, man, I just love how you did the interplay between the two different races on the starship." I'm like, "There is only one race…
[Hah!]
[Maurice] On the starship." He's like, "No, I meant the white characters on your starship." I'm like, "There are no white people in this entire novelette."
[Laughter]
[Maurice] He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like… So I had to explain in this Afro future universe, people are free to define themselves as themselves. They're not defined in terms of an other. There's like no… African-Americans defined just by being African-American. So what you've actually just witnessed is black people talking to each other.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] Right. It just blew his head. It was interesting that he had defaulted, because I don't name the race of some… Of any of the characters really, because it's not like I sit around at a family dinner going, "Hey, by my blackness, pass me the salt."
[Laughter]
[Maurice] It's not something we do.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] So it's just a non-consideration.
[Amal] That's a beautiful turn of phrase, though. I love that.
[Maurice] By my blackness…
[Amal] By my blackness, give me the salt. It's amazing.
 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for the book of the week. We're going to talk about The Murders of Molly Southbourne.
[Maurice] The Murders of Molly Southbourne. So that is a novella from Tade Thompson. It's from Tor… I believe it is from Tor.com, from their novella series. This is an absolutely thrilling book that at first had me completely… I mean, it just caught me completely off guard. Because it's about this woman, Molly, who… I mean, the opening scene is her encountering herself and she has to kill herself. I'm like, "What is going on, right now in this book?" It's a really dark book, but it's also so thrilling. So, Tade has a way of just… And it's really, this really tight POV so you're just really immersed in this one character's head. Which means you really have no clue what's going on. The masterful way he manages to tell the story of this woman encountering versions of herself and having to confront and kill herself, and why she has to do this… It's like this mystery unfolding that he is just… It's elegant. I'm sorry.
[Brandon] That's awesome.
[Amal] That sounds so great.
 

[Brandon] So we're talking about kind of biases, and some of these, that you will have is a listener, are narrative. Because certain types of narrative have been told to use so many times, you have internalized them and you will use them. You will just use them. It will happen. I've got a good example from my books. I'm… Mistborn. My second novel. I love this book. It's a great book. But it has one, now that I've seen it, very glaring flaw. This is that, as a writer, I was trying to… I said, "I'm going to write a really strong female protagonist." That term is loaded, in and of itself, but I'm going to write a female protagonist, teenage girl, and this is a story of her moving in this realm of magic and things like this. I feel like I did a pretty good job. Got a lot of early readers, used my sisters as a model. It really just kind of treated her like a character, right? It works. A lot of people really like it. But, people have also pointed out, she's the only girl in basically the whole book.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Right? This is… Well, this is just a thing that we do. We default to male a lot of times. We default to male when describing characters. When coming up with a team of thieves, I just defaulted to a bunch of guys, and then, and then, kind of the Smurfette principle, right? The one girl. Fortunately, I was good enough not to define her only by her femininity. But at the same time, I still fell into this kind of trap of I defaulted all of my characters to male. Because that's the thieving team that I imagined in my head.
[Mary] I find that I am often guilty of that with characters. That there is a default setting that I'll forget about. In an earlier episode, I offered a worksheet that I use where I have all of the different kinds of axes that people exist on, like ability and age and orientation and all of that. When I filled that out, I will… I look at it, and the default that I kept coming back to is that I tended to have straight characters. Like… And by tended to, I mean that I would look at it and go, "Oh, look, all of my characters are straight. Huh. Interesting. Look at me not even noticing that I did that." The reason that I'll fill the sheet out is because it allows me to spot that. But there's just so many things that even when you think you're thinking about it, because it's programmed in so hard… Like with the Glamorous History books, the first two I was like, "Well, I'm writing Jane Austen with magic. And this is set in Regency England. It's in a small town, the first one, so, of course, there are no people of color there. Then, next is in Brussels, and of course, there are no people of color there. Then I actually researched, and realized that I was completely wrong in both cases. Pieter Bruegel is painting… Etching black peasants in Brussels. So, anyway, point being that in book 3, I addressed that. Set in London, I had this nice diverse cast. Then, book 4, I finished the book and looked at it and was like, "Mary. You have just done another book that is all white people all the time, and it's in Venice.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Which would not be… What have you done?" I had to go back in to correct that. But it's much harder to correct something like that when you are examining your default setting at the end, rather than attempting to examine it before you begin writing.
[Amal] It's a little bit like using the hand that… Using your nondominant hand.
[Mary] Oh, yeah.
[Amal] Like, if you're really focusing on it, you will be able to do something with almost as much dexterity as your right hand, but you're just so used to using… I said right hand, right now, right? That is mine, but that is not the case… Someone's left-handed listening to this podcast, going, "Hang on. But I'm… That's my dominant hand." It is something that…
[Mary] And this is actually assuming that someone has a dominant hand.
[Amal] Has a hand, for that matter. A dominant hand, has a hand. Like, these are all the things that are baked into us because… Especially, when it's your body, using your body to navigate the world. Your body is thoroughly informing all of your thoughts and experiences. I mean, actually, when you're talking about all the straight characters in your books, one thing I love about your writing, and I basically cannot stop talking about this on the Internet, is that I love the fact that you write straight women lusting after men.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Because… Like this is genuinely… I love it. I love it so much for so many reasons. But one of the reasons is that… Besides the fact that I don't see it often and don't see it done in a compelling way. I see… There are so many reasons. One of the reasons is there is this default expectation that women and men are just going to end up together, and you don't actually need to show that desire or that lust, because it's expected. It's just what's going to happen within the parameters of a relationship. But the other reason is, like, I'm bisexual. And I just sort of expect that… I have the opposite sort of bias, where I do just kind of write bisexual characters by default. It's sort of doesn't make sense to me that people don't experience sexual desire for like… For just… That they have the capacity to experience it for everyone. I have to remind myself that that is a thing. But I just… So when you write that, when you write your women who like exclusively want men, I love it. I actually find that like just… It's like it reveals a part of the world for me that I don't experience on a regular basis.
 

[Brandon] Well, one of the things that I think is important, that came out here, that came up again, is being aware of this. Right? Like, where did my biases come from, why do I have them? If we go back to Mistborn again, I'm looking at my models, right? Ocean's 11, the Sting. Sneakers. These are all-male casts. It isn't that I sat down and said, "I want to do a story with an all-male cast." I just did it. There is a separate argument of, "Is it okay to just sometimes write an all-male cast or whatnot?" That's not what we're getting into. We're getting into the things you're doing unconsciously, on accident, that if you examine them, you might say, "Wow I didn't mean to do that. It would be better, it would be more interesting, make a better story, make me more interested in the story if I confronted it and looked at it and tried to do it a different way."
[Mary] Absolutely. That is the thing… Like, as a writer, you want is you want things that you're putting down on the page to be there because you put them with intention. What we're saying is look for the stuff… That it's like, "Whoops!"
[Brandon] Or just Wow.
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Amal] I'm thinking about this a lot lately with… There are just so many assumptions that… I think it's also good to think about the fact that everyone has these. That having these doesn't make you a bad person. But being aware of them can in fact make you a better person, just because you have become that much more aware of others, and therefore you have like a new channel open for empathy about things. But… Yeah.
[Brandon] I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but one of the very eye-opening moments for me happened way back for a lot of the kind of things that have happened in science fiction recently happened. It was one of the first ones. It was something they called Race Fail. I'm not going to dig into this right now. It's not the appropriate place. But I remember reading a really great essay, and I can't even remember who it was, who looked at this really open eyes, and they were a person of color. They were like, "Look. We need to change the discourse in our society from the word "That was racist" being like the worst thing that you can say to someone. Instead, we need to shifted toward being able to say, "That was racist," and you saying, "Hey, yeah. That was a little racist. Thanks for pointing that out. My eyes are a little bit more open now. I realize something that I' ve internalized." It's… What we would love for you to do as listeners is be able to say it's okay that I have had a bias pointed out to me. It is… I am better now. Not just… We get so defensive. We get so defensive.
[Maurice] That's why I… my credo has always been, "Fail better the next time." Because I'm not going to get everything right the first time. I'm not going to get everything right the second time. But I want to learn, I want to improve. I want these biases pointed out to me so that I can fail better the next time.
 
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do some homework. Amal, you have some homework for us.
[Amal] So, on the subject of biases and norms and defaults, I want you all to think about a bird. Think about what makes a bird a bird. I want you to write down a set of characteristics, say five characteristics that are… That, to you, define what a bird is. I could… I'm not going to give you examples. You can do this on your own. Then, once you have those five things, find real-world examples of birds that in fact don't share those characteristics. Just kind of examine why is it that the bird you came up with is the bird that you came up with, as opposed to some other bird.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

Jul. 12th, 2018 01:28 pm
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Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils
 
 
Key points: A foil is a character in a story who acts as a contrast to the main character, externalizing a point of conflict or contrast. May be a sidekick, two side characters, or even two protagonists. Sometimes the foil fills in weaknesses. Beware of flanderizing a foil, reducing them to a flat character. The best foils make both characters more rounded as they change in interesting ways. Foils can be good for exploring knotty topics, showing more than one opinion or view. Often, the foil can hang a lantern on the discussion. Heist novels can be an example of a group of foils! Specialists, weaknesses, and plenty of interaction playing on those weaknesses and the cracks in the process. Foils are a natural with teams who are just meeting, but they also can be good for introducing the long-term relationship of a couple. What keeps foils together? Family! Also, try using the Kowal relationship axes -- mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Keeping the morals aligned can help keep a couple together. Manners are a good place for friction.  
 
( Just between you and me... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Characters As Foils.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We've talked a lot about building really interesting characters, giving them arcs, having them changes they go along. Now let's talk about them messing with one another.
[Oo… Yes. Laughter]
[Brandon] What do I mean by a foil?
[Amal] I thought you were going to say what do you mean by messing with each other.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Okay. So, a foil is a character who serves within a story to act as a contrast to the main character. This is not a character who exists to stop their forward progress, which is what the word foil sounds like it is going to be, because of "Curses! Foiled again." But this is more like… Often a role that you'll see occupied by a sidekick character. They're someone who allows the character to express themselves, so that they are getting some of their internal thoughts outside, and also to provide usually a point of contrast or conflict surrounding an internal conflict that the character has within themselves.
[Brandon] It doesn't have to even be main character/side character. I've done it frequently with two side characters that in order to make them both more distinct in the reader's mind, I make them have some point of friction or contrast, which then as they discuss, they argue about, or… Just offer examples of one another in that way.
[Mary] Like one of the examples we were talking about earlier was Abbott and Costello. In which they are actually kind of foils of each other.
[Amal] Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite things to read or see, is when you have a rivalry, for instance, and you do have two protagonists. But you can… In order to establish what they each are like, you use the other character… You use that contrast as opposed to another element of the environment or other characters. Instead, it's almost like you're making the differences between them a character as well. That kind of grows from the fact that they are… They don't even necessarily have to be opposites. They can just be complementary, they can be contrasts.
[Maurice] I spoke a while back about one protagonist, whose sole object through the course of the story was to just be left alone and get high. That character's name was Sleepy. Now his foil is one of my favorite characters I've ever created. Just to put that out there. His name is 120 Degrees of Knowledge Allah.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That's amazing.
[Maurice] The reason why they work so well together, and why Knowledge Allah is his foil, is because in a lot of ways they were like polar opposites. Knowledge Allah was an activist, Knowledge Allah knows what he believed, why he believed, and in a lot of ways, Knowledge Allah also played straightman to some of Sleepy's antics. So, Knowledge Allah actually became the motivating force to help drive Sleepy's story and drive his arc in a lot of ways.
[Mary] I think that goes to the thing that people talk about a lot, which is opposites attract. That frequently what the foil is also doing is they're filling in the weaknesses of the main character. Which is why a lot of times you will see husband-and-wife couples in a foil relationship. In The Thin Man, which is one of my favorite series of films, Nick and Nora, they… Well, and actually Asta sometimes acts as a foil, too… But they act as a foil for each other. Although given the way the films are structured, Nora is much more in the foil role then Nick is, because he, as the detective, is often driving the action more than she is.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask you this. Do you design this specifically, or do you let this grow naturally or some combination of the two?
[Amal] The best example from my own work is this novella that I cowrote with Max Gladstone. The working title of which is This Is How You Lose the Time War. It was totally baked into our concept. It was that… We recognized that Max and I had super different writing styles and writing paces and methods. We wanted to make a virtue of that necessity and have these two characters that were going to be very opposite. One called Red and one called Blue, and have them be agents of opposite sides of the Time War. Everything about those… Like, everything about these differences became part of the plot, part of the texture of the book, and the development of it. But ultimately, the point of those contrasts was… Ended up being more about how they're each not great representatives of their respective sides. The more that they engaged with each other, which they do because it's an epistolary story. The more they engage with each other, the more they realized how alike they were in spite of coming from these places that are literally opposites.
[Brandon] It's really easy to, I feel like, flanderize one of your foils. Which is this concept that we use where a character, over time, becomes more and more focused on their quirks, rather than more and more rounded. More and more flat, hitting one note. But when a foil is done correctly, I feel like it, in the best films and books where I've seen it, both characters become more rounded over time because of the friction between them changing them both in interesting ways.
[Amal] Exactly.
[Mary] I think that I often, because of that, because of the way it allows you to flesh out a character… The times that I plan ahead to insert a foil… Most of the time, they develop naturally. But the times that I plan ahead are when I'm planning on tackling a topic that is particularly knotty or weighty, because it gives me a way to explore multiple aspects of that topic by having two characters whose contrasting opinions and views on it show that there's… It's not just a single side. So if I were telling a story about the merits of hamsters, I might have a character who is very, very pro-hamster and her best friend would be anti-hamster. Their conversations illuminate a lot… Not just about the topic, but also about how much of this is just the nature of the character versus the nature of hamsters.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] So, the reason I do a lot of foils is actually because a lot of my stories tend to deal with some of the weightier topics. So by having that foil who's like the opposite of whatever character I'm working with, helps me from sliding into a screed at any point. Because then… Now I have to look at the other side. I have to embody another school of thought, and let that play out more naturally.
[Brandon] You have to… You have a natural motivation as a writer to hang a lantern on what's going on, the… You're speaking… You start into kind of a lecture, that other character's going to be like, "Oh, you're lecturing us now?" It's very natural. It works really well.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and break for our book of the week, which is Breaking the Chains of Gravity.
[Mary] Yes. So, Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel is a phenomenal nonfiction book, and it's one that I came across when I was working on The Calculating Stars and Fated Sky. This is about the space program before NASA. So it starts from the very early days of people just like "Let me see if I can get this rocket off the ground…" And lots of people getting blown up.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It carries you through to the very early days of NASA. One of the things that I just had no idea about was the sheer number of women who were involved in it, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And also like… It also… I don't want to minimize the fact that many of the early… And the book does not. That many of the early rocketry pioneers were Nazi war criminals. But it does highlight the fact that they began as a teenage rocketry club in Germany that got absorbed by the German army, which I didn't know. That does… It certainly changes your view of rocketry when you begin to look at its past. But there were just so many people, and it's a fascinating, incredibly well-researched book. She's got a real grasp of narrative, so it's an engaging read at the same time that it's filled with really cool factoids.
[Amal] Has… This is… Can I piggyback on that recommendation? So, there's this amazing poem by Sofia Salatar called Girl Hours. It's dedicated to Henrietta Swan Leavitt. It's a brilliant poem. It's basically as if… Written as if it's preparing to be an essay on the subject, but then broken up, so like the top part is actually notes and says, "In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as human computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars. I didn't know about this until I read this poem, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
[Mary] So I'll put that in the liner notes as well. So you should check out this poem which is called…
[Amal] Girl Hours.
[Mary] As well as Breaking the Chains of Gravity.
 
[Brandon] So. Let's talk around foils. We often view them as the kind of A character-B character interaction. Have you ever designed a group where each character is meant to kind of be a foil for the same concept, or a foil for one another in a big group dynamics?
[Mary] This is what a heist novel is!
[Laughter]
[Amal] Yes! Yes. I want you to talk more about that, because I loved reading when you were writing about how you did research for a heist novel by watching heist movies.
[Mary] Yeah. I watched a lot of heist movies, but I also read as many variations on heist novel as I could. Scott Lynch's… I want to talk about something other than my own book. But Scott Lynch's Red Sea under Red Sky and lies of Locke Lamora… These characters all act as foils for each other. Each of them has a weakness, and there is another character in the group who needles them on that weakness. That weakness represents both what their skill set is as well as what their personal failing is. So having that conflict externalized allows for the book to be a lot more dynamic. One of the things about a heist, in particular, is that it's a group of characters each of whom has a specialty. The thing that a foil does in this case is remind you that they may have an area of specialty, but there's… That area of specialty means that they have a ton of other weaknesses. So it prevents the group from feeling just like a flat one-sided gro… Collection of experts. Which then is actually no fun to watch. Like, if you watch a group of experts go in and accomplish something, it's actually not very interesting. Just as an example of this, I was talking with Kjell Lindgren, who's an astronaut. He was talking about actually in space, he always felt very safe, because they had practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced everything that they were doing. They over prepare before they go up there. So, you go out, you do a thing, and it goes… And all of the acceptable variables, because of the amount of prep time that you've put in. So that, in a book, is not very interesting. But if you throw a foil in there, that suddenly offers you a lot of places to insert cracks into the process.
[Amal] That's true. I love that. At the same time, I was… While I completely agree, I find myself thinking of how I really actually really love watching people who are super good at stuff doing stuff. But…
[Mary] But then, the story is very short.
[Amal] That's true.
[Mary] It's like we go in, and we accomplish the thing, and then we leave.
[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. I mean, even the Food Network, with experts cooking delicious things, they have to generate some kind of drama somewhere. Oh, no, the pickles are sour. I don't know. Something like that.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] Pickles are usually sour.
[Mary] That's exactly why Gordon Ramsay is so prickly when he's dealing with adults, but if you've ever watched his kid shows, he's not. Because his role there is not to be a foil to the child.
[Amal] Exactly. It's to actually be a teacher, it's to actually embody that role.
[Brandon] Well, they do it for different cultures. If you watch the British version, he is way less of a foil than in the American version. Yeah. Anyway.
[Amal] [garbled]
 
[Brandon] [garbled] slightly different tactic on this. I've noticed there's kind of two general groups of foil. There is, when you're writing a book, there is the team who have… Are just meeting and you find that everybody kind of hates each other. Then there's the long-term couple who you use their foil nature at the start of a story to establish a long-term relationship. I happen to like both of these. I really like how the second group can really easily show that these two characters know each other so well, because they know how to push each other's buttons in just the right way, but they also know how not to go too far on pushing those buttons. It makes both characters usually more relatable, unless these two people just don't get along at all. Which happens sometimes. Which brings me kind of to a question. How do you make sure, when these characters are pushing each other's buttons, that the reader understands why they are together in this situation? What tactics do you use to make it so that they don't just say, "Well, we don't get along. We're not good for each other. We are not good teammates. We're going to break apart and go separate directions."
[Maurice] Well, the easy cheat for me has been, [garbled I kind of] go back to that combination of those two groups that you were talking about, and we call that family.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] I was just realizing that, in the scene I was just writing this morning, I was just like, "Why are these people to… Oh, they're brother and sister, and they're kind of stuck with each other, aren't they?" But they do. They know how to push each other's buttons, but they're still kind of stuck in this relationship, like we're not going anywhere, so how do we now accommodate one another?
 
[Mary] I use a tool that I talked about last week, the Kowal relationship axes, which I will recap for those of you who are listening to just this episode. Which is that basically, there are six kind of sliders, axes, upon which relationships are built. The more you have in common with a person on these, the less friction there's going to be. So, mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers, which represents sense of humor. This is a theory my mother-in-law came up with for describing dating.
[Amal] This is amazing.
[Mary] It's actually really, really phenomenal. So what I do is that I try to make sure that for the most part that my characters' morals slider is really well aligned. Unless there is a reason that I want to specifically explore that. But if they have to go on a process together, their… That is a place that they have to be in agreement, if there both committing. Their mind can be out of alignment, their sense of what money is for, their sense of manners… Their sense of manners is usually one of the ones that if I want them to… If I want there to be a lot of friction, that's one of the ones where I will slide them apart, and give them very different backgrounds, so that they have different ideas of what is polite.
[Amal] That is fascinating, actually. The idea that… This has less to do with writing and more from experience, but it's… I'm Canadian, and I went to live in the UK for six years. The culture shock that I experienced was almost entirely to do with how people treat you when they like you.
[Laughter]
[Amal] I was… I just… I have a very thin skin when it comes to sarcasm and being teased. Which made things very difficult when I suddenly found myself in a country where the more people like you, the meaner they were to you. I just couldn't… Like, I could not wrap my brain around this. I just… I like you, and you're my friend, why are you being horrible to me? They didn't see it as being horrible, they saw it as being familiar. Whereas if they were polite and distant to someone, then that would be someone who they weren't friends with.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap this up with some homework. The homework I'm going to give you is I want you to take a famous soliloquy, like from Shakespeare or something like that, a monologue, a single character saying something, and I want you to insert a foil. It doesn't have to be comedic. It probably will, from the nature of this assignment, but someone who is contrasting what they're doing, and interrupting this. Or go the other direction. Take a famous comedy bit, like Who's on First, and remove one side or the other. Take out Abbott, or take out Costello, and maybe replace them with someone who completely plays along, and see how far it goes, and see how it works when both characters are trying to one-up each other to the joke. Or just take one out and see if the… It works on its own. So, this has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13-4: Protagonists Who Aren't Sympathetic

Jan. 30th, 2018 11:07 am
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Writing Excuses 13-4: Protagonists Who Aren't Sympathetic

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/01/28/13-4-protagonists-who-arent-sympathetic/

Key points: Non-sympathetic protagonists, aka antiheroes, come in two flavors, classic and pop! Classic or literary antiheroes don't protag. They don't move the story along, even though they are where a protagonist should be. Pop is an evil person who still does good. Why write an unlikable character? Well, one reason is a reverse character arc, where the character goes down, then redeems himself and comes back up. It does make readers uncomfortable! Sometimes it's a signal that the character is becoming an antagonist. Sometimes we do it to mimic reality -- some people aren't very likable! To make it work, hang a lantern on it, give the reader subtle hints that it is okay to dislike this character. Modern antiheroes? The Punisher, or other bad guys with a heart of gold. We like them because we wish we could forget the limits and just do it. Hulk smash! Also, the pop culture antihero has dramatic tension -- they aren't likable, but they are proactive and competent. Built-in tension! Or maybe they are likable and proactive, but not competent. Again, built-in tension. You may not like them, but when the aliens show up, they are the hero you need.
( Motorcycle jackets and long hair... )

[Brandon] All right. Let's wrap this one up. I have some homework for you. I want you to take a slightly different spin on this. I want you to write a protagonist or a hero that the reader is supposed to like and does like. Right? You're going to make them likable. But you're going to try to create dramatic tension by having them… By having the reader not want this protagonist to succeed. So, generally, the reader's going to have information that the protagonist doesn't, or they're going to see things more clearly than the protagonist does. So you want the hero to fail. He or she is trying something, and you like them, but you still want them to not succeed. See if you can do that. It's very difficult. It's an interesting thought experiment. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

Aug. 2nd, 2017 11:03 am
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Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/07/30/12-31-what-makes-a-good-monster-with-courtney-alameda/

Key Points: The best monsters subvert the status quo and remind us that we are not the top of the food chain. Frightening means posing a threat to the protagonist or that culture. Some monsters are people, too. Subverting expectations. Monsters also reflect or represent other aspects of the stories. But beware of parallelism that turns into too on-the-nose, or pushing the subversion beyond fear into comedy. Building a monster? Start with folklore from all over. Look at the role of the monster in the story, themes, and symbolism. Think about fears, and what frightens you, and then spin that into a monster. Make the protagonist super-competent, but let the monster be powerful in ways that leave the protagonist incapable of responding. Look for the patterns that cross cultures, the fears that are universal (Yungian!). Then make them your monster. And shiver a bit.

( Did you hear something clank? )

[Howard] Well, on that note, we should probably wrap this up. Because we don't want to leave our listeners just terrified all night. Susan, can you give us a writing prompt?
[Susan] Yeah. It's funny, because Courtney actually mentioned the writing prompt that I was thinking about. Which is that Neil Gaiman's American Gods kind of envisioned like an American monster… I'm sorry, American Gods, like what using all of the different mythologies and kind of coming to America and kind of creating a uniquely American God. So I would like you to write about a uniquely American monster. Whether or not he has orange hair and [inaudible]
[laughter]
[Susan] I'll leave up to you.
[Courtney] Really great. I mean, really great.
[Howard] I love it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.21: Narrative Bumper Pool, with Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel

May. 24th, 2017 10:44 am
mbarker: (Smile)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.21: Narrative Bumper Pool, with Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/05/21/12-21-narrative-bumper-pool-with-bill-fawcett-and-carrie-patel/

Key points: Writing for games, interactive storytelling. Narrative bumper pool -- choices, but constrained. Branches and funneling. Vines! Different choices, but similar results -- every choice leads to the valley. Wide range of choices, different interactions, but common outcomes. No binary choices -- not yes or not, but do you want this sandwich cut into squares or triangles? Consider your verbs -- what are the ways the player interacts with the game? Don't forget the rewards! Story events, boondoggles, and a compelling reason to go where you want them to go. Lots of rewards. Being able to make your mark on the story world. Make the player actions move the plot forward, discovering, conquering, doing things. Rebuilding! Beware ephemeral mayfly questing.

( Roll 2D6 and get... )

[Dan] All right. So we're out of time, unfortunately. But we have time just for a quick bit of homework from Bill.
[Bill] All right. My next book is 101 Stumbles in the March of History. Where I and a few of my friends like Harry Turtledove, Eric Flint, Chuck Gannon, Mike Resnick write about great mistakes and how it changed history that they did it wrong, and then speculate what would the world be like if that mistake had not been made. Anything from Columbus's math error to Stalin training the German army, which, by the way, he did. He provided both equipment…
[Howard] What a terrible idea.
[Laughter]
[Bill] And places, when the Treaty of Versailles prevented it. So I would encourage all of you to go out there and think of a mistake that's been made somewhere in history. I don't care if it's last month or Napoleon or Caesar, and how you would have prevented that mistake, and then think about what your life would be like today if it hadn't been made.
[Dan] Cool. All right. So, lots of research and some cool stuff to do. This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you very much to Carrie and Bill. You're wonderful. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 6.20: Endings

Oct. 19th, 2011 02:02 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.20: Endings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/16/writing-excuses-6-20-endings/

Key points: Endings need to live up to the promise of the beginning. For the Hollywood formula, the protagonist has to overcome the antagonist, achieve his goal, and reconcile his relationship with the dynamic character. The closer these three happen to each other, the more emotional impact. Endings can fail due to lack of earlier groundwork, or because it's overstayed. Don't hold back on your ending, but raising the stakes doesn't always mean the fate of the universe. Root it in the wants, desires, and needs of the characters. The groundwork and promises of the beginning are a social contract fulfilled by the ending.
( bringing down the curtain )
[Howard] What if I give a really good writing prompt?
[Dan] Okay.
[Lou] The writing prompt to end all writing prompts.
[Dan] Let's see it and we'll see.
[Howard] Take your least favorite recent movie. Take the first 15 minutes of your least favorite recent movie and write down what you believe the groundwork was that was laid. Now ignore the rest of the movie. Write the ending. I'm not playing how it should have ended with the... We should have just flown the eagles to Mordor. Do something tricky and sensible and wonderful with the first 15 minutes of your least favorite recent film.
[Dan] Excellent. Okay, we'll let you stay.
[Howard] Thank you. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now, go write.
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Writing Excuses 6.18: The Hollywood Formula

Oct. 5th, 2011 01:24 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.18: The Hollywood Formula

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/02/writing-excuses-6-18-hollywood-formula/

Key points: The Hollywood formula starts with three characters: the protagonist, antagonist, and relationship or dynamic character. Protagonist must want something concrete, a definite achievable goal. Antagonist places obstacles in the path of the protagonist and is diametrically opposed to the protagonist. The antagonist is not necessarily a bad guy. Relationship character accompanies the protagonist on the journey, articulates the theme, and in the end reconciles the protagonist and antagonist. First act (30 pages) introduces the characters and what they want, poses the fateful decision, and closes. Second act (60 pages): transition from asking questions to answering questions, and ends with the low point. Third act (30 pages) is the final battle. End with the protagonist achieves his goal, defeats the antagonist, and reconciles with the relationship character. The closer all three events are to each other, the stronger the emotional impact.
( now showing on the silver screen )
[Howard] Very cool. All right, well, we are pretty much all the way out of time. Who wants to throw a writing prompt?
[Mary] So, for your writing prompt, come up with a protagonist, an antagonist, and a relationship character. Then see what happens if you start spinning a story.
[Howard] Excellent. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[Edited 10/30/2013 to give the right name: Paolo Bacigalupi]
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Writing Excuses 5: Heroes and Protagonists

Jan. 27th, 2011 10:39 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5: Heroes and Protagonists
From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/03/09/writing-excuses-episode-5-heroes-and-protagonists/

In which we learn that Professor Google likes Charlie and The Chocolate Factory; main characters, heroes, and protagonists aren't always the same thing; and that everyman needs to be competent at something. Oh, and didgeridoo and rutabaga.
( Lots of little stuff . . . )
On to next week!
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