Writing Excuses 18.08: Building a Mystery

Feb. 23rd, 2023 05:44 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.08: Building a Mystery
 
 
Key Points: Types of mysteries? Cozy! Solving mysteries in your spare time? Straight up detective. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot. With a final gathering, explanation, and fingering the murderer. Police procedural. The system, and how it works. Supernatural mysteries. Weird happenings, and puzzles. Noir! Voice and character make it. In the dark streets, in the rain... Mystery structure? Crime, investigation, twist, breakthrough, and conclusion. Also, red herrings. Act 2 try-fail cycles. Final clues are often out-of-left-field, accidentally revealed. Playing fair, so the reader and the detective have the same information. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 8]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Building a Mystery.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm the Act 2 corpse.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] So we're going to be talking about mysteries today. One of the things we promised you is that we were going to use the... Our deep dives as a way to look at different things. Over the course of the next couple of episodes, we're going to be talking about tension. But we're going to start by looking very specifically at mysteries. For the first half of this episode, we're going to talk about the different types of mysteries. Then, after our break, we're going to talk about some of the common tools. So. What are some of the different types of mysteries?
[pause]
[Mary Robinette] Great. Good answer.
[laughter]
[Dan] Yeah. We're all deer in the headlights. The first one that comes to my mind is the cozy mystery. Which is the... Kind of the Murder She Wrote ish genre of often an older lady who is solving a mystery in her spare time while doing something kind of charming or adorable. That's one of my favorites.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I feel like they tend to be lower stakes, a little bit, like easier on the violence. I mean, people still will end up dead in these, but it's not like as hard hitting as like a Jack Reacher or something like that.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] Oh... There's a whole rule set for cozies, where if the detective... If our POV person, who I'll call the detective, if they are ever actually threatened, then you've stepped out of the cozy. If they actually perform violence, get in a fight, then it stops being cozy and starts moving into something else. Yeah, Jack Reacher, I'm not sure what style that is. It's not quite... I think of it as the anti-cozy. Because we have... we are following one person who didn't set out to be a detective under these circumstances, but they are doing all of the cozy mystery-esque stumbling into things, but they're stumbling into it with elbows and fists and sharp edges.
[DongWon] It's like the reluctant detective kind of thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. One of the other things I love about cozies is that they can really be in any like area of interest. It's like are you interested in this hobby? Then there's probably like a cozy mystery for you. Be it bridge, gardening, mountain climbing. So I love that it gives people an opportunity to put the things that they love, their passions, into this really comfortable form and just work it all in there.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I remember as a kid I read this whole series of cozy mysteries told from the POV of cats. This is still ongoing. One of my dear friends continues to edit these books. But the cat cozy mysteries is just one of these truly delightful weird corners of publishing.
[Mary Robinette] I have been contemplating having Elsie solve mysteries, but it feels like it's already been done.
[chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] So another type that you'll see is the straight up detective novel. Which is where the main character is a detective. Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot. Where they're using their expertise to solve the mysteries. With Spare Man, I was actually splitting the difference, a little bit, because I have a detective, but I sideline him very fast. So my main character is using different expertise, but she is not a detective. So we are landing somewhere in between those two.
[DongWon] For me, the defining feature of these is the moment where the detective gathers everyone in a room and explains what happened and points a finger at the actual murderer. Right? I feel like this is just that really classic Poirot scene of like you have to use the little grey cells and he's going to tell you exactly what happened. That, to me, is just one of the most delightful sort of resolutions to a mystery in this very clean way. Yeah, it's just like the thing that makes them stand out in my head is this iconic figure standing in the front of the room telling you what happened.
[Dan] Yeah. Really great modern example of this is Knives Out which was leaning really hard into all of those tropes of detective, and, I think, very telling that when they got a sequel, it is about the detective rather than the other giant cast of really interesting people. He wasn't even necessarily the main character. But he got that big scene at the end, where he walks everybody through and then he points the finger. It's right back in the tradition of Agatha Christie and that sort of thing.
[Erin] I think something that Knives Out plays with a little bit of... is that I love that the detective is there like 50% of the time before, in this case it's after, but before a murder occurs. Which is hilarious to me because it's very like anticipatory a lot of the time. Like, I think I'm going to be killed tonight...
[chuckles]
[Erin] So instead of preventing that, I'm just going to invite a detective, so at least my murder is solved. It's such an interesting, like, very comfortable trope in a lot of ways. It makes the death feel less tense, I guess, because the person kind of knew it was coming and at least they prepped for it. Which is an interesting feeling that I enjoy in sort of a classic detective story.
[DongWon] That's great.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of my other favorite classic detective mysteries is a series called Foyle's War. It's set during World War 2, he's a detective for the British government, or the British police force, and he has to go out and solve murders. So that actually trends us over into another style, which is called police procedural. Which is usually a large group of people working within the system, and they're using the system to solve the mystery. So, Foyle's War kind of sits between these, because he gets some help, but it is frequently him doing his detective thing because they are significantly understaffed because of World War 2.
[DongWon] I mean, Law and Order being the classic example of this. You can turn on daytime TV at any point and watch a procedural episode of somebody committed a crime, usually you'll see it in a cold open, somebody solves it, and you go through the whole arc of following. It's very fixated on process. It's very fixated on the machinations of how a police department functions. All the Michael Connelly novels kind of fall into this. Police procedural's like a very classic... Probably the most popular version of this through the 90s and early 2000s.
[Dan] Definitely.
[Howard] It's why I identified myself... Instead of saying I'm Howard, saying I'm the Act 2 corpse. Because in those police procedurals, it is very, very common with the structure that in Act 1, you've got 2 or 3 suspects, and one of them is looking really good. Then that really good suspect ends up as your corpse at the beginning of Act 2, or in the middle of Act 2, somewhere in there. To the point that when my family sits down and watches a new police procedural or something, someone will point at the screen and say, "Didn't do it. That's going to be our Act 2 corpse." It's like we're putting money down. It's fun.
[DongWon] Called shots.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Another genre that I think is important to mention, this is kind of two for one, supernatural mysteries. I think the kind of main example I want to throw out is Dr. Who. Dr. Who is often not even a murder mystery. This is not about solving a crime necessarily so much as solving a puzzle. The mystery is weird thing is happening. In Dr. Who's case, it could be supernatural or science fictional. But mysteries don't have to be about murder.
[Mary Robinette] That's right. Especially when you're talking about something like YA, where it's so often dealing with... Or middle grade, where you're often dealing with a theft. The Encyclopedia Brown books. Nancy Drew. All of those are dealing with a classic mystery structure, but there's no corpse. So, even for adults, it does not have to have a corpse.
 
[DongWon] One more category I wanted to hit is a classic one, which is the noir. This is taking elements of mystery, but really punching it up with voice and character right up front. This is Dashiell Hammett, this is Maltese Falcon, Chinatown. A mystery is core to what's going on, usually someone's dead or money's been stolen or an object's gone missing, but this is very much focused on a very moody, very dark tone. A very specific voice and pastiche. Noir is truly one of my favorite categories. It's a thing I delight in. I think Dashiell Hammett is one of the great writers of the 20th century. It's a real delight.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That, interestingly, was one of the challenges that I had working with Spare Man, because the novel, The Thin Man, which I was riffing on the Thin Man, the novel is noir but the films, which is the part that I was riffing on, are not. They're a different style, which is called a mystery comedy. So one of the challenges that I had was getting some of the trappings of noir, but keeping the tone light.
[DongWon] Which is great because the Spare Man feels... You can feel the noir roots in it, but you can also see how pushing the voice a little bit takes it out of the category and makes it something else. It just shows like how much it is about a particular way of saying things and a particular way of voicing a character and a perspective.
[Dan] At the risk...
[Mary Robinette] Well, that's...
[Dan] At the risk of leaning really heavily on Ryan Johnson, and this is going to lead us into our thing of the week, one of his first movies was called Brick.
[DongWon] What a [garbled]
[Dan] Which is a modern film noir. Watching that, and comparing Knives Out to Brick, you can see how important that tone is. The tone of it, the style, that kind of atmospheric focus really changes the flavor of the whole thing.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and take a pause. Then, when we come back, we're going to talk about the structural elements that all of these different forms of mystery have in common.
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Ryan Johnson's newest movie, The Glass Onion, which is a sequel to Knives Out. It just came out last December on Netflix, and was truly one of my favorite things that I saw over the holidays. It is following on the world from Knives Out, it's the same detective, Benoit Blanc, returns, but tonally, it is doing something very different from Knives Out. Where Knives Out was riffing on sort of classic mystery structure at a remote house, at a remote manor, this is a much brighter, sort of pulpier, more contemporary story about a tech billionaire who invites his friend to an island for a murder mystery game, which then devolves into something far more dark and chaotic from there. It is, as... He does such interesting things with narrative structure and is very playful with the audience expectations. It is somebody who understands the mechanics of how to put together a mystery at the deepest levels. Watching him assemble this beautiful puzzle box is, for me, as somebody who likes to think about story and craft, just incredibly delicious and incredibly exciting. I can't recommend Glass Onion highly enough.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, now we're going to talk about structure. There are a lot of overlaps in the different genres of mystery. You'll see things that are both a cozy and a detective. All of these things. But they have two main things in common. There's the overall structure, there's a... Mystery has a specific structure. Then they all contain a puzzle. I'm going to talk about the structure that I was working with when I was working on The Spare Man. Then we can also talk about some of the additional tropes, because I'm not hitting all of the tropes when I talk about the structure. So, you have the crime. Then you have the investigation. Then there's a twist. Then you have a break through. Then you have the conclusion. These are the basic beats that you have to have in a mystery. There are some other beats that will commonly occur. You'll see red herrings. The crime is often preceded by the establishing of normal, but sometimes you begin with a cold open of a crime. So what are some of the things that you all think about when you are thinking about mystery and the structure of mystery?
[Howard] I look at the structure of... When I think of 3 acts, I think of Act 2 as driven largely by this iterative looping of try-fail cycles. For mystery writing, for me anyway, the try-fail cycle is the detective having a theory and proving it wrong, having a theory and proving it wrong, having a theory and it proves disastrously wrong. The Act 2 corpse. With each iteration, information is being dropped on the reader so that the reader has the opportunity to catch up with and maybe, if they're super clever and I want them to be right, they will be able to get the answer before the detective drops it in Act 3. But that whole try-fail cycle of iterative looping through theories is a key structure for me.
[Mary Robinette] When... Surprising no one, I'm going to mention the MICE Quotient... mysteries are classic inquiry stories. This iterative looping that Howard is talking about... In a mystery or an inquiry thread, you begin with a question, and it ends when the question is answered. So all of the road blocks in the middle are keeping you from answering those questions. That's that try-fail cycle, the iterative looping which is also where red herrings come from, because it draws the detective and the reader down the wrong path.
 
[Erin] One thing I think is really interesting in thinking about the differences between the types of mysteries is where that information is coming from, and how much of it is access to authority. So, in a cozy, there is usually no real authority figure. It is just a person acting on their own. Detective stories tend to bring in... like, I've done a few try-fail cycles on my own, but now I really need to get that autopsy report, other thing that like an authority brings. That is why the detectives tie to the police, even if it's tenuous, it's helpful in their moving things forward. In a police procedural, they have all of the access and sort of the authority of the state that they can use as they're making these try-fail cycles happen. So I think the structure is the same, but how these try-fail cycles happen is a lot different, depending on who's actually doing the investigating.
[Mary Robinette] That's a really interesting point about the authority of the detective. I am making notes. That's very smart.
[chuckles]
[Howard] Well, I often use that as part of the structure. Is that I'm... one of the fails in the try-fail cycle is not being able to do a thing because you're not the authority.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Dan] Yeah. A lot of what we're talking about, it strikes me, are basically impediments to success. Right? Why does the detective not solve this mystery in the first scene? Because there are impediments to their success. Sometimes that is access to authority or to key information. The detective requests the autopsy report or the bank account records or whatever very early on, but they don't get them until the end. A lot of that middle part is just treading water in an entertaining way, until we finally get that information. Sometimes it is the try-fail cycles like Howard was talking about of this theory doesn't pan out and this theory doesn't pan out and so on and so on. One thing that I see often is that the final clue that helps us solve the whole thing is discovered accidentally. The detective earns it by their dogged determination to never stop looking. But in the process of trying something else, something pops up and they say, "Oh, wait. Now I know exactly what's going on." It's because of this out-of-left-field clue... If the audience is paying attention, they can possibly put it together as well.
[Mary Robinette] A lot of times that out-of-left-field clue recontextualizes a piece of information that the detective had recieved earlier. Frequently, it's one that they had misunderstood, that is pointing them at the wrong person, or that had seemed otherwise irrelevant. This is... This gets into an area called playing fair. Which is that in a mystery, the detective and the reader are trying to solve it at the same time. So to play fair, the reader has to recieve all of the same information that the detective does. Often, you will have some things, like with Sherlock Holmes, which aren't actually playing fair in many ways, because Holmes has this encyclopedia of knowledge in his brain and will often, because he's not the POV character, will have noticed something that Watson does not. Like, "The shade of mud on his left cuff...
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Indicated that he was bicycling through tarpits. Obviously. Elementary."
[DongWon] A little bit of a magic trick. Right? Because you're trying to make the audience feel like you've played fair with them. But you, as the author, obviously have way more information than the reader does. So how you reveal things and when you reveal it is sort of the prestige of the trick. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Dan] Like, how are you revealing the information. One thing that I think about a lot in terms of the structure of this is you actually want the audience to solve the mystery before the detective does. You want them to do it as close as you can to the reveal, but immediately before it. There's a famous saying in film making that's like, "If you let the audience realize that one plus one equals two, they will love you forever." Right? Letting them feel slightly smarter than the thing that they are reading is going to really hook them. Now, if they figure it out like on page 10, it's way too early. So being able to time what information you reveal that let's them figure out who it is right before they come to the in-text revelation is a thing that is so satisfying to the reader as they're engaging with your mystery.
[Howard] I want to point out that that's not the same thing as sitting down to a familiar, but you haven't seen this episode, murder mystery show, and in the first ten minutes, realizing that person's the killer. I don't know why, I don't have enough clue... There's no way for me to know why other than the fact that these screenwriters, these directors, these actors consistently do certain things that are their own identifying tells for who the killer is. I don't know how I'm identifying that, but sometimes I'm right. That makes that delightful for me. Then, as the episode unfolds, and I see the clues, I'm even happier. That's my goal, is to make people happy when they read a thing.
[Mary Robinette] So we have so much more to talk about with mystery, however, we are doing a second mystery episode. In between, we're going to be talking to you about the tools of tension. So even though I can see everyone wanting, including me, to tell you more things about mystery, we're going to go ahead and wrap up here, and then move on to our homework assignment. In a couple... In seven more episodes, we're going to come back to talking about mystery with your new tool set. 
 
[Mary Robinette] So, Dan, do you want to give us the homework assignment?
[Dan] Yeah. So, this is a pretty fun, pretty simple homework assignment. We want you to consume a mystery. Whether that is reading a book or watching a movie or TV show or something. Maybe seek one out that you haven't seen or read. Or try one of the genres we talked about in the beginning that you're not familiar with. We're going to be talking about mysteries for quite a while. So give yourself some ammunition to work with.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems

Mar. 12th, 2019 02:53 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems
 
 
Key points: How do you go about designing magic for a book or story? With younger readers, you can get away with a softer magic system. I drew on Indian mythology, but then change or craft it to fit. Hard = rules, crunchy. Soft = more free-form, less description. Take something from mythology or folklore, and turn it into a system. Think about what the readers are looking for -- wish fulfillment, fun, aspirational geewhiz. They want escapism, a world of new experiences, but where they can still identify with the problems and conflicts. Don't forget the flipside, the speculative what if and social exploration. Why do we like favorite magic systems? Essentially giant puzzles. A visual component to the magic. The immediate combination of "it would be cool to do this" and "Oh, wow, the implications are really frightening." Surprising, yet inevitable fulfilling of promises. Collecting plot coupons! Knowing what it would be like to experience or confront the magic.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 10.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic Systems.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard. Why are you laughing?
[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I'm laughing because she copied our vocal intonation.
[Laughter]
[Dan] It was really funny.
[Howard] Okay. You know what I do when I'm traveling in a foreign country? I start to sound like them. We are aliens and… Welcome, Mahtab.
[Laughter]
[Dan] [garbled cool aliens house]
[laughter]
 
[Howard] One of my alien powers is to invent magic systems.
[Dan] Ooo… Talk about that.
[Howard] Did that bring us back on topic, Brandon?
[Brandon] Yes, it did. Before we started this, Howard looked at me and said, "Brandon, you're not going to just talk this whole time, are you?"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because you could.
[Brandon] We decided together…
[Dan] Probably what the listeners want. Tough.
[Brandon] No, it's… We… I have written a bunch of essays on magic systems. We're not going to touch on the things in those essays. Because we've covered them in episodes of Writing Excuses, I've talked about them at length. Instead, we're going to kind of talk to the side of them. So if you want to read those essays, Sanderson's Laws, you can go find them. You can read them. Instead, I want to ask… I'm going to start with Mahtab. How did you go about designing the magic in The Third Eye or in any of the stories you've worked on?
[Mahtab] Well, first of all, because I'm writing for middle grade, I do not need to have too many hard facts or go at extreme length in terms of describing the system. I think you can… With younger readers, you can get away with doing a softer magic system, where… So one of the influences that I had was the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was one of my absolute favorite novels that I read. Things are not really explained. When Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund, and then he dies, and he's on this Stone Table which breaks, and that is some deep magic related to Christianity and sacrifice. I didn't know all of that. I totally didn't understand. But, I mean, I felt that wonder when he came back alive, and the kids went back with him. So, as far as mine, when I was writing The Third Eye, I drew a lot on Indian mythology. So one of the… Well, the main character's Tara, who is a young child, but the mean villain is Zarku, who is an evil character and he hypnotizes people with his third eye, which I borrowed directly from the god Shiva, who has a third eye. Except that Shiva uses it to burn evil things, whereas I actually gave that quality to my evil protagonist, who could hypnotize people and make them do things. I had a couple of really gruesome scenes which kids kind of love and the parents hated. Which is fine by me, as long as they picked up the book to read.
[Howard] But, you know what, that's the mark of a really good book for kids.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Kids love it, and their parents hate it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You've done society a great service.
[Mahtab] Thank you. That's actually the one book that won the Silver Birch, which is a reading program in Ontario, and it kind of kick started my career. I was really happy about that. So I drew a lot on Indian mythology. Even when Tara has to solve problems, she prays to Lord Ganesh and she has… Lord Ganesh is supposed to have a helper in the form of a little mouse. That is what comes to save her. So, my magic system was soft, but it was based a lot on drawing from Indian mythology, and then kind of changing or crafting it to suit the story.
 
[Howard] It's worth pointing out that next week we're going to talk about magic without rules. So…
[Dan] That's kind of what we mean by hard and soft.
[Brandon] Right.
[Dan] She was throwing those terms around. If it has a lot of rules and is very crunchy, that's a hard. If it's more free-form…
[Brandon] Yeah. There is sometimes this sense, like, when I start talking about these, people assume that I don't like soft magic systems. You'll be disabused of that next week.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I really like a good soft magic system. I like magic in all its different varieties, and what it does in stories.
 
[Brandon] So let's talk about building… You said you reached into Indian mythology to get a lot of your ideas. I do this too. A lot of my ideas for magic systems will come from something from mythology, or something that… Like, I love the idea of spontaneous genesis, right? That things get… They used to believe that frogs were born out of mud, because you always find frogs around mud. That idea is so cool…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And so interesting. A lot of my magic systems are born out of me looking back at some sort of folklore or myth, and then saying, "Well, can I make that into a system?"
 
[Dan] One of the things that I have started to value more and more, every time I try to write magic, is the idea of wish fulfillment. That what readers are really looking for, even though they don't always admit this, especially adults, is magic that is fun, that they would want to use. I think that's one of the major reasons that Harry Potter has been so successful, is because everybody wants to go to Hogwarts, everybody wants to be using those cool spells. So while there's certainly a place for magic that requires sacrifice or that causes pain or something like that, I think there's a lot of aspirational geewhiz in fantasy, where the reader wants to be able to go, "Oh, I want to write a dragon. I want to use all these metals and then fly through the sky. I want to be able to do that. That looks awesome."
[Brandon] That comes into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is the draw of fantasy. What is it? How is that maybe different from some other genres? I hadn't even really put this together, but if you look at like movies, some of the big ones, what is the difference between the superhero movies and Star Wars? Star Wars is a lot more fantasy, right? Even though it's got science-fiction trappings. You see with Star Wars, people… They don't necessarily just dress up as the characters in the movies. They go get their own Storm Troopers costume and become a Storm Trooper and things like this. I saw this a lot in The Wheel of Time fandom, that people didn't necessarily when they would do costumes, not necessarily want to be one of the characters. Sometimes they would, but often they would want to put themselves into the setting, and dress themselves like a character and come up with a persona from that world. That's a very kind of distinctive thing, I think, for fantasy.
[Dan] It really is.
[Mahtab] It's a lot to do with escapism. I mean, most people who read fantasy, they're just so bored with… Well, bored or whatever. They just want to go into a whole new world, be the characters, live with them, experience totally new things that they wouldn't, and then they kind of come back to their lives. For me, science fiction and fantasy is exactly that. Just getting out into a different world, yet being able to identify with the problems, with the conflicts that the characters face, so that there is something that I can feel, I mean, it should be something that I feel is relatable to me. But it's still… It's a whole new world.
 
[Howard] Well, there's a flipside to that, which is the speculative fiction aspect of fantasy and science fiction. At risk of calling the elephant in the room an elephant, Brandon's Steelheart takes the social concept of absolute power corrupts absolutely and wraps that… Or maps that onto a superhero universe, and asks us the question, and it's a socially important question, what happens if there are superpowers and absolute power corrupts absolutely? That question, whether or not there's escapism involved, it's a fascinating read for the social reasons. I think that's kind of the other half of magic systems. We talk about wish fulfillment, we talk about escapism, but we also talk about how the ability to obey a different set of rules, a set of rules that are not the laws of physics as we understand them, but are themselves rules, how will that change us as people? If it doesn't change us as people, how will it change our relationships with other people? That's… So that was really deep and maybe way to crunchy, but…
[Dan] No, that's something that a lot of urban fantasies in particular get into. The TV show called Lost Girl, The Dresden Files series, they both get very heavily into that idea. The Magicians, as well. If you have all of this power, and can get away with stuff, you're going to start getting away with stuff, which I think adds another really cool dimension to the magic system, is there are people who use it well and there are people who don't. People who use it for evil.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop, and our book of the week is actually The Third Eye. So, will you tell us about it?
[Mahtab] Absolutely. This is actually the very first novel that I wrote. I think I sweated blood and tears over it. It's about a young girl, Tara, who slowly… I mean, she is living in this village with her father and her stepmother, and slowly, as the story progresses… There's a new healer in town who has got three eyes and just about everyone's enamored with him, but she's the only one who can see behind that façade of his and realize that he's evil. The story is about her journey in trying to find her grandfather, who's the only other person who's kind of strong… You could call him a Dumbledore kind of thing. Who is strong enough to fight Zarku and defeat him. But throughout the journey, what I try and do is take away the entire support system, so that eventually, Tara is just relying on herself, and a little bit off the soft magic system based on Hindu mythology that I talked about earlier, to try and defeat Zarku.
[Brandon] It's a delightful book.
[Mahtab] Thank you.
[Brandon] I'm really enjoying it, although I will tell you, I did not expect it to be as much of a horror book as it is.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's not where I thought I was going.
[Howard] Brandon loves it, his parents do not.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] It is genuinely creepy in a lot of places in a really delightful way.
[Mahtab] It's a different horror. I was just telling Dan on the way here, saying I'm delving back into horror, but, yeah, there are some very graphic, gruesome scenes which I really enjoyed writing. I often get teachers saying, "What were you thinking?" But then, it's like, the kids like it, and there isn't anything else that shouldn't be in there, so let them enjoy it.
 
[Brandon] All right. Let's ask you guys, favorite magic systems in books or films that you've experienced, and kind of why? What made this magic system work? What made you enjoy the story?
[Dan] Well, at the risk of over inflating Brandon's ego…
[Howard] It's now an inflatable elephant in the room.
[Laughter]
[Dan] The… I love the Mistborn magic system, but for two very specific reasons. First of all, they're essentially giant puzzle games. Where, here's all of the pieces. You know how these work. How are they going to solve the problem at the end of the book? For me, reading any of the Mistborn novels is essentially just a cool puzzle to solve. Okay, this guy can do… Here's, in the Alloy of Law series, here's the girl who only has the one weird power that she doesn't think is of any use, she likes slows time down or something. How is that going to be valuable, because you know it is? I love ciphering those puzzles.
[Brandon] They are slightly Asimov Laws of Robotics books, stories.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Brandon] Where you set up several laws, and then you show they're not working or that there's a hole in them somewhere, what are we not understanding? Then you kind of put it together at the end.
 
[Dan] That's not what every magic system has to do, and shouldn't. There needs to be variety. But I like those for that reason. One of the others, though, and this is another one of the rules that I've kind of set for myself as I develop my own, is that magic should have a visual component to it. I always used to try to make magic very mental, very cerebral. I think a lot of aspiring fantasy writers do the same. But adding that visual element… So again, back to Mistborn, you've got things as simple as being able to pull or push on metal, and you don't need a visual component, but you added the blue lines. The blue lines bear so much weight in these stories, and they serve such a powerful function, even though it's a very simple thing. Because that gives us a sense of what it looks like, and what it would feel like to do it, and it helps us understand what's going on. Just because of these dumb little blue lines.
 
[Brandon] I love magic systems where, when you start reading it, you both see why it would be so cool to have this magic and also, are instantly worried and frightened about the implications of it. Right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] A great example of that is our former professor, Dave Wolverton's Runelords series, in which you can take someone's strength and brand it onto yourself with a branding iron, and that person loses their strength and you have it. You're twice as strong. But now, you have this person that you need to take care of, because if someone can get to them and kill them, you lose your magic strength. The social implications of that are just staggering. The moment you read it, you realize, "Oh, man. This changes society in some really dark ways." He goes there.
[Dan] Yeah. He follows through on the ramifications. Like, every evil thing that you think as you're contemplating that, he comes… He deals with at some point or another. It's a really great example of how to show the effects of magic, and how to show a society shaped by magic.
[Brandon] How fantasy can, as Mahtab was saying, can take some our world element and in some ways by exaggerating it really kind of bore down into that issue. Like with the Runelords, the fact that the strong become stronger and the weak become more and more subject to the strong, is really well exemplified in that story, to ways that make, I think, you start to realize this is kind of how our society works, and that's an ugly underbelly to it.
[Howard] Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. The… I suppose I'll just spoil it, because…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Do it.
[Howard] That's what we're here for and it's an old book. The name of the book is both a reference to our detective, our wizard, Harry Dresden, who is kind of a deadbeat, and this idea that necromancy works best when you have a rhythm to which all of the dead are marching. I don't remember the exact details, but the older the bones are, the more powerful a thing you can raise. We end up with a guy dressed like a one-man band drummer riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton through town. It is surprising, yet inevitable. It fulfills all of the promises of necromancy as he set it forth. It was a lot of fun. I mean… Undead dinosaur, you can't go wrong with that.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Any other favorites?
[Mahtab] I have one which is… I read it a few years ago. But, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. Where Will Stanton, on his 12th birthday, realizes he's one of the Old Ones, and he has to collect these six symbols of… I think they're called the Champions of Light, which is… Is to circles made of wood and bronze and iron, fire, water. Then that… He has to collect it, it makes a powerful object, then he repels the Dark with it. But it's just so beautifully written. It's kind of a coming-of-age, a fantasy, there's wild magic, high magic, but it's really, really good. The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper.
[Dan] I also wanted to mention, just to have like a really soft magic system in here, the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. I love the magic as he presents it there. Because there's maybe one or two rules, and I don't know anyone who could name them off the top of their heads, but it has a distinct flavor to it. Like, there's no… We don't know what the rules are governing it, but we absolutely know what it feels like. We absolutely know what it would be like to experience or confront the magic that we find in those books. I loved the way he pulled that off.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, I've also got our homework for this week. Now, next week we're going to be talking about soft magic systems. What I would like you to do is kind of… Make you take some sort of soft magic system that you've read about or you've loved. The example we came up with was… Is Gandalf. Gandalf's very soft. We never know what Gandalf can do, specifically, we just know he's awesome. Well, I want you to take a soft magic system, and apply rules to it. Give Gandalf rules. Take a soft magic system you have written and give it rules. Flip it on its head, and see how the magic works differently if you explain exactly how it works and have it work according to those rules. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.23: The Element of Mystery

Jun. 7th, 2016 10:11 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.23: The Element of Mystery

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/06/05/11-23-the-element-of-mystery/

Key Points: A mystery is a puzzle, and we read them for the thrill of solving a puzzle. Mysteries often start when the main character has a question, usually "Why is this dead body here?" Whodunit is one of the common forms of mystery, but there are others. Why are our robots acting screwy? Write a mystery because you are going to need that element in nearly everything you write! Puzzles and clues, oh my! Who did it? Where do the clues lead us? The body at the start creates an immediate question and stakes! Also, especially in the bookstore genre, a body is expected. For a murder to be compelling, there must be something at stake in solving it. Not necessarily a personal stake by the main character -- consider Sherlock Holmes and other PIs! Planning a mystery? Start with a question that has multiple answers, for uncertainty. The mystery plot is built on fascinating clues, revealed one step at a time. Plus a healthy dose of red herrings. Dan starts with the solution, then lists clues, and works backwards. Learn ways to plant clues, such as in the middle of a list, with a bit of character misdirection, or as part of something else.

( In the library, with a lead pipe... )

[Brandon] All right. I have to call the discussion here, although it's going very well. We will talk more about mystery in a couple of weeks. But for now, Howard has some homework for us.
[Howard] I do. For you seat-of-the-pantser's, this may be very difficult. For you outliners, this may be equally difficult. I want you to create a crime. Start with… Not in real life, please.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Just stay at the keyboard. Create a crime scene. Create a crime that… Where you know who's done it, you know what's been done. Start leaving the clues, and work your way backwards through the criminal's path, through the victim's path, whatever, and lay clues. Then start removing the clues that people wouldn't notice, so that you are building… You're essentially building the framework for a mystery which you could then later wrap prose around.
[Brandon] Right. So outline backwards.
[Howard] Outline it backwards.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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