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Writing Excuses 20.08: Identity 3 - Stakes & Fears
 
 
Key points: Stakes and fears. Relationships? What will make the character feel less about themselves? A friend might die? Your parent will be disappointed? Stakes often are what will I lose, rather than what will I gain.  Sometimes stakes are small. Low stakes sometimes become important. What is the worst thing that could happen? Sometimes big stakes aren't as important as small ones. What fears do you give a character? There's a hole, an absence in the character. Do we fear the unknown, or do we fear knowing it? Be obvious. Courage is picking up a flashlight and looking in the dark corner. Trauma points, along axes of safety, connection, and empowerment. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 08]
 
[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.
 
[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining your writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 20, Episode 08]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Character stakes and fears.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[DongWon] This week, we're continuijng our conversation about sort of the lenses of who, talking about character. The thing that I wanted to focus on this week is talking about how the fears that a character has and the stakes that a character faces help move them through the story, and help create the story that exists around them. Right? So, last time, we talked a lot about motivation and goals. The way I think about motivation and goals is very internal. Right? That is how the character's relating to themselves. When it comes to stakes, now we are getting to the parts where we're starting to feel tension, where the audience is relating to the character, we understand what their goals are, but now are feeling the pressure that they're facing and how that's moving them through the world. So when I think about stakes, I don't necessarily think necessarily about failure or danger, because we are all… Your readers are all people. As people, we tend to care about other people. So, what we care about are relationships more than we care about physical danger. Right? So, starting in an action scene can sometimes feel a little flat. But if you put a relationship under pressure in that, that's where a little bit more of that juice can come from. So, how do you guys think about creating stakes, especially initially when you're jumping into a story?
[Mary Robinette] I usually think about something that makes… Will make the character feel like less of themselves. So I find that early on, and then I say this with early career writers, that I would say, well, this… The goal is to have the eight gems of Rovisla…
[Laughter]
[Erin] We got a C in it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Sorry. I do pronounce…
[Howard] That letter's supposed to be an apostrophe.
[Mary Robinette] I do pronounce the apostrophes. It's a regional variation. So… If they fail, then they don't have the eight gems. An inverse of the goal is not… Like, that's not compelling. Or they're like… And then they might die, which is actually, like, the least compelling…
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Thing. I think, then, a friend might die. But that's…
[DongWon] Or your parent will think you're a failure because you didn't bring the eight gems back.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. That's significantly worse for most people.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] You do not want someone to be disappointed in you.
 
[Dan] Yeah. I think a lot of stakes often come down to what do I stand to lose rather than what do I stand to gain. It's not so much about gaining those gems. This is how the D&D movie starts, is look at this great life that I had before everything went wrong. We see him throughout the movie trying to get back to zero. Just trying to struggle back to regain the things that he lost in the first place.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes the stake can be really kind of small. Like, when you look at… Back at, This Is How You Lose the Timewar, that initial stake was if I don't check this, I'm going to be curious for the rest of my immortal life. Just that, oh, what am I going to miss? It's a small thing, but it is the thing that also is the catalyst.
[DongWon] Then, the stakes of that so quickly become what does this other person think of me? They might think I'm not a worthy competitor. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Not think I'm a worthy companion by the end of it. The evolution of that stake is the thing that gives so much of the tension to that little novel.
 
[Erin] One thing I really like is when something feels low stakes, and then it turns out that it was worse than you thought. When the thing…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, oh, I'm just, like, trying to, like, get my cup of coffee so that I can make it through the day. But actually it turns out that there's something about… I cannot think what that would be… About getting that cup of coffee that is, like, suddenly the most important thing. Because when you're doing something low stakes, like, if you're doing a low stakes mission in life, you're not super prepared, you're just, like, I need to do this one thing. I'm only bringing what I need to get this small thing done. If that small thing becomes huge, then, all of a sudden, you are unprepared, you're afraid that you will fail, you feel like you have not brought your best self maybe to the table. Then it taps into those deeper fears about who am I, what will people think of me. It's sort of the same thing that gets people to often… When I go to karaoke, people will talk about how bad their voice is today. You don't want people to think that you're doing your best and you failed. You're either…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It's like, I could have done better if things had been set up differently for me.
[Mary Robinette] I see this in critique groups. I actually have my critique or's do a ritual apology before we begin where everybody apologizes all at the same time. Because all of them are afraid that people will think that they're not a good writer, and that they are lesser. I… When I'm sometimes talking to a student who's having a little bit of a meltdown, I'm like, okay, but what is actually the worst thing that could go wrong if someone doesn't like your story? They're like, it doesn't get published. I'm like, and what's the worst thing that can go wrong if it doesn't get published? I write a new story? I'm like, great.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Is that a bad outcome? No?
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] Yeah.
[[DongWon] For an example, I'm going back to your sort of coffee thing becoming bigger stakes. One of my favorite escalation of stakes scenes in a movie is in The Devil Wears Prada. Where, early on, and he goes to get coffee for her boss and brings it back, and, kind of like is in a meeting about… I can't remember exactly what it's about… And she kind of snickers at something. There's this incredible speech that Miranda goes through about the color of the sweater that Andy is wearing in this scene, the periwinkle blue speech, and it's like this thing that goes from the stakes of my job are absurd, I'm getting coffee for someone who runs a fashion magazine, to understanding the perspective of the people who run this magazine and why clothes and fashion and aesthetics matter in the world and the context of that, and her realizing that, oh, no, I want the positive regard of this woman who is now yelling at me because I didn't take this seriously enough. So that slow escalation as we understand the terms of the movie and the stakes of everything that's going to come in the rest of the movie is just a masterfully done scene.
 
[Dan] At the same time, one of my favorite tropes is the complete opposite of this. Where we realize that what we thought were the big big stakes really aren't as important as the small stakes.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] The Perdiem Chronicles does this really well.
[DongWon] Oh, yeah.
[Dan] Throughout, where… For the several books, they don't need him to be a hero. They need him to be an assistant pig keeper.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because the pig's the hero, and they need him to do that. In book 4, this kind of comes to ahead with one of my favorite lines where he's trying to work with the witches, and they say, "Any hero can soar with the eagles. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." Like, learning how to be a person, learning how to fend for yourself, how to survive in the world is so much more important than one or two acts of heroism.
[Howard] I got to thinking about the stakes and the fears in the very first Iron Man movie. Because the movie begins and Tony Stark wants for nothing. He can afford to blow the deal, he can afford to… He can afford to screw up because he's so rich. It just doesn't matter. Then the very first set of stakes he's presented with are now you might die. Now you need to invent or die. Those aren't the big stakes. He invents, he saves his life, and then he puts the whole company at risk. Now it is… Now he might not have money. Then we find out what was really happening here is someone's trying to take the company from you, and they're going to find another way to kill you. The final battle in the movie is because Tony doesn't want them to hurt Pepper. It comes back to a personal thing. It is not I need to where the Iron Man suit to save the world or to save the company or to save my life. It is because my friend might die.
[DongWon] So, while we all contemplate what we're all afraid of enough to make us a hero, let's take a break.
 
[DongWon] Welcome back. So we've been talking sort of about character stakes and how that relates to relationships. Right? One of the things that comes into that idea of stakes is the concept of fear. Right? We often have seen fear in stories as a negative to be overcome. But when you're thinking of how you're constructing character arc, how you're constructing a character, how are you thinking of what do I want to make this character afraid of? What fears are you putting into your characters that will help move them forward through the story?
[Mary Robinette] So this is why we wanted to tie these episodes together, because I will often look at their goals and motivations. What I find is that there's something that the character… There's a hole, there is an absence in the character, there's something. They are either rushing towards things, which are their goals, to try to fill it, or they are running away from the goal. So the… Having to confront, oh, this is a lack in myself is something that a lot of people are afraid of. Like, no one wants to confront their failings, their… No one wants to confront the fact that they're vain. Or no one wants to confront the fact that they're insecure. No one wants to confront, like, people want to be self-sufficient. So if I can create a fear and a reason to trigger that fear in them, that causes them to have to confront that or, to, like, flee from it. It's like I don't want to believe that I'm selfish, so I'm going to help these people. But they're constantly, like, but maybe I don't help them…
 
[Howard] We talk a lot about how people tend to fear the unknown. I don't think were actually afraid of the unknown. I think were afraid of knowing it. I… There's a thing out there that I don't know anything about and I would prefer not to. It may be a truth about me. It may be the fact that layoffs are coming. But there is a dark corner out there that I don't want to peer into, because it has information in it that is going to force me onto a new path, and I would rather continue to live with ignorance as bliss. Ignorance isn't actually bliss. But it's not the fear of the unknown, it's the fear of learning a thing that will now force me to change.
[DongWon] I would say it's even more than that. It's the fear of how other people see you changing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
 
[DongWon] Right? That in encountering the unknown, you will be forced to change in some way through that encounter and what your partner thinks or what your children think of you, what your friends think of you, what your boss thinks of you, all these will change when that layoff comes. The thing you're afraid of is how do I survive that? Is that a survivable encounter? So I think that tapping into that fear is going to be the thing that will drive your characters forward. The thing I want to emphasize about when we talk about character fears like this, there's an instruction in the game dialect that's a player instruction that I love a lot. The instruction is very simple, it just says be obvious. As a player, when you're making choices, make really obvious choices. That will lead to complexity through the interaction of everyone at the table making obvious choices. Not overthinking it. So leaning into what your character's afraid of in a Broadway will lead to specificity because of all the other stuff we've talked about in this section when were talking about the lens of who as they bounce off the other characters in your plot. But don't be afraid of them being afraid of a really broad thing, of, oh, my partner's not going to like me, my parents won't love me anymore. My sister will hate me now. Right? Like, those are really juicy, really powerful motivators that I think drive most people as they move through the world.
[Dan] Well, it's not just those choices that can be really obvious. But the resolutions, the ways of dealing with them, can be really blunt and obvious as well. Going back to a previous episode, we talked about Toy Story… Or I talked about Toy Story…
[Laughter]
[Dan] His… What he really fears there is that he has no value. Unless he… And he… Once again, he misinterprets that by saying, I will have value if I am the favorite toy. That all comes to a head when he gives the huge speech to Buzz. You're a cool toy. That is not only the moment where he convinces Buzz that it's okay to be a toy instead of an actual spaceman, that is very clearly and obviously the moment where Woody is convincing himself, being a cool toy is awesome even if I'm not the favorite toy. I don't need to find external validation. I can just love me for who I am. Whether I'm the favorite toy or not.
[Mary Robinette] It's occurring to me that what we're talking about here is basically give your character imposter syndrome.
[Laughter]
[Howard] One of the thoughts that I had just a moment ago, after talking about the fear of the unknown, the fear of knowing the unknown. Courage, to me, has always been defined as moving forward despite fear. Not an absence of fear, it's moving forward despite fear. I love the idea that if were not afraid of the unknown, we're afraid of knowing what's there, then courage is picking up the flashlight and looking at what's in the corner. That, just as a metaphor for me feels like an easy sort of litmus test, lens if you will, for looking at what my character's doing and deciding, well, in act one, they're staying away from the corner. They're not peering into the shadows, and things are coming out of the shadows and they are reacting. In act two, Act III, they're picking up the flashlight and they are staring at what they were afraid to stare at before.
 
[Mary Robinette] I sometimes look at really primal fears as a thing to give a character. But I was having… I was talking to my therapist and she started talking about trauma points. I'm like, I'm sorry, sorry, can you repeat those? I'm just going to start taking notes right now…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I'm like, stop doing a therapy session and started being a… This is really useful.
[Howard] I no longer need therapy, I have a professional interest in the information you're providing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So she said that most people have these trauma points where something bad happened in childhood. Most of the time, you are not actually aware of what that is, because it happened when you were fairly young. But it was a long one of three axes, safety, connection, and empowerment. When we are looking at our Tony Stark example, the thing for him, his trauma point was connection, because of his damaged relationship with his mom… With his dad. You can see that. It's, like, how does he handle that? He makes Jeeves, who's in artificial intelligence… Boo, hiss… Artificial intelligence connection. He buys friends, essentially. Then when he realizes he has genuine friends, that then becomes the most vulnerable thing for him, because it's something he absolutely cannot lose.
[Erin] I think that doesn't necessarily mean that every… I mean, we can traumatize every character, and we should…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But we don't have to actually, because sometimes I think some of that is based on traumatic experiences, but also some of it's just a staying alive lizard brain, like, human response. Like… Safety, like, every creature has a desire to stay alive. Like, as a species, like, they do things that will help to keep them alive.
[Howard] Whether you're a mother or whether you're a brother…
[Erin] Exactly.
[Howard] Staying alive…
[Oo, oo, oo…]
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, I think of, like, my cat… Like every… Cats want to get high. Like when I…
[Laughter]
[Erin] There's a tornado warning… Yes, they do, in every sense. No, but whenever… When there's a tornado warning…
[DongWon] I've lost many a spider plant to cats, so, yes.
[Erin] Yeah, like you're like… I'll be like, no, we have to, like, get it in a lower part of the house.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Because there's a tornado. But the cats, just, like, something is weird in the air and the best way to get away from weird things is to get as high as possible where I cannot possibly care anymore. No, to get to like a higher elevation where I can keep an eye on everything. It's just kind of baked in. We have our own thing with that. We are also safer in numbers. Humans as a species have, like, not very good, like, actual personal defenses. Like we don't have, like, really tough hides or really sharp teeth. We've got these opposable thumbs and the ability to come together in a group and build tools that help to keep us safe. So all of these things are things that are very baked in, I think, is very primal fears.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Empowerment, being able to take action to change the environment around you, because we don't necessarily physically adapt to our environments the way that, like, a reptile might.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So I think it's really nice to think about, like, those primal fears. I also just wanted to say that… I love to write, like, horrible people as characters. So I'm, like, they don't do that, like, when they… They let their fears get the best of them. So, a lot of times, I love thinking about what happens if the character does not overcome their fears. What if they do the thing… They're like I'm afraid that no one will love me so I won't let anyone, or, I will put up a wall. That's just going to be my character arc is becoming a worse version of myself. So it can be something that drives your characters positively or negatively.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's something that, like, as you were talking, was making me think about Sour Milk Girls, and how, like, the fear absolutely takes over that character. For listeners who are just joining us, you can hear a deep dive about that in season 18.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's what makes a truly relatable villain pop off the page…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Is understanding where they're coming from, understanding where what their fears are rooted in. It's also what allows you to give a hero a truly believable low point. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] The low point of them giving into a fear that you've seen them grapple with and understand intimately over the course of the series, that let you buy into the moment where the hero does fail. Because so often we see those moments and they fall flat, because it's not connected to anything. There was nothing actually at stake for the hero when things went off the rails. So, giving them things to care about, giving them goals and motivation, but then giving them fears that go alongside those, that is the thing that I think really can juice your story and get it to that next level.
[Mary Robinette] I will say also that going back to the idea of the traumas, the trauma does not have to be a big trauma.
[DongWon] Oh, yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Like, my… I don't know what some of… Like, what my trauma triggers are. But knowing the axes that it's on can really help clarify how a character reacts to things. Which again can help you shape the plot when you apply that lens to your story.
[DongWon] Exactly. On that note, I think we should go to some homework.
[Mary Robinette] I think that sounds like a great idea.
[Dan] Absolutely.
[DongWon] To traumatize our listeners a little bit more.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] So the first thing I want you to do is to make a note of all the major things that your main character is afraid of. List out those things, the fears that they have. Then, take your MC and draw a little map of all the characters that there connected to, and describe their connections to these other characters in one sentence or less. Now compare the list of relationships you've made to the list of fears that you've made for that character, and see if those two lists are in conversation with each other. Are they supporting each other, or are they completely disconnected? If they are disconnected, start thinking about how do I bring these two closer together to sort of get that feedback loop between relationship and fear?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.07: Lens 3 - Identity 2 - Motivation & Goals
 
 
Key points: Motivation and goals. Motivation beyond the story. Motivation and goals may shift. What happens when they achieve their goal? Eight jewels of Rovisla. Some goals and motivations conflict with each other. Ability, role, relationship, and status. A headlight writer. At the edge of the cliff, what does their motivation make them do? 
 
[Season 20, Episode 07]
 
[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 07]
 
[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Motivation and goals. 
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We have been talking about different lenses that you can be using to view things. So what we're going to be talking about now, coming off of our history and community, is we are going to be talking about this idea of identity and that the motivation and goals and that as a lens that you can apply. So a character's motivations can help them... Make them like relatable to the reader. It can drive the story's momentum, it can create obstacles. But what is good character motivation and how do you share that with the reader? How do you make that visible on the page? So we're going to be talking about, like, what do they want? What part of themselves is the goal serving? What are some of the things that you think about when you are thinking about motivation?
[Dan] For me, it's important that the characters have motivation beyond just the story that they're in. I mean, the first Star Wars movie is such a blunt instrument example of this. He wants to be a fighter pilot. That's his motivation. It's dumb and it's small and it doesn't matter very often, but it is distinctly not I need to go and rescue this princess and destroy the Death Star.
[Howard] But he also wants to go get power converters from Tosche Station.
[Laughter]
[Dan Wells] That is true. That's the thing that he wants.
[Howard] Which is, he wants to get off the farm.
[Dan] To get those in order to get off the farm.
[DongWon] Well, he wants friends, specifically, which becomes his most important character trait throughout the entire arc of Star Wars, is that Luke is someone who cares about his friends. Right? So what we just cleverly done there is unpacked how many different motivations a character can have its, even when what they want seems very simple, which is to be a fighter pilot.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Erin] That, I think, there's a lot of times the motivation they have on the surface is not, like, the true thing motivating them underneath.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Being a fighter pilot is about being away from here. It's about literally flying off, it's about wanting glory, it's about wanting recognition, it's about a lot of those things. Those can get then applied to a different goal. So a lot of times, like, the character's motivation and goals seem like one thing. The motivation underlying stays the same, but the goal shifts.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] This is something that I think is so important because sometimes you'll see people and they will have the goal shift, but they won't realize that the new goal does not match the motivation. For me, the thing… You've probably heard me talk about this before, that I talk about objective and super objective. That the super objective is kind of the deep-seated hole that is always there that they're trying to fill. When I'm playing with the idea of goals, I try to think about when they achieve their goal, because often there's the short-term goals. What is the new goal that immediately replaces that? An example that will hit too close to home for our listeners is the idea of, well, I want to be a writer. Okay. So I'm going to submit something. But I'm not a writer, because I haven't had anything accepted yet. Even though I've submitted something. Then, oh, I've had something accepted, but I've only sold one story. So there's this constant… I think for… I think the really interesting goals, the ones that are very sustaining, are the ones where the character is constantly redefining themselves to tell themselves that they haven't met their goal… Their… Yeah.
[DongWon] Well, this… Again, we can go back to Star Wars for this, because what Luke wants is to become a hero like his father was. He becomes a hero like his father was at the end of Star Wars, and then discovers what an awful fate that is in the second movie, when he finds out what happened to his father and who his father is. Right? So we see this evolution of Luke's goal as he's searching for an identity, as he's searching, quite frankly, for love of a parent, of community, of people around him, and how much that goes against him as he struggles in the third movie with am I like my father or am I not? Right? So you can see how the goal shifts as the objective and the super objective kind of move around him. What I love about that also is that wasn't a plan when they made the first movie. That evolved over the writing of the second and third movies. So you can see the way in which writers find ways to disrupt a character's motivation and goals to keep tension moving, to keep the story interesting and developing, and they end up with one of the most enduring stories of our generations.
[Howard] The understanding and application of… Mary Robinette, to use your terms, the objective and super objective hinges pretty heavily on whether or not you understand that in yourself. I've had career conversations with artists, with writers, with cartoonists, and I often come back to, hey, do this job because you would be drawing comics anyway, not because you want to get rich. I remember as a kid, is a really little kid, kindergarten age, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor because I felt like that was a neat job. Then in high school, I wanted to be a rock star because I wanted to be a rock STAR and I wanted to be rich. Neither of those were things that involved the actual passions that I had for doing things. It wasn't until later in life that I realized, wait, I like making stuff. Performing in front of people less so. Carving people up into little pieces with knives, quite a bit less so. I like drawing and telling stories. So the motivation for my character was really driven by the thing I'm passionate about, and the super objective was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could do this full time. What steps do I need to take to do it full time? So, what is it that your character is deep down have discovered about themselves that they really want? Or, what is it deep down that they haven't discovered that they really want? That they haven't explored yet? Maybe the character arc is about learning that.
[Erin] First of all, just a note to self that in a crisis, I will never let Howard perform any sort of surgery on me.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Cutting somebody up into little pieces may not be what people think of when they think of medicine…
[Dan] Very [garbled] characterization.
[Howard] I planned to put them back together. I mean…
[Mary Robinette] I was convinced that I was going to be a veterinarian until I was a senior in high school, looked at my grades, and realized it was a bad option and went into puppetry. But I also changed from… I wanted to make sick animals well, and in puppetry, I just made animals.
[There you go. Garbled]
[Erin] [garbled] worse. I love that. What I was going to say also in addition to life lessons, is that what I like about that is that it talks about how the super objective is something that sort of beyond individual, kind of, like, titles, or you may not understand what it really means to be a doctor. There's just something about it that you identify with. The reason I bring this up is because a lot of times in science fiction and fantasy, I'll hear people talk about their character's motivation as really tied into, like, the world itself. They're like, the character's motivation is to get, like, the eight jewels of Rovisla.
[Mary Robinette] Sure. Yeah.
[Dan] My favorite books, Rovisla. Okay. Continue.
[Erin] Sorry. So, yes. So, like, that's the thing that you're, like, well, why? Like, I don't know one jewel of Rovisla from another. So, like, what is happening…
[DongWon] How many apostrophes are there in Rovisla?
[Laughter]
[Howard] There are three, and they are all jewel shaped.
[DongWon] Okay. Got it. Please continue. I'm… This is very interesting.
[Erin] Sorry. So, since I don't know anything about the world, that motivation means nothing to me. Often, in early chapters of a story, if you focus too much on the Rovisla and not enough on the internal super objective…
[Howard] The apostrophes…
[Laughter]
[Erin] The apostrophes, so to speak, then you don't actually get what makes that character interesting, and people glaze off of it, because we relate to super objectives that we can understand.
[DongWon] Yeah. Well… Sometimes the best thing you can do, sometimes, is give your character exactly what they want. Right? If you are searching for the eight gems of Rovisla, and you're 50 pages in the book, and you get the eight gems of Rovisla, that can be such an interesting moment of, like, oh. Oh, no. Now what? Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] What is the story here? Right? Like, them realizing there are still problems that aren't solved in fulfilling their quest. Right? Like, one of my favorite novels of all time was one when I read it when I was very young which is Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown. Right? The goal that she sets out to do, she accomplishes way earlier than one would expect given the length of that book. Everything that follows after is what takes that work from being a delight to being an absolute masterpiece.
[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that we actually saw in N. K. Jemison's book last season, is that on one of the timelines of the character, that it's like I want to be a really amazing Oragene.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And, yeah. Got that. Ooo, not what you actually wanted. And there is all kinds of complications that come from that. One of the… The next episode, we're going to be talking about stakes and fears, but I just want to say that one of the things that I love about a really good, juicy goal is that achieving it creates the next problem.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that I love, I'm going to tell you about after our break.
 
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[Mary Robinette] I love giving a character goals and motivations that are in conflict with each other. So I break it down in my own brain when I'm trying to come up with them, with… By talking about ability, role, relationship, and status. This is basically what the character is good at, or not good at, the responsibilities that they have, the relationships, the loyalties, and then where they are kind of in a power dynamic. So, if I have a character who's like I love my mom and I want to be there for my mom, but also, if I am there for my mom, that I have to miss this big stakeholder meeting where, I don't know, stake-y things happen.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I'm imagining this to happen at a steakhouse.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I was thinking actually different kinds of stake, like the stabby vampire thing.
[Vampire? Oh, boy.]
[Howard] There is this aphorism that I've… This saying that I've held close and tried to live by for much of my life. It's don't put off what you want most for what you want at the moment. That is itself the current between the two poles of conflicting goals and objectives. Your… In that sense, in the way I took it originally, is the battle between your immediate appetites and your long-term desires. I mean, that's every substance addicted person ever where they are fighting this battle against a now metabolic desire for a thing that is hurting them, and is preventing them from achieving their long-term goals. That doesn't mean that for goals and objectives and motivations to be in conflict, one has to be wrong. But that's a very common real-world occurrence.
[DongWon] I think time is a great way to create conflicting goals and objectives. Right? What happens on this timeline, what happens on that timeline. Another way is through relationships. Right? Were going to talk about this more when we get to talking about stakes, but the way in which our different goals represent different aspects of who we are in life. Right? What my goals are as a student, as a professional, as a family member, are all really different things, and those are often in conflict with each other. Like, our professional goals and our relationship goals are famously often in tension with each other. Right? In terms of, like, balancing work and life.
[Dan] Yeah. The first Toy Story movie does this really well. Where what Woody really wants ultimately is he wants to be the beloved leader of the toys. Like Mary Robinette was saying, that sometimes the goals can be in conflict with each other, he misinterprets this to mean I have to be the favorite toy. To the point of becoming this incredibly venal selfish guy who's trying to get rid of one of the other toys. Buzz Lightyear shows up, he's the new favorite toy, and Woody is ready to sacrifice him completely. Because he has misinterpreted his own motivation. Then, when he finally gets what he wants and gets rid of Buzz, he immediately realizes, oh, no, I can't be the beloved leader of the toys if I have thrown one of them out a window and cursed them to be lost forever. So he spends the second half of the movie trying to be the beloved leader inclusive of Buzz rather than excluding him from them.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] I also think something really fun about, like, really understanding the motivation of your character is that it can help you, or at least it helps me, somebody who kind of writes forward, I'm a headlight writer, so I'll write what I understand until I get to the part where, like, the light I can no longer see what I was originally aiming for, and then I figure out the next part of the story, and then figure out the next part. A lot of times when I'm at those transition points, I go back to the character's motivation and think, okay, I got them to the edge of this cliff. What motivates them? A character who's motivated by being seen as amazing is going to, like, dive off the cliff in a really, like, spectacular way. Whereas someone whose motivation is more about care might say, okay, how can I make sure this is a safer cliff for everyone, and create a path down it? So, figuring out what that motivation is means that this… The story, even as goals change and plot points change, the story still feels like it has a nice emotional through line. Because it's still responding to what the character's motivation is and what that makes them want to do.
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that the character's motivation and their goals affect the actions that they plan, that they take, in the story. That changes the shape of the story. So when you're looking at the story… This is one of the reasons we wanted to include this in our idea… In the who and the lenses that… You can… It's not just, ah, this is a very juicy character. It's… It will affect the shape of the whole story.
[Howard] I think it's… Just in terms of story structure, if you've got an outline that on the surface just looks like it holds together beautifully, with twists and turns and pinch points and a great ending and whatever else, but your character motivations don't match, it's going to be a struggle to read. It's going to be a struggle to edit. If you've got a story where your outline is weak, but the character motivation is really strong, and at every turn of the page, at every hard return as you are writing, you are following what that character's voice in your head is telling you, you might end up with something where, yeah, you have to go back and edit and wrap a plot around that in some way, but you're going to end up with something that's a compelling read, and more of us are going to enjoy it.
[DongWon] I mean, this is specific to my approach to storytelling and what I enjoy to read, but I'm very much a plot derives from character person. Right? Like, I think when I see story problems arise, so often it's because somebody came in with an idea of here's what happens in the story and then tried to backfill what the motivations were that got them there. Sometimes when you do that, it's really hard to get motivations to line up with the actual events that you want to have happen. Versus if you flip it, and this is admittedly a little bit easier if you're a headlight writer like Erin versus a plotter, but having a strong sense of what your character's motivations are, are the things that can lead you to interesting complex plots. Right? As you have characters who want different things, and, for themselves, have their own tiered wants that are in conflict with each other, that's where complexity comes from. Right? When you have a character who wants three things, two of them are in conflict with each other, and they're trying to pick between those, and another character also wants three things that intersect with the first character's things, you have so many places you can go to, so many choices you can pick from. That's when the interactions, the intersections between these plot arcs are going to feel really nuanced and exciting because you have the richness of this whole tapestry that you start weaving together.
[Mary Robinette] It's interesting, as you say that, because I'm… I tend to be a plotter, but I do not plot my character arcs. I think that's because I come out of theater, so character is the thing that I've internalized the most. So I'm like, here are the events that are going to happen, and part of what I enjoy is this is how my character reacts to them as these events stampede across their goals. One of the things that I will do sometimes is that I will give my character a small goal at the beginning that's just like a cup of coffee, warm pair of socks, just want to take a nap. Whatever it is. I think of that as kind of my avatar of success, for now we are in a safe secure place because we can have the thing that we have not been able to have. As a… Related to that with the Glamorous Histories, once Jane and Vincent are married, I didn't want to do the will they, won't they kind of thing where it's constantly breaking a couple up. So I gave them the motivation for the all four of the second books, that all they want to do is get off the page and go have sexy fun times.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Things keep getting in the way of that. So I do think that if you can give them something that is not related to the plot in any way…
[DongWon] Yeah
[Mary Robinette] Shape or form, that it can help make things a lot more interesting.
 
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of things that can make stuff more interesting, we have a little bit of homework for you. So, we've been talking about motivation and goals. I want you to write a scene from a secondary point of view character. This is not something you need to include in the novel, this is… Or short story, this is an exercise. Write a scene from a secondary point of view character. Pick a concrete goal for them that is not the protagonist's goal. How does that change the way they react in the scene? Can you take those reactions and bring them back into the main scene and make it more interesting?
 
[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who
 
 
Key points: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I'm so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 05]
 
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 05]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] The lens of who. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Howard] And we've got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what's the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must've read a different book, moment you've ever had with a friend?
[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it's one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it's a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, "Oh, I love that dragon killing game." I'm… I was like, "Dragon killing game? I guess there's a side quest where you can kill dragons…" He was like, "Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there's no achievement for that." I was like, "Yes, because that's not what the game is about at all."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The game is not… That's not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.
[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[DongWon] I mean, it's called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.
[Howard] The point here is that, and I've said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can't count the number of times where I've come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They're like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I'm like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can't be friends.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.
[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I'm a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they're most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you're not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you're not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn't be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it's a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that's maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.
[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they'd be like… I don't know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think that's so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it's easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you're like…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don't get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you've created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.
[Mary Robinette] That's also… That's one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don't have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that's when you can start making a character that's multidimensional.
 
[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what's around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what's on the page. If you don't understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn't expect, that you didn't want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there's so many pieces to this that we're going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we'll be covering in upcoming episodes.
[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character's eyes, view, gaze. Even though it's obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It's always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character's having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character's eyes. They're going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.
[DongWon] It's important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It's why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I'm always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That's where tension comes from, because… But that's true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person's emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that's how you pull people into the story. That's how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There's… It's impossible for us not to do so. I think.
[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don't have to share… And I don't think any of us are saying this, the character's lens, in order to care about that character.
[DongWon] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don't want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it's still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don't wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it's really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.
[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don't necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don't have to do an awful character. I think that's fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Howard] I've got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.
 
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[Howard] So, we've talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character's biography before sitting down to write the story. But I'm pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where's the shortcut?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.
[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there's a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what's here] character's name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character's coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who's an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they're going to bounce off each other, how they're going to react, how they're going to see the world.
[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character's afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.
[Laughter]
[Erin] For every meal. Don't know why. Then I'll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I've decided that she's just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that's an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it's a very discovery… Because I'm a discovery writer, it's a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it's like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?
[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That's not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people's pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I'm now speaking as if I'm the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don't remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they're afraid to face, which is that they didn't depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.
[Mary Robinette] So, I don't use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don't use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it's the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it's the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don't have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I've got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn't know and didn't care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it'll be a different tool for each character probably.
[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we're giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it's the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I'm very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you're right, doesn't know what tool you used. They're enthralled by the story, they're charmed by the character, they're connected.
[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there's really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…
[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin's thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you're trying to be general, you're trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you're trying to be broad, you're saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn't work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can't control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that's okay.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That's not just okay, that's essential.
[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you're seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That's one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it's important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you're going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don't see it, if they don't get it.
 
[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it's because you did this and this and this, and the response is, "Oh, I'm so glad you noticed that."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "I didn't put that in there on purpose," is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, "I'm so happy you noticed that." Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else's lens. It's really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we're talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we're talking about let's give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] You're having a bad day, you're going to bring a different lens to the table. You're having a really fantastic day, different lens. It's just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.
[Erin] I also just think that's a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it's like you love your characters so much that you don't want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it's the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.
[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it's entirely about character. Right? You're always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character's perspectives. But because it's collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character's perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.
 
[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.32: An Interview on Character with CL Clark
 
 
Key points: What do you do when you think "It's time for me to write a short story and it should have a character?" Triage your characters, who would be there. Then pick a few you are interested in, and ask what they want, and drill down into the stakes. Big stakes or internal stakes? Both! Relationships. Do you approach character differently when you write novel length versus short length? Yes. If they are loadbearing, you need to flesh them out. How do you pick what to include in a short story? Not so much picking out what to put in, but what to take out. Pay attention to what you want to play with. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 32]
 
[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 32]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] An Interview on Character with CL Clark.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Mary Robinette] And we have a special guest with us today, CL Clark. You've been reading their work for a couple of weeks, now we are extremely happy to have them with us.
[CL] Hi, everyone. I'm CL Clark. I am the author of The Unbroken and The Faithless and several short stories. I'm really excited to be here. Yay.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, the reason that we picked your stories was we wanted to have this conversation about character. There were a couple of things that short stories offered the opportunity to do, which was to look at how you built three different characters, three different POV characters, in a very compressed space. We looked at The Cook, Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an account of several misadventures and how I found my way home, and You Perfect, Broken Thing. All three of these characters are really distinct. They have different backgrounds, they have different personalities, different wants. What… Like, what are you doing when you're sitting down and thinking, "Well, it's time for me to write a short story and I guess it should have a character?"
[CL] Okay. So, I should also say that I have been a really big fan of Writing Excuses from a very, very long time ago.
[Chuckles]
[CL] So, one of the things that I do, not with every story, but for many stories, I actually stole from you, Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] Oh. How convenient.
[Chuckles]
[CL] Very convenient. But I used to be a patreon on your Patreon, and you shared at some point this sort of plot process thing that you did. There's… At the beginning of that plot processing, you do this sort of… Or you did, I don't know if you still do it, but I found it really helpful. That you would do this kind of triaging of the characters, and, like, starting with who would be there at this whatever place or situation you'd be in. Pick a few that you'd be interested in in focusing on or that you're just mostly interested in. Then asking what they want, and drilling down into the stakes. I found that the more you figured out a character's world and situation, the better… The more distinct they became. The more distinct they became, the more interesting their story was and the more they… I was able to kind of hone in on what made this story different from other stories that I was writing.
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's… So, first of all, I'm super glad that that worksheet is useful. It is on the podcast website, so folks can grab it. But I also find that, like, knowing what is important to a character is one of the things that really drives this. Part of the reason this is coming to, like, oh, yeah, it's a really good reminder, is that I just wrote a short story with a character who is a secondary character in the Lady Astronaut novels, and wrote her as a main character, and realized I did not know her at all. It is that, like, what is she afraid of? What does she want? What does happiness look like for her?
[CL] Definitely.
 
[Erin] I was going to say, I wonder, because I was thinking about, like, what characters want. I think one of the really interesting things in all of these stories is that all of the characters have, like, big wants on the surface, like, big things that they're dealing with, like, I need to get through this competition, I need to… I'm in the middle of this war. I need to figure out what's going on with this lighthouse. But I feel like when I think about the characters and what they want, I keep thinking back to their relationships with the other characters. So I'm wondering, like, when you're coming up with this, are you thinking about those big stakes, are you thinking about, like, their internal, like, what they're dealing with on the inside, both?
[CL] Both.
[Chuckles]
[CL] Because I like… I really like writing stories about relationships and not always romantic, but often romantic. Just because I think stories are the most interesting for me personally when the thing that is getting in the way is another person. That other person can also be yourself. It's very often, like, I want this and I also want that, and somehow they're mutually exclusive. But how somebody navigates around another person, not necessarily just in like a physical, like… Now I'm going to beat this person and kill them and now I have whatever, but, like, negotiating or developing a relationship to get what you want is very interesting to me. So they're not necessarily distinct when I think of whatever the stakes are. But since that other person is usually one of the three characters that I kind of brainstormed at the beginning, they just sort of come looped together already. If that makes sense. Like, they're a web that I can start pulling on and tying together.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, that does make sense. Because there's that saying, everybody's the hero of their own story. So if you start thinking about what the stakes are, what the other person's wants are. One of the things that I particularly love in The Cook is how much that story is really just about the relationship. Like, there's this massive war that happens offstage that we spent a lot of time talking about how delicious it is to watch both characters change in each scene that they're in. The relationship to each other inflected by this experience that we don't participate in. We only participate in their relationship. That's, I think, one of the things that is really, like, really lovely and beautiful about having given them both something that they want, something that's driving them.
[Erin] Yeah. I also think it's interesting because, like, even though, like, the war is such a small part in some ways of the story, it casts such a big shadow. Like, it's not like you could take that story and be like, it's not a war anymore, it's a parade…
[Laughter]
[Erin] And it would be the same story. You know what I mean. It would be a very, very different story. I love that you're able to…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled thematic story]
[Erin] [garbled] planning or something instruments…
[Garlic yeah]
[Erin] But the amazing thing about the parade version of the Cook is such a different story, because we feel the impact of things that you didn't even show us. I love that you're saying that they come to you intertwined, because they feel intertwined. It feels like if you took out a thread from one, it would unravel the thread of the other, even if it isn't a thread that we see that, like, hugely on the page, like explicitly. So I just love that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Also, please write The Cook at the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
[Mary Robinette] Please. Yeah.
[Laughter]
[CL] Hey, a fanfiction. I do do a fanfiction of my own works.
[Erin] Do you really? Wait, wait, wait. Say more?
[Mary Robinette] We're going to do…
[CL] I'm sorry. Some of it is not as wholesome, so…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] I know what I'm doing after this. Okay!
 
[Mary Robinette] Yep. Have the same thoughts. [Garbled] novels, that's interesting to me. Do you find that you have to approach character differently when you write at novel length than you do when you're writing at short length?
[CL] Absolutely. 100 percent. But, like, just on the very barest level. Kind of what you said, Mary Robinette, about your side character that you didn't know at all when you actually started trying to write her story. Some stuff that I can get away with in a short story just doesn't fly in a novel. Because, for me, I can just feel it when I have to be with a character longer, even if there a side character. If they have any loadbearing at all, and they're not fleshed out enough, I can just feel it, and every scene with them feels a little flat. Or they… I don't know, they just don't feel… I've actually been dealing with this recently with characters in a couple of different books. There's just something about even scenes that they're not in or other character storylines, like main character storylines, that feel off if someone is supposed to be important but they're not fleshed out enough to them. So, like… Well, I'll just say so. In the novel series, in the Unbroken and The Faithless, there is a friend of the princes's named Sabeen who I love to pieces, but I had to work a lot on her, because she has not ever gotten a point of view chapter or anything like that, but she supposed to be really important to Luca. Enough that Luca make some questionable decisions about her. Or around her. If she's not, if Sabeen is not a strong enough character to deserve those decisions…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[CL] Then the whole book kind of falls apart. So… Yes. It's very different that way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I wonder if… As we're thinking about it, because I do tend to think of them as being in the same general toolbox, I wonder how much of it is audience expectation that in a short story, we know that the author can't include everything, and so we're used to filling in the gaps for them, but in the novel, we hunger for that, for those details that are not necessarily there, and we're with them longer too.
[Erin] I think it's also that idea of loadbearing. Like, I love that is a concept. Like, you're not holding up as much stuff. Like, as short story is, like, you're just holding up an umbrella.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And not a house. So the amount that you need to know in order to bear that load, seems like it would be a lot less.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean…
[Erin] I don't know if that is true for you, or even how you figure out what it is that you need to know to make the story work, either in short or in novel length.
[CL] I think, like… Definitely one of the things that seems easier in a short story is… Not easier, just for the characters that… Part of the reason, I think, that you can sort of sketch out just is partly reader expectation, but partly it's easier to work with negative space when, like, so much of a short story and the world building and the plot, all of it, is negative space.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[CL] Whereas with a novel, all of it is… Not all of it, but a much higher percentage of it is fully filled out. Like, main characters in short stories are not the fullest, most fleshed out things always compared to a novel protagonist.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I like the way you're thinking about it with negative space. That probably appeals to me because I was an art major. For people who haven't heard this term before, it refers to a concept when you're looking at a picture. There's the object that… The subject of the picture. There's a vase, or a person. Then the negative space is all of the stuff that is around them. That negative space is as much a part of the composition is the figure itself I think it's a very useful concept in short fiction. The one where you see it the most clearly is The Cook, where so much of the war happens in the negative space. But I think it's also… It's also there very much in You Perfect, Broken Thing as well. Just lines like one of my favorite lines in the… I mean, I have a lot of favorite lines. But at the end of the very first thing, you say, "This is not my first race." That is such a good example of like telling you so much. You're not describing all of the other races, you're not doing any of that. But you're giving us this negative space, and we can pour the rest of ourselves into it. I think it does a really good job of creating space for the reader in this story.
[Erin] I was just thinking about this negative space idea, and, like, what readers expect. Because I was thinking, like, if you leave… It's basically what you already said, but if you leave negative space in a story, it feels intentional. If you leave negative space in a novel, it often feels like you just forgot. Like you just forgot that part of a page. Like, I just stopped coloring and left. I'm wondering, though, in a short story, how do you know what you do need to fill in? Like, you've ordered a cast that's shadowlike… How do you know that you need to like make a reference even to a first race, which you didn't have to do at all. I could have been, like, no, I'm just telling you about the current thing. Like, how do you pick those pieces that give you enough of, like, an outline that the negative space comes through in a really clear, cool way?
[CL] That is something that I struggled very hard with when I first started writing short stories. But I do want to just drop in re negative space in novels, I do think that it can work. I just think it's harder to navigate with a slight… The current sort of expectation in the fantasy genre of a quicker pace kind of reads where things are a little bit more spelled out, but sometimes… I think I have a fair amount of negative space in my novels as well. Just, I don't necessarily rely on it in the same way as I do in short fiction. For, like, understanding and plot. But, back to how I was working on what to pick to put in a short story. I struggled for a really long time actually before I ever got short stories published with writing really, really epic short stories. Because I really liked epic fantasy. It's really hard to write an epic novel, or an epic sized world in 5000 words. So the first story I ever got published was called Burning Season. It got published at Podcastle. But I remember one of the critiques that I had when I was trying to get it ready was, "This isn't a short story. This is a novel." I was like, "Well, I don't want to write this novel right now. So I'm going to figure out how to make it a short story." It was basically not figuring out what to put in, but figuring out what to take out. So I just took out as much as I could without losing the meaning. So there was a lot of, all right, well, if I take out this, does this paragraph still makes sense? If I take out this entire scene, and I still get the spirit of what this scene was trying to get across? Basically, I just kept whittling it down and cut until I could condense it into its smallest form while still having the sense of the world and the magic that was required. And the history. So…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Fantastic. I think, let's make a little bit of negative space for our thing of the week.
 
[CL] Okay. So the thing of the week that I would like to talk about is a book. It's called Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times by Brigid Delaney. I did not know that I was going to be sharing a sort of pop philosophy book today, but it has been really helpful in reframing not just, like, the world at large, but my writing career or being in the writing industry. Because the idea of stoicism is primarily about letting go of the things you cannot control. By golly, the writing industry is a thing that not a single one of us can control.
[Mary Robinette] What?
[Chuckles]
[CL] So if you are looking into this as a career, whether you're in it or aspiring to it, you're going to have to let go of a lot. This could help you do that.
 
[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. So, as we returned from our negative space, I wanted to kind of switch gears just a little bit and talk about Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an account of several misadventures and how I found my way home. Even the title of it has a different character.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, The Cook. But one of the things that's also very interesting about this one from a character point of view is literally the point of view. You're balancing two character POVs, one of which you give us in first person, and the other you give us in third. Do you remember why you made that choice?
[CL] I think I wanted to make it distinct from… I wanted to make the lighthouse keeper distinct from the sailor, not the pirate. But I think it was because the lighthouse keeper felt more distant, a little more cranky. To me, it was the better way to get across some of that anger. But also, because I often find that two first-person point of use are harder to distinguish. So that was the easier way, for me, as well as I knew I didn't want to spend a lot of time in the lighthouse keepers point of view. So having these little tiny barks was actually more… It seemed more fitting as a… Like, a section break as opposed to a point of view, so it helped distinguish it structurally as well.
[Mary Robinette] When you said you didn't want to spend a lot of time in the lighthouse keepers point of view, was that… I mean, I could try to structure this in a different way, but… Why?
[Laughter]
[CL] Because I still think that the story that I wanted to tell was primarily the sailor's. Yes, it is about their relationship, and yes, the lighthouse keeper also has some changing and growing to do. But, ultimately, it was about the change that the sailor had to make in terms of selfishness and… I don't know, like… What she was going to give up to be with someone or not give up. That was just more her story. I didn't… Also, like, there are secrets in the story, and so having too much of the lighthouse keepers point of view would have been harder to obfuscate that without resorting to tricks I don't know how to do. So…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] that when you're looking at something where you are needing to withhold information from the reader, that it is much easier to play fair with them if you stay in third person, because of that distance that you were talking about.
[Erin] I'm thinking about what you just said about relationships and, like, whose perspective we're in in the relationship, and I'm wondering, like, does that… Do you just tend to find yourself drawn to, like… All of these stories have relationships at their core. Like, one character over the other, and like, that's always the person you are going in with? Does it ever shift in any way as you learn more about the characters in the story? And, like, whose perspective you want to use?
[CL] I don't think so. I think I… I think… I have a sense fairly early on of whose story I want to be telling and who has… Again, back to that idea of stakes, who has the most stakes in the relationship or has the most to learn or change from in their convergence. Yeah, so I think I go in pretty well. But it is a little different from my novels when I have more space to have multiple points of view. So, like in The Unbroken and The Faithless, Luca and Terran are both… Like, they have romantic tension but we get both of their perspectives in the novel. That is… It's very different when I have to show both sides, but it does just offer more nuance. Like, I get to play with the idea, like, with the sailor and the lighthouse keeper. The sailor has all sorts of thoughts about the lighthouse keeper. But we don't even get to see if all of them are correct. Like, she thinks that she's snotty or stock up. We don't get to see her rea… Like, the lighthouse keeper's reasoning for her snotty and stuck up behavior. Which may or may not actually be her being snotty or stock up. Whereas when you have both points of view, you can almost immediately cut that tension by giving their reasoning. But it creates a different kind of tension. Which is, well, now that we know they both have different opinions of this action, how will they resolve that? So, I think it really just depends on what kind of tension you're more interested in playing with. Honestly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that that's a really important thing to remind readers, what are you more interested in playing with. Remind our listeners. The… So often we get hung up on oh, this is… What's going to be the best thing for the market, what's going to be the best thing for this or that. But, really, it's about what do you want? As the writer, where do you want to spend your time and energy?
[CL] And, I mean, unless someone has developed this without my knowledge, last time I checked, we cannot read other people's minds. So sometimes it is more interesting to explore that without… With having a character who only has the same capacities that we do. So…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] We should develop that. No. We shouldn't.
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Laughter]
[No, no, no, no, no. Nooo.]
[Erin] Mary Robinette mentioned, like, markets, and it reminded me of something I was thinking about before we started recording, which is that, like, all these stories are in Uncanny. We don't mean to do it on purpose, but it happened. I'm curious, and also, you worked… You were an editor at Podcastle for many seasons. So I'm wondering now, like, what you think the intersection is between, like, what you're writing and where it ends up? Like, does knowing… Do you ever write for a specific market? Do you just think it turns out to be a good fit accidentally? I'm curious where that plays into your writing process?
[CL] It's actually shifted a little bit. Especially now that I do write a fair bit of my short fiction now on commission or invitation. Just because of timing. But I think the reason, for example, that I do have so many short stories in Uncanny has a lot to do with the kind of stories I like to write. I think if I were, like, by percentage, I think most of my short stories are either at Uncanny or Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It's no… Like, it's no surprise because those are the ones that I read very often. And, obviously, Podcastle, but I can't count that because I kind of helped build that taste. So… As an editor. So I know it. But, like with the other two, I think that I'm… I have so many stories in there because that is where I naturally gravitate. It's… They… Both venues make space for the second world stuff that I like to do. With Uncanny, though, there's a bit more flexibility for little more of the realistic. I don't tend to do hard or spacey sci-fi very often. So it's very often near future, and that tends to go best at Uncanny compared to other science-fiction venues. High character focus, at both venues as well. Oh, we're on the character podcast, so, yeah. That makes sense.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It's weird. It's like you write character focused fiction. Interesting. Strange. The first thing that I read of yours was You Perfect, Broken Thing. It's a story that I keep going back to when people are saying, "Oh, short fiction, you can't really do much with it." I'm like, "Excuse me." Because it's really, actually… It's only… It's less than 4000 words.
[Really?]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 3930, according to Uncanny, which has the thing up at the top. But it feels bigger in scope. I think that some of that is how specific you get in this story, in particular with the sensory details that the character notices. Like, we are… It is such a grounded story. We don't actually go that many places. We go to the gym, we go home, and then we go to the race. How do you think about sensory detail when you're thinking about character?
[CL] With that story in particular, it's especially sharp for me because she's a very embodied character. Most of my characters are, they're very physical, whether they're fighters or dancers or athletes. Because that's just something that I'm very interested in. But it was… That story, I wrote it while I was in some creative writing classes. So I was really, really paying attention to a lot of different things. But one thing that I had rattling around in my head was something from a teacher who said, "Pick something from your job." At the time, I was a personal trainer. So, pick something from your job, and then just write every single detail about your job. So, that was everything from what do I see at my gym, what do I here at my gym, what are people doing, what are we… Like, what are we drinking, like, what are we eating, like… So that was everything from the sweat to the pre-workout, like, the locker rooms, locker room smells, like there was so much of that. Then, the other thing that I did and I really enjoyed was I did a couple exercises from Ursula K Le Guin's Steering the Craft. One of my favorite things, so everybody gets like a two-for-one of recommended books for me.
[Mary Robinette] It's so good.
[CL] There is like one is the write a really long sentence one and one is the write a really choppy kind of crush type paragraph. So if you read the story…
[Oh!]
[CL] You can pick out which ones are… Came from two of her exercises. But they also have high emphasis on sensory detail as well. So…
[Mary Robinette] Those are great, great examples. I know exactly where… What you're talking about in each. Because we… As our listeners know, we talk about that during the podcasts. I think that that's actually probably a really good place for us to segue to our formal homework, since were giving you some accidental ones. Like, go read Steering the Craft and do that exercise.
[CL] Do every exercise.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I think you have some homework for us.
 
[CL] I do. So I… As you guys can probably tell, I pay a lot of attention to the other instructors and writers who have, like, stuff to share. So this exercise, this next exercise, comes from another writing teacher that I love whose name is Matt Bell. One of his exercises is about… It's called four scenes about power. The exercise is as follows. You will write for scenes. Whether they're in a short story, a novel draft, or just like just sort of like triptych quartet thing. One is a scene in which your protagonist does something to someone else, so they act upon them. A scene in which your protagonist does something for someone else. So acting on their behalf. A scene in which your protagonist has something done to them. So they're acted upon and react to that. Then, finally, a scene in which your protagonist does something with someone or something else. They are acting in collaboration with another character or a group of other characters.
[Mary Robinette] That is a great exercise. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
[CL] Of course.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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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 19.29: A Close Reading on Character: Barriers vs. Stakes
 
 
Key points: Barriers and stakes. Speedbumps and clinking jars. Use stakes that are tied to the character. Which stakes impact their sense of self. Setting up a barrier? What is the character's goal, and what stops them from achieving it? Barriers and stakes in ability, role, relationship, and status can interplay. Connect the reader with the character to make the barriers and stakes resonate. Use sensory details. Metaphorical heavy lifting.
 
[Season 19, Episode 29]
 
[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.
 
[Dan] 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 29]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Barriers vs. Stakes.
[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.
 
[Howard] I drove over here with some glass bottles in the back of the van that were full of what is essentially marmalade for making hot tea. For making, like, citron or honey [honey tea]. Every so often, I would hit a bump, and I would hear the jars clink together. There were no speedbumps. A speedbump is kind of a barrier. Slow way down for it. The glass jars in the back of the van? Those are stakes. If you don't slow down for the speedbump, you will get marmalade all over everything in the back of the van. So there is my one-trick pony explanation for barriers versus stakes. Now, let's get out some other tricks. More ponies, please.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So we're looking at You Perfect, Broken Thing by C. L. Clark for this episode. One of the things that I very much like about it is… Well, there's a bunch of things that I like about this story. But, it's a really good example of barriers and stakes. The barrier in this story is very clear and escalates. It's that our main character has to run a race. Not only… So, that's barrier one. Barrier two is that they have to run a race while they are sick. Then, we've got this additional thing that there are family members that are dependent on them, and the more that they practice, the sicker they get. The family members depending on them are the stakes. This is the reason that they're running the race. The need for the cure which is what they earn when they run the race is the… Is one of the stakes of this. So, it's a really short story, but there are multiple barriers and there are multiple stakes, all interacting simultaneously.
[Howard] One of the things that works so well for me with this story, and I wish it worked less well, because it's a me thing not a story thing, that is the description of physical pain. The description of… Well, it's this line at the very beginning. 
 
When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women's locker room. I can't stand anymore. But I know if I sit, I'll never get back up. At least, not for another hour. 
 
Oh, I feel so seen. What do the kids say these days? It's me. So much, it's me right there. If I sit down, I will never get back up.
[Erin] I also think that that… There's a great technique that's being used to demonstrate this a little later in the story, the, 
 
I use the railing like a cane. All my strength bent to keeping my feet for one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Ten, eleven, twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen stairs.
 
You just feel in the punctuation… There's nothing else going on in this sentence. At that moment, everything stops for the I need to get from step one to step fourteen, and I cannot think about anything else because it's taking all of my will to get past this pain. Without even saying exactly what's happening, it's coming through so clearly in that moment.
 
[DongWon] One of the things I really love to see is when I can feel the writer in the story itself. I can feel their perspective in it. I can… I get such a sense of C. L. Clark's own experience with exertion, with working out, with pain, with exercise, and it's coming through so clearly. I think, when you think about character, when you think about projecting and empathizing with someone who's not us, but also don't forget the ways in which you can utilize what is you to really enhance the reading experience.
[Howard] One of the places where the barrier and the stakes… The line between the two begins to blur, is the… If you've experienced the pain of that with a really tough workout, and have experienced the pain of, I think I've injured myself. We get both of these. "It takes a long time," I'm quoting now. "It takes a long time for the lightning pain in my ankles, knees, hips to dissipate to a dull throb." For my own part, when I work out, which is not a thing I do much anymore, but when I've worked out in the past, if I start getting lightning pain, it's time to stop. I am past the barrier of I am exhausted and I am into the stakes of how much do I really want to pay for the rest of this work out. Do I want to pay with not being able to walk tomorrow?
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a great example because it's so personal to you. When you're trying to choose a stake for your character, you're looking for a stake that is tied to the character. You can have big global stakes, but when we're talking about character stakes, it's something that is going to affect the character's sense of self. So… We have this, right in that first sentence, or in the first paragraph. "When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women's locker room. I can't stand anymore. But I know if I sit, I'll never get back up." So, that is directly tied to the character's ability. That… This very small stake. If I sit, I do the thing that I want to do, which is to sit down. That's my goal, I want to sit. But I can't. I can't. What is at stake is my ability to stand back up. I can't… I don't have that ability anymore. So when you're looking for those, you can interrogate the character's identity which we talked about in the previous episode to find the stake that is going to most directly impact their sense of self.
[Erin] Yeah. I think that the barrier… I think one of the things that really works for me here in terms of that identity barrier is if it's hard to sit, to stand, to climb, and the stakes are so high for something that is much more physical exertion than, Lord knows, I'm doing on a daily basis, then how hard is it going to be? I really feel when the race starts, I'm not anticipating that the main character's actually going to make it through.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] To be honest. Like, I'm like… Like, you are not even making it from, like, barely to the starting line. How are you going to make it…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] All the way through? There is a surprise… I think I get the same surprise in ability that the character does, which is great. It brings me on the journey with the character, because as Coach is learning, like, Oh, I actually did climb this wall, and did murder that person. I'm also learning that that's what they're capable of. Then that, actually, makes me identify with them more, and makes the emotions of the story hit that much more… Like, much more… With much more of a punch.
 
[DongWon] In what is a very brutal story, one of the most brutal lines, in my opinion, at the end of the first section when it just says, "This is not my first race."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] We understand that she has done this before, and she may do it again in the future. That's how she's thinking about it. Even though we see how much her body is breaking down, we see how much she's at the limits of her ability, but the idea that she's been doing this for a while is just heartbreaking, and it sets the stakes of how important this is, that she is going to keep pushing herself to accomplish this.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] I'm going to read a bit of the breakdown for you, after the break.
 
[Erin] This week, I have got to plug one of my favorite books of all time, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. This is a voice story, like, from start to finish, in my opinion, which is why I love it so much. It starts with this opening paragraph. "My name is Mary Catherine Blackwood. I'm 18 years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead." If that doesn't get you to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I don't know what will. So check it out.
 
[Mary Robinette] When you write a novel, there are often things you have to leave out. Scenes that predate the main book, situations that just didn't fit in, character moments that hit the cutting room floor. I've taken nine stories like that from the Lady Astronaut series and put them together into a short story collection called Silent Spaces: Tales from the Lady Astronauts. It's on Kickstarter right now. It includes stories about the arrival of the meteor in 1952, the race to the moon and Mars, and my Hugo award winning novelette, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. And there's one story, Silent Spaces, that is 100 percent new for this book. The Kickstarter funded in eight hours, so this is not so much a please help me make this, as a please help me make this even cooler. Because the stretch goals bring the Lady Astronaut series off the page and into the real world with tons of memorabilia, like patches, drinkware, teletype reproductions, recipe cards, spacesuits, and more. I hope you'll be a part of its journey and help out Silent Spaces on Kickstarter.
 
[Howard] Welcome back. I promised you some reading. There we go. Our protagonist is climbing a climbing wall. 
 
The colorful rubber is rough under my fingers. I think of Little and try to imitate her gibbon's grace. Each contraction of my lats pulls me higher and my biceps thrill at their strength. My legs forget their fatigue and I'm –
I'm a goddamn orchestra.
Until I'm not, and numbness webs across my back, a note out of tune. Maybe it started in my fingers and I didn't notice and now it's too late.
 
I have been in… I have been in that… Not exact position, not on a climbing wall, but I've been in that position more times than I care to count. It really struck home to me. The feeling of oh, I can do this, I've got this, oh, I'm fine. And then all of a sudden, there is pain and I realize not only am I not fine, I'm not fine and I'm in a place where I should not have put myself. This is another one of those barriers that blurs into stakes because we failed to clear the barrier properly.
[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about how to set up a barrier. Again, you're looking for something that your character can't get through. So if you think about what their goal is, like, her goal is to run the race. So, if she can run the race well and quickly, then story's over. Immediately. So you have to put barriers. The barriers are the things that stop your character from achieving their goal. So the first thing we do at the beginning is we establish what our goal is. Then we have a series of barriers. You can tell the reader what those barriers are, and disguise it as part of the character thinking. So when there's a part where right before the section that Howard read to you where she's thinking about, she puts the climbing harness on and her teammates say, "Don't do that. Shut that shit down. You just ran a mile's worth of sprints." "I didn't need them to tell me that. I calculated our needs the night before, our weak spots. I accounted for his lack of stamina, for Shell's lack of speed. My pain. Our weakness will come with us to the race. The wall is there, too, and I need to be able to take it." So, very clearly, we've laid out exactly what the problems are, we've foreshadowed what's going to happen in the race. Doing that allows the reader, knowing what the barriers are ahead of time allows the reader to anticipate those and to anticipate the failure points and also to be surprised when they play out in different ways. But all of these things are, again, still tied to that goal of I need to run the race and we've also been told what's at stake if we don't run the race. So it's the here's the goal, here are the things that are going to stop me from hitting that goal, and then when we actually get into the race, there are even more things that go wrong.
[DongWon] I still love that line, our weakness will come with us to the race.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's just… You just feel it in your chest when you read that.
[Erin] That's life, though.
[Laughter]
 
[Erin] Also, Mary Robinette, when you were talking, it made me think about the fact that there… The barriers also can exist in those ability, role, relationship, status, and that when a barrier hits in one, then maybe one of the others can be the thing that gets you past it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So I'm thinking about the other moment in the race, where, like, the strength gives out, and then somebody's like, "You got this, champ." Which, as a former [crossroader?] Like, there is something very powerful weirdly about some random person being like, "You can do it." It is the role. You are a champion. A reminder of the role that helps you get forward a little more. Then, when that runs out, it's something of the relationship.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] To the people that you need to bring this medicine forward to. So it makes me think about my own work, how can I create a barrier in one of these areas and then solve it with another, and then hit a barrier there and solve it with another, and sort of pass back and forth between the different aspects of character is a way to create story moments.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to be clear that there are other ways to create barriers for character. You can use milieu. So… We'll see this in the race itself, where the place itself is the problem. You can create things with the questions. That… If a character has a question, they can't get the answer. I'm specifically in this section, because we're talking about character, thinking about barriers to the character and to their sense of identity. But I want to be clear that barriers can, in a lot of different ways.
 
[Howard] It's important to note that the… This several extreme connection that I developed to this story grows out of the very close parallel between the physical experience in the story and some of my own physical experiences. It's challenging to set up a barrier or to set up stakes when that connection isn't apparent. For instance, the wizard who just needs to cast that spell right. But it's not tied to exhaustion or hunger or migraine headache or any… It's tied to some magical sense. Finding a way to communicate that so it is personal to us, the reader, can be a challenge. That's where, for me, stories that fail to deliver barriers and stakes in ways that resonate? That's usually why they fail. It's because, for some reason, worldbuilding didn't connect me to those things.
[DongWon] Because it's really about character choice. Right? To bring all these barriers and all these stakes back to creating a character that we are interested in, engaged with, whether we hate them, whether we love them, whether we empathize with them or not, it has to be about choice. So when this comes down to that moment of Coach in the mud pit, right? And making a choice about what she will do to win this race, what is worth it to her? I think that's one of the things that communicates so much about the character, about the stakes that are going to occur, and our understanding and compassion for her, even as she does something that in some ways is unforgivable.
 
[Erin] I also really like how we're taught a little bit how to read that moment. So, one of the things that I love is the series of, like, the very long kind of sentence paragraph of just things that are happening, that I will not read, because it's very long. But there's a series of things that is going on as she's in the mud and trying to get out of the mud. When I was looking back and doing a close reading, I noticed that we… It's not the first time we get this long sentence paragraph. We also get it with the meal the night before, which is also, like, a moment of, like, just really being in the moment. So, sometimes you can be in the moment with the food and enjoying it and the companionship. Then, the next day, you're in the moment of survival. I don't necessarily relate to life or death survival in that way, but I do relate to eating a good meal. I feel like the story sort of taught me a little bit how to take in that kind of sentence, and how to be in that moment with the character, and then used it for something that I was less comfortable or less familiar with.
[Howard] We actually talked about that principle in the very first season of Writing Excuses, a bazillion…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Bazillions ago. The idea of get one thing, one small thing, exactly right and we will follow you along for the big thing. If you can connect me with the character enjoying a meal, then I will stay connected when they are trying to cast color magic using their sense of [oxareen].
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[DongWon] I love picking Clark for character because they do embodied character so well. Right? They do sensory detail. I always feel I am in the room with them. I feel like I can smell the things that the character smells, tastes the things, feel the pain and the burn in my body.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's so wonderful to be so deeply entrenched in a perspective like this.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that I love about it is how they managed to do that with such often sparse description.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Like the section...
 
I don't want to tempt the ache in my body, but I don't want to die tomorrow without remembering the good things my body does. So we’re two bodies, in flexion, extension, the slow eccentric stretch and the isometric clenching hold, over and over, until we can release.
 
Like, she does not tell you what is exactly happening in that scene, but you can understand it and feel it in your own body. The other thing that I want to call out about that particular section that I read is that this is also one of the two moments where she makes… The character makes it clear that she is not expecting to survive the race. That her motivation has changed. Which, for me, also helps with that moment in the mud. Knowing that this is something she's doing for other people. That the relationship aspect of it…
[DongWon] Drowning another runner is okay because she doesn't expect to survive herself?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? There is… If she weren't willing to sacrifice that much, it would make that moment less sympathetic. Then, of course, we get the moment at the end which… I don't know why, it caught me off guard. I was surprised by it, when she turns down the shot for herself…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And gives it to the kid. In retrospect, it's, of course, and that's what so lovely about that moment is when you're doing character and you're setting up the stakes and all these things, getting to that moment of, oh, of course, this is what they would do even when you didn't see it coming, is so much what let's character drive a story. Because it means you're leaning into choices, it means you set up the stakes well. Right?
[Howard] It's ironic almost to the point of a pun to say, Mary Robinette, that example you read is a fine example of muscular prose.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because it's giving us so much information. All of the words are doing the metaphorical heavy lifting for us, explaining to us what's going on.
 
[Howard] I've got the homework for you. We're going to return to the speedbump metaphor. But you're not allowed to use my speedbump and my jars.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Write a short scene in which your character has to deal with a mundane obstacle. Then, rewrite it as if that obstacle now has life or death stakes. How do you shift it to make those stakes clearer?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.27: Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark's ...
 
 
Key Points: Short stories are like tapas, a bite-size treat. Relationships. Backstory. Choices. Ability, what the character can and cannot do, role, tasks and responsibilities, relationship or loyalties, and status, where they are in a power structure. Sequence and anticipation. Momentum or velocity. You are who you choose to be. Dragon's tears, and nebulous expectations.
 
[Season 19, Episode 27]
 
[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 about the Navigator of the Seas from September 14th through the 27th of 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 27]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark's Short Stories. 
[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.
 
[Erin] I am very excited that we're doing a trio of stories for this section of our close reading. Because I love to write short stories, but also, I think that there's a lot that you can learn from looking at one author doing a few different short stories. So, as a reminder, we're going to be doing C. L. Clark's stories, You Perfect, Broken Thing, The Cook, and Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home. Which were all actually published in Uncanny Magazine. I think, Mary Robinette, you were the one who brought these stories first to our attention. What made you think of them?
[Mary Robinette] So, I have known C. L. Clark for a couple of years, and one of the things that I love about their writing is that they can be extremely emotional, get deep into a character, within a very compressed space. One of the first things that I read of theirs was You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, even today, I had to reread just to prep for this, it still makes me cry when I get to the end. That's a really beautiful gift, from a short story, is to have this kind of in-depth emotional response. The other thing that I love about it is that there's a very clear character arc that happens, and the character is encountering several different emotional spaces. Not only is the character inhabiting those different emotional spaces, the style of writing that C. L. Clark deploys to convey that is so specific to each moment, that it's… I thought that it was a really good example of "Look at this! Look at how much freedom you have when you are attempting to convey character."
[DongWon] We hear the word character-driven a lot when talking about different kinds of fiction, different kinds of stories. C. L. Clark's work really drives that home. It definitely feels like the character has taken the wheel of the car of this story and has just taken us wherever they're going to go. Right? There's so many unexpected choices for surprising or nuanced things that the characters say or do that in each… All three of these stories will catch me off guard in a way that was so delightful and so fun. In a couple of them, really, making choices that were almost borderline [garbled] choices in ways that I think are so relatable and understandable and… I can't even be mad at them when they've done something that I so heartily disagree with.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. The other thing that I really like with this is the second story that we mentioned, The Cook, is supershort. It's like 800 and… It's less than 900 words. There is major action that happens offstage and all we're looking at in this story is the difference in the way to people are relating to each other, based on this major action that happens offstage, but the major action is not the interesting part. So it just gets quickly referred to in just a couple of lines, and then we go on. I find that very compelling, that… There are a lot of these character portraits that I find in their work.
 
[Howard] I want to tie a couple of things together here and clarify something. Erin, you said you love to write short stories, and, Mary Robinette, you mentioned The Cook. I love to read short stories. I was trying to figure out why, and I realized I think I like to read them for the same reason I like to eat tapas. I love being able to get in one bite a million flavors all at once. You think of a novel as… It could be a three-course dinner, it could be a pepperoni pizza with everything, it could be… If you think of it as a pepperoni pizza, or a pizza with everything, thinking of short stories as deconstructions of the pizza, as tapas, little bits of those things that would be in the full meal, and which, in and of themselves, are complete. That, coming back to the idea of just being a cook, that is the mastery that I found in reading these. That… They're small, but there is so much in there.
[Erin] One of the things I like is that… To just build on this pizza analogy, which I love, and is making me hungry, is that these are three different lengths of stories. There short stories, but one is this very tiny pizza bite type of like…
[DongWon] It's a bagel bite.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] trying to think of a name for them. It's a little… Thank you. Bagel bites. You have one that's basically, like, maybe a cross section…
[DongWon] A hot pocket.
[Erin] The hot pocket. You're…
[DongWon] I'm on it.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, I just want to be clear that the story is way better a story than a hot pocket is a food.
[DongWon] Hey, some people like hot pockets [garbled] hot pockets.
[Erin] The third is maybe a slice. So, each one of them… Because it's the same author writing them, there's a certain… There's certain things that are done in all of the stories that makes us… Like, there's cheese in all three of those things. Theoretically. But the way that that cheese would be expressed is different.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Similarly, like, things like a description of another person, all of these have relationships also at their core. But the way that people are described is slightly different when you have three words to do it versus a sentence versus maybe a paragraph.
[DongWon] One of the reasons we chose Time War is because there's like 3 to 4 different voices in that book. So it's really useful to break it down and compare. Short fiction, similarly, because they're bite sizes, the metaphor we've landed on, it's very easy to figure out how to talk about different aspects and highlight different aspects. Being able to cover a collection of short stories, a handful of them here, let's us really compare and contrast how the author is highlighting different aspects of character, drawing out different elements of character, across all three stories. So I think it'll make for a really dynamic and fun conversation.
[Howard] When we do close readings, the power of these, for me, is being able to reference the text, being able to read to you, fair listener, the words that did the thing. With the short stories, it's so much easier to find the words. Because, you know what, in this one, there's only six sentences to choose from that did this bit of lifting on that character.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find, having gone from short stories to novels, is that the skills that I learned in short fiction, I deploy in novel form so that I have more space for… Like, I establish a character very, very quickly because I've learned these skills in short form. Which gives me more space to have character development, to have other things that are happening and interesting. Whereas I see a lot of people who are early career spending chapters and chapters trying to establish this character and all of this painful back story of the character. Frequently, when you look at short fiction, you're able to establish painful back story in just one or two sentences, maybe a paragraph. Especially when we get into You Perfect, Broken Thing, there is so much worldbuilding in that that's just conveyed superfast in super economical terms.
[DongWon] Well, that's kind of the thing that I want to talk about is there something Clark does so masterfully here, which is have this laser focus on character and be so late with worldbuilding. So much of the worldbuilding is defined in negative space. Right? The Cook is a great example of this, but all three stories do this in different ways, where there is very little that they are telling us about explicitly here's why this contest is happening, here's why the world is like this, is why these people have been persecuted out of existence. All that is left in the margins of the story, and not addressed. Because they don't matter, unless they matter to the character interaction. So we understand the world enough to understand why characters are making the choices that they make and that's it. It's a stop at that point. I think that is so cool, and is such a great demonstration of how much you can do if you really hone one of the tools in your kit. Then, when you carry that into novel writing, I think when you have that more expansive space to do the stuff that is offscreen in these stories, you still have that strong foundation in knowing how to write character, how to write that element.
[Erin] Yeah. I love when you said the worldbuilding sort of just comes in when it's needed. I remember in Your Eyes, My Beacon, that there's this the high court, which is…
[DongWon] Yeah. But barely mentioned.
[Erin] Like, all of a sudden, they were mentioned and I'm like, "Oh. Actually, I think this is the first time I hearing about high court. But it's very cool that both of the characters are very familiar with it." But didn't… It didn't need to be mentioned to me until this moment. I really thought this was like sort of an audacious but amazing choice. Because the time that you spend explaining the high court takes you out of the moment between these two characters is there trying to figure out what to do within this lighthouse.
[DongWon] It barely comes up again, but is this constant threat throughout the story. I never forget about the high court for the rest of the story, but it's mentioned maybe twice, off the top of my head.
[Erin] Yeah.
[Howard] On the subject of taking you into and out of the moment, we're going to take a quick break, and be back in a moment.
 
[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is called… A role-playing game called Monster of the Week, which, as that name implies, is based around this kind of TV show Supernatural or Buffy or X-Files. The kind of show where each week there is another monster and you have to figure out what it is and deal with it. The reason I am recommending it is because it gets so creative with the powers that you have in the way that these powers help you to tell a particular kind of story. So, for example, one of the character classes has the power of getting captured by the monster. That is literally their superpower. The reason that that is useful is because getting captured helps reveal all kinds of things, where does the monster hang out, what kinds of powers does the monster have, and it fits into that genre of storytelling that you see on shows like Supernatural, where someone will get captured and then gets to talk to the monster or see how they work. So the sh… Game, once again, is called Monster of the Week and it's awesome. Check it out.
 
[Mary Robinette] Right. As we come back from the break, I want to give you a couple of very specific tools to be thinking about with character. Then, what we're going to do is, we're going to read to you the opening of… Just the first paragraph of each of the three stories, so you can hear how these tools are being manipulated even in this… In these tiny, tiny spaces. So these tools are about a character's identity. Ability, role, relationship, and status. We're going to dig more into these in the next episode, but right now what I want you to think about is ability, the things a character can and cannot do. This is all about how a character self defines. So the things they can and cannot do. Role are the tasks, responsibilities, that move them through the world. Relationship is about their loyalties. Then, status is about where they are in a power structure. So, as you are listening to us read these, think about ability, role, relationship, and status, and how they are manifesting even in these compressed spaces. Just these first paragraphs.
[Erin] I'll start with the opening of You Perfect, Broken Thing.
 
When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women’s locker room. I can’t stand anymore, but I know if I sit, I’ll never get back up. At least, not for another hour.
 
[Mary Robinette] The Cook.
 
The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. I’m standing in the inn’s common room and the other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. While some reach for a serving wench or boy, cheeks to pinch, a life to grasp—my stomach growls a monster’s growl. I should be slain; the growl is that fierce. I smell the roasting lamb, the unmistakable sneeze of freshly ground peppercorns, and garlic, but it’s all hidden behind the kitchen door.
 
[DongWon] Your Eyes, My Beacon.
 
She is light. Until she is not, and the lighthouse goes dark as the waves crash against the cliffside, the rocks at its foot jutting and jagged, a peril to even the most skilled navigators’ ships.
 
[Mary Robinette] So you can see how they are manipulating those things, even in these tiny spaces. That first one, we're seeing ability, the ability of the character completely manipulated. In the second one, we're looking at the tasks, I'm hungry and need to eat, and in the moment, that's everything that's defining this character. Then, in this last one, she is light, again, we're back to tasks, but also this role…
[DongWon] The status really comes in here.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] As she's failing to complete this task, as her ability fails her, suddenly her power and her status becomes very much in question.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think to do that with something that was really interesting I noticed between The Cook and Your Eyes, My Beacon, is, I think The Cook is very much relationship. The first time I see her, it's just a glimpse. It's about a specific other person, is being centered, really early on. Whereas in Your Eyes, My Beacon, when it talks about the lighthouse goes dark, a peril even to the most skilled navigators' ships, you can tell it's a role or status, I guess, because it's affecting all the ships. It's no longer about a single… It's not that ship. It's all the ships out there. That's where you can tell, like, it's a specific person's status or place in the world versus their place with regards to another individual.
 
[Mary Robinette] So this is just kind of a little bit of a preview of some of the things that we're going to be talking about over the next couple of weeks. And why we're so excited to be exploring the work of C. L. Clark.
[Howard] I want to look at The Cook again, because this, the shortest of the three, that first paragraph gives us so much information, and some of it is inherently mimetic, in that we are being given information by being asked to recall things that are not in the story. The sentence I'm talking about, I'm standing in the inn's common room and other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. Inn, common, warriors, ale. Pathfinder or D&D. You are there. Those are words that get used all the time. If you tell yourself, oh, I'm in a D&D setting, or I'm in a Pathfinder setting, or I'm in some sort of Western fantasy-esque role-playing game setting, except I'm telling a story, you know what, that's good enough. The story will play with that backdrop you've painted. We were told to paint it by being given those four words in quick succession.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly. It leaves so much more space to then explore character. So you don't have to do a ton of worldbuilding. That allows you to then… The negative space that DongWon was talking about before, that allows you then to just focus on the character. Again, in that… In The Cook, the first time I see her, it's just a glimpse. One of the other tools you're going to hear me talking about is recency or primacy effect. By starting with this is the most important thing in this story. The first time I see her.
[DongWon] It's funny, we almost get the inverse of that with Your Eyes, My Beacon, because we are starting with her, we are starting with the she is light, and by the time we get to the reveal of what's going on with the lighthouse keeper, I… Me at least, completely forgot about this opening. Right? Completely forgot about the connection between the character and being light. Then, when that comes back, it's such a thrilling moment.
 
[Erin] I also wanted to note that the first time I see her, it's just a glimpse… The first time. Because you know there will be a next time. I love words like that, that help to create anticipation naturally in us by telling us there is a sequence of events, and if you wait, we'll get to the next one in the sequence.
[DongWon] All three of these imply future action. Right? We have her leaving the kill floor, this sort of athlete pushed to her limits. We're going to get more about this. Right? You get the first time I see her, you get the lighthouse going out, and the consequence of that. All three are such a great way of rooting yourself in character, but with momentum. Right? I think sometimes when people talk about characters, it can feel very static, because it's a portrait of here's a person who existed at a point in time. But the thing is people aren't static, they are in motion. C. L. Clark is a master at giving us that velocity. Each one of these, I feel like I'm coming off the starting block, and just sprinting away into the distance.
 
[Howard] There's a line from… I think it's… I think Hogarth speaks it in Iron Giant where he tells the Iron Giant, "You are who you choose to be." I love that line. You are who you choose to be. Just show us a choice. Show us the character making a choice. Now we know who they are in that moment. We don't know what their next choice… What they'll choose next time, but we now know enough. It's motion.
[DongWon] Yeah. But I love how that also feels in tension with this idea of character as destiny. Right? They are going to make choices and they have choice… They have agency, which, we're going to talk a lot more about in a future episode, but also, there almost trapped by who they are and what they need to be, and watching them struggle against that is so much the dynamism of these stories. Of how do you make a choice when you have to go fight a war? How do you make a choice when you can't leave the kitchen? How do you make a choice when you need to save your family? That is so fun.
[Howard] I want to come back to the kitchen. One last comment about tapas and…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] About the length of short stories. I was served something called a dragon's tear at a sushi restaurant. Which was basically a slice of habanero, teardrop shaped, wrapped around a little nugget of wasabi.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, no!
[Howard] Okay. That is one bite of heat and tears and sneezing and regret…
[Heehee]
[Howard] And joy.
[DongWon] What did you do to piss those folks off?
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's… But, see, here's the thing. I don't want a plate of dragon's tears.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I just want one. I want to go on that ride one time. Okay. I'll go back to that restaurant and get another one. Because it was fun. That, for me, is what short fiction can do. I don't know what this is going to taste like when I start reading it. It doesn't have a book cover. It's not shelved somewhere in the fantasy or science fiction section. My expectations are nebulous.
 
[Erin] I think that is a perfect time to go to the homework, which I have for this week. Which is to write a series of sentences. Each one… Pick a character that you have and write that character's name is someone who… And then something about them. Then write it again, and again, and again and again and again. Until you run out of things and you have to continue to keep writing, because that will help you find levels to your character that maybe not even you anticipated.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.19: A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: An Overview and why A Memory Called Empire
 
 
Key points: Worldbuilding. Not just the things you invent. Spaces, relationships, and interconnections. Not just speculative fiction, worldbuilding is a part of any fiction you are writing. Where do your characters live, what kind of people live there, what kind of industries, schools, family... Worldbuilding gives you texture, realism, and plausibility. What you don't show as well as what you show! Worldbuilding establishes stakes for your characters. What's important. Legal system, physical infrastructure, what people value. Rules and systems as much as physical material spaces. Think about your establishing shot, that first scene. Not always a wide shot, sometimes a single detail can tell you a lot about the world. How much do you need to establish and explain? Beware of the "in a world" prologue. Balance show and tell. Two kinds of worldbuilding, decorative and structural. Structural things drive the story. Decorative is just fun. And sometimes things are both! Audience surrogate, fish out of water...
 
[Season 19, Episode 19]
 
[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.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
 
[Season 19, Episode 19]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: An Overview and why A Memory Called Empire. 
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Marshall] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[DongWon] So, to kick off this second series that we're doing of close readings, we are going to be talking for the next few episodes about worldbuilding. Why it's important, how it functions, and to dig into that, we wanted to do a close reading of Arkady Martin's A Memory Called Empire. This is a really wonderful novel. It won the Hugo award. I am very biased, because as a literary agent, I represent Arkady and I worked on this book, so I know it pretty well. But to kick us off here, before we dig into A Memory Called Empire specifically, I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of worldbuilding. What is it exactly, what are the basic mechanics? Just so we all have a shared vocabulary heading into doing the actual close reading.
[Mary Robinette] So when we talk about worldbuilding, it's really easy to get hung up and think that it's only about the things that you invent. But, for me, it's also about not just the spaces, but the relationships between people, and how all of the things interconnect. That it's… It is worldbuilding because you are thinking about those connections, and the connections are often the things that are significantly more interesting than any individual thing that you may invent.
[Dan] Well, it's worth pointing out, I think, that we tend to think of worldbuilding as being a part of spec fic exclusively, but regardless of what you're writing, worldbuilding is an important part of it. When I was writing the John Cleaver books, a big part of those books was figuring out how big is the town he lives in? What kind of people live there? What kind of industries do they work in? Where does he go to school, what is school like? What is his family like? Who are the other people that he's known? That helps give the town a lot of texture and a lot of realism and a lot of plausibility. That is absolutely a part of worldbuilding.
[DongWon] Yeah. What you don't show is as important as what you put on screen. Because any novel or any short story, whatever it is, there's going to be way more details and facets of this world than you can fit into your book itself. So, you don't have to invent every aspect, or if you do in an attempt to be realist, you don't have to show every aspect. The way I think about worldbuilding, and this kind of ties into what Mary Robinette was saying, is it's about establishing stakes for your character. Because what parts of the world you show are the things that are important to the people in your world. So, what the legal system is, what the physical infrastructure is, what rich people value, what poor people value, all those things are going to be part of your worldbuilding. So, as you're establishing what's important to your characters, think as much about rules and systems as you do about physical material spaces.
 
[Howard] You used the word establishing, which always takes me to establishing shot. As you're doing your worldbuilding, as you're writing languages, creating religions, doing geography, whatever else, at some point, the rubber will meet the road and you have to write that first scene. That first scene is your establishing shot, where you start giving people the details they need to understand what's happening here. If you look at a helicopter shot of New York City, at the beginning of something, you know that this is taking place in New York City, or a city. If you have a helicopter shot zooming over rolling fields of grain, you know that it is a completely different type of story. Just understanding that principle can help you set up that first scene so that your worldbuilding works.
[Mary Robinette] Also, along those lines, that establishing shot does not need to be a wide shot. That often, zooming in on a single telling detail is going to tell you a lot about the world more so than the rolling fields of grain. So one of the mistakes that I will sometimes see people make with worldbuilding when they are doing it in spec fic is the feeling that they need to do that wide shot. While there are times that you need to do it, and it's something that we'll see with Arkady's work, there are also places where just starting very, very tight in is going to serve you better. That decision is based less on worldbuilding and what you want to convey about it and more about the tone of the book. Like, are you doing something that's very intimate, are you doing something that's really slow? When we start looking at Arkady's, it's a huge empire that we're being introduced to, so it is both a wide shot and, I think, a more detailed shot. Which is a lot of fun.
 
[DongWon] Part of why this is so fun to talk about in speculative fiction is that when you're doing contemporary realism, you get… You've got a lot of shorthand, right? As Howard was mentioning, if you have a wide shot, a helicopter shot of New York City, you've established a lot of world that you don't need to explain to your audience. When you are inventing a new culture, so, as we get into Memory Called Empire, when you're like approaching this massive planet-city, there's so much you need to establish and explain. So, sometimes, in that case, when you do the big wide shot, as Mary Robinette was talking about, it can be very overwhelming and not give you very much information. So zeroing in on a very specific thing often is a way to get to more information faster. Because if you try to tell them everything at once, their brain's going to shut down. That's when we start talking about quote unquote info dumps.
[Dan] Yeah. This is making me think of the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, where there is a ton of world, the incredibly expansive world… He's famous for his worldbuilding, and yet, the first several chapters, and our introduction, our establishing shot, is all just the Shire. It's a peaceful little village with just a bunch of idyllic sheep and people eating happy meals together. Not actual happy meals…
[Laughter]
[Dan] But they're eating meals and they're happy about it. That doesn't tell us what the world is like, but it is vital worldbuilding because it tells us what the characters are leaving behind.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Dan] And it establishes, like you said, the stakes. This is what we're protecting when…
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] We leave here and go out into the rest of the very complex world.
 
[Howard] A common mistake that I've made myself in regard to delivering your worldbuilding to the reader is delivering it the way the late 90s and 2000's movie trailers did, "In a world." In a world, guy… He's the guy who pitches the worldbuilding in 15 seconds so that you know the pitch for the novel. Okay? He is not the guy who opened your story. Having a story that opens with some text telling you where we are, and then the first scene contextually gives me 80% of that information… You know what, we didn't need that text.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] We didn't need that. We didn't… I say we didn't. Maybe we didn't need the prologue of your novel. But consider if your prologue is "in a world," go ahead and just start with chapter 1.
[DongWon] Well, this is where I love the balance of show and don't… Show and tell. Right? Because we hear the advice all the time, show, don't tell. But when you're communicating worldbuilding, there's so much information to get across that sometimes you do just want to come out and say the thing. You do just want to explain it. I think a lot of our favorite examples are ones that don't do that, because it's more memorable to find an effective way of showing it without explaining. But also, sometimes, slowing down and just explaining, "Hey, this is how this world works. This is how this legal system works." You will have to do that, especially in speculative fiction, because there's too much to explain to let your audience infer it. When I find myself getting super confused by worldbuilding when I'm looking at submissions, it is almost always because they have tried to adhere to closely to just showing me. Then I'm like, "Wait, wai, wai, wait. I don't understand because this could mean 8 different things."
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] So, finding that balance point is the trick, especially early in your book.
 
[Mary Robinette] I find that I break my worldbuilding kind of into 2 categories, decorative and structural. So the structural things are the things that are driving the story. Like when we get into A Memory Called Empire, one of the things that's in there is something called a cloud hook. Arkady just like drops us into it, we just… Like does not really explain it, except in pieces, like, gives it to us as a character interacts with it. The reason that it's worth taking the time to have the character interact with it and spend that time with it, is that later, the cloud hook becomes this really important thing. But there's other pieces that happen in the story, like there are these little hummingbird-like things. We don't need to know where those come from or anything like that. Those are purely decorative. That, for me, that I will see people put in a decorative thing that there super excited about, and then people don't understand it, and they try to explain it, and it's not important.
[Laughter]
[Dan] One of the things that I always try to do in my books is put in enough of these decorative elements that the reader is never sure until it matters which elements are loadbearing and which elements are decorative. This is one of the things I love about the movie My Cousin Vinny. Because it has such wonderful worldbuilding, is you take these outsiders into this small southern town and they encounter the mud, and they encounter grits, which they've never seen before, and all of these little aspects of small-town life that just blow their minds. Then, about half of them become vital to winning the case at the end. Grits doesn't sound like it would be a loadbearing element, and it absolutely is. It's just…
[Howard] You make them thick enough…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was gonna say…
[Dan] So, yeah. It's the… That ability to… I mean, it's not quite red herring, but it's just as you are explaining the world and where your story takes place, the reader has that thrill of not knowing which elements are vital to the plot and which elements are fun and which are both.
[DongWon] This goes back to talking about how contemporary fiction can be a stretch in the imagination, because for 3 out of the 4 people here on this recording today, grew up in grits-eating country…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] So the idea that someone wouldn't know what they are…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Completely baffling to me when I watched this as a child. But, on that note, let's take a break for a few minutes, and when we come back, we'll start digging into A Memory Called Empire.
 
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[Erin] I think a lot of people have heard the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. But if you haven't heard that song and aren't singing it to yourself right now, then really, go ahead and listen to it. Because it's amazing. I will admit a little bit of theft here. My father had taught high school English for many years, and always used Fast Car is a way to teach his students point of view. I think it's because it's a great story in the song that's all about this woman trying to get a man with a fast car to run away with her, but you get these little glimpses from her life as it is, as it will be, as it was. It's a great way to look at how past, future, and present can all come together through one particular person's POV. So, listen to Fast Car, and if you want to be like my dad's students, think about what it would be like if that song was sung from the point of view of the man with the fast car and not the woman looking for him.
 
[DongWon] Okay. So, I would love to start talking about the text itself and why we chose this particular book. In some ways, it's a little obvious, because it's right in the name, it is about Empire, and when we think about big science fiction worldbuilding, we tend to think about space empires. We tend to think in fantasy about books like Lord of the Rings that have really rich, complex settings. I find the way that Arkady, the author Arkady Martine, approaches worldbuilding in this particular book to be really fascinating and nuanced and complex, but what about you guys? I mean, what did you feel about when this book was proposed, why we decided to settle on this one for the close reading?
[Dan] I was so excited that we chose this book. I read it… I have right here with me my original ARC that I read before it came out. It blew my mind. This is one of the best science fiction books I think I've ever read. Most of that stems from the incredible work that she's done with the culture. So much of science fiction is worldbuilding a new technology or worldbuilding a new alien or a new environment. Most of the work here is a culture. The story is, in large part, about getting to know what this culture is like and how their names work, and how poetry is vital to the things that they do. It's just such a rich book because of that.
[DongWon] Yeah. Talk about surprising loadbearing elements, it's rare that you get a science fiction novel that has loadbearing poetry recitals…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] That radically alter the direction of the plot.
[Howard] Also, unusual to get something with such an epic scope that has a single POV. We… I mean, yes, there are other POVs for interludes and for chapter bumps, but the story is being told through the perspective of one character. I think that's part of why the worldbuilding is so accessible and so effective. We have a stranger comes to town, really, is the… Well, not… Somebody goes on a trip is the story structure here.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] We are seeing a new place through the eyes of someone to whom this place is new, but she has loved it from afar and has studied it and is now immersed in it. Every paragraph… Every paragraph gives us tidbits about this struc… About this place.
[Mary Robinette] So, for me, the thing that is interesting and exciting is that it is not a single world. That every paragraph illuminates 2 worlds at the same time. Because our main character, Mahit, comes from Lsel, which is a space station. It is an un-planeted world. Has come to this planet that is part of this Empire, this massive Empire. So all of everything that she sees is seen through the lens of someone who grew up not on a planet, and also has had this deep, deep love for this culture, but has never been a direct participant of it. Interacting with people who are, who have grown up in it. So there's all of this really wonderful, like, very muscular writing that is happening, where we're using all of the tools that are possibly at our disposal. She's using interactions with the environment, she's using point of view, she's using conversation, she's using every tool. Epistolary things. Every tool to convey all of this rich information. But had to create, like, there's 2 worlds that we are getting information of, and then there's bits of other places and other cultures. Even within the world that we're in, there's multiple cultures, for both. So that's why I was excited by it.
[Howard] For me, one of the scenes that best calls that out is the café bomb. Because someone sets off a bomb…
[DongWon] We're going to dig into this very deeply in a couple of episodes, actually.
[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. But, the idea that on a planet, someone can…
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] Protest by blowing things up. But on a space station, that would kill everybody. It would never occur to anyone to protest by setting off an explosion, because that would destroy the world.
[DongWon] Well, she has a whole speech, actually, where someone did do that in the consequences were that were so extreme. Right? They immediately physically spaced everyone involved and cut them off from their [imago line], so they essentially just erased them from society in a radical way. The difference in scale of response versus what you can do on a space station versus what can happen on a planet is one of those fascinating little things.
[Howard] Actually, yeah. So it calls up her perspective of I come from this place…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I'm now in this new place. If this thing happened in the old place, it'd be completely different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's such a novel of contrasts, and the way Arkady uses that parallax of perspective to give you perspective on the whole universe. Right? Because 99.9% of the book takes place in one location, in one city. Really, between 2 offices, primarily.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It mostly just… The range of spaces in the book is very limited. But when you think about the book, your memory of it is so expensive, of a sense…
[Mary Robinette] Your memory of Empire.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Your memory of Empire is a sense of multiple worlds, of massive systems, of huge space wars. But the action in the book is very constrained and very limited.
 
[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say that on one hand, this idea of the outsider coming in is just My Cousin Vinny again.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Right? It's… That's such a helpful trick and a wonderful little tool to explain one culture is explain it through the eyes of an outsider. But it is rare to see the opposite done. Like, if My Cousin Vinny told us as much about Brooklyn as it does about little southern town, then that would be closer to what we're talking about here. The differences between them is kind of the whole story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] I love, in particular, how torn she is about this. Mahit… You get this sense that she doesn't want to love Teixcalaani culture as much as she does. That they are imperialists, that they are colonialists, that they are kind of absorbing and warping all of the other cultures.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] And that everyone who encounters them loses a little bit of themselves, but at the same time, she just really loves it. It's this kind of otaku visiting Japan since almost…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That she's like, "I'm so excited. I'm finally here. I've watched all of these movies about this."
[DongWon] Yeah. With the difference that Japan is not actively colonizing the United States. Right?
[Dan] Yes. Yes. Right.
[Howard] If it was a Chinese otaku visiting Japan…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] In 1940.
 
[DongWon] Well, this is why this book is so significant to me personally. The term we usually use for what you're talking about is audience surrogate. Right? You have somebody who is… Stands in for the audience, arriving at the place, and we see it through their eyes, so there's an excuse to explain all of the things about how this works. Right? So this is Kitty Pride arriving at Xavier's mansion, and we get to see oh, these are what all the X-Men are. Right? But in this case, Arkady pulled an incredible trick, in my view, where the subjectivity of the audience surrogate becomes very, very important. Because they are not just a visitor, they are someone who is resisting assimilation, resisting Empire, by the place that they are visiting. What does it mean to love the Empire that is destroying your culture? I'm Korean-American. My family is from Korea. Which was… This is a complicated statement I'm going to make, but has been occupied territory by the United States since the Korean War. Right? The influence and dominance of American culture on Korean society cannot be overstated. So the idea of coming from a colonized people, colonized by many people… Another example is the way Japan has colonized Korea. I love Japanese media. I watch animes. Some Japanese filmmakers are some of my favorite filmmakers of all time. Right? Whether that's Kurosawa or a variety of other people. Those things are very near and dear to my heart. So what it is to feel like you love the cultures that have actively or passively tried to destroy the culture of the people that you come from is a very complicated emotion. To see that represented on the page by this person who is not only trying to figure out how to survive in the most literal way, but also to preserve her identity and her people's safety. It was such an inversion of the trick of the audience surrogate, that I was completely blown away. Again, that contrast between the 2 perspectives gives you all of this depth and all of this complexity of the world she encounters.
[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing that she also did, in addition to that, the other layer of it, is that… Often the audience surrogate, the fish out of water, has no experience and everything is new. Mahit is a subject matter expert.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Fluent in the language, studied it, top marks. Knows the history. Still… Still, there are these enormous lacuna in her understanding. I think that the… That those gaps, those places where herself, her home, rubs up against… And her book understanding of a thing rubs up against the actual experience of it, those are the things that make the world building in this so meaty that I'm just so excited to be digging into over the next several episodes.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think many of us here have had the experience of living overseas are visiting overseas for a period of time. It's amazing how much you can do all this research, you can speak the language, and still the texture of actually being there is wildly different. Right? Again, this is a thing for me growing up as a child of immigrants, going back to Korea, is this culture I know so well in so many ways, but Korea is different from being Korean-American. Right? So, while it's not exactly Mahit's situation here, it was such a familiar experience of thinking you know how things are going to go, and then somebody says the word and you're like, "Oh, my God. What does that mean in this moment? I thought this meant this other thing, but now they're saying this…"
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] How do I navigate this social interaction that made sense to me through the filtered version I experienced or from watching movies? But then somebody's saying to me right now, what do I do?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That is such a fascinating experience.
[Dan] Yeah. I… With that is this idea of loving a culture so much and living in that culture and still realizing that you're an outsider.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] I had this experience living in Mexico. I lived in Mexico long enough to start to consider myself Mexican. I'm not. I would never actually say that I. But there is that bit of… I don't really fit in here. But I do, but I don't. This book explores that so well.
[Howard] I think the power of this novel lies in the fact that as readers, we come away from it understanding what it means to be Lsel…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] To be Teixcalaani. And we understand that there's a depth way beyond that that we could never have, because we weren't born there. We weren't raised there. That level of immersion is one of the things that I love about good worldbuilding and well presented worldbuilding. A Memory Called Empire pulls it off perfectly.
[DongWon] Well, I think that's a great note to leave it on. I'm so excited to dig in in-depth over the next few episodes about specific things about this book that communicate all the concepts we talked about here. So, thank you guys for joining us on this little journey here.
 
[DongWon] I have some homework for you in the meantime. That is, I would like each of you to pick one of your favorite fictional worlds, whether that's Middle Earth or the galaxy in Star Wars or what Memory Called Empire… Whatever world has spoken to you in your past. Then, I want you to write down 3 different attributes of that world. So, think about ones that establish culture, think about ones that establish legal systems and power, and think about ones that establish physical spaces. All of these things are going to communicate different things about what's important to your characters. So if you make a list of those, I think that's a great starting point to understand how you can approach writing a world that feels robust and consistent.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you would like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Hello. Yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But, a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So. Rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.
 
[Mary Robinette] Let's talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It's going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.15: Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools
 
 
Key points: Using a toolbox of ways to build tension in mysteries? Anticipation! Unanswered questions. A foundation of character tension, relationships and stakes. Handles or business ends of the tools? It's not just information, there's also emotion, revelation, and consequences.
 
[Season 18, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to talk about mysteries again, but now you have this whole toolbox of different ways to build tension, and you see why we were so excited about it. So. Let's start  talking about mysteries. So we've been talking about mysteries and anticipation. Okay. So how do you apply anticipation to mysteries? What are some of the classic ways we've seen it done or ways that you're like, "This! This is a really meaty juicy way to do it?" I can talk about... I was like, "I'm just going to riff until one of you has an answer…"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was anticipating something and then it fell through for me. Seriously, though, one of the things that I did a lot in the Spare Man was that I was using anticipation. I was using the anticipation of waiting for that body drop is one of the things in the first scene… Or second scene. In the second scene, I set up a fight. So that is building for the reader the anticipation that something is going to happen with one of these three characters. That then allows me to have… To keep you moving along. Then we get into the second scene… Or I guess it's the third scene, actually. The next scene where we have a scream. That builds an anticipation of oh, something has gone wrong. Which I then ramp up further by giving you an unanswered question of who is the screamer? So what I find a lot of times you can do with these is that you can take one of the tools that we've used and then use it as a… One of the tools we've mentioned and then use it as a handoff or a funnel point…
[Howard] A page turner.
[Mary Robinette] Page turner. Use it as a way to keep you going, and then give you another. Another piece of tension.
 
[DongWon] I'll say that those are the mechanics of a plot structure that you have there. Those are the beats that you used to move us along. What works really well, and the reason all all that engine goes, is you've established underneath that the character tension. Right? You've established the relationship and the stakes for these individuals of like her trying to figure out how do I relate to this other person, what is marriage going to be like for me, and also like dealing with her own trauma, her own history. Like those are all questions you've introduced fairly quickly. I cannot remember exactly when each piece of that comes in, but by the end of the first few chapters, I have a lot of questions about the future of this character, the future of her relationship, the future of her sense of self, that are pulling me through all of this as your giving me the plot details and the unanswered questions that layer on top of that.
 
[Howard] Coming back to the toolbox metaphor for a moment, as we talked about these as tools, we're kind of talking about the business end of the tool. The way the blade of the screwdriver fits into the head of the screw. The way the hammer slams the head of the nail. We haven't talked a lot about the handles of the tools. For my own part, I don't start with anticipation or juxtaposition or conflict. I start with what is the answer to the original unanswered question of who committed the murder. Then I start making notes about where I want readers to feel the different things. This is where I want them to be excited. This is where I want some sense of wonder. This is where I don't know what's going on or what's going to happen, but I've got to get them to turn the page, so here's a question mark. Then as I sit down with the manuscript, that's when I open up the toolbox and start looking at, "Oh. Oh. This is where I'll throw in micro tension, because the characters are talking about things that don't really matter, but I need to explore them. I need to explore the characters so I need them to be passionate about what they're talking about and to be perhaps a little bit in conflict during the discussion." So my approach to the use of the tools is… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, I will say that with Spare Man, I actually started with not who committed the murder, but how the murder was committed. Because for me, the thing that is interesting in a mystery is the puzzle. That puzzle is around the murder. So I figured out what is a really interesting way to murder someone. Then who do I have that can commit that murder. That was actually the way that I built that particular thing. Which… What I'm hoping that you're noticing, dear listeners, a thing that we keep talking about is that there is no one right way to do things. Each of these is a correct way, it's just whatever is feeding you as a writer.
[DongWon] Yeah. I don't want people to come away from this feeling like with all of these different tools, you have to have some kind of master plan. Right? That you need to know, "oh, I'm going to deploy a red herring here, I'm going to deploy tension here, I'm going to deploy this that and the other there." Because I think a lot about the apocryphal thing about Agatha Christie, about her not knowing who the murderer was until Poirot said it on the page or something along those lines. Right? You can approach it from… I mean, yes, you do need to know which end of the tool's the business end, and which is the handle, but you can deploy these tools as you go and sort of see where that leads you and sort of build up to something that feels really consistent. A lot of making a mystery feel right is a thing that happens in editing process as you go back through it and say, "Hum. I was giving a little too much information here. I need to withhold that there." Or, "This is really confusing because I knew what was going on, but I didn't set that up properly two scenes ago." Right? So, mysteries. Think of them more as magic tricks rather than like perfectly executed plans. Right? You get to go back through it and adjust and tweak and make sure everything's set up right for your audience to get there when they get there.
[Dan] So, as we've been going through these last few episodes, which really stood out to me talking about all these different forms of tension and how to use them are overlaps between them and ways to solve multiple problems with a single tool. So, for example, we've talked a lot about how we need to care about the characters in order to be invested in them. That is a perfect match with the concept of micro tension, because if you give your character enough texture that they have a hobby or a job or something that they love outside of the plot, then suddenly you've given them something that they can be working on in the background of a scene or these other kinds of little micro tension problems they can be dealing with while trying to solve or trying to ignore the much larger mystery and problem that they are faced with. That solves a lot of things all at once.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example… Sorry, I'm going to use… A great point, and I'm going to use the character of Fantine in Spare Man as an example of that. So, there's two things, two micro… Two points of micro tension for her. One, she's doing crochet for much of the thing. At one point, she is so distracted she makes a mistake, and in yelling, she's mad, not just about all of the other things that are happening, but about the fact that she had to rip out 20 rows. It's like having to rip out 20 rows has no bearing on the overall mystery at all. But it is… It's a piece of character detail and it adds just a little bit of micro tension. Then the other piece for her is her weird pattern of cursing. Because she had made a deal with her priest that she wouldn't use swearwords. So she curses by a combination of Shakespeare and Catholic martyrs. Again, she hits a point where she's so upset that she accidentally does swear. Again, it's just this tiny bit… Little bit more tension that I'm applying to that seen, and texture to the character, which is a lot of fun.
[Dan] Fantine ends up as a lot of people's favorite character, or one of their favorite characters. Because of all these things that you've done.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. Hashtag team fantine or team gimlet, apparently.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Why don't we take a moment and pause? We'll come back and talk about some of our other tools and how to apply them to mysteries.
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Mark Oshiro's new young adult novel Into the Light. It is a very twisty thriller that's told in a nonlinear way. It focuses on a young teen named Manny who was first pulled into a cult called Reconciliation and then subsequently kicked out of said cult. We sort of meet up with him while he's on the road after all of that. His sister stayed behind, and so he's trying to reconnect with her. Then sees on the news that a dead body has been found in the hills near where Reconciliation is based. There's multiple timelines, there's different POVs, as we try to get to the heart of what exactly happened at Reconciliation. What is his trauma around his experience with this cult, and what is it like to navigate the world as a queer adoptee who's been sort of neglected by the system. It's a really fantastic pointed sharp funny weird novel. I think people are going to be very excited to find the spoiler at the core of what makes this novel tick. It's a real thrill.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, when we're talking about mysteries and tension, there are a number of other tools that we have not even gotten to yet. One of them which… One of my favorites and one of the core things is the unanswered question. So we talked about that a little bit in the first one. We've got a whole episode on unanswered questions. But when we're applying them specifically to mysteries, one of the things I want to look at is not just the ways to do it, like misunderstanding the question, but also some of the dangers in that. Like, what are some of the pros and cons of delaying an answer in a mystery?
[Dan] Okay, so I've got a pretty good example of this one. One of the things of the week that we promoted earlier was my new book, Dark One Forgotten. Which is a mystery and it is a prequel to a Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel. What that means is that even though it is structured as if you are listening to a true crime podcast, you go into it knowing that there will be a supernatural angle. You know that eventually… It's got Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson on the cover, there's going to be magic or some kind of speculative element to it. Especially if you've read the novel it's based on, you know exactly how the mystery gets solved. So the problem that I ran into in writing it, and that I had to send multiple drafts over and over through my writing group to figure out is, it is obvious to the reader what's going on. We know that the reason no one can remember the killer or the victims is because there is some kind of magic effect. So, how long can I drag out that anticipation for the reader for the characters to finally catch on without making them seem stupid or without frustrating the audience? It's difficult. It was very hard to write a story that kind of fundamentally ignores one of its core premises for the first half or so of the story. So there is that unanswered question like who's the mystery, but the fact that it's… Or who's the killer. The fact that it's a prequel means that I needed to start… And here's the solution. Here's why I'm saying all this. What I eventually had to do was to just give you as much information as possible. It was essentially a story about tying off every possible loose end before they finally conceded that maybe magic was real. Because it takes place in our world. They aren't predisposed to believe it, even though the audience is predisposed to expect it. So, three episodes of them exhausting every possible other explanation made it interesting enough to get through that. So the anticipation and the unanswered question was very difficult to deal with.
[Erin] I think this gets to something that we've talked about before. Which is that sometimes you can give the answer to the reader or to the listener. I think it's what's really cool about that example is the question, it seems like to me, becomes less is there magic involved with this, because everyone knows the answer is yes, but more how will people deal with the revelation that magic exists in the world? So that's a different unanswered question. So sometimes shifting from the informational question… I think one of the dangers sometimes in mystery is you think everything has to be about information and plot. But, sometimes some of the most interesting unanswered questions are the ones about emotion, revelation, and consequence, as opposed to the ones about who did what to whom at what point.
[Howard] Touching on something that Dan said toward the beginning of this episode, and something that Erin just said, we've talked about how it's like setting up a magic trick. In the second edition of Xtreme Dungeon Mastery, Tracy and Curtis Hickman point out that magicians entertain purely by deception. When they explain how the trick is done, it just kind of makes us feel dumb for not having seen it. Which is why they typically don't do it. Storytellers entertain by setting up deception, and then with revelation. Erin, you use that word twice. So when I think of unanswered questions as a tool, I'm always thinking of the revelation that is going to come at the end. The reveal of this is the answer to the question, this is how it was done. The magician typically won't show us that they were using a trick knife with a collapsible blade, but in Knives Out, famously, we are told about a trick knife in the first act, and we are shown the trick knife at the very end of the show.
[Mary Robinette] Interesting that you say that, because I have some friends who are magicians and we talk about the overlap between magic and story all the time. Because one of the things that a magician must do is that they must tell the rea… Tell the viewer what they're about to do is impossible. Because you go into a magic trick knowing that they're going to do something. I think that that is also one of the things that you have to do, in different ways, but it's still a narrative thing, that you using a lot of these tension tools in a mystery to signal to the reader that this is actually hard to solve. A lot of the conflict things that you're using are ways to say this is… There are reasons that this is hard to solve. Much like what Dan was talking about with, well, why don't they just think it's magic. There have to be… It has… You have to present the impossibility to them in order to get the payoff of, "Ah, here's the solution and the answer." So a lot of the tools that we've been talking about are tools that you can use for that.
[DongWon] I think one thing that's important to remember in all of this is that there's a way in which mysteries and the structure of a mystery is a fantasy. You are selling people on the idea that there are easy answers to complex problems. That there is a trick behind the whole thing. I think when we think about unanswered questions, sometimes it is almost more interesting to not answer every single unanswered question you put out there. Right? Like, sometimes you have a Darrell who's still wandering around the island and nobody knows why he's there. That adds this extra layer to what you're doing and you can sell the fantasy of, "Wait. We do know who the killer is. We do know what happened. We do know what exactly was done to pull this magic trick off." But things are hidden from the audience in that. Right? There are answers that we won't see, and that's okay. I think that can add a really interesting layer to how your presenting your mystery, how your presenting your answers, and what questions are you really asking in the story that you're telling.
[Mary Robinette] I think these are all great points. I'm hoping that our listeners have some new tools for when they're going back into their mystery and can apply all these different forms of tension to the mystery.
 
[Mary Robinette] We also need to set you up for success for the next episode. We are going to be doing a deep dive on The Dark One. Dan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what people should do?
[Dan] Okay. So, as we explained several episodes ago, our next little series that were going to do, we'll start with a deep dive on Dark One Forgotten, an audiobook by Brandon Sanderson and me. Then we'll have some other episodes spinning off of that. So, in preparation for that, you've had several weeks, you have one more week left to listen to Dark One Forgotten. This is audio only because it is a fake podcast. You can get it pretty much anywhere that has audiobooks. Audible and LibroFM and Google Playbooks and Barnes & Noble and all these other places. So it's about six hours long, a little more. Listen to that. Then get ready for next week, when we are going to dive deep into everything about its structure and its… The process of creating it and why I love it so much.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that we're doing these deep dives, and then building episodes off of them, is so that you can see the tools that we use and hopefully start to build a toolbox of your own. Which brings us to our homework assignment.
[Howard] Okay. So. Yeah, part of your homework is if you haven't listened to Dark Ones yet, go listen to Dark Ones. But the other part of your homework is make a list of the tools which you regularly return to when you're writing. That might be MICE Quotient, three act structure, Hero's Journey, whatever. Just make a list of the tools that you already use regularly. Then make a separate list of the tools you know about, perhaps tools like tension via micro tension, conflict, anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions. Make a list of the tools you know about but don't think you're using yet. Then, try to move one tools from the second list to the first one.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go build a toolbox.
 
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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 14.34: Author Branding
 
 
Key Points: Branding, or making you and your product identifiable. How do you define your brand, how do you control it? Think about Hamburger Helper! What are the expectations, what kind of relationship do you have? What is the public persona you want to have? Separate your private person from your public persona. It's a version of you, but selected. Think about what happens if you become famous. Be careful to build a brand that is big enough for the range that you want to work on. Think about a career brand, with series and book brands. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 34.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Author Branding.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
 
[Howard] We are talking about branding.
[Mary Robinette] Not Brandon.
[Howard] Not Brandon.
[Dan] Not Brandon.
[Howard] He's not even in the room, because that would make it too hard to keep the words straight, because I always swallow the ing.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Branding. I came from a marketing background. When we talked about branding, it was always huge, and we always tried to break it down into pieces that were easy to assimilate. I can't imagine it being any different in the publishing world.
[Dongwon] One of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is when I talk to writers, they treat branding as this taboo word. Right? If you say branding, then suddenly you've violated some sacred trust.
[Mary Robinette] It's supposed to be about the art!
[Dongwon] The Muses have now abandoned you and you'll never write again.
[Mary Robinette] The Muses are fictional.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] They have excellent branding. The reason I want to talk about it is because it's unavoidable. If you are publishing books, if you are asking people to go to the bookstore or go to the Internet and pay money for your words, you are already a brand. There's no way to escape it. Whether you find that to be a dark apocalypse or a blissful mercantile utopia is irrelevant, because you have to live in it. So the more you can understand how branding works and what your role is in defining your brand and controlling your brand, the more you're going to be able to build a brand that you're happy with, you're comfortable with, and that is sustainable for you over the course of your career.
 
[Howard] A good way to examine this for those who just don't like the idea of a brand is to consider the grocery store. There are many people who have a favorite box dinner, like Hamburger Helper or Zatarain's or something. And there are folks who say, "Oh, that's terrible for you. You shouldn't buy those branded goods. You should go get fresh fruits and vegetables." Okay. When I walk into the grocery store, and I look at the fresh fruits and vegetables, that is the brand that I am looking for. It doesn't come in a box. It was fresh. Doesn't have to have a sticker on it that says what the brand is. But there is a judgment that I have premade for this thing that I am looking for. As an author, yeah, you can tell yourself you don't want to be a box dinner, you want to be more like a fresh fruit and vegetable. That's still a brand.
[Dongwon] To put it in publishing terms, you'll often have people who will say, "Oh, I don't want to be a brand, I want to be like this authentic author." The David Foster Wallace's of the world. Right? Somebody who's a curmudgeon, somebody who doesn't participate in the system. I hate to break it to you, but that is their brand. It's extraordinarily well defined and extraordinarily effective. You will find someone who… You won't find a writer who is better branded than David Foster Wallace was.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you guys are kind of hitting on that I just want to break out a little bit is that what we're talking about here is expectations and relationship. These are the two things that you are manipulating when you're manipulating a brand. So when we talk about going to your favorite coffee shop, you don't go there because they have the best coffee in the city. Like, the one you go to over and over again. Every now and then, depending on who you are… And those of you who I know are serious coffee drinkers, I apologize. But… 
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The point being that frequently the reason you go to this coffee shop is because of a barista. Or because of the staff, and they recognize you, and that it feels like there's a relationship. This is one of the things that encourages brand loyalty, why you keep going back. Why, often, you will go to someplace where it's not the best coffee in the city. That it's because of that relationship. So, as an author brand, a lot of what you're doing is building the relationship with your reader. Then, the other aspect of it is their expectations. Giving them a sense of what that relationship is going to be like, what sort of experience they're going to have. So, like the fresh fruit experience is very different from the boxed dinner experience. Both of which are valid, and both of which have audiences that appeal to them. But you want to know which one… Where you're landing. So, like, I have the puppeteer brand. That tells people a little bit about the kind of expect… You can reliably expect that at least once an episode, I am going to talk about puppetry at some point. But the other thing that I have is that I'm open about aspects of my personality. Like, I'm open about the fact that I have depression. These are… This is part of the relationship. But I'm also… There are things about my life that I don't talk about. So you can have an authentic open honest relationship with your… As part of your brand, and not have to word vomit your entire emotional experience.
[Dongwon] One important thing to think about, and this is one of the differences between having a personal brand versus a corporation having a brand. Right? Those do operate slightly differently. Is, as a person, really what you're branding is having a good set of boundaries. What you're going to start doing is drawing lines around certain things that you're comfortable talking about in public with your fans and certain things that are only for you and your close personal friends. Once you are a published author, you are no longer just a person. You are now a person and a public persona at the same time. Knowing when you're talking to a person, if they have expectations of the public persona version of you or the actual you is really important. When I see this relationship go awry, when I see fans get their feelings hurt, or when I see other writers interacting in a way that ends up causing drama, it is often around this disconnect. So having a crystal clear idea of what is you, what do you keep for yourself versus what do you put out into the world is going to help you manage that and make being a public persona much more sustainable for you, and much less taxing when you're at a con or online or whatever it is.
 
[Dan] On that note, it's important, I think, especially for an author, when it's just one person instead of a corporation, you're not so much defining a brand-new identity for yourself as you are defining a version of the self that already exists. I… My brand is basically me, but slightly flavored for the Internet or whatever. It's not an entirely different person that I have to think of and then maintain constantly. That's more work than you need to put into this.
[Dongwon] You just find the murderer within and put it on stage.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Part of what you're describing here is a compartmentalization. In 2004… 2003, I think, I was still working at Novell, and I was briefing a bunch of salespeople. I was the hard-hitting, knows all the facts, project manager. I was managing an audience full of people who were really kind of hostile, because the salespeople don't always want to sell what it is that you've made. You need to convince them to do that. At the end of the presentation, one of the guys came up to me and said, "So. My son read stuff on the Internet." I said, "Oh. Okay. Yeah. I'm the same guy." "No. Hear me out. He reads this comic strip and he says it's by a guy who works at Novell." "Yeah, I'm the same guy." "No, hear me out. It's this guy, he's named Howard." I'm like, "Dude. It's me." He stopped for a moment and stared at me, like, it can't be you. That was where I realized that my brand as a cartoonist was incredibly different from my brand as a guy who is talking to the salespeople. To the point that this person couldn't even imagine that I was the same person. Do I feel two-faced for that? Not really. Because I had two different jobs. I'm the same guy doing both of them. That was one of the first points where I realized that I never wanted the brand of me as a project manager to be the person that people see as the cartoonist. Because the project manager was the designated jerk.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That's not the guy I want to be.
[Dongwon] But one thing I want to point out there is that both were authentically you. Right?
[Howard] Yes.
[Dongwon] Therefore, both are sustainable almost indefinitely, right? You may not want to sustain the angry project manager guy because that sounds exhausting after a certain point in time, but it's really important that you aren't constructing a totally artificial brand. If your brand is the exact opposite of your personality, you might be able to sustain that for a few years, but at some point, it's going to start breaking down, and just the mental effort it's going to take to keep that up online every day or in newsletters or personal appearances, it's going to be very draining. It's very important to try and make sure that when you're choosing your brand and you're developing it, you're making choices that are really organic to you.
 
[Howard] I've got the book of the week. I got to read… About a year ago, I got to read Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone. I've been waiting for this thing to hit the streets ever since then, because I was so excited by it. It is like post-singularity space opera launched by a near future sci-fi thriller. That twist where we make the shift from the near future thriller to the post-singularity was beautiful. I mean, it wasn't seamless because I'm like, "Well, that was abrupt." But it is beautiful. I loved loved loved loved loved this book. It is… I don't need to say anything about it other than that. Max Gladstone and Empress of Forever. When I was tweeting with some of my author friends about it, I'm like, "Oh, I just got to read this thing by Max." The response was, "Uh. Oh, that thing with the Empress? Oh, that thing! Oh, that thing." Nothing but enthusiasm. My friends, you need to get this book. Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I'm just going to say as a counter to creating a brand is that it is actually possible to create a brand that is artificial. The person I'm thinking of is Gail Carriger, who's open about the fact that she has created a persona as her author persona. There are absolutely personality traits that are completely in line with the real person. But the physical nature of the brand, the choice in clothing, the set dressing, the costuming of the brand is different than the real person. That was a conscious choice, because she wanted to be able to go to conventions and go incognito. So while it would be lovely if this was a concern that all of us had that what happens if I become famous… It is actually a thing to think about. Like, what happens if you become famous? Because George R. R. Martin can no longer move through space without anyone saying, "[gasp] You're George R. R. Martin!"
[Howard] He must traverse now with a bodyguard of sorts. A handler.
[Dan] That can be something as complicated as what Gail does, and you're absolutely right. I should have thought about her earlier. Or it can be something as simple as I wear my hat. In Latin America, which is the only market in which I get recognized on the street, I can take that hat off and turn invisible and nobody knows who I am. Then put it back on and be recognized. I did want to talk about a problem that you can have with branding. I'll use myself as an example. But first, I'm going to use… I'm going to go back to Hamburger Helper, which is where Howard started us off. So let's imagine the beginning of Hamburger Helper. I don't know what the first flavor they had was, but I'm going to pretend like it's stroganoff.
[Howard] I think it was helper flavor.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Let's say that some guy invented this cool stroganoff thing, and he's like, "Oh, I can sell this. People can make it in their homes for dinner, and it'll be great." He could have decided that he was just going to be the best stroganoff for dinner guy in the world. But what he… He took the time to look at it and say, "Actually, no. What I want to be is the person who helps you make your own dinner, regardless of the flavor." So he focused his brand in that direction instead, and Hamburger Helper now represents much more than that initial stroganoff idea.
[Howard] In terms of brand, it's not just that. It's that when you are buying hamburger, which is a thing that you might be buying anyway, and which comes in all kinds of grades, and maybe you're making burgers and maybe you're making tacos, and I don't know what you're making with it, you go out to buy hamburger. Hamburger Helper is a thing that you know will go with this thing you just bought, because it's right there in the name. They put that in the brand. It's are there ways for you as an author to create a brand that is similarly associative?
[Dan] When I started, I branded myself wholly around my first published novel. My first Twitter handle was John Cleaver who was the character in the book. I was that guy. I was the John Cleaver horror guy. And very quickly realized no. I want my career to be so much more than this one character and this one series, and had to rebuild my brand, let's say three years into my career, so that I could encompass the much wider range of stuff I wanted to work on.
[Howard] Can I… Oh, go ahead, Dongwon.
 
[Dongwon] Just to the point there. Branding is a very tricky thing. Because what you want to do is have your own career brand. Then, underneath that, you need to make a bunch of smaller brands for each book or each series that you're doing. At this point, Mary's maintaining four or five different brands, in addition to her career brands, which is actually two or three brands put together. Right? If you map it out that way, it can feel enormously complex. This is part of why I encourage make your brands as natural feeling as possible, because it's easier to maintain a bunch of them at once, because they're different parts of you and they're different parts of your work. Then, you'll have structured ways you can talk about each series, structured ways you can talk about each book. But when you're thinking about your personal brand, your author brand, Dan's absolutely right. If you tie it to one book or one series, then immediately when it comes to transition to the next thing, you're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble and having to rebuild more than you would want to at that point in your career.
[Mary Robinette] Let me use Calculating Stars actually as a quick example of what you're talking about with the managing of the brand. I am picking aspects of Calculating Stars to put forward that are the things I'm already interested in. So I have a character who's a mathematician. She's a woman in STEM and working in rocketry. Woman in STEM and rocketry, super excited about math… I really don't care. I'm terr… It's not… I think it's a wonderful thing, but it's not something that I have any personal enthusiasm or passion for. So when I am pushing my brand, my Calculating Stars brand, the stuff that I put out on social media, the stuff that I'm super interested in… Like, saying, "Look, I'm at NASA. I'm looking at rockets. Look at this really interesting woman in STEM." You will… If you look at my Twitter stream, I don't think I've ever tweeted anything about look at this cool math thing. Because I'm sure that they're out there. But I don't understand them. It's… So it is, again, you can make something of a brand that is still an authentic representation of you, while being part of that sub brand.
 
[Howard] I'd like to try something that might not work. But I want to try it anyway. The four of us sitting here. Do you have a short description of one of our brands? I'll go first. Mary Robinette. Didn't see it coming, historically accurate, makes me cry.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Huh. Nice. I'll take that. Which is funny, because I would say happily married couple for myself is a core part of… Or happy relationship.
[Howard] This is me speaking as a consumer of your books. Not necessarily is someone who knows you personally. Because the brand is expanded for me.
[Mary Robinette] Nonono. But that… For my books, that is the thing. Happily married couple. That is the thing that… I feel like that is one of the things that you're signing up for when you pick up one of my books is that there is a committed relationship someplace in there. Yeah, that's an interesting exercise. Like…
[Howard] Anybody else want to try it? I had more time to think about it.
[Mary Robinette] I would have if you had warned me.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah, I don't think I can do it off the top of my head.
[Mary Robinette] So, my brand for Howard. Jerkface McJerkface.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Mic drop. Comic drop. Excuse me, comic drop. Cartoons.
[Howard] You know, you said you didn't like math.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But that… The math checks out.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] For Dan, I mostly have murder and hat.
[Mary Robinette] Not…
[Garbled]
[Dongwon] It's murder and hat. It's not a murder hat. It's not like the Dexter outfit.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's what you think.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] It's very hard to get blood out of leather.
[Dan] It does underline something I've talked about before, which is the trouble that I sometimes have trying to sell science fiction. Because I went in so solidly on that horror brand when I started. Like I said, about three years in, I had to rebuild it. I am still in the process of rebuilding it.
[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things, having seen other people do that, with my first series, that was one of the reasons that I did a different elemental genre with each novel while I maintained the same set dressing. So that I could try to train people that look, I can write more than one thing.
[Dan] Well, Brandon's not here. But I'm going to confuse Howard by talking about Brandon's branding. We often, on the podcast, when we are behind the scenes planning out what guests we want to have, we'll talk about getting someone who's in YA. Mary Robinette and I will both say, "Oh, that's great, because we need more YA." Then Brandon will be like, "I've got three different best-selling YA series." But nobody thinks of him like that. He's the epic fantasy guy.
[Dongwon] Which is both the power and peril of a brand. A brand can be limiting in some ways. As Dan is pointing out with his work and with Brandon's, sometimes it can be hard to break out of that if your brand is very strong. That said, you have the upside of you have a strong brand, which is in the category of good problems to have. Doesn't make it not a problem, but it does mean that you have already taken up mind share among a group of readers, and that's a great place to be.
[Howard] Can I do Dongwon?
[Dongwon] Do it. I'm dying.
[Howard] Okay. Knows everybody I know.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Knows people I didn't know were even people. Can sell any of them anything.
[Mary Robinette] You left out fabulous dresser.
[Dan] That's true.
[Dongwon] I'll take it.
[Howard] That is… I was just picking three.
[Mary Robinette] I know, but…
[Dan] He's the only one of us… We wear these stupid headbands when we record. His actually matches his outfit. And it's not even fair.
[Mary Robinette] What's amazing…
[Dongwon] I would say Mary kindly gave me the one that matched my outfit. I could have ended up with that orange one.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. No, you couldn't have, not while I was in the room.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] Okay. So you've just seen us struggle with this exercise. It is not easy. I believe Mary Robinette has some homework for us for you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Time to do some soul-searching. You need to identify your brand. For this, what I want you to think about is the aspects, the core aspects, of your personality that you don't mind highlighting for the public. The things that… It doesn't have to be your entire personality. Like, focus on three things. If you look at my bio, I say puppeteer, author, and… Audiobook narrator. Like, what was my third thing?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Those are three jobs. Right? But I could… You could also define my brand as historical fantasy, mentor, and theater person. You can pick three things and figure out what you want to do. But pick at least three. Pick, like, your three major things. Make sure that they're things that you are… Topics that you're passionate about, that you will probably be passionate about for your entire life. Make sure they're not a transitory passion. Try to find something that is a passion that is not strictly tied to your books. You will notice that in the things that I listed, I did not list Regency although I love it. I did not list space, although I love it. I did not list World War I, although I love that too. It was a bad time, but still…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The point being, pick things… Pick three core aspects of your personality that you want to highlight, three core things that you're passionate about that you want to highlight that are not directly related to your work.
[Howard] Thank you very much. The bar has been set pretty high, and you watched us fail to clear it. This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.04: Writing the Other – Bisexual Characters
 
 
Key points: Writing the Other is aimed at encouraging writers to write characters who aren't like you, and giving you the tools and examples to do it right. Starting with bisexual representation. First, bisexual is someone who has an attraction to two or more genders. Beware bisexual erasure! Bisexuality is not a phase, nor is it a transition on the way to gay. Bisexual, pansexual, queer... the language is evolving. The power of the default often reinforces bi invisibility. Think about how to resist the default. Watch for treating one kind of relationship as a joke, while the other is serious. Remember that people are not just one thing, make them intersectional and real. Make sure you emphasize the positive! Remember that bisexual people are normal people. Be wary of making one kind of relationship real and meaningful, while the other kind are just sad pale smears on a bagel. Use sensitivity readers, too.
 
[Mary] Season 14, Episode Four.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Bisexual Characters.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Tempest] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Tempest] I'm Tempest.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[T. J.] And I'm T. J.
[Dan] Yeah. We have our wonderful guest with us today, T. J. Berry. What are we going to talk about today, T. J.? Actually, before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself?
[T. J.] Hi. I'm T. J. Berry. I'm an author of science fiction/fantasy mash ups. I… This is my second time joining Writing Excuses on the Writing Excuses Cruise, and I'm a long time listener.
 
[Dan] Well, that's awesome. We are excited to have you here with us. This is the first of a series that we are going to be doing. In previous years, you've heard a lot of the what writers get wrong podcasts. Those are awesome and informative. We wanted to do another series that was a little more constructive, where we give you great advice about how you can write these other things. This is the brainchild of Tempest Bradford. What can you tell us about the Writing the Other series, Tempest?
[Tempest] Well, basically, it's all about getting writers to understand that it is okay to write characters who aren't like you, and, yes, there are many ways to get it wrong, and to fall into the fail hole, but there are also a lot of ways to get it right. It's actually much better if you learn how to get it right from constructive examples. So that's what were going to be talking about in this series. We're going to be giving you tools to learn how to write these characters well, so that everyone is happy.
 
[Dan] Awesome. Cool. So what are we talking about today?
[Tempest] We're going to talk about bisexual representation. I wanted T. J. to come on because I know that T. J. is a bisexual person, and T. J. writes fiction that has bisexual people in it. And especially since T. J. is in a relationship with a person who is not her gender. So, from the outside, it may look a lot like T. J.'s in a heterosexual relationship. That's one of the many sort of nuances of writing bisexual characters that I thought you would be a great person to talk about that.
[T. J.] Awesome. So, yeah, backing up just a little bit, and making sure that people understand what the definition of bisexual is. A person who is bisexual is someone who has an attraction to two or more genders. You can also use the language that it is yours and another gender. Outdated language uses binaries like attracted to the two genders. We don't really use that much anymore, because we've recognized that gender is a spectrum, so we don't use that. We don't use that binary language much anymore. Tempest, as you said, I am married to a cisgender man, and I have been for 21 years. But that doesn't make me any less bi. So one of… That segues really neatly into, one of the things that if you are writing a bisexual character you need to keep in mind is that there is a phenomenon called bi-erasure, by which, if specifically a person is in a relationship with somebody who is not of their gender, it can read as a straight relationship. Just because you're in a relationship with somebody who is not of your gender, does not make you necessarily straight. I am no less bi, because I am married to a man. So, as a writer, when you are creating bi characters, you should be aware of bi-erasure as a concept, and how to avoid it. Some of the things… Like the tropes that have been used in the past that contribute to bi-erasure that you should avoid. Treating bisexuality like a phase. Like, oh, this is just something you're exploring and then you're actually a straight person. Also, the reverse of that is… I've heard the phrase, and this was on Sex In The City, which I quite enjoy. They call bisexuality a layover to Gay Town.
[Wow]
[laughter]
[Dongwon] That show has not aged well.
[T. J.] No, it has not. Bisexuality is not a layover to Gay Town. Nor is it a stop on the cruise to Gay Town.
[Chuckles]
[T. J.] Bisexual people are queer people. So, for an example of the layover to Gay Town in television and film, think of Buffy's Willow. Buffy's Willow, for four seasons, dated guys. Then, all of a sudden, in season four, she declares, "I'm gay now." Which can be a thing that happens. But it also can lead to bisexual erasure. She dated men, and was clearly happy dating men, and then all of a sudden was like, "Click. I'm gay." So, yes, those things can happen, but because bisexual people are so infrequently represented, when that changeover occurs, it erases her bisexuality. So be aware of that when you're writing, and have bisexual characters who are visible and who are seen and who are treated as bisexual and queer people. Now, I kind of use those terms a little interchangeably. A lot of that is personal preference. Somebody may use the term bisexual, someone may use the term pansexual, which is similar, but not exactly the same. Pansexual, generally, is someone who's attracted to all genders. But some bisexual people are also attracted to all genders. The language on this is evolving constantly.
[Tempest] It's very just layered and nuanced, right? Like there's…
[T. J.] Absolutely.
[Tempest] There are a lot of people who like adamantly, are like, "I'm pansexual because bi means this." Bi doesn't actually mean that, but like, for them, bi meant that, and they're like very much like "No! I want to be sure that I am inclusive of everything."
[T. J.] Exactly. A lot of this is what word feels right to you. Some people will just simply use the word queer as an umbrella term. That's fine too. Yeah. Some people have started reclaiming bi even though it has that bi in it. People get really thrown by the two prefix, by it. People are really reclaiming it to mean two or more genders.
 
[Dongwon] If I can jump in for a second.
[T. J.] Sure.
[Dongwon] One thing I want to talk about a little bit is sort of the mechanics of how bi invisibility gets reinforced in fiction. It's a thing that we see happening a lot when dealing with any kind of marginalization is there is the power of the default, right? Whenever you're not explicitly stating somebody's sexual orientation, their gender identity, their racial identity, there's going to be a lot of pressure for your reader to automatically assume that they are whatever the default is for the culture that they come from. Here in the US and in the West generally, it's often cisgendered white heterosexuality. So when you have a bi character dating someone of the… A different gender or of the opposite gender of them, then there's going to be that default assumption that they're hetero. So, what are some of the ways that we can flag that in an explicit way to sort of resist the default being assigned to those characters?
[T. J.] Absolutely. An example of something that happens… I know we all love The Good Place…
[Chuckles]
[T. J.] But along your line of tagging, Eleanor often makes jokes about how attractive she finds Tahini in The Good Place, and that is great, but the creators have explicitly said that she is not bisexual. So it is treated as a joke, and she's not tagged as bisexual. So that's a way that bi-erasure can be enacted in our popular culture. Because it's played… Sometimes relationships between two people of the same gender are played as a joke, whereas the opposite gender relationship or the different gender relationship is played as serious. That's a way to erase it. So if you are having a bisexual character in a work that you're creating, make sure that you're treating with the same seriousness the relationships of all genders.
[Dan] Right. This is actually a whole that is very easy to fall into. The third Pitch Perfect movie did exactly the same thing. Or, no, it was the second Pitch Perfect movie. Where there was, similar to Tahini, a female character who was very tall, very attractive, and very dominant in personality, and the main character was constantly making these kind of joking references to attraction, that were never actually taken seriously. So it does show up a lot, that people do that thing.
[T. J.] Sure.
[Dongwon] We see it between male characters as well. I was thinking of anytime we see The Rock and Kevin Hart on-screen together…
[Oh, my goodness.]
[Dongwon] There's always that sort of like little bit of attraction tension. That's part of what makes their comedy duo work. But it always is played for sort of this queer panic laughs. That's very frustrating.
[T. J.] The laugh is, exactly as you say, it's just a nervous laugh. Like, "Oh, we wouldn't really want that to happen." But yes, we kind of do.
 
[Dan] All right. Let's pause for our book of the week which is Space Unicorn Blues by T. J. Berry.
[T. J.] Yeah. So, Space Unicorn Blues came out July from Angry Robot Books. The pitch is a disaster gay in space cooperates with a talking unicorn in order to deliver a time-sensitive magical cargo to save humanity from a coming apocalypse.
[Tempest] I love it.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Every single piece of that sounds amazing.
[Laughter]
[T. J.] I'm not sure when we'll actually air this, but if by then the sequel is coming out in May of 2019. It is called Five Unicorn Flush. Our disaster gay is back with all of her friends. Now she has to protect a planet full of magical fairytale beings from humans who want to colonize and exploit them.
[Dan] Fantastic.
[Tempest] [inaudible] go wow!
[Laughter]
[Dan] That is Space Unicorn Blues by T. J. Berry. Where can people find that?
[T. J.] People can find it online, Amazon, bookstores. It's really delightful to go into bookstores and find your own book.
[Tempest] Isn't it, though?
[Dan] It's a great experience.
[T. J.] As a new author, that is my greatest joy.
[Dan] It's wonderful.
 
[Dan] All right. Well, let's get back into this. One of the things we really want to focus on is that what we're here to do is to give you, as an author, you can use to port… If you choose to use bisexual characters, here's some great ways that you can do it well. So what are some things that they can keep in mind or include in their fiction or in their descriptions so that they can do this right, and do it well?
[T. J.] Sure. So one of the things that I highly recommend is that you make your characters intersectional so that… People are never just one thing. So you may have a bisexual character, but keep in mind this character may also be disabled. They also may be Latino. They may come from a marginalized… A background that hasn't been explored fully. Make sure your characters are intersectional and real. One of the things I'd like to talk about is there's a book by C. B. Lee called Not Your Sidekick, which is a YA book. Really fantastic. The heroine is Asian, she is Vietnamese Chinese-American, and she's a bisexual teenage girl. So you've got a lot of different things going on. That is what happens in people's lives. People are never just one thing. She is the daughter of superheroes, but she has no superpowers. So she gets an internship with a local super-villain. So we're basically looking at sky high but queer, which is amazing. One of the things that's done really well in this book is not just the inclusivity, but the intersectionality. So you have someone who is Vietnamese Chinese-American and is dealing with be… The cultural implications of being second-generation and her bisexuality. So intersectionality is something that writers should definitely take a look at. Another thing is positivity. Make sure that if you have bisexual characters, that they are not just… This goes for marginalized characters in general. Make sure they're not just receiving the brunt of homophobia, racism. Make sure you are showing the positive sides of their lives. A book that really does this quite well is Passing Strange by Ellen Klages. It's a novella from Tor.com. It is of 1940s San Francisco and it has magic in it. So it's really delightful. The LGBTQIA representation is fantastic. The characters are very well-rounded, and they… She is able to touch on the realities of queer life without making it a tragic gay story. This is a positive, uplifting love story where we see some of the discrimination and hardships that come with this life, but also things go well in the end. So, make sure that you're not doing the usual trope of burying your gays, which means that your gay characters are disproportionately killed off in your narrative. Make sure that queer people have happy endings, and that they also find love. Those are some things that you can definitely look at to make sure you're doing the right thing. Also, make sure your bisexual people are just normal people. There is a stereotype that bisexual people… This was more in the past, but still it kind of pops its ugly head up now and then is that bisexual people are promiscuous. This is… Just because bisexual people have a larger dating pool doesn't necessarily mean that is true. Bisexual people are soccer moms, you know?
[Chuckles]
[T. J.] Just write that into your narrative as daily life. People are married, they have domestic lives. Not everything is necessarily clubs all the time.
[Tempest] Right. It isn't always about like their sexuality.
[T. J.] Right. Exactly.
 
[Tempest] Another thing I want to mention is if you are going to have a bisexual character that is going to have relationships with people from multiple genders, it's really important to not privilege some relationships over others. This is a mistake that I found in Torchwood, which was supposed to be a very bisexual program. I wrote a whole essay about this, so I won't go into like all the things about Torchwood that made me mad. But, like, one of the core things was how even though Capt. Jack Harkness was bisexual, omnisexual, or whatever they were calling it at the time, it was very clear that the relationships that he had with men were like real impactful relationships on him as a character, and the relationships he had with women were like sad pale like smears on a bagel in comparison.
[Chuckles]
[T. J.] Exactly.
[Tempest] It was… That's like a problem that Russell T Davies has in general when he's writing bisexual characters. That may be in part because he, as a gay man, is like pulling more from his… Like his relationships that are deep and whatever are with men, because he is gay. So like he sort of transferred that to his character that was supposed to be omnisexual. So, I would say, like… You don't have to have your bisexual character having relationships with multiple people to prove that they're bisexual in your work. But, if you do decide to have that, if you do decide to have multiple relationships, make sure that like it's clear that all those relationships are meaningful. Not just some of them.
[T. J.] Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the last things… I cannot enough stress the importance of sensitivity readers. On this last book, Space Unicorn Blues, I had the services of five sensitivity readers because it is a fairly diverse book with a lot of intersecting marginalizations that are not mine. I'm going to quote [me sea schall?] here, who I love very much, who says, "There is a difference between writing a diverse set of characters and telling someone else's story." So what is helpful is if you can get a sensitivity reader who can come in and say, "No, you are telling someone else's story that maybe you should not be telling." I know Mary Robinette has told the story many times about she had a book where she was telling someone else's story and decided to pull back on it. I cannot stress enough how important it is, because even certain turns of phrase that you will not recognize as problematic, someone who is own voices will look at this and say, "No, you should not use this particular word." It may not be a very problematic word, but the phrase itself may be something that indicates something that you would not know as a member… As not a member of that community. So hire sensitivity readers, and pay them.
[Dan] Absolutely. We want to stress the whole purpose of this series of episodes is to tell you that you can write these kinds of characters. We want you to write these kinds of characters. It benefits the entire industry, the more of this that we have. But there are those lines that are easy to cross and hard to notice if you're not part of that community.
[Exactly]
[Dan] That's why sensitivity readers are so valuable.
[Definitely. Definitely.]
 
[Dan] I wish that we had more time. We really need to end, though. T. J., you've got some homework to give us.
[T. J.] Yeah, this is an easy homework. You don't have to write, but what I would love for people to do is find the 100th episode of Brooklyn 99. They have a canonically bisexual character, Rosa Diaz. On the 100th episode… Which, by the way, a 100th episode of a show is a big deal. So to dedicate the hundredth episode to the coming out of your bisexual character is a really fantastic thing. This is her coming out episode, and she talks to her family members. Not only is it difficult, and she has a really tough time getting through it, it has to happen multiple times. This is something that people who are not queer may not understand is that coming out is not a one time thing. It's multiple conversations in multiple spaces, and sometimes with the same people over time. So Brooklyn 99 handles this beautifully, and I would love for people to take a look at how they did it.
[Dan] Well, that's awesome. Thank you very much. This is been a fantastic episode. Thank you very much to T. J. for being here.
[T. J.] Thank you.
[Dan] And, of course, Dongwon and Tempest for joining me here. This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.30: Project in Depth, THE CALCULATING STARS, with Kjell Lindgren.
 
 
Key points: (Beware of Spoilers) The Calculating Stars. Set During Mercury/Apollo era space travel. Start with We Interrupt This Broadcast, an alternate history about slamming a meteor into Chesapeake Bay in the 1950s. Add Lady Astronaut of Mars, an anthology piece that starts with the first line of Wizard of Oz. Then drop back to write the prequel, 40 years before! And you have The Calculating Stars. Decide that the loving relationship, the commitment, is not going to be a conflict point, although stuff going on around them can strain the relationship. Going up there and doing cool astronaut things is actually a very small part of the adventure for the whole team and the family. Put the focus on emotional reactions and societal pressures more than technical pressures. Survival training. Terminology. The emotional reactions to events, the visceral reactions. The vividness of your first launch. Get experts to fill in the jargon.  
 
ExpandWhat did they say? )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Project in Depth, The Calculating Stars.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart. I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm wondering what evil plague you have in your lungs…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Over there, Brandon.
[Brandon] I don't know how many of these have aired yet, but I haven't been on the NASA episodes yet. You can tell why. I've been on book tour for a week and also caught a head cold.
[Dan] He was sick, so we had to quarantine him from the mission so the rest of us could carry it out.
[Brandon] But I'm stepping in for this one because we're going to talk about Mary's book and we have a special guest star, Kjell Lindgren. Say hi to the audience.
[Kjell] Hello, audience. I'm excited to be here.
[Dan] Welcome back.
[Kjell] Thank you.
 
[Mary] So I am especially excited about this specific Project in Depth, because it has two unique circumstances for you listeners. So, first of all, this is a reminder that in the Project in Depth's, we go full on spoilers. The Calculating Stars is not a heavy book to be spoiled, but if you're one of those people don't want to know anything ahead of time, read the book first, come back and listen. But the reason I'm excited about it is that we are doing this at an interesting point in the process. I have not yet finished… My editor has done all of the structural stuff on it, but we haven't done the line edits, which means that I'm actually going to be able to incorporate any changes that come up during this conversation.
[Ooo]
[Mary] And because this book is set during Mercury and Apollo era space, and it's involving my Lady Astronaut universe, and we have an actual astronaut here, this is also an opportunity for you to kind of hear sort of what it's like to have a sensitivity reader or a specific expert in to talk about a book. This is kind of what this process is like, although obviously usually it's not done in a podcast format.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So, let's address, at least for me, what the elephant in the room is for this. This is a stor… A novel based on a novella that you wrote. Why did you decide to do it? How did you approach it? Like, just that concept? What's going on here?
[Mary] Okay. So what started with this… For most people. Most people first became aware of this through the Lady Astronaut of Mars. Which is not actually the first book in this series… In this universe that I wrote. I call this my punchcard punk universe. The first story I wrote in this was from a writing prompt. It's called We Interrupt This Broadcast. It was about slamming a meteor into the Chesapeake Bay in the 1950s. That one was… That idea I had was it would be really cool if there was a mad scientist and things went slightly wrong because he had forgotten to account for leap year. That was how that started. Then, Lady Astronaut began when I was asked to write something for an anthology called Ripoff in which we had to begin our story with a famous first line. So I began with the first line of Wizard of Oz, which is why I have the International Aerospace Coalition launching rockets from Kansas…
[Laughter]
[Mary] Because I got locked into that.
[Brandon] Did that ever feel like… I don't know…
[Mary] A giant mistake?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] [inaudible restriction?]
[Mary] Yes. Because it doesn't make any sense at all to launch rockets from Kansas. You want to be as close to the equator as you can be. It's nice to have a big body of water in case something goes wrong. I've got none of that in Kansas. So what happened with the novel is that it's set 40 years before the novella with the same character… Same main character. So there was a lot of stuff that I had to justify in the world that I was locked into. There's also stuff that I just… I looked at and like, "Oh, boy, that timeline was wrong." So Elma in Lady Astronaut of Mars just misremembered the dates on that. 'Cause…
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It doesn't make any sense.
[Brandon] Locked into some character things, right? You've got the relationship which... we know what happens in 40 years. So we know that they're going to be in a loving relationship for another 40 years and things like this. Like, there are certain things... Did that ma… Was this the sort of restrictions breed creativity sort of thing or was this a man, I wish I could just toss this continuity?
[Mary] There were times when I… Mostly timeline issues with continuity. The timeline does not actually make sense. But we just, as I say, handwaved past that. The character stuff, there were things about it… I was committed to having a loving relationship. That's… I liked…
[Brandon] That's one of my favorite parts about the book.
[Mary] Thank you. I feel like it's not depicted often enough. So I… One of the things that I knew going into it was that their commitment to each other was never going to be a conflict point. But that all of the stuff that was going on around them would cause stress… Would put strain on the relationship, but not in the OMG, are they going to break up? I never wanted that to be a plot point.
 
[Dan] So, before we get too far into this, I feel like we may have missed a link in this chain earlier. Where was the point where you decided, "Okay, I've written these two shorts. Now I'm going to go back and write a novel." How was that decision made?
[Mary] I don't actually remember completely.
[Laughter]
[Mary] I suspect that it was something along the lines of, "Hey. That just won a Hugo award."
[Laughter]
[Mary] "Can I market that?"
[Dan] Let's capitalize on this thing.
[Mary] Which is really crass. But it was… To a certain degree, it was looking at some of my favorite works. Like Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider… The Ship Who Sang, which was a short story that got expanded and some other things.
[Brandon] Even Dragonflight won the Hugo before it was finished as a novel.
[Mary] Yeah. So I was interested in what that process was like. The other thing was that I have these characters and they've got this really interesting backstory that I haven't explored. Like, I talk about in the novella that Elma was one of the first women… The first people on Mars. How does that come about in the 1950s? How do you get to a point where you have women in space since it took a long time in the real world for that to happen? So how do I make it happen faster? So there was a lot of it that there were just pieces of it that I was interested in, but I don't actually remember what it was that made me go, "This is a good idea."
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] So, let's get the astronaut, first thing.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Thank you. Because I've been looking at Kjell. I'm like, so… Yes. Tell… So…
[Kjell] I'm coming at this from a completely blank slate. So, not having read the sequel that was first written, I get to kind of follow this chronologically from when Elma first becomes an astronaut. So… I have to say that the relationship between Elma and Nathaniel is one that… There's clearly a very loving relationship, and frankly, Nathaniel sets a very high bar…
[Laughter]
[Kjell] For husbands everywhere. But it's clear there that that is kind of the emotional core from which Elma draws her strength. I think that that really resonates for those of us that undertake these sometimes… Well, not sometimes. These very risky missions. That we, I think, largely recognize that we could not do this, we could not go through selection and go through training and do all that travel and do the mission as a single entity. It requires support at home from the family. Your spouse has to be on board with this. Your kids have to be on board and understand what all this entails. So, for me, personally, and I see that in Elma also, is that it is an adventure for the team, for the family. The other part of it is that you clearly are showing behind the scenes, that it's not just the astronaut that is going up there and getting to do…
[Mary] Really cool astronauty things.
[Kjell] Yeah, cool astronaut things. In fact, that is a very, very small part of…
[Brandon] Well, that's the book, right?
[Kjell] That's real life.
[Brandon] [inaudible]
[Kjell] That's true, that's true. I mean… So, that is real, also. In a typical astronaut career of… I don't know if you can call 20 years typical, that's maybe six months, maybe a year in space. So most of that time is spent on the ground, with this larger team that makes that possible. That is reflected in these… You know, the calculators that are doing the work and mission control and the engineers and all that. So that is, I thought, really well depicted and reflected in the book.
[Mary] Whew!
[Brandon] I'm going to build off this and ask you a question, because this is one of the most interesting things about this book to me. When you first started talking about it, I remember brainstorming with you. What is now two books was one book. A lot of the things you talked about were going to be… All ended up in the second book, right? The quote unquote exciting parts. Right? The actual flying, the rocketship, and [inaudible]
[Mary] Right!
[Brandon] Yet, this book is very compelling. You made an extremely compelling book out of quote unquote the boring parts. It's not boring at all. In fact, it feels breakneck to me throughout the entire story. So, how did you structure this, knowing that what everyone expected to be the book wasn't going to come until the second book, and how did you keep it paced and exciting?
[Mary] So, this was… when we were talking about it was… My plan was that I was going to structure it like three novellas. That novella one was dealing with the asteroid strike, novella two was the push to the moon, and novella three was the push to Mars. As I got into it and started… Was working on it, there were sections that… Because I knew I was going to be doing them in novella three with the Mars, that I was needing to skip in novella two, the push to the moon, because they felt… It felt… It was going to be repetitive. But it also meant skipping things that were really emotionally important. So I talked with my editor and said I feel like I have made a structural mistake and that this is actually two different books. As soon as we did that, and moved Mars to being its own book, that freed me up to deal with a lot of the unsexy stuff. But the things about… That I had been reading about in all of these different autobiographies by astronauts, talking about the selection process and getting the call and the first time that you do… The first training flights that you do and all of these different things that are these emotional points. So what I was trying to work with was… With this was not so much the question of… It's never a question of is she going to the moon? Is she going into space? That's never… But how and when and what is she going to have to push against? So what I wound up doing was trying to focus more on her emotional reactions to stuff, and also the societal pressures, rather than the technical pressures. The technical pressures, I felt like, well, this is our job, this is what we're doing, this is the thing we do. Then, the societal pressures were kind of more my major plot points. Because it's set in the 1950s, which is in the middle of the civil rights era.
 
[Dan] So, one of those kind of emotional arcs that you do in this book is her overcoming this kind of very intense anxiety disorder that she has. I am wondering how much of that was presaged by the previous books, or is that just you felt like it was important for her character and you created it for this one?
[Mary] It was something that I created for this. By 40 years later, she's got that pretty much under control. In part, because the specific anxiety that she has is a social anxiety disorder. You have things… You strap her on a rocket, she's fine. But you ask her to speak to a large room, she's like, "I'm not okay with that." That is true for a lot of people. Also, oddly, people with things like social anxiety disorder tend to be really good in a crisis situation because they're used to managing low level… Or high-level anxiety all the time. So they're actually quite levelheaded when things are going wrong. I added that because I had a character who was hyper competent. That was this canon thing. She's a pilot, she's this computer… Mathematician. I needed to give her a breaking point, a weakness. That one was a very obvious one for a number of reasons. One of which is that it also allowed me to highlight some of, again, those societal pressures. Because she's bucking against what it is that she's supposed to be doing, the hole that people keep trying to fit her in. So that was one of the reasons I added that to her character.
[Brandon] Oh, go ahead.
[Kjell] I have to say that that societal part was something that it was hard to read. The reactions to… The introduction of the female astronauts, and photos of them powdering their nose in the cockpit, or as they're doing a dunker test, putting them in bikinis. So from today's perspective, I have a really hard time with that. But when I think back to the 50s, and you've just introduced a new astronaut class and you ask this group about cooking in space and this cook about what they're going to accomplish during a mission. I mean, of course, that is very foreign to the experience… I hope is very foreign to our experience now, but it really brings you into the era that we're talking about.
[Mary] It was… That was based on two things, which are both unfortunately real world. One is the way the WASPs were treated in World War II, and a lot of the early women airline pilots… Just even becoming airline pilots. But there was… One of the things that they would have to do… I read about… I think this is in Jerry Cobb's book… But in one of the books about early women pilots, they would talk about how they would fly, and they would own their own company, or they would be… The captain. They would get in the craft, they would fly it to wherever they were going, and then they would have to slide their trousers off and slide a skirt on before they got out, because the people wanted to see them in skirts and heels. That they would have to powder their nose in the craft and put on the lipstick before they got out because that's what the client expected to see. Some of the first women astronauts talked about the different questions that they got from the press. You can read them and you're like, "Yup." I mean, I've pushed it a little, but not very far.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week. You were going to tell us about Riding Rockets?
[Mary] Yes. So this is one of the books that Eileen known very heavily when I was writing this. There were a number of them which we've talked about on other podcasts. But Riding The Rocket… Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane, who is a shuttle era astronaut. It is a fantastic autobiography. One of the things that's great about it is that he came into the program when a lot of the Mercury and Apollo people were still there. So he's got this perspective, where he's looking at the way the program is changing, and also he's a really compelling storyteller and very good with sensory details. I pulled a lot of stuff from that.
[Kjell] I really enjoyed that book as well. It's a great shuttle era book.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask you, Kjell, did you get freezing water squirted in your ear?
[Kjell] I did not get freezing water squirted in my ear. I spent three days and two nights in a freezing Russian forest. But I did not get surprised with a…
[Mary] Yeah. That was… I so wanted… That was one of the things that I wanted to fit into the book and just there wasn't a structural spot for it, was the wilderness survival stuff.
[Kjell] You bet.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] Ah, I wanted that in there. So I'm going to do…
[Brandon] What do you mean by that? Like, you actually… They make you do wilderness survival?
[Kjell] Absolutely. So they did it back in the Apollo days. In fact, there's a great photo of… Actually, I think it's the Mercury 7 out in a desert. They've cut up a parachute and tied it on their heads, they're in various states of undress, because they're out doing essentially desert survival.
[Mary] They weren't sure where they were going to come down.
[Kjell] Right.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Kjell] So, as a part of our training, we do water survival and winter survival to prepare us for the possibility of one, landing in water. The Soyuz spacecraft is designed to land on land. So a water landing requires some additional procedures and training. Then winter survival, because… I did in fact at the end of my mission land in the middle of the night in a blizzard. So had the team not been able to track us, then we would have to have been able to fend for ourselves for a little while. That technology's improved since the days that we really kind of started this training. We have GPS, we have satellite phones. So the fact that we would… The team wouldn't be able to find us is fairly remote at this point. But the winter survival training is a little bit of a… A little bit of a haze.
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] Just to kind… It's that Type II fun that I think in a previous podcast…
[Laughter]
[Kjell] That Tom Washburn was talking about. Type I fun being the fun that you're having in the moment, and the Type II fun the experience that you think back at and you're like, "It's fun, that that is done. That is over."
[Mary] Well, it's also… My father-in-law was Air Force, Vietnam-era fighter pilot, and they did survival training with them as well as a teambuilding…
[Kjell] Sure.
[Mary] And ways to test how you react under pressure situations without the safety net of well, I'm in a simulation. Like, no you're actually…
[Dan] No, you're not…
[Mary] You could actually die out here.
 
[Brandon] So, let's talk about the climax, because we're running… We only have a few minutes left. This book pushes toward lift off quite effectively. I wanted to ask, Kjell, this is your chance. What did she get right, what did she get wrong?
[Kjell] Well, let me tell you, it's clear that you've done your research, because the terminology that you use, even the tempo of the use of that terminology, is really good. The acronyms, people railing against acronyms…
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] That's all… That is all very common to the experience. So in the biographies that you've read, the pieces that you've borrowed, that feels very familiar and sounds very familiar. But you don't dwell on that. That is background. I really appreciate that. What you do… I thought you did a great job of is really focusing on the emotional reaction to various events. Talking… The description of taking off in a T-38 and the ground falling away below, and the same with her other flights, that sensation of taking off. Then the launch. It's not so much a description of necessarily what's happening. You certainly let the reader know what's going on. But it is that visceral reaction, it is the explanation of how she's feeling as she experiences these various milestones as they climb into orbit. That is really what rang true to me, is the description of the person that's going through it, and not so much the technical description of okay, now this is where the rocket is. So not just the launch, and not just taking off. Sitting in Mission Control. How you feel when you see a rocket explode. All these things rang very emotionally true to me.
[Mary] Oh, good. So, here are the hacks that I used to get that.
[Laughter]
[Mary] One is that I noticed in a number of the autobiographies when the astronaut began talking about their launch, their first launch, they switched to present tense. Chris Hadfield's… In his Astronauts' Guide to Life on Earth, says that he's switching to present tense because it is that vivid, that it feels like something that he has just done, because it is unlike… It doesn't fit… It doesn't get blended into other memories.
[Kjell] It's interesting that description of it. I see it in your book as well, is that it is not a narrative of… Like this is my launch narrative, this is what happened when I took off. It is snapshots of memories and emotions that you had at a particular time. So I remember the whole launch sequence, when the engines started, and that there are various specific times, when the launch shroud pulled away so we were able to see out the window for the first time. My first glimpse of the Earth, the arc of the Earth and the blues and whites contrasted against the sky. When… The first time I opened the hatch to get ready to do a spacewalk. Just various specific snapshots. It does feel very present and it's not… You can string those things together as a story, but… Yeah, these are very brief glimpses in time that you remember and just are able to relive.
[Mary] So, let me tell one other hack that I used… Or two other hacks. Because these will be useful for readers. Or for writers. One is that I basically grabbed the Mercury… Because NASA has these online. The transcripts of the Mercury launches and the Apollo launches. And used them as the outline for the scene, and wrote on top of it. Pulling up some stuff to… I'm like, "And we're going to skip past this very long thing." Then the other thing is that… Which Kjell is well aware of… I would write sections and be like, "Then the captain turned and said jargon."
[Laughter]
[Mary] "And he handled his jargon." Then I sent them off to experts. So I would email Kjell and I had a rocket scientist and for Fated Sky, I also had the person who does the algorithms to figure out where the landers should land. I would send it off to them and say, "Can you just play MadLibs with this?"
[Laughter]
[Mary] Katie Coleman also, who's a shuttle era astronaut. So, technically speaking, sections of this book were written by an astronaut.
[Brandon] Or multiple astronauts.
[Mary] Or multiple astronauts.
 
[Dan] The version of this that you sent to me was early enough that it still had a lot of that in there. I remember in particular, I'm fairly certain it's the sequence early on where she is flying the plane into Kansas, and it just broke, and there was about a half page all in brackets that said, "Okay, I haven't written this scene yet, but here's a bunch of jargon I've already collected." Then you just had some sentences that could be used to fit in as she talks to the tower to make the landing. Which is not something I've ever done. I thought that was a really cool trick too.
[Mary] I found a… Without one, I'm not sure if that's the one. There was one of them where I found a training video of how to… It's an Air Force training video from like the 70s or 80s of how to start a T-38. So there's an instructor talking through it, and it's real-time, and… So I'm just like, "Wait. Gonna pause that. What did they just say?"
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Write all this down.
[Mary] Because it's exactly the thing that I have, where I have a trainer, and I have a… The pilot in the back, and these are the back-and-forth between them. I'm like, "Okay. Noting that." My father-in-law had a number of things that were wrong with the… Which I think were all fixed by the time you guys read it. With some of the piloting stuff. Because he had flown all of the planes that I talked about. He was a test pilot, too. So…
 
[Kjell] So there is one piece, though…
[Mary] Yes.
[Kjell] In chapter 34…
[Dan] Oh. I'm excited.
[Mary] Yes.
[Kjell] Where you talk about… So it looks like a grab from shuttle era description of the TALs, the Transatlantic Abort. Talking about the OMS engine systems. So that is very, very shuttle specific…
[Mary] Ooooo...
[Kjell] So for anyone that knows kind of the shuttle lingo, they will see this as a… This is a shuttle lingo grab. So there may be pieces of that that are applicable. It's kind of the Mercury Gemini Apollo era vehicle. But this is probably some of that terminology. You'd have to really make sure that that fits. Because they didn't have an OMS… The shuttle had an OMS engine, but the…
[Mary] Right.
[Kjell] Apollo era did not.
[Mary] Of course they didn't.
[Kjell] We planned aborts for the shuttle, so that they would actually… Could land, so there's a Transatlantic Abort, there's a Return to Launch Site Abort. If you're aborting off of the capsule, you're basically just going into the drink somewhere.
[Mary] Random.
[Kjell] Along the flight path.
[Mary] Okay. Yeah. So that is… 
[Kjell] So we want to reconcile that with this era of spaceflight.
[Mary] Yeah. Thank you. I will totally go… Readers, you will not see that in there because I'm going to go fix that… And get more details on it.
[Dan] But the original version…
[Mary] The original…
[Dan] Will be available somewhere?
[Mary] We're putting the original version up on the… Of anything that I… Chapter 34, up on the Patreon, so you can see after I… See the Transatlantic Abort… No, that's… Of course. Right. I think I probably grabbed that because I couldn't find any stuff about aborting from Apollo and Mercury because of exactly that. Interesting. Huh. Anything else that I got wrong? Please tell me things.
[Kjell] Oh, boy. So, I just want to say, I really enjoyed this alternate history. Because there were brief glimpses… 
[Mary] That's not a thing I got wrong.
[Kjell] No, that's not.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] No, I'm… I don't have a whole lot…
[Dan] Yes, you did. Dewey loves [inaudible]
[laughter]
[Kjell] That's right. Dewey's in charge, and we hear… We see Aldrin and Armstrong and Collins name in the next… The new class of 35 astronauts. So there are pieces of our history that have been borrowed into this, and I really enjoyed that. I love that it started with a cabin in an earthquake, and that her description of the launch was shaking like a cabin in an earthquake.
[Mary] Yay. Circular stuff.
[Brandon] It is a really good book.
[Mary] Thanks.
[Brandon] You guys all have obviously read it, because we told you you had to, but if for some reason you haven't, you need to read this book, so that you can read the sequel.
[Mary] Right.
[Brandon] Which is…
[Mary] The sequel is all space, all the time. I mean, they have to get to space.
[Dan] Most of the time.
[Mary] Most of the time. Yes, and the sequel has a section that I changed because I was talking to Kjell at a convention and he talked about watching in The Martian movie someone changed direction in midair. I remember that he was continuing to talk, and I'm like, "I am rewriting a scene in my head, while this man is speaking to me."
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] We are out of time, though. We've already gone about 30 minutes. So, Dan, you've got a writing prompt for us?
[Dan] Yes. Okay. So, what we want you to do is re-create for yourself a little of what Mary did with this. Take something you've already written. It doesn't matter what it is. Something you've already finished. Then write a prequel of that that takes place 40 years earlier.
[Brandon] All right. We want to thank Kjell for being on with us.
[Kjell] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.28: What Writers Get Wrong, with Wildstyle.
 
 
Key points: In describing hip-hop production, writers often forget there is an artist-producer relationship. The producer/engineer picks the beats, composes the music, mixes it, makes the artist sound the way you hear them. Artists and producers dabble in different areas in the music. In hip-hop, artists do the lyrical work, the rhyming. The producer/engineer composes the beats, the melody. There's a collaborative interplay in the best relationships. Sometimes the artists ask for a certain kind of music, sometimes the producer/engineer composes something and thinks it would be perfect for someone. How do you make it real? Focus on the relationship between the producer and the artist. Twitter beefing, jealousy, and producers trying to steal artists? What makes a producer wild? Artists who know everything, who want to tell the producer how to do the composition and engineering. 
 
ExpandTalking about ... my generation... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What Writers Get Wrong, with Wildstyle.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Brandon] And we have special guest star Wildstyle. Thank you so much.
[Wildstyle] How y'all doing?
[Brandon] We're doing all right. We are live at GenCon.
[Woo hoo! Applause!]
[Mary] Awesome. So we're so excited to have you on. Just to give the readers a… The readers? Hah. Just to give our listeners a little bit of a grounding in who you are, and so that they know you don't exist along just a single axis, tell them a little bit about yourself.
[Wildstyle] Okay. So I'm a lifelong musician… I actually started out as a violist.
[Mary] Ooo...
[Wildstyle] When I was 11. I also spent 15 years working on cars and equipment and such, and I'm also a community organizer, as well. I'm also a hip-hop producer and manager.
[Mary] So, of these various identities and professions, which are we going to focus on today?
[Wildstyle] We're going to focus on the hip-hop production, producer and managing.
[Mary] Awesome. So…
[Dan] I'm so excited about this.
 
[Mary] What do writers get wrong about hip-hop production?
[Wildstyle] I would say writers normally forget that there is even an artist-producer relationship.
[Mary] Yeah.
[Wildstyle] That's like one of the most important things, even in the music that you hear on the radio. Like, I don't know if y'all listen to Drake, but he has a producer/engineer called 40. That guy's responsible for his sound. He is the one that picks a lot of the beats, and mixes it, and makes Drake sound like you're used to hearing him. Without that guy… Drake wouldn't sound like the person that you've ever heard.
[Howard] You've already… I majored in music composition and sound recording technology. A long time ago.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Back before anything was digital.
[Laughter]
[Howard] There we go. When I was doing this, there was the artist, there was the engineer, and there was the producer. The idea of there being a producer/engineer, at least where I was doing this, was not a thing. So you've already… You've already broken one of my rules in my head. Tell me how that works? How do you be a producer and an engineer?
[Wildstyle] Well, I mean, in hip-hop, in the early days, people were doing it, and I think still now, because we all don't make that much money…
[Laughter]
[Mary] Just like writing.
[Wildstyle] Drake… Yeah. Exactly. I see a lot of parallels. But there's not a lot of money to be had, especially at the aspiring level. Which most people are. Therefore, if you only compose music and make beats for artists, you're going to have a hard time. So most… Not most people, but a good portion of producers actually learn to record and engineer the artists. In fact, a lot of artists engineer themselves, or they can if necessary. Little Wayne was one of those who actually mixed himself as a rough mix, and then give it to one of four engineers in the world and let them play around with the concepts that he had come up with. So this is really common for artists and producers to dabble in several different areas in the music, so that they get the sound that they want, or just because they want to experiment. So…
[Mary] So, for me, because I come from classical music violin, the… What it sounds like, to translate for my own brain, when you're talking about people adding beats and things, it sounds like they're actually participating in the composition process as well?
[Wildstyle] A lot of times… And that's another thing. I think on… When you see it in the movies and stuff, sometimes they overdo the artist participating in that process. I think with modern hip-hop, and I don't think it's a good thing, but that doesn't happen as much. It definitely… When it does happen, it doesn't happen the way it happens in movies. There's… If their artist is participating and great things are happening with the composition as it's happening, it is because they have a relationship and they have built that over time and they… The producer knows what the artist is capable of, not always what they like…
[Chuckles]
[Wildstyle] But what they're capable of, and what they're going to be good at, and that's how that happens. That… It's just not… People don't see that.
 
[Howard] You're using some shorthand here that may be going right past our listeners. When you say the artist's participating, the artist, in a hip-hop album, they are responsible for the lyrical work, the rhyming, the part that our linguistic processors get. The producer/engineer is the one doing the beat composition. If there are melodic elements, that's them.
[Wildstyle] See, but often times… In modern hip-hop, the artist will go… Not have as great a relationship, like the… Especially aspiring ones, they will find just like random instrumentals on YouTube or something, and start, and write a song to it. But when you… Most successful artist have good relationships with their producers, so that… They're not going on YouTube and picking a random instrumental, they're absolutely sitting down with one person, and they will either be in the studio with them, or they will have been in the studio and tell them, "Hey, send me this, send me that, I want something that's dark, I want something that's vibrant, I want something that's tempo." That's… The stuff you hear on the radio, even the successful underground artists, they typically work with fewer producers and they all have personal relationships with them.
[Mary] So why don't you… Because I think this will be useful for our listeners. Why don't you walk us through the process of starting a new work? How does that go?
[Wildstyle] Well, depending on the artist… I have a handful of artists that I work with, and not much more than that. So I record… I engineer the music and I compose a lot of the music, so often times they may come to me and say, "Hey, I'm looking for this. A dark sound." Or "I want this type of feel." Or they'll reference me other songs. Either I'll come up with that or I will find something that I have already composed and I will send it to them or play it for them in the studio. Also, how this works is that I can be doodling and come up with this amazing composition, and I'm like, "I think this would be perfect for so-and-so." Either I'll wait until they get in the studio, which I prefer to do so I can see their real reaction…
[Laughter]
[Wildstyle] Or I'll take a chance and email it to them and hope that they're not emailing it to everybody else to see what they think and check out what I'm doing. But often times, that's how things get started.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop. You're going to pitch an album to us, right?
[Wildstyle] Yes. This is an album that I executive produced for an artist named Pope Adrian Blessed, and you can find him on the web, popeadrianblessed.com. It's only three tracks along, but I engineered and produced all of that along with my friend, Ares. He produced… He composed one of the instrumentals on their, and I actually mixed and recorded all of it. It's probably different than what y'all have heard. It combines lyricism with a lot of sonic… A sonic sound that's not common with lyrical rap. So it's…
[Howard] What's the album called?
[Wildstyle] Eastern Conference. You can find out on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, [tidal?], whatever you have. Apple Music.
[Dan] Awesome.
 
[Howard] So what… Earlier, when I said you'd crossed the producer/engineer boundary that I thought was a sacrosanct thing…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And then you're describing your process and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, you also crossed the composer-engineer boundary…"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "And the performer-composer boundary…"
[Mary] And the orchestrator boundary...
[Laughter]
[Howard] The amount… When you… When I hear the word producer, I think of the guy who sits in the back of the studio and just basically is grouchy.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Do you do that too?
[Wildstyle] I'm notorious for being that person, actually.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But what you've described really is 90% of what people hear. It's just… It's like the whole process, and the artist happens to be standing out front and making meat noises with the face hole.
[Laughter]
[Wildstyle] You know… That is…
[Howard] Doing it really well.
[Wildstyle] But I agree with you. Sometimes, in the past, not so much with my current artists, I have to remind them that this is all more like a NASCAR race, where I'm your crew chief and you're in the car. You need me as much as I need you.
[Howard] You're the crew chief and the pit crew and the tires and the car…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And a large portion of the track.
[Laughter]
[Wildstyle] Sometimes it feels that way.
[Mary] [garbled] running over you.
[Howard] I'm having a great time. I could… This is fun.
 
[Dan] Well, I… So I've been thinking about this, this exact topic as you're describing this and realizing that it sounds like this is much more collaborative than the kind of author-editor relationship, which is what I assumed that it was. So I'm wondering, and maybe this is a weird subject to bring up, but I'm wondering a little bit about the issue of credit. Like, because you mentioned earlier, Drake, and I know Drake and I've listened to Drake. I had no idea who his producer was. Is that just me being an idiot, or…?
[Wildstyle] I think… Well, I…
[Dan] You can say yes.
[Laughter]
[Wildstyle] I'm not going to say that, but I think like most hip-hop aficionados and people that are really deep into hip-hop would automatically know that his producer is 40.
[Dan] Okay.
[Wildstyle] The sound they've crafted over the years… He's been there almost from the very beginning.
[Dan] Wow. Well, okay.
 
[Mary] We have been schooled there. So, when you are… We've talked a little bit about the things that are annoying. What are some things that our readers could do… I keep saying readers. Our listeners could do for their readers to make it seem more real, to make it seem more grounded?
[Wildstyle] I would say, focus on the relationship, because the relationship is up and down. At the same time, especially if the artist is a big time artist, or they're making a little bit of money, or they've got a growing fan base, there's going to be plenty of other producers that want to come in and wreck that relationship, or get in so that they can take advantage and then they'll have their work out there, they can possibly make money, or they can get bigger opportunities. That often can be a bigger issue. You often see, in the hip-hop scene, that the artists and producers will end up twitter beefing off of just the weirdest stuff. I don't know how many of y'all listen to Future, but Future and Young Thug had a beef over their producer, Metro Boomin. They were all on Twitter, just acting crazy over this, and it was because of a little bit probably jealousy over they both have the same producer, and some felt that they had more, better hits with them than the other one.
[Howard] Glad that never happens with writers.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Well, they write for a living, so they know how to go on Twitter and always…
[Laughter]
[Mary] [garbled]
 
[Dan] [garbled] with a straight face. So can you point us towards some depictions? The media depictions in books or TV or movies of hip-hop production and that producer relationship that you think are accurate? That you think have done a good job? Or can you point us toward some that are terrible?
[Wildstyle] I would say, and this isn't really hip-hop as you would think of it, but the James Brown movie about his… The bio-pic, Get On Up, was a… I don't think they quite got it right, but Bobby Byrd was like a big key to James Brown's sound, and he stayed with him, and when they finally fell out for the last time, James Brown's career went down. It was very, very quick. For his late 70s, James Brown never did have another hit.
[Mary] So this producer-artist relationship is much older than I was realizing it was. Fascinating. So with… As we're kind of wrapping up, since I do love watching people rant, pick anything that makes you kind of just flip the table.
[Howard] You're asking him to go twitter beefing live.
[Laughter]
[Wildstyle] Right. Which I do too much of.
[Mary] Not… He can pick a fictional example. He can pick out the pet peeve. Because one of the things that I think is very telling in fiction is when someone is doing a process that is so annoying. Like, what is it that is so annoying to you when you are doing your job that you just kind of want to flip the table sometimes?
[Wildstyle] Oh, as being a producer? Oh, I think it's artists that think they know everything.
[Laughter]
[Wildstyle] Often times, you will… People that you know, sometimes they get a little ahead of themselves and they want to tell you how to do your job as the composer, and as the engineer. They have all these ideas. Some of them have good ideas, and some of them have really bad ideas. Sometimes you're expected to try to piece together really bad ideas. When it doesn't work, it's your fault.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] Thank you so much, Wildstyle, for being on the podcast with us. Did you have homework, or a writing prompt, for our listeners?
[Wildstyle] I would say, if you haven't seen the movie Get On Up, to watch it, because that's… That gives an interesting dynamics of some of the things that… Not hip-hop, but hip-hop was founded on that… How artists have this tension with their producers and their management and everything else about the sound. I think that would help the writing and understand how hip-hop producers…
[Howard] If I can echo that, which we don't usually do during the writing prompt. But the things that you are describing, it is impossible to write these things well without listening, without hearing the music, and learning to put into your ears and kind of into your heart, the sorts of things that you're describing happening in the studio. That movie's a… Movie's really smart.
[Wildstyle] Yeah, it is. It is. I would recommend everybody watch that if they're interested in writing about hip-hop or music in general.
[Brandon] All right. Well, thank you so much. And thank you to our audience.
[Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go listen.
 
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships
 
 
Key points: Beyond the character arc, with characters changing and developing, other characters get involved. That's where character relationships come in. Some people plan them in advance, while other people discover them in the writing. Leave yourself wiggle room, and when you find two characters that work well together, let them show you great scenes and better stories. Try the Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Mind: intelligence. Money: what is money for, and what are your goals? Morals: what's right and wrong? Manners: what's polite? Monogamy: hot, burning kisses? What is our relationship? The Marx Brothers: what's funny, and what's not! Alignment makes compatibility, differences create friction points, tension points. Another tool is position power versus personal power. How can you introduce backstory in a relationship quickly? A shared in-joke. Free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, reflecting on the relationship. Final question: the relationship after HEA! How do you write that? The classic romantic arc is a character arc, from I am dissatisfied with being alone to they hook up. After that, don't break the relationship, use an event arc, with something disrupting the status quo. External conflicts plus friction in the Kowal relationship axes equals story! Don't just strut like a hawk, scratch for your own worms.
 
ExpandPutting words on the outline... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Relationships.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, we know what our characters… They have a big arc, and they're changing, and they're developing. Now other people are going to start interfering with that. Helping or hindering it. We're going to talk about character relationships. This is something that I do a lot ahead of time. But I know that Dan, for instance, just kind of… Often they…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Mess each other up and you see what happens.
[Dan] Sometimes. I do a mix of both. I like to plan out in advance when I know, for example, that I'm going to have a group of friends. I want to know how they all interact with each other. But very frequently, and in fact the book that came out earlier this year, Active Memory, turned into a father-daughter book. Not because I planned it that way, but because as I was writing the other two in the series, that relationship became more and more interesting every time the father came on screen. So by midway through the third book, I'm like, "Okay, you know what?"
[Laughter]
[Dan] "We're just going to focus on this, and we're going to do it right."
[Brandon] I would say… I mean, I joke about being a heavy outliner, but this is one of the places, no matter how much you outline, you have to have wiggle room for. When your characters are quote unquote on screen together and you find that you write them with great chemistry, that they are working… When those two characters are on screen, you have a better scene than when either of them are apart, you know that something is going on there, and you need to be willing to run with that and explore it. You want to write the scenes that are best. You want the characters to give you the opportunity to write better stories.
 
[Mary] This is one of those things that we're always talking about, that writing is a spectrum from outlining to discovery writing. This is one of the areas that I also tend to discovery write a lot. But I also have a tool that I use when I need to… Like, when I know that I'm going to need these two characters to fight, but I don't want it to be a stupid fight. Because… Oh, I see this all the time, where the characters are fighting and I'm like, "Why are you fighting? You're fighting… There's no…" Or conversely, the characters who really do not get along at all, and then suddenly wind up in bed together. I'm like, "What? You've got nothing in common." So allow me to introduce you to something that I call the Kowal relationship axes.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] It's actually named after my mother-in-law, who used it as dating advice to my husband… Or to her son. I realized that it actually works incredibly well for describing the ways we interact with not just a romantic partner but kind of for everybody. So the idea is that there are six axes along which relationships exist. The more closely you are aligned on any one of these, the more compatible you are. The farther apart, the less compatible. It… The sliders don't have to be very far off. So those are mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers.
[Laughter]
[Mary] I will grant that my husband added the Marx Brothers after he realized… After we were married, that I had never seen…
[Laughter]
[Mary] We'll start backwards and work our way up. Marx Brothers basically represents that you have the same sense of humor.
[Brandon] Right. You laugh at the same thing.
[Mary] It's a very simple one. Monogamy is not that you're both monogamous, but that you have the same idea of what the relationship is. I mean, you've experienced the thing where someone thinks that you are BFFs, and you're like, "I kind of vaguely know you from work…" It's really super uncomfortable. So it's just you have to have… She labeled that one as hot burning kisses, which is better for the romantic stuff.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So they weren't all iterative?
[Mary] No.
[Brandon] When she… You being a writer have…
[Mary] Well, it was actually… The first four were alliterative, and then…
[Brandon] Then, hot burning kisses.
[Mary] Then hot burning kisses.
[Dan] Then hot burning kisses. Which, to be fair, can stand alone.
[Mary] It's true. So, manners mean that you have the same idea of what is polite… What is… And what is not. Morals are different from manners. Morals is your sense of what is right and wrong in the world. So you can have morals that are in close alignment and manners that are wildly off, or the other way around. I mean, that's often why you know someone on the Internet who's a terrible person on the Internet, and you meet them in real life and they're so nice. It's because your manners are really closely aligned, while your morals are wildly off. Money is that you have the same sense of what money is for, and the same goals towards money. It doesn't actually necessarily mean that you have the same amount of money, but that…
[Brandon] For swimming through in your giant money vault, obviously.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's what you do with it.
[Mary] Yes. Obviously. Mind is that you have comparable degrees of intelligence. What's interesting about this is that they really do not have to be very far off. So you can have people that are compatible. Like, the upper ends of all of these sliders in terms of their compatibility, but even just a little bit off… Those are the points where the friction is going to happen. What that does for you if you know that, if you know the places that they're a little bit farther… A little bit off, it tells you what the fight is going to be about.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] The… Why would you even say that?
[Mary] Yes.
[Howard] That surprise… We are so like each other, and yet you just… That thing.
[Dan] Yeah. The… Using those, some of them being close together can also be a good reason why the characters stick together, even though the others are far apart. I mean, the Lethal Weapon franchise is almost entirely founded on the idea that their morals are completely aligned and their manners are wildly 100% off.
[Mary] They have very similar… They're also lined up on mind and they're also… At the beginning… What's, I think is interesting is that they are in agreement on what their relationship is. Which is that we don't like each other.
[Brandon] I work alone.
[Mary] Yes. For both of them. Their understanding of what the relationship is evolves together. So those sliders move in the same…
 
[Howard] I have a much simpler tool that I deploy much differently, which is the two scales of power. Position power and personal power. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer has position power over the employee. But a very, very charismatic, intelligent, effusive employee has gobs of personal power, and without even trying, can undermine an employer who doesn't have any personal power. In fact, you see this a lot in workplaces, in all kinds of relationships. Where someone assumes that their personal power grants them position, or assumes that their position power grants them… For instance, friendship with everyone under them. I pay close attention to this in Schlock Mercenary, because the military organizations that make up so many… Or that encompass so many of the relationships in the books are inherently about position power, and there's a wide array of differing personal powers in there. I need to make sure… We talked about manners. Something that you would say to a fellow grunt is not something that you would say to an officer. That… That dichotomy, I have to keep track of that, because if I get it wrong, it knocks people out of the story.
[Dan] I had… I worked in an office, and was there for the moment when the guy with all the position power realized that he didn't have any personal power.
[Mary] Oh, hohoho.
[Dan] The office became unlivable. It was fascinating to watch that. That has just given me the dialogue to describe what happened.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have a book coming out!
[Mary] Yes. I have two books coming out, actually. I have a duology, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Book one is called The Calculating Stars. That's coming out this month. Actually, has just come out last week. The sequel, The Fated Sky, is coming out in August, at the end of the month. The set up for the first book is basically, it begins about two minutes before an asteroid slams into Washington, DC, in 1952, wiping out… It's actually the Chesapeake Bay, because it turns out that a water strike is way worse than a land strike. But it kicks off the space program hard and fast and internationally, with 1952 technology. So the first book is push to the moon, and second book is push to Mars. It's a woman-centered cast, because I've got a lot of… Because it's 1952, all of the women who are in Hidden Figures, all of those computers? Not only are they computers at that point, but historically speaking, a lot of them were also left over WASPs, Women Auxiliary Service Pilots from World War II. So you have a lot of people who are lighter than men, better able to handle gravitational blood pressure shifts, and who are walking computers.
[Brandon] It's out, it's awesome, I've read it, it's great. You guys should all go read it.
[Mary] So one of the exciting things for me about this book also is that I had astronauts reading it, and we are actually going to be at NASA and do a project-in-depth about The Calculating Stars, which is the first book in the series, in two weeks. Although we will have done it already… It's time travel, don't worry about it. So this gives you two weeks to read the book before we get to NASA. Go ahead. Three… Two… One… Lift off!
[Rumbling]
[laughter]
[Howard] Was I supposed to make a rocket noise?
[Mary] No.
[Howard] Oh.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] That was a terrible joke.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I was waiting to see. Is she going to say lift off? Or are we not going to do that? Nope, she did it.
[Brandon] Either way, there will be massive spoilers for Mary's book in two weeks, so you should read it now.
 
[Brandon] Let's… Let me ask you guys another question about relationships. One of my favorite things in books and in film and whatever is when you get two characters who minutes after interacting, you can read in their interactions an extensive history that they don't have to tell you point by point by point, which is boring. Characters who just… You can read their relationship in moments. How do you write this? Any tips, any tricks?
[Mary] An in-joke. Just one. You don't have to do a lot. But an in-joke, like if two characters are talking and one of them is like, "Oh, yeah, like the time with the pumpkin."
[Chuckles]
[Mary] You don't have to do anything more than that.
[Dan] You said you wouldn't bring that up, Mary.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Sorry.
[Brandon] They did that in the Dirk Pitt movie, and it worked really well, to kick off the fact that these two characters have been in lots of crazy hijinks together.
[Dan] A story that does this really, really well is Sneakers. Because there's that whole little group of misfits and people, and one of the great things they do is the character Mother, who is always bringing up weird conspiracy theories. The first time he does that, Sidney Poitier, who's the ex-CIA guy, he reacts before he starts the story. I mean, he starts the story, and before he has a chance to get to the weird stuff, he's already rolling his eyes. You immediately know, "Oh, they do this all the time."
[Laughter]
[Dan] They have this very specific relationship to conspiracies in government, and it tells so much in the timing of his reaction.
[Brandon] That's awesome. Yeah.
[Howard] The Rocket and Groot scene where we are introduced to them in Guardians of the Galaxy… Groot's only dialogue is "I am Groot," where Groot is drinking out of the fountain, and we establish very, very quickly that the relationship between these two is kind of father-son and kind of boss-employer and kind of brains and brawn, and yet there is something woven in there that we just don't know, but it's there.
[Mary] I think that the thing with that is not just the in-jokes, but also, tying into what Dan was talking about, that... the characters' reaction to each other. So this is a place that you can use one of the tools we talked about when we were talking about character voice, which is that indirect… That free indirect speech, where the character's internal monologue can be a little bit about their relationship. "Oh, no, no, no, not this story again."
[Brandon] You see this in relationship… Romantic relationships a lot. Someone walks on screen, in a movie or television show, and you know instantly that those two characters have a history, a relationship. Often times it's that they're extremely cold to one another, which we read as, "Oh, something happened in the past between those two." I would say, less is more, in a lot of these instances. 
 
[Brandon] Now, different topic. I wanted to make sure we asked you, Mary. You had an entire series where two characters went through a classic romance relationship, and then multiple books afterward where many people would have just stopped the series. In most movies and things, they just stop at the point where the first book ended. You wrote wonderful, awesome books about a different kind of relationship in some ways.
[Mary] So… Why, thank you. So, anyone who's married knows that you can actually be in a committed, happy relationship… Anyone who's in a committed, happy relationship, whether or not you're… You can be in this wonderful relationship, and there's still conflict. But the conflict is external. So the way I actually structured that… Okay. It took me a while to figure out. So I tend to think about the MICE quotient a lot. What I realized was that a romantic arc is structured as a character arc. The character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and then… That is, "I am alone." Then they hook up. That what happens when you… For the most part is that when people attempt to write relationships later, what they do is they're still writing a character arc, but once you're in a relationship, that couple is now a single unit, and you have to treat them as a single unit. So when you have the "I am dissatisfied with an aspect of self," that means that it's all about an internal conflict between the couple. So what I did was I treated it like an event arc instead, where they were totally happy with each other, but any event arc is when something disrupts their status quo. So I made sure that all of the conflicts that were hitting them were external conflicts, and then used the Kowal relationship axes to talk about how that friction expressed itself between them.
[Brandon] I would say that one of the reasons I like this is, it's a pet peeve of mine… Maybe that's the wrong term… That when the two characters hook up, the story is done. Which it's totally not.
[Howard] Or we have to make them break up so we can put them back together.
[Mary] That drives me crazy.
[Brandon] It's the sort of thing that I feel like, as storytellers, sometimes we internalize this thing which is a complete lie. Sometimes the best stories, in fact often the best stories, are when the reader's personally invested in both characters and personally invested in this relationship, which only happens once they are together. It's the same sort of thing in a different way that happens with Mistborn, this trilogy. If you haven't read it, the story that I originally wanted to tell was how do you keep an empire together after you've conquered it? When you're the Rebels and you've blown up the Death Star and taken over, and none of you have any experience in leading an empire or whatever, a republic, how do you make that happen? It's gotta be way harder than blowing something up, keeping it together. That's what made me initially start working on the series. With relationships, keeping together a relationship, I wouldn't say maybe it's harder, but in some ways it is, right? Because you have to work on it every day. The initial euphoria is gone, and something deeper is growing and building, but that's way more interesting.
[Dan] There's a beautiful quote from the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, in the fourth one, where the kid just wants to go off and be a hero. One of the witches says to him, "It's easy for the chicken to strut like a hawk. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." I always think that… That is such a more interesting story to tell, is how do you actually live rather than do this one cool thing and then be done.
[Mary] I think that it's also important to note that this is… This thing you're talking about of working on a relationship is not just a romantic relationship. Like, if you've met someone at a con or just school or… And they've moved away, it's difficult. You have to work constantly to maintain that level of friendship. It doesn't just take care of itself. I think that that's one of the things that you can do when… As a conflict point, as a tension point, is not the we want to break up, but we want to hang out and there are things getting between us. That's the other secret that I used in the Glamorous Histories is that I gave them, both characters, the same basic objective in addition to the same basic relationship objective, which was they wanted to get offscreen to a fade to black scene.
[Laughter]
[Mary] All they wanted… It's like, we really want to do a fade to black scene right now, but we're being attacked by pirates.
[Brandon] I would say… You mentioned friends kind of growing apart just because you're no longer in the same social circles. If that's happening to you, start a podcast with your friends…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Then you get to see them and hang out with them.
 
[Brandon] We're actually out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. So take the elements of the Kowal relationship axes. Look at your characters. Decide where their friction points are. I want you to just pick two of them. Don't pick all of them, if you want them to be friends. Decide why they're that way. It's not enough to say they're… They have different manners. Like one of them is from the south, one is from Hawaii, which is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] [garbled] and I. But pick two, decide why, and then give them an external conflict and let the friction express itself.
[Howard] Can you rattle off the axes again?
[Mary] Yes. They are also in the liner notes. Mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, Marx Brothers.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J. R. Johansson

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/04/30/12-18-gendered-dialect-with-j-r-johansson/

Key Points: Men and women have different motivations in communication. Women, in general, seek connections, while men seek status. Women use rapport talk, while men use report talk. Men tend to goal-oriented communications, while women are building bonds. When women join other women, the first comment is likely to be a compliment. With men, the first thing is likely to be a joking insult. Relations versus dominance. Most of this is socialization. Be aware that the exceptions are as interesting as the rules! Broad spectrum of engagement. When a woman says, "This is what happened to me," they are looking for empathy, sympathy, where a man is likely to answer, "Let me fix that for you." Women often apologize, are overly polite. They use equivocating, and self-deprecation. To learn the other side, read work written by and for that gender. Get someone to flag your writing. "Spend more time listening than you spend talking."

ExpandAll the talk, uncut! )
[Howard] Okay. We are out of time. Susan, do you have a writing prompt for us?
[Susan] Um...
[Mary] I actually…
[Howard] No, Jenn has the writing prompt for us.
[J. R.] I do. I have a writing prompt for you.
[I'm so sorry, I don't.] [Laughter] [We got you covered. Go to it.]
[J. R.] Okay. So, I think it's very, frequently when you see a matriarchy represented in fantasy, sci-fi, any of those type situations… It's really just a patriarchy with women in all of the roles. So write a scene with a matriarchy that has them communicating and dealing with each other in a little more of a female fashion. See how that goes.
[Howard] Outstanding. Fair listener, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.50: Hand-Selling Your Book to Potential Readers, with Michael R. Underwood

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/12/11/11-50-hand-selling-your-book-to-potential-readers-with-michael-r-underwood/

Key Points: Hard selling can poison the well. Don't do it. Start with a conversation. Questions are good. Get them to talk about their favorite books, then pitch something similar. Find out what problem they have, what they are interested in. Set up your table in clusters. A big backlist or working with other authors can help you meet their interest with something that matches. But find out what their problem is, and then suit your pitch to that. "What do you like to read?" and "What kind of fun are you looking to have with a book?" Be enthusiastic! If you have a big backlist/series, prime yourself to talk about a good entry point to get past paralysis of choice. Try out different pitches, and then think about what worked and didn't work. Get the book in their hands. Your pitch is a story you are telling to an audience of one, make it a good one! Don't forget the economic pitch -- sales bundles, special deals, etc. Build relationships, don't force today's sale and lose a long-term reader.

ExpandA special deal, just for you... )

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to call it right here. But Michael, you said you have a writing prompt for us.
[Michael] I really love looking at the sociology of science fiction. I think this is may be related to a prompt that Mary has given, so I'll apologize if it's a little bit of a retread. When you have an idea about like oh, say, here's a cool technology. So, come up with a cool technology. Then, to figure out who your protagonist is, look at who has the most to gain and the most to lose, and how it will change any given industry. Then you can find a protagonist there. From that, you've created a couple of points, and go forward. Write an outline or write a story.
[Brandon] Excellent. Well, Michael, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
[Michael] Thanks so much for having me. That'll be $20.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] And the audience from our Writing Excuses cruise. Thank you guys.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.39: Elemental Relationships Q&A, with Greg van Eekhout

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/25/11-39-elemental-relationship-qa-with-greg-van-eekhout/

Q&A Summary:
Q: What is your favorite way to establish relationships? Is it through dialogue or is it through background or is it through narrative? How is it?
A: Dialogue, because it can quickly establish the relationship. Action, because it shows characters that know each other well.
Q: How do you recover when a relationship between a hero and a supporting character starts to feel forced?
A: Throw something in that messes up expectations. Banter.
Q: How do you show a best friend relationship?
A: The same as for a romantic relationship, intimacy in dialogue and a degree of physical comfort with each other. Leave out the gaze. Best friends stay together even when they fight. Best friends are the ones who are still there after everyone else leaves.
Q: When doing romance, how do you decide to move fast or slow?
A: It depends on the kind of book. Erotica? Jump in fast and stay there. Others, much more slowly.
Q: Do you try to make the nature of the relationship between characters clear, or do you often leave things to subtext? Do you use different techniques to write different types?
A: Yes. Relationships in Schlock Mercenary depend on whether people like working together, and on relative rank. How close characters are governs how much subtext you use.
Q: How do you approach writing a relationship with a transsexual character without making it stiff or unnatural?
A: Deferred. Talk to people who have primary experience.
Q: What are your favorite relationships to write?
A: Happy marriages. Functional families. New friendships. Prickly antagonists. Working relationships where characters are discovering each other's competencies.
Q: How do I write a starting relationship, a friendship or things between two characters that the reader doesn't even know well yet? How does someone start off with that?
A: What do the two characters need and want? Similar, so they work together, or opposed, so they work against each other? Either way, use banter as they explore how they are going to interact.
Q: How do you transform love into hate and vice versa?
A: Time. Money. Betrayal.
Q: When writing a love triangle, how do you keep from making it obvious the final couple ahead of time?
A: Make them both plausible choices.
Q: Recommendations for books that focus on familial friend relationships rather than romance.
A: The witches in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Mother-daughter in A Wrinkle In Time series Nancy Drew and her dad, Monica Mars and her dad.
ExpandRelationships mean never having to say you're sorry? )

[Brandon] Well, why don't we end with a writing prompt instead? Greg, you've got a writing prompt for us.
[Greg] Yeah. How about take a look at the actual place that you live, the city or the neighborhood, the general region. Find some source of magic that is specific to that location that if your story were taken somewhere else, taking place someplace else, the magic would have to be different. Something endemic to where you live.
[Brandon] All right. So, thank you, audience at ComicCon.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] Thank you, Greg van Eekhout.
[Greg] Thank you guys. This is fun.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.38: The Elemental Relationship As a Sub-Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/18/11-38-the-elemental-relationship-as-a-sub-genre/

Key Points: Relationship is often the number two thing in a book. Often the main plot, the driver, is another elemental genre, but relationship adds, either throughout the book or in smaller sections. Relationship often helps make a main character more sympathetic. How do you add relationship without letting it take over? What's the driver? Use that to push evolution in the relationship, without making relationship the main problem. Think about where you spend your words -- the problem with the most words is the most important one! Often there are true hybrids. Often just use relationship as a seasoning, with moments where characters stand in support of each other, or reveal a shared history. Suggest a relationship, and let the reader tell their own story about it. Subplots need to evolve, with the reader interested in how it is going to develop. Seasoning can be fine, too.

ExpandWho's driving, anyway? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to give us some homework. My suggestion to you for homework is that two weeks ago, if you did what Dan told you, you took a romantic comedy and you highlighted the beats of this romantic comedy. I want you to take that outline that you've done, and if you didn't do it, go do it. I want you to change it into a different kind of relationship. I want you to take these same beats and say, "All right. Now it's mentor student. And I'm going to build the same story around this, but with this very different relationship." Or I'm going to be buddy cop, or I'm going to be mother-daughter, or I'm going to be whatever. Take this, take the same beats, and transition it to a new type of relationship.
[Howard] So you take the beat map from While You Were Sleeping and write Lethal Weapon with it.
[Brandon] That's right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.36: The Elemental Relationship

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/04/11-36-the-elemental-relationship/

Key Points: Relationship stories where readers are driven to turn pages to find out how the relationship develops. Often denial, reluctance, exploration, acceptance. Braiding roses -- show us the roses, show us the thorns, then show us how they fit together. The Act 2 disaster, where the relationship worsens, can break your heart. Beware the idiot plot, where 5 seconds of conversation would solve the problem. Make the problem real, and let them work to solve it. The conflict often reflects outside pressures. The key moment for a relationship is when the characters support each other. The conflict sets that up, makes you wonder if they will. Then you cheer when they do, when they step up and fight for the relationship and each other. Look for the media naranja, the half orange, that completes your character. What are the gaps, holes, and thorns that need to be fitted together? Make sure that the characters are ones that the reader likes!

Brandon's moment: We look at the elemental genres to give you basic components to use in building stories. Stories are often based around crisis moments. But to get to the crisis moment, make the right promises, in tone and progress, so that the moment fits.

ExpandHe's not heavy, he's my brother... )

[Brandon] All right. Let's call it here and go to our homework. Dan, you have some homework for us.
[Dan] I do. I want you to go out and grab a romantic comedy of some kind. One you've seen before, one you've never seen, it doesn't matter if it's good or bad. Watch it, and take notes as you go. What are the things… How do the characters meet? What do they do that helps each other, what do they like about each other, what do they not like about each other? Where are those gaps and missing pieces and thorns that define that relationship? Just take notes as you watch and see what that teaches you about how the story is constructed.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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