Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] 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 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Etiquette.

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

 

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

[Erin] Who is Elsie?

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

[Laughter]

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

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

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Personal voice.

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

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

[DongWon] Exactly.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

[DongWon] Absolutely.

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

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

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

 

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Absentmindedly.

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

 

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But I know which parts!

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

 

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] "When I wrote it."

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

[Howard] Oh, my.

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

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/04/11/16-15-poetic-structure-part-i/

 

Key points: Sonnets are memes! Poetic forms are memes. Structure, rhyme scheme, meter can be tools of communication. Patterns of difference and repetition. Sonnet, villanelle, sestina, different forms suit different themes and topics. Repetition catches our attention, but it needs to point to something.

 

[Season 16, Episode 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetic Structure, Part 1.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And this is haiku.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Humm…] [Mary Robinette] I'm not going to pause to count to see whether or not that was actually haiku, however…

[Howard] I counted five times to make sure.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It is. Our tagline is very accidentally a perfect haiku.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's

[Amal] That's beautiful.

 

[Mary Robinette] That is so beautiful. And thus, poetic structure. Which Amal will speak to us as part five of our eight part series on poetry.

[Amal] Yes. So, poetic structure. So, one of the things that we've been sort of… I feel like up until this point in this series, I've been trying to talk about lots of underlying ideas about poetry, some things that are assumed, some things that are received, and stuff like that. To kind of challenge and develop our ideas of what a poem is or can be. But what I want to do in today's episode is talk about some much more recognizable poetic forms, and talk about how, even though you don't need a poem to be structured in an explicit way that has been received with like centuries of lineage and baggage behind it, in order for it to be a poem, it can be really fun to play with those forms on the same. So you absolutely do not need to write a sonnet in order to be writing a poem. You don't need to write a villanelle or a sestina or a limerick or a haiku for it to be a poem. But since we have these forms, I would love to actually talk about the forms themselves and how they can be not so much constraining as liberating sometimes. Especially when you're just starting out writing poetry. Also, to talk about a revelation that I experienced about poetic structure that I received from one of my students while trying to teach a class on structure, when I was talking about sonnets. What happened was this. I was talking about how sonnets have come through a series of transformations over time, the way that the sonnet form tends to get taught at say an undergraduate English student level is that it is 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme. But there is a distinction that happened. In the past, once upon a time, Petrarch, an Italian poet, wrote in a certain rhyme scheme because Italian is a rhyme rich language. So poets were wanting to write sonnets the way Petrarch did copied that scheme. But then Shakespeare comes along, and Shakespeare, recognizing that English is a rhyme poor language, changes the rhyme scheme of the sonnet. Instead of having a turn in the poem that happens in the middle, he has the turn come right at the end, before that last couplet. All this sort of stuff. As I was going on and saying this in class, a student, absolutely ingeniously, interjected to say, "So, you're saying a sonnet is like a meme?"

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I said, "Oh, my God. Yes."

[Chuckles]

[Amal] A sonnet is a meme. My mind exploded. I thought this. This is the most… How could I not have seen it before? A sonnet is a meme. So is almost any poem that is a received form that you interact with and engage with and transform as you move forward. Then it occurred to me that there is actually a fantastic example of this in that there is a specific poem that has been meme-ified more than perhaps any other, which is This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That was exactly what I thought you were going to refer to.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So, here you have this poem. This is the plum poem, if you're not familiar with its actual title. If you literally just Google this is just to say meme, you will get the most beautiful panoply of transformations of this… Of the plum poem.

[Mary Robinette] This is just to say, that this is a podcast that you were probably saving to listen to later.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. So this is what I want to kind of touch on. But even though the idea of a structure in a poem, of a rhyme scheme, of a specific meter, look essentially like constraints, like things that are going to limit your creativity, they are going to hamper you in your progress towards poetic majesty, they also can be tools of communication and of ultimately freedom as you engage with and transform them and contribute to a kind of accumulation of meaning around these poems. Shakespeare 100% did this with something like my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. Where he took this idea of a sonnet is a sincere honest love poem, and one of its defining features is that you're going to itemize a kind of shopping list of your beloved's features and kind of sing the praises of each one. He just comes out and goes, "Nah. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is more red than her lips are red." And just kind of goes down this sort of like seemingly nasty list of ways of saying, "Nah. My lover is actually not that great. She's not a goddess, she's not got all this stuff." But "And yet, I think my love more rare than any she belied with false compare." It's totally transforming the whole principle of the poem.

[Dan] Yeah. I love… I've got a 19-year-old daughter. She is constantly trying to show me, because now she's off to college, and so most of our communication is done over text, and she will send me all these things she thinks are hilarious. I say, "No, they're not. Those are not remotely funny. What's wrong with you?" What we eventually figured out is that the root of this kind of massive generational gap between what I think is funny and what she thinks is funny is…

[Mary Robinette] That you're a dad?

[Dan] She knows the memetic structure behind everything that she is trying to share with me.

[mmm]

[Dan] Right?

[Ooh]

[Dan] So it's not necessarily funny on its own, it's funny because someone is taking a known form and playing with it. I love the idea of… That your brilliant student who compared that to poetic structure is absolutely dead on. One of my favorite web comics is Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North.

[Yes!]

[Dan] That is… He actually has… What's brilliant about that one is that it's like six panels that are identical every single time. They're thousands upon thousands of comics that he has put out and they all have exactly the same visuals with different texts. One of them, in response to critiquers who were like, "How can you possibly just use the same images over time? That's so boring." He literally calls back to sonnet structure, and says, "No. The form is just the way in which you are saying something, and allows you this incredible freedom of expression, because you don't have to worry about all these other aspects of it."

[Howard] During the break between recording episodes, I posited what I now think is a possible doctoral thesis for someone who understands…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Poetry and oral tradition. That was the idea that poetry with rhyme and meter is a checksum for the oral tradition. Well, in between episodes, I was reading up on the word meme and Richard Dawkin's original interpretation of it, which is that it's a unit of information which, when exposed to humans, is easy for the humans to copy. Easy for them to replicate. So, yes, these forms with meter and rhyme, it makes it easier for us to replicate them. I love that concept, and the idea that memes at some point… Like Dan said, I have a 20-year-old and a 26-year-old and a 17-year-old, and they're regularly trying to show me things on their phones. No, I don't want to look at your phone, I just… Do you want to tell me a story? No, I want you to have the experience of this meme unfolding before you. I guess, Dan, I'm fortunate in that I have a little bit more of the context, because I regularly think they're funny.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of stories that we want people to tell us… Let's pause for the book of the week. Which is Resident Alien. That was your suggestion, Howard.

[Howard] Oh, my goodness. It's not a book, it's a television program which is airing now on scifi. It's based on a comic book, and it is about an alien who crash lands on earth and who must take the form of a human in order to fit in in order to complete his mission. The alien is played by Alan Tudyk. In the very first episode, there is a scene where Alan Tudyk is watching Law & Order and trying to replicate the dialogue. "I've gut mn mukoset."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Rewind. "I've got news for you, Cosette."

[Gasp]

[Howard] Okay. Alan Tudyk pretending to be a human being is my new favorite jam.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As of this recording, the first four episodes are out. It's funny in that the tagline that they've been using is 3 5-syllable sets. It's the doctor… Excuse me. Alien comedy doctor dramedy we all need right now. I realize that in the patterning of their marketing for it, they've created poetry. Anyway. It's beautiful. I think you'll enjoy it. Scifi.com, and it's called Resident Alien.

[Amal] That sounds so great. I extremely want to watch it.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I love Alan Tudyk so much.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[Amal] Alan Tudyk being sinister, in particular, is of great appeal to me.

 

[Amal] So, I want to pick up on the last thing you were saying about pattern, actually, and how that fits into this idea of poetic structure. So, a pattern is essentially a recognition of difference and repetition, right? And the… So often, when we use a shorthand like rhyme scheme and stuff like that, what we're talking about is a pattern of difference and repetition. And that poetic forms are an orchestration of those kinds of differences. They are formed over time, they have different origins, different contexts, that kind of give rise to them. That each one can be its own mini lecture that I don't really want to get into, because I want to talk about structure more broadly. But I do want to point out that when you look at a poetic form, I would encourage you to think about what it is suited for. The sonnet comes out of a love poetry tradition. But something like the villanelle…  if you look at a villanelle, thinking of famous ones, something like Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light, by Dylan Thomas, or Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath. I think I made you up inside my head. The thing that when you look at a villanelle, the repetition… The refrain in it makes it peculiarly suited to themes of obsession, to themes of being caught up in some feeling or idea, in a way that is different from something like a sonnet, where you kind of are building towards an argument and then turn away from it. Or from a sestina, where you have this ludicrous form of like repeating six words in a different pattern every stanza in a way that ultimately feels eclectic. Or like a sort of pattering of rain or something like that. So… Yeah. Sorry.

[Mary Robinette] No. Continue your thought, and then I have a question thought.

[Amal] So, it's… All this to say that different poetic forms can be… Can come out of a process that has suited them to a particular theme or topic, and then you can get a lot of mileage out of subverting that theme or topic, the way Shakespeare does with a love sonnet to make it slightly more sarcastic or something like that.

[Mary Robinette] This is so interesting to me. So, one of the things that I talk about, and it took me a while to get to it, was the idea of repetition carrying important. So, in puppetry, people have heard me talk before about head bobbing, which is where the puppet's head just bounces up and down. The problem with that is that it carries no meaning. It's not that the puppet's head is moving, that's not the problem. It's that it's not pointing to anything. Part of this is because the way people are wired, when you're thinking about narration, that someone who is droning is hard to listen to. But repetition also catches our interest. This is, I think, related to how we are originally hardwired, which is that repetition is inherently unnatural. So when you hear something repeating outside in the wild, that's important and that's something you should pay attention to. When you're… Like in prose, when you have accidental repetition, when something… A sentence is awkward because of the accidental repetition, it's because it's pointing to the wrong thing. So, my question is, after all of that, is one of the things… Like, it sounds like what you're talking about with this, with these different forms being well suited to different things, is, to some degree, because of where that repetition happens, because of what it's pointing at. Am I getting this?

[Amal] Absolutely. Absolutely, completely. I love the example of accidental repetition or unintentional repetition that happens in prose. Because the… There's a corollary to that which I find really fascinating. Those of you who did the night brain exercise might find this interesting to muse on if you look at the results of what you did. When I see people do the night brain exercise, there are a few things that kind of come up, that recur. That in the shape that their unguarded, unselfconscious thoughts take as they're trying to write past a snag or something, one of them is a sort of chanting repetition. That, as they're trying to write something that is poetic, they'll find themselves repeating a sentence over and over again. As if the repetition itself is going to bring them into a more poetic affect. It works. It absolutely works. Because the intention is there. Off the top of my head, I think of something like TS Eliot's The Hollow Men where it ends with, "This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper." You need that repetition, that accumulation, essentially, of a kind of storm gathering.

[Mary Robinette] That's so amazing. I cannot wait for us to get to part two, where you're talking about the without constraints. 

 

[Mary Robinette] So, do you want to slide us into homework so we can…

[Amal] Absolutely. So, your homework for today is to essentially write a poem with a form. So right either three haiku or one villanelle. You can look up the constraints of these respective forms. They are widely available online. I want you to pay attention to the demands of the form. Consider how those constraints that you're experiencing can actually inspire the theme of a poem or a certain mode of poetic expression. If these particular two forms don't speak to you, go for another one. But it has to be an established, traditional form that you are engaging with from our contemporary present moment.

[Mary Robinette] This is amazing. Thank you so much. You are out of excuses. Now go write.