Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-37-a-close-reading-on-tension-movement-and-resolution 

 

Key points: The law of the half step, a little movement creates tension. Solutions to problems that create a whole new problem. Yes-but, no-and! Repetitions that have changed just a little bit. Don't play coy with the reader, withholding secrets. Make sure your reveal give us new information, moves the story forward. EDM beat drops! Use mini-drops, small revelations, to assure your reader that we are moving towards a resolution. Use multiple threads, multiple pieces of tension, at any given time. Resolve something that the reader doesn't know needs resolution. Make sure the movement and resolution is story driven. Reframe have to do as get to do. Reframe have to hold this back from the reader as at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing, and I am going to build to that reveal. Make your goal to be cursed by readers who didn't want to feel the thing that you just made them feel.

 

[Season 19, Episode 37]

 

[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 37]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution.

[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 want to talk about music for a moment. Way back when I was studying music composition, one of my instructors talked about what he called the law of the half step. Which was that when there's a note that is a half step off from being the tonic or the dominant or whatever, from being in resolution, you have a chord that has created tension, has created a need for movement. The whole principle behind this was that as you are composing, you want to build chords where there are these half step movements just waiting to happen. You don't want to move a whole step, you don't want to have a note jump, especially if you're writing for choir. You don't want to have somebody jump a third or a fourth or a fifth in order to resolve the chord. You want the little movements that make things resolve. In teaching us about this, he said, "Now let's listen to some Wagner," because he was a cruel, cruel man. What we learned in listening to Wagner is Wagner was always resolving in one direction, while shifting something else out...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Of place. He knew what he was doing. How does this tie into close reading tension with regard to Ring Shout, where the tension depends on something that is just a little bit out of place? Something… It doesn't need to move far, but it needs to move. It really needs to move. The longer it doesn't move, the tenser we get.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it's a different way of describing something that I often use when I'm trying to create tension, which is the solution to whatever problem your character is dealing with creates a new problem.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which… One of the things that I specifically think about in Ring Shout is the butcher shop scene. She needs to find the butcher shop. She needs to go and confront this guy. Doing so unlocks… It's like she does it. She has the confrontation. That unlocks this whole other enormous problem that… The dream that she had had was not actually just a dream. Ugh. I still have problems with that scene.

 

[DongWon] I mean, we see that again, over and over, he's doing that in terms of creating these moments that are the yes-but, no-and. Right? Like things… Even when things don't work out for them, it opens a door to further progressing the story. When things do work out for them, it works out in an unexpected way. Right? So, I think the night doctors is another great example of that…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] When she goes into the tree, there's a [garbled] name for the tree that I'm forgetting in the moment, but…

[Mary Robinette] The Angel Tree.

[DongWon] Yeah. The Dead Angel Tree. Sort of that whole sequence, which is this deeply upsetting thing, which is a solution to a problem. But it raises so many more questions in doing so. Right?

 

[Erin] What I love about both the girl from the dream and also the sort of brother's voice that comes out, is that it's one of those things where it's like every time we come back to it, it's moved a little bit. So like there's a little bit of tension in that. Because you know that there's some revelation coming. There's no reason this would be occurring over and over again in the story, and then be like, "Oh, well. That happened." Like, it seems like it's building towards something. But in between, there's all these immediate, like, present tensions. Like, I gotta go into this butcher shop.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I have to like run into a place on fire. But then it will be like, "Oh, this little voice." And the voices saying something a little different. Oh, this little girl. But she looks a little different. It's almost like those movies where something small on a shelf moves out of the corner of your eye…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh, my God, this moved such a long way."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That is a great way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To build tension in this story.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, to return to the music metaphor, it's that scale is building in the background. Right? It's each note is progressing up the scale, and at some point we know that's going to resolve. We know that's going to have to go somewhere.

[Howard] The… Going back to the music again, and the law of the halfstep. When you have a repeated theme in music, but something is changing, the accompaniment has changed, the tempo has changed. We've all heard it done when you play a familiar melody in a minor key. One of my favorite examples of that was Katrina and the Waves played in a minor key as part of a tribute during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. It was emotionally superpowerful, but you make little changes and it tells the reader, tells the listener, we're going somewhere. We're not just waiting for this piece to end. There is a resolution coming, and the modification of the thing that you're familiar with is leading toward that resolution.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is one of the things that P. Djèlí Clark does that I see early career writers not get where they have a character who has a secret, who has some past traumatic event, and they play coy with the reader. The reason that it does not work is, when it's handled badly is, that there isn't that movement, there isn't that giving us new information, there isn't anything to be gained by the withholding. In this, is the withholding and then the resolution of that. When she finally goes and has to relive that memory fully, that is a… That is a major plot point. It is one of the things that the story is building towards. As we are going through it, there are these tiny movements, we get these small resolutions every time we come back to it. With the things that Erin was talking about, with those, every time we come back to the voice, it's a little bit different. It's a… It is these small resolutions that then open up a different question.

[Howard] There's a common trope in all kinds of fiction where there is a secret and someone asks about the secret and the answer is you don't want to know the answer. Oh, you're not ready for me to tell you that yet. It's often so ham-fisted that we just think of it as a trope and we hate it. But in Ring Shout, there are secrets that she is not ready for the answer to. When you talk about the butcher shop, in particular, and we get an answer and the answer is a reveal where there is a whole scary horrible mess that you were just not ready to know about earlier.

[DongWon] Yeah. To modernize the metaphor a little bit, from Wagner… Sorry. But you can think about it in terms of like in EDM beat drop. Right? Like, you're building this slow thing, and then the beat drops, and now you're in a different rhythm and things are going faster. What you want is that sense of release when you get there. When you get to that beat drop, things should be popping off, being a little chaotic. Then you'll find a different rhythm, you'll find a different pace as you settle in past that moment. But the butcher shop is such a good example of that because it's a thrilling scene. Right? It is… The things that are happening in it are like absolutely buck wild. Even compared to the kind of horror we'd seen up until that point, this is reaching a different crescendo of that. Right? Which is part of the mix. That sequence is so memorable and is going to set the pace and tone for the back half of this story.

[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about moving toward that resolution.

 

[Shawn] Hey, it's Shawn Nelson, founder and CEO of Love Sack and host of the Let Me Save You 25 Years podcast. Want to avoid common pitfalls and get straight to the insights that drive success? Join me and recognize names like John Mackey of Whole Foods and Joe Vicente of Sparstar as we unpack the hard-earned lessons from their journeys. Ready to streamline your path to success? Listen to Let Me Save You 25 Years on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That's Let Me Save You 25 Years with Shawn Nelson. Listen now.

 

[Erin] The movie Clueless is great.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I'll just say it. So my recommendation is watch the movie Clueless, the nineties Valley girl retelling of the Jane Austen book, Emma. It's got classic clues, it's got amazing actors, it's got Paul Rudd at whatever age he was claiming to be at that moment. But the thing that I really love paying attention to is the way they take something from a completely different era, the Regency era, and move it into nineties valley girl voice. If you're thinking about voice in your own work, think about how did they do that? How do they make it seem like Clueless is a movie of the time and place that it's from while still keeping the plot and all of the things that come with being a retelling of an Austen classic? One thing I like to think about that you may do as you watch this work is how would you make that same story happen in the world that you're building? Enjoy that, while you watch Clueless.

 

[Howard] So you might have in front of you an outline for your work in progress where you've got a pretty clear picture of where things are going. Many of us will look at you and laugh a little bit, because your characters have not yet run away with the story. Others of us will look at you very jealously and say, "Wow, I wish my outlines work that way." The thing to remember is that this is your plan. You have an idea of how to move and how to resolve. The reader isn't in on it. Part of what makes Ring Shout, for me, so satisfying is that at every stage I could tell that we were moving toward a resolution. I knew that, but I had no idea what it was. How do you set about creating that for your readers?

[Erin] I would say that one of the things that I loved that I was talking about before with ring shout That is the mini-drops, the small answers that let you know that questions will be answered. So, looking at the sort of dream figure of the little girl… It's a little girl, who is this? Who is this girl? Wait, this girl is me? Wait, this girl wasn't a girl. And there's a barn. Like, there's all these pieces of information…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Come out. Like, we don't learn about the barn, really, until about three or four…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And then, once you hear about it, like, you may or may not contextually put together your own beliefs about what the barn is… It was exactly what I thought it was…

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But, it's each thing tells you, okay, this small question was answered, so I know the next question will be answered. That leads you towards the overall resolution of why is this important. Each single bit of information also tells you a little bit more of the reason that the girl is a girl in her mind's eye, even though… When the event happens, she wasn't young because it's easier for her. You're like, "Oh. That gives me both an emotional resolution and some more information about what's happening here." I think it is those smaller bits that really help to give the reader confidence that you are driving towards something.

 

[Mary Robinette] It's also that more than one thread is active at any given time, more than one story thread, more than one piece of tension, active at any given time. And each scene is moving those, like… In… Ah, it's so good. I'm thinking about, there's the girl, but also the Ring Shout scene. That in that scene, you're learning about how Ring Shout works. You're also learning about violence that's been happening other places. You are learning about how the Ku Klux's work. All of those things move just a little bit. And then the weather begins to shift. Each time, it's like… It's all of these little tiny half steps that resolve something while shifting something else out of alignment. It's something that you can do with your own work, is to look at scenes and see do you have only one thread that you're moving and resolving tension for in a given scene? That's for short fiction or longform.

[DongWon] It's why overlapping sounds and overlapping rhythms and melodies create greater amplitude. Right? They're not countering each other out. I mean, you want to make sure that they're not canceling each other out, which is a thing that can happen. So if you have different kinds of tension and they're running counter to each other, this can cause a drop in excitement and tension in the book. But if you're doing what he's doing here, which is adding all these different layers of here's the most visceral immediate layer of like they're fighting Ku Klux's in the street after trying to blow them up with this trap to the memories every time she draws her sword. We know we're going to get another beat on that particular layer. Then the Ring Shouts, the sort of epistolary pieces that start off each section…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Each of those is adding another note to the sort of stack of melodies that we're getting that is building over the course of the book. It makes the whole book feel like one of its own Ring Shouts. Right? It's one of these owned stories that has this impact and potential and is saying something very specific and powerful.

 

[Erin] I also love that sometimes it's building and creating emotion, even when you don't think it is. So, for example, all the people, the voices that… The images basically that she's getting when she draws the sword happen basically the same way every time that we see them the first few times. So it feels like this is just a thing. When you draw your sword, you get some random pretty tragic things that happened. But then those voices come into play at the end…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Of the novella… Spoiler alert, but you were supposed to read the book. Like, those all come into play feels like such a great res… Like a resolution I wasn't even expecting.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I think that sometimes that is also something that we could do, which is to resolve a thing that you didn't know needed resolution, that it feels so emotionally satisfying to get it.

[DongWon] You keep us moving so much that we forget that, oh, her best friend died, which means that she could be one of the spirits of the sword now. You know what I mean? So that moment when she comes is such a resolution to that whole arc, the arc of friendship, the arc of the tragedy of her death, and the ark of the sword, all coming together in a single moment that leads to such a big emotional catharsis for these two characters and this relationship.

 

[Howard] One of the things that makes this kind of movement and resolution satisfying is when it is always story driven, rather than driven by the necessity of the meta-, the beat chart. I want the reader to not know this yet. I want the reader… Now I want them to know this. Okay, that's fine. Having a beat chart at the beginning that says the reader is in the dark about a whole bunch of things and this is my list of reveals. But every one of these reveals not only needs to be justified, but the reader needs to feel like there was a really good reason why nobody in whose POV I was had that information until just now. One of my favorite parts of the book is the realization that the trope of oh, I had this sword because I am the chosen one of these women who gave me the sword, and then, after the butcher shop scene, you're like, "Wait a minute. I'm not their chosen one. I'm someone else's chosen one." I… Oh, and that's the point at which, for me, I no longer knew… I had no clue where this was going to resolve. I was now genuinely frightened because there… We had this discussion years ago on the podcast. There's so many worse things that can happen to a character than death.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Having them make the decision that you as the reader hate is so much worse. I was afraid of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] [garbled] About the relationship between writer and reader, you were talking about the meta-beat, and I think that one of the things… A life thing that I have been thinking about recently is the difference between have to and get to. So, trying to reframe things that you have to do in your life as, like, I get to do that. It doesn't always work…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But…

[Mary Robinette] I may try it at home…

[Erin] But I do think that, like, sometimes instead of it's "I have to hold this back from the reader," it's "at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing to the reader and I'm going to build to that amazing moment of reveal." So I think it's about like wanting to share your story versus wanting to hold back your story.

[DongWon] This came up in one of my D&D games in a conversation with one of my players. We settled on this thing of the difference between holding a secret from you versus holding a secret for you.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's great.

[DongWon] So… If you think of yourself as a writer holding the secret for your audience, you're… It's going to be more exciting, more fun, better resolution if they don't know this thing yet versus like I'm keeping this thing from you and you don't get to have it. Right? I think that subtle shift in the mind set… It's as delicate as the get to, want to or get to, have to, or whatever it was. It's as subtle as that distinction, but I think it's a really important one, and that can be really helpful in getting to the most exciting kind of release at the end of the movement.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that also gets to something that I often end up telling writers which is, like, "Okay. So what emotion do you want the writer to have? Because, gosh, that writer is clever is not…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] "Sustainable." That is the I am holding the secret from you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The, "Oh, no," is I am holding the secret for you.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. [Garbled]

[Howard] My goal as a writer, as an early writer, would be… Yeah, I would like to be seen as clever. Now, I've reached the point where my goal is I want to be cursed by people who didn't want to feel the thing that I just made them feel. That's… For me, that's the high bar. Do I curse P. Djèlí Clark?

[Mary Robinette] I do.

[Howard] Maybe a little bit.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Maybe a little, but I enjoyed that ride quite a bit.

[Mary Robinette] I appreciated that ride.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that this was an enjoyable ride.

[Howard] Hey, we've got one or two more episodes to talk about this? Two more. All right. Let's go ahead and wrap this up.

 

[Howard] In the musical vein, I have a fun homework for you. Write a scene three times. Same scene, and write it from scratch three times. But listen to different music each time. If you need help varying things, try all instrumental. Try something that's got lots and lots of vocals. Try something that you are completely unfamiliar with, you've never listened to before. For… See how that changes what you put down on the page.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-48-nanowrimo-week-5-writing-endings 

 

Key points: How do you wrap up your novel? What makes a satisfying ending? Make sure the parentheses are closed. But how do you decide what to resolve, and what to leave open? Endings let the characters and your reads feel everything that has happened. Give the readers the same grounding that you did at the beginning. Where, who, why, how. Restate the core thematic elements of the story. Give us the aftermath. How do you leave the door cracked for a follow-on, and still give a satisfying ending? Remember, life is messy, and your character may not achieve all their goals. Leave some things unanswered. Think about how you want your reader to feel, and make sure that is the last beat, but leave other questions hanging. End with a success that leaves something else to try. Revision! Not for NaNoWriMo, but when you reach the end, you know what questions you should have been asking, and you may need to go back and set it up right. Go ahead and try different endings! Nowhere near the end? Write yourself some notes about what you want the ending to be.

 

[Season 18, Episode 48]

 

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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 18, Episode 48]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 5, Welcome to the End.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Mary Robinette] Congratulations. You have made it to week 5. For those of you who are still writing, and all of you should be, because we believe in you, you are now trying to wrap this thing up. Listen, if you lost steam, you don't have to have 50,000 words. This is about just moving forward. You can save this episode and listen to it when you're ready. But we're going to be talking about how to wrap up your novel. So, what are some things, like when you are thinking about moving towards a satisfying ending? What are some of the elements that you think about as, hmmm, this feels good?

[DongWon] It's funny. I have an issue, editorially, in thinking about endings. I have such a bias towards openings and the beginnings of books, and all like getting into the story and asking all these big questions, but I sometimes forget to think about how important the ending is. So I've made it a real focus for myself in the past few years to really pay attention and really care about how a book ends and how we're moving on from the story, emotionally. Right? There are so many very famous authors, very successful authors, who are notoriously bad at endings. Where the book just kind of stops. Right? So I think we criticize those endings, but there's a way in which maybe we can think about endings as a broader category than just making sure there's a long denouement, where everything is fully wrapped up. But, overall, I think making sure those parentheses are closed, that we were kind of talking about last week, as we were talking about starting to get to the climactic beats and making sure certain things are tied up. But how do you prioritize what are the things that you want to close off, what are the things that you want to leave your reader with a real sense of resolution on, and what are questions you want to leave open?

[Erin] I think endings are difficult because they're quiet. In some ways. Not all. But there's a moment where everything you've been doing sort of resonates in the room. It's like the moment after a concert ends, when you can still hear the mild echo of the music in the air. There's something like really beautiful about that. But also frightening in the stillness. Because it's sort of you don't have the candy bar scenes that we were talking about last week to like distract you, you're really sort of left with you and the word. I think that's why a lot of times I'll say, for me, I had a real tendency to like just try to murder everyone…

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] At the end, because then there's no one left to be in the quiet and in the stillness. I could just be like, "The end. They're dead." But I actually have found out that… Somebody told me once that it's like landing a punch. When you punch someone, you want to actually let that impact happen. If you punch someone, and then go to black, you never really see them feel it. And that endings are the moment where actually your characters get to feel everything that has happened. As frightening as it is, it's really important to also give your reader an ability to feel what has happened at the end or throughout the course of the book.

[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that The Wire ends. As much as I think season 5 went wildly off the rails, that final moment, you've got McNulty driving down the highway with a person. He stops, and he gets out of his car, and he just stares at the city for a while. Then we get a chance to see, like, what is each one of these people doing, and we get to see McNulty thinking about it and digesting it and processing it. Then he gets back in his car and he drives away. Giving your characters the chance to process what has happened and what they've gone through gives your readers that same chance. Rather than just yanking out the rug and saying, "Thanks for reading my book. Imagine for yourself what happens next."

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I had a lot of problems with when I started the switch from short fiction to novels is that I would in my novels the short story pacing. That I would stick the landing and I would be out. Because novels are about immersion. I wasn't giving my readers time to absorb this. The dénouement that we talk about sometimes. So what I've started realizing is that I need to give them the same things that I gave them at the beginning of the book. I need to ground them, because my character is in a different emotional place. They're often in a different physical place. So I find that if I start thinking about it with the why, where, who, and how that we talked about at the beginning, that I can… I know more of the elements that I need to include. It's like it helps me ground my readers. Like, who is my character now? Who have they become over the course of this journey? What physical actions are they doing in this scene that conveys that to the reader? Where are we? Like, how is the status quo changed? Like, what does the environment tell me about this new landscape, and, like, why is it important? So these are the things that I will be thinking about. Like, we're talking about the very, very last piece of it. But it's that looking back at the beginning for my answers to what we're talking about at the end. Some of it is what Dan was talking about in the previous episode of the inverse thing, or, you've heard me talk about it with nesting code. But that's what I start thinking about, is easing them out and kind of very similar pacing to how I brought them in. If it was a fast opening, that I'm going to give them a faster paced close. If it was a thoughtful opening, that's going to tell me something about the pacing at the end. So, sometimes I'm looking at mirroring that kind of pacing that I had at the beginning, sometimes I'm looking at doing an inversion, because it's saying something about the changes that have happened across the course of the novel.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Sort of building off of that idea, I think there's sometimes… One of my favorite types of endings that I've run into that I think kind of plays into this is when the last scenes are just a restatement of the core thematic elements of the story that you've just experienced. Right? So I think going to your Wire example, McNulty, looking at the city of Baltimore at the end is just a statement about what this whole show was about, what this 5 season project was, was we did a portrait of Baltimore, and now we're looking at it and reflecting on the journey that we went on. One of my very, very favorite endings to a TV show, finished last year, was Better Call Saul. Which, I don't want to quite spoil it, but the way that it ends is such a statement of what is important in the show. Right? Why did we spend all of this time with Saul as he went on this whole journey? It's making really clear, crystal-clear in some ways, the importance that love has in that story and what he stands for and what is important to him and who he wants to be. That is all restated in the final episode in this really beautiful, elegaic way. So I think when you're looking at your ending, it's almost a little bit like writing an essay in college, where you start with you state your theme. You explain how you're going to say your theme. That's kind of the opening to your story. Then you get to the business of explaining all the things. At the end, you're like, "Here's my conclusion. In this story, we discover that love is real." You know what I mean? There's a very simple, boiled down version of how you end the story that can look like that, that I think can be simple and impactful. I'm thinking about your punch example. There's a thing in Hong Kong cinema where you will actually see the punch 3 times. Right? You'll see the blow land, and then it'll cut to the slow mold impact of like you can see how it's affecting the person who got it, then it'll cut back to the wide angle and you'll see them jump backwards or fall down or whatever it is. So you see these 3 different beats and 3 angles on the same strike. That's the thing that makes it feel so impactful to the audience of, like… It can also seem corny when it's done certain ways, but, so often, it happens very quickly, you don't even really see what's happening, you just see boop, boop, boop. And you realize that that guy just got crushed in that moment, he got hit so hard. You can feel his ribs breaking, in that moment. Right? I think letting it sink in in that way and being a little obvious in your ending is not a bad way to go.

[Dan] If you've ever watched a GIF of like a disaster, someone falling down, something collapsing, and it ends right as soon is the disaster happens, and you're like, "But wait, I wanted to watch it land. I wanted to watch it fall. I wanted to look at the rubble for a minute." That's what we're talking about, that sense of, yes, you've seen the big thing, but you didn't really get a look at the aftermath, that's what really is satisfying about it.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the other tools you can use to make that disaster really satisfying.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writers. Welcome to week 5. How are you doing? I wanted to share something with you. I wrote my first published novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, during NaNoWriMo. I also wrote multiple unpublished novels during NaNoWriMo. I've won Nano and I've had years where I could not hit that 50,000 words. So as you enter this last week, I want you to remember that every word you've written this month has been a victory. Because the journey is the thing. By writing, you are learning to write. You're learning to set goals. You are learning about your writing process and what works for you. Whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5000 words this month, you are a writer.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we're going to talk about kind of the messiness of it all. I think you had something you wanted to say?

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a thought as we were talking about all this, where we've talked about closing things out and leaving things on this very resonent ending. I think that can be really important. In the categories that most of us work in, there's a lot of series writing, a lot of people writing trilogies, a lot of people writing ongoing series, and a lot of people are doing quote unquote standalones with series potential. So, one of the things I would love to hear your thoughts on a little bit is, how do you leave that door cracked open? How do you give the satisfying ending, make a book feel like a book, even if it's middle of a trilogy? Right? Make the audience feel like I went on a journey, this had a conclusion. I feel good about where we're ending. And still have more questions to be asked. Have… They want more story, they want to spend more time with these characters. What do you do to leave that door cracked open?

[Mary Robinette] The trick that I've found is that life is messy, and that I don't have to give my character all of their goals. When you read a book and the character achieves all of their goals, those are the ones that feel too tight. So sometimes I don't… It's not so much that it's a cliffhanger, it's that I have deliberately left something unanswered, knowing that that can be a problem for later. But I think about… To give that sense of satisfaction, I think about how I want my reader to feel. When I'm looking at nesting things at the end, I try to make sure that whatever solution, whatever goal thing lines up with the emotional feeling I want my reader to have, that that's kind of the last beat I land on. That's the thing that gives it the sense of closure as a standalone, while the other questions that are still hanging there are available if I want to use them for future books. So, like in Calculating Stars, Elma achieves her goal of going to the moon. Right? But I don't answer your questions about what it's like when she gets there. I don't answer your questions about what the next steps are. I leave all of that open. Her conflict with Parker is still a conflict with Parker. Like, that's not a solved problem. So I have all of that to play with when I come back to the subsequent books. Then… This is outside of the scope of NaNoWriMo, but when I am looking at my next book, I look at my solution to the first one, and that becomes my problem for the 2nd book.

[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that we've talked a lot about try-fail cycles. Generally, a novel ends on a success. I mean, it can end on a failure, but I think it has some sort of emotional closure. But, it feels to me like it's a success that leaves something else to try. That thing that you're trying becomes the thing that happens in the next book. So that's sort of like… So there's a finishing, but there's something more.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Dan] This is such a horrible thing to bring up the last week of NaNoWriMo, but a lot of what makes a lot of this work is the revision process. Knowing that, okay, we've reached this point. Now we need to go back and set it up right. Getting to the end, having satisfying answers, really means you need to make sure what questions you're asking. In the Fellowship of the Ring, for example, that first book ends with the Fellowship breaking and everyone splintering off into different places, and yet it does feel conclusive, because Tolkien made sure that the question asked at the beginning, is Frodo constantly wondering am I leading people into danger? Can I really live with the fact that I am corrupting everyone around me? So, leaving the group behind and setting off on his own with Sam, that is a victory for that specific question. So it feels, okay, this feels very natural. We've asked this question, we've answered it, obviously there's other problems, but we've concluded this part of the story.

[Mary Robinette] But this is why we… When we talk about you have to keep writing and finish, this is why. Because you don't know always what questions you want to set up at the beginning until you're getting to the end. It's… Like, when I was an art major, I would see people… I mean, I did it myself. Where you would draw the perfect hand and the perfect arm and the perfect shoulder, and then you would step back and the entire figure was entirely out of proportion. Because you work thinking about the entire picture. So with novels, like, one of the things that you can be doing for yourself during this last week is coming to an agreement with yourself about, oh, this is what I want the book to be. Like, these are the… And if it doesn't match what you started, that's okay. You have a new understanding of it. You can go back and fix everything that you did earlier later.

[Erin] I would say one other way to do that is if you want… If you liked what you had at the beginning, and you feel like you've gotten away from it because that also happens is something that I like to do right before, when I've done Nano, like, right before I get into the last bits is to actually tell myself out loud, or actually to be honest, tell my cats out loud…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] The story so far. Like, not every single thing, but, like, what I can remember of the story. I find that what I go to, like, the things that I choose to explain are the things that have continued to stick with me about the story that I'm telling. So I may have forgotten one subplot or one character, but, like, when I go to say, like, the Fellowship of the Ring, which I wrote during Nano… No…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. It is about X, like, that's what gets to the core of it for me. Then I can say, if that's the core, then what's the ending that works for that core? Then, like Mary Robinette was saying, go back and fix the rest in post-, as they say in the movie business.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, truly, when working with clients on projects, the things that usually change the most our beginnings and endings. Right? Often in tandem. If the last act isn't quite working, then you'll find the roots of those problems in the first act. Middles always… I mean, every part needs revision, but the middle tends to be a little bit more defined from the jump, and then really… It really is about asking questions and answering them. So if the answers are wrong, then maybe the questions are wrong, and vice versa. So, this is again, this is NaNoWriMo. If you're not feeling super great about your ending, that's totally fine. Right? We're not… No one's expecting you to have the perfect answer to the question you didn't even know you were asking on day one, because it's been a crazy month. You've made it this far. Right?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will also catch you here is that you're like, "I don't know how to solve this. My character has to solve this thing and I don't know how to solve it." You feel like you're locked in because of everything that you've written up to this point. But your… When the book is out in the world and you're letting other people read it, they never have to see this draft of it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So you can always go back and just say, "You know what? They could have solve this the entire time, if they had only been able to tesseract spiders into the building with bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] I knew it!

[Mary Robinette] "But I didn't introduce the ability to tesseract earlier. So, I'm just going to say that they can do it, and I'm going to make a note to myself that I have to establish that when I go back and do my revisions." So just go ahead and give yourself the tools that you need and fix it in post-.

 

[Dan] Well, one of the great things about writing and NaNoWriMo does this perfectly is you can try different endings. This is what I said about free writing in the beginning. If you get to the end and you think, "Well, maybe this would work as an ending. Maybe this is a good solution to the problem." Write it. If it doesn't work, don't delete it. Try something else. Right that. I know that for a lot of you, that is so painful, me telling you to write a bunch of extra words that are not going to be in the final manuscript. Well, guess what. That's most of this job.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a project recently where 500,000 words were written that went into the trash that will never see the light of day, for the 150,000 that got published. Right? Sometimes that's what happens. Right? I think one of the best lessons about NaNoWriMo is there's no such thing as a wasted word. Everything that you put down to paper got you to this point. It helps you realize that these extra scenes need to be written, even if the older scenes also had to be put in a drawer somewhere. All that was useful work. All that was the work that got you to understand what your book really is and make your book the best version of it it could be. So I hope you're hearing us talk about revision and not feeling discouraged. Instead, be excited that you now have clarity about what it is you're trying to accomplish with your book, even if it's just a little bit. Even if you have one degree more…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I hope you don't have to write 500,000 words…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] To the 150 that got published. That's not great. We all felt not great about that. But also, we all felt great about the book that was there at the end, and so proud and so happy about the work we did on it.

[Dan] Well, the same thing that I said earlier about endings, making sure that you're asking the right questions to provide a satisfying answer, apply that to your life! Apply that to the process. Apply that to NaNoWriMo. Don't necessarily think of this as I'm going to end November with one awesome book. Think of it as I'm going to end November having learned how to write a book. Then, even if the ending is weird or there's bits in the middle that are clunky and awkward, that's okay. You learned how to write a book.

[Mary Robinette] Just briefly, I want to speak to the people who are like, "Hey, you know what, I'm coming up on 50,000 words, but I'm nowhere near the end of my book."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's fine. You can… We're talking about things in proportion right now.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] You're totally fine. Don't worry about it. You don't need to have, like, the ending. You just need to hold on to what you're aiming for.

[Erin] Yeah. You can… You may want to take a break. You may say, like, writing 50,000 words in a month was a lot, so even though I don't have the ending like I want to get there. This is when you could leave yourself lots of fun notes in brackets, like, "And here's the part where they figured out the meaning of love," and, like, "Here's where he defuses that bomb filled with spider bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Right? Then you can come back and your future self will have the problem of figuring that out. But I hope the main thing that your future self takes away from it is you wrote stuff that did not exist at the beginning of this month and it exists and only you could have written it.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So we're going to give you some homework. This is, again, a way to help you just keep moving forward. Especially those of you who are like nowhere near the ending and you're just like, "I gotta keep going. I've just gotta keep going."

 

[Mary Robinette] Here's your homework. Gift your character with your insecurity. Brainstorm about what should happen next in the voice of the character as they're facing the challenges in the scene. Because your character doesn't know what's going on either. So all of that and just be part of your character development, and the brainstorming process may get you closer. It also will just get you words on the page, which is very useful. You may wind up cutting it later, but after you hit 50,000 words.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Good luck. You're out of excuses.

 

[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any question that is on your mind.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-35-organizing-your-writing-or-managing-the-mega-arc

 

Key points: Tools to keep big projects in line. Use string to align things! Simple tools can manage big things. Airtable, a database. Track character names, places, what you've done, what you mean to do. Find things that you are missing! E.g., over using one gender, or personality traits or alignments. Tracking helps you recognize patterns, and be intentional about them. Obsidian, a digital whiteboard for visual layouts, and automatic linking, a kind of mind map of connections. Wikidpad, use tools that work for you, that seem intuitive. Use find to see if you have already written something, so it is canon, and a collection of useful links. Measure twice, cut once, or relative measurement. Think about monetizing your references or research results. Worldbuilding, prep work, pre-writing is not wasted work if it works for you and your project. Spreadsheets and other pre-writing can tell you what you care about, what's important to you. The beginning needs to introduce the important characters, and the end needs to resolve or answer questions asked at the beginning of the book. What is the big story? Who are the specific characters in this book? 

 

[Season 18, Episode 35]

 

[1:30 minutes advertising, almost inaudible]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Managing the Mega-Arc.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Howard] This week, we're going to talk about big projects and the tools we use in order to keep them in line. I'm reminded of the… I can't remember who it was who was making such a big deal about how the stones and the pyramids were laid out in perfect straight lines, and someone else pointed out that, "Dude, they had string." You pull the string straight and, boy, you got a straight edge right there. You can just line these things up. There are some very simple tools that we can use to manage really big things. So I'm going to pitch this to the rest of the cast. What is your string?

[DongWon] Hey, Erin, do you want to talk about airtable?

[Erin] [chuckles] I do want to talk about airtable. So, I will say first that while airtable is actually free to use, I am not being a shill for airtable. Any sort of database or way of tracking things can work. It's just the one that I really love, because it has a really great fun way of looking on the screen that works for me. But what I like to do is a lot for my game writing projects is to track things like character names, places, what I've done, what I mean to do. One of the reasons that I really like tracking is actually maybe for a different reason than other people do. I use tracking a lot of the time, and I use airtable, which is, like, I set up this database and I'll list like every character I've ever mentioned. Every place that's ever shown up in this particular game, is to find places… To find the things that I'm missing about myself. So, for example, if I track all of my characters and their genders, I may find that I overly skew one way or the other in terms of gendering characters. If I then add in a little bit about their personality traits or alignments in like a D&D or TP RPG world, I may find, for example, that I love chaotic good women, which I do, because I am one. So I… And that I make all men evil, because they… No, just kidding.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Those types of things we often miss in our own work, the patterns that we're creating. I think that a lot of times when you create patterns, and you're not intentional about them, that's when you can replicate bad things in the world that we don't necessarily want to put on the page. So, for me, tracking is a way to keep things straight, to learn that I love names that start with the letter K, and that I can't make everybody's name a two syllable K name…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Because eventually it will be very difficult to keep them apart.

[DongWon] I don't know. World of Karen seems pretty terrifying.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. That's actually a bad theme park. The World of Karens.

[Howard] That feels very much like the string metaphor I led with. You stretch that string out, and if one of the bricks is sticking just a little to one side, oh, you can see, oh, that is so clearly a thing I've done wrong. Let's fix it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I also do a spreadsheet for similar reasons about my internal biases. But then I also… The thing that I started doing, and this gets to the… Over the course of a long series. I originally was putting in the characters ages. But, in the Lady Astronaut books, I just finished writing book four, which takes place 17 years after the first book. So when a character, a new character enters the world, I'm like, "Okay. So I just wrote down their age, but their age in what year?" So now I write down what year they were born in instead, which makes it much easier to track. I still have to do math. But it makes it much easier to figure out, like, where they are in relationship to the other characters in the book and how old they are as the story progresses.

 

[DongWon] Going back to tools specifically, Erin mentioned the airtable is a database, which is technically true, but also makes it sound very scary. Functionally, when you're interacting with it, it is a series of linked spreadsheets is kind of what it looks like, that you can make it show your information in various ways. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It's a very cool tool, and one that I highly recommend playing around with and exploring a little bit. If you want something that's slightly less hierarchical for… I use this a lot for my games. I use a tool called Notions… Or, sorry, not Notions. I use Obsidian which is sort of like a series of linked text documents. But the reason I really like it is it has two features. One, it has a digital whiteboard version, so you can sort of lay stuff out visually. The other is it automatically links different documents together. If you mention something in one document, it'll give you a sort of a mind map, so you can sort of see how things are connected and clustered and it gives you a really useful way to be like, "Okay, this location, these characters, these plot points are all linked in this way." So you can find connections, or see where you didn't draw a line that you need to. So a lot of these tools are just different ways to visualize all the information that's in your head in a really structured way that can give you more insight into what it is you're trying to accomplish.

 

[Howard] Often we resist tools that have a learning curve at the front of them. You look at a tool, you're like, "Oh, I'd… I don't want to have to learn how to program a database. I don't want to have to learn how to format a spreadsheet." The very first planning tool that I really used for Schlock Mercenary was a standalone wiki software called Wikidpad. Wiki D Pad. I always pronounced it Wikidpad because it never occurred to me that the developer was making a fun pun and calling it wicked pad. I loved it because while I was typing, by doing just a couple of keystrokes at the beginning and end of a name, it automatically turned that name into a link for a new page. So I could just right and by doing whatever those little blips were, I don't know if it was double pipes or whatever, by doing those at the beginning of the thing, I was making a note to myself that says I'm going to expand on this later. Then I go back on it and click it, and boom! Up comes a blank page and I could start writing again. The desktop version, the only me version of the Schlock Mercenary wiki, was born. We talked about it in an early episode of Writing Excuses. I'm not here to pitch Wikidpad to you. I'm saying the tool that's going to work for you might be the tool that is the most intuitive. Maybe that's sticky notes on the wall, maybe that's a clipboard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So the two… Like, you'll hear people talking about needing to build their worldbuilding bible and things like that. Yes, I use a spreadsheet to track my characters ages, I use things like eon timeline to track the big over… Making sure that I've actually allotted them enough time to get from point A to point B. But most of my worldbuilding, I don… My two organizational methods are the find function…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that I can look for it in something that I have already written. Because if it's not in the document, it is not canon, and I can change it. Then, my Scrivener, I have a section that's called useful links and I just dropped the links in randomly. Like when… After I've researched something, I will drop a link into what I've researched. The reason that I'm bringing this up is that I know a lot of people who feel like they have to create this very detailed document before they can start writing. I am here to tell you that if you are chaotic neutral about your organization, or chaotic evil as my case may be, you don't actually have to… What Howard said earlier about using the tool that works for you to solve the problem that you need to be solved. All I need to solve with my links is if someone says, "Where did you get that?" that I have someplace where I have it saved.

[Howard] I think my alignment is lawful lazy…

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] In woodworking, which is another one of my hobbies, permitting me to pull extended metaphors from my hobbies, there's two ways… There's the old saying that if you're a carpenter, you measure twice and cut once. There's a whole different school of thought to that. Right? So in this case, measure twice, cut once, is very much like I'm cutting this to this exact dimension, it is going to be this size, and I've planned it all out, and you've built a cut list of like 15 different things that are exact measurements and you have to follow that to a T. If you screw up, your whole project is going to be off. Right? That is how I think of very much this, like, worldbuilding document where you're pre-building all these things in a very detailed way. There's another mode of thinking that I find more useful. It's a very traditional method called relative measurement. Right? You have a board. You are now going to mark that board in ratio to the next thing you want to make. Right? So if you have a drawer back, then that is the size of your drawer, you're going to cut your drawer front in a way that matches the size of that. It doesn't matter how big it is. You don't need to know that it's 9 inches and three quarters. You just need to know it's this size, I'm marking it to be the same as that size. So you can do that with all your joinery and all of your pieces, and you have a thing at the end that is very beautiful and very proportional that fits the design that you wanted, but you're doing it all relative to each other rather than trying to impose this top-down hierarchy on it. So if you approached your organization that way, I think for a lot of people, I think it can be much more intuitive and fluid, and sort of takes some of the stress off, of having to figure all these things out before hand.

[Howard] My own woodworking mantra is I've cut this three times and it's still too short.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Then you just cut the other board to be short enough that it fits.

[Howard] Exactly. When we returned from our break, I'm going to talk about turning my planning tools into money.

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk to you about Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This book… Like, I started recommending this book before I finished it, which is unusual for me. He imagines a future where the sea levels have risen, as they're going to. That's not really imagining the future, but one of the things he's looking at is whether or not octopi… podes can be sapient. He's got that layered on with the way AI might manage fishing vessels. Like, there's all of these different layers, and it's heavily, heavily researched. All of the characters are also scientists at the top of their game. So the amount of research that he had to do was huge. But it feels pretty effortless on the page. So if you want to look at, like, what the end result of some of these tools that were talking about are, and you want just a really good read, it's very thought-provoking. I highly recommend Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler.

 

[Howard] Probably the single most profitable thing Sandra and I put together for Schlock Mercenary was the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. I have a PDF of the Planet Mercenary role-playing game on my desktop that I refer to all the time so that I can get my worldbuilding details right. It's totally fair to write a 300,000 page role-playing book and expect to make money off of it and then to refer to it yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I joked in a previous episode, between the words schlock and mercenary, which word suggests I wouldn't do something like that?

[Mary Robinette] So I've done a similar thing, which is not the role-playing game, but one of the things that I've done to monetize my research is that I have a bookshop.org, so I have on that bookshop.org, I have a list of… The bibliography that I have for the books that I used to research my stuff. It's there for two reasons. One, it makes an easy reference for me. Two, people are always asking me, like, where can I go to get information like this. Then, because it's through bookshop.org, I actually get an affiliate kickback from that. It's not that you have to do this thing, but one of the things that you will be doing as a writer is looking for multiple income streams.

[DongWon] Just one thing in general I want to remind you is that there's no such thing as throwaway work in writing. Right? It may be frustrating to feel like you've written however many words in worldbuilding and prep work and pre-writing, 50,000 words, whatever. That all goes into building up your internal understanding of this world in the way that you may need it, so that that work is going to go into the book that you're writing. Right? Words that you write and throw away just because they're not ending up on the final printed page doesn't mean that they were worthless. It just was what the project required. Right? Not every book will require that. Maybe that's something you do for your first book. Maybe it's something you find you need to do for your seventh book. Right? But I love framing, like, being able to take the pre-work you're doing and make it work for you in other ways. I think that's an absolutely brilliant way. I think writers yeah… Look for ways to monetize that work you're doing. Look for other income streams. But also don't feel like you're wasting time by doing these things. Yes, sometimes for some people it's a mode of procrastination, but I just encourage people really, like, if that's your process, that's your process. Lean into it. Find ways to make that work for you, and don't beat yourself up just because that doesn't end up on the printed page.

[Howard] One of my favorite outgrowths of the research was I had a spreadsheet for when people were born. I realized that two of my main characters were from the same area, had the same life… About the same life span, and may have been sitting on different sides of the same war. I had never explored that. An entire story and the whole bunch of character data came out of one moment where I looked at a spreadsheet and went, "Huh."

[Erin] Yeah. I think something else that spreadsheets can do, and, granted, I love them more than I should, is it teaches you what you care about. So a lot of the process of making a spreadsheet is trial and error. So you decide, I'm going to make a spreadsheet today. You're like, "Oh, put all the character names down," or something very easy. You're like, "I'm going to track their age." Then you're like, "Oh, no, that's wrong, because my thing goes through time. Actually, I need to track their date of birth." That tells you something about the way you view the story, the timescale that you're working on. If you keep going back to your spreadsheet and being like, "Oh, this spreadsheet is not working because it doesn't tell me X." That means X is important. Number one, figure out if there's a way to add it to your spreadsheet. Number two, like, that should be, then, something… If that's important to you, then it's something important to the story, and you should see is that actually coming through. That thing that you keep thinking about. So, I think that a lot of times what tools do is they force you to take the wide creative universe that you're working in and put it into some sort of structural mode. Even if it's just like I've made power points of stories before, being like random things I mentioned that I should get back to. They don't have a lot of form to them, but it's a way of putting it somewhere on paper, put it in some sort of box, even if it's just a box that I'm going to rifle through later to see if there's something really interesting that I can use to inspire myself going forward.

[DongWon] Aabria Iyengar has this brilliant worldbuilding question that she uses that is, "What is the lie that the people of your world believe in?" Right? The questions you're asking and putting into your spreadsheet can be so thematic and so creative and so generative that… Yes, you want the biographical details, when was this character born, who knows who, what are the connections. But also, going to Howard's example of here are two people on opposite sides of the war, what lies were each of those characters told? Right? What things do those characters believe and how is that going to drive story down the line? The way that... These tools are storytelling tools. They sound cold and mechanical when you say, "It's a spreadsheet. It's a database." But I think from that you can find such rich narrative hooks and chase your own interests, as Erin was just saying. You list the things that you are interested in. Sometimes you will be like, "This is boring. I'm not interested in this part of this world, or the set of characters, or this question," because when you're making a spreadsheet you are asking a question, and I think that is a really useful way to think about these things as you approach it.

[Howard] In structuring Schlock Mercenary, I realized on around I think book 5 or six, I realized that every book needed to stand alone. Because it needed to be a salable product without someone having to buy the earlier books. That may sound crassly commercial, and that's because it is. It would have been a terrible business decision to tell people, "Oh, you have to start with my very first thing that I ever did before you can read this thing that I'm super proud of." The solution… I mean, it should be obvious, I need to make sure that the beginning of every book introduces the characters who are going to be important, and that the end of the book resolves questions, answers questions that were asked by those characters at the beginning of the book. That started going into my planning spreadsheets very early on. I would have some cells for this is the plot, this is the big story. Then I would have columns and cells for the specific characters that this book was tracking. I had people come to me later and say, "You know, I always thought that Schlock was the main character, but he's almost never the main character in the stories." Yes. Yes, I'm so glad you noticed that. That's how we're supposed to say that, right, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yeah, I'm so glad you noticed that. He's very rarely the protagonist. Because he very rarely gets an arc that tracks things. I realized on about book 17, book 18, I realized that I needed to return to Schlock for the finale. So the ending that I had originally envisioned, the big solution, the big resolution to the plot that I had originally envisioned and that I had in my spreadsheets needed to have more Schlock in it. I went back to, and this is going to sound funny, I went back to an old forum post from like 2003 where someone said, "Yeah, the answer to a lot of these stories is just Schlock eats it." I looked at that and thought, "You know, I bet that'll work."

[DongWon] Character is destiny, you know.

[Howard] I bet that'll work. It felt so… It was one of those moments… Again, it grows right out of staring out the spreadsheet and realizing there's this pattern and there's this missing piece of this pattern, and I have to fill it with this character. I took my proposal for the changed ending to my brother and said, "This is what I'd like to try." His response was, "Oh, my gosh, that's genius. How long have you been planning this?" I'm like, "30 minutes."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed. Speaking of 30 minutes, we don't want to run for a full 30 minutes. So, let's wrap this up with some homework. Erin?

 

[Erin] So we have talked about a few different tools today. Sometimes I think about tools as hammers in search of a nail. So the homework is for you to actually find what are the nails within whatever story that you're working on? What are the things that you can or could track within your story? What I would challenge you to do is find three different things that your story could be tracking, whether those are informational, thematic, character driven, emotional. Write down what those are. Maybe a few examples of what those could be. If it's birthdays, right down five characters birthdays. If it's theme, write down what five characters are thinking about thematically. Then start looking at what are some tools that could actually help you take those nails and build something really cool out of them.

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

 

[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/09/16-19-intro-to-roleplaying-games/

 

Key Points: A roleplaying game allows you to inhabit a persona (play a character) and live their life for the course of the game. The outcome of a roleplaying game, the course of the game, is not necessarily predetermined. When you're writing for a roleplaying game, you're writing a story, but someone else is writing the protagonist. You have to balance predestination, the writer as the invisible hand of fate, with free will, the characters' choices. You're turning a novel into an amusement park. Writing a tabletop roleplaying game is balancing between all games are physics simulations and all roleplaying games are improvisational theater. It has to be fun. Situations need multiple successful resolutions, a large possibility space. Game masters curate the experience the players want to have. The illusion of choice, or curating real choices? The choices need to be entertaining. A good visual model of narrative flow for tabletop roleplaying games is a pachinko machine. Pet peeves? Dead ends. Only one type for a gender. Long read-aloud sections. Other people telling me how my character feels. Game master versus players.

 

[Season 16, Episode 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Intro to Roleplaying Games.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are very excited to be introducing for you all another one of our intensive courses for the year. This one is about game writing and interactive fiction. So we've got two really incredible guests who are both experts in this field. They're going to be teaching us all about it for the next eight episodes. So, James and Cassandra, introduce yourselves. Let us know who you are.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra. I used to work in Ubisoft Montréal. I've worked on games like Hyperscape. I've also done indie work for titles like Fallen London, Sunless Skies, Wasteland 3, and I've done a little bit of tabletop work for D&D and World of Darkness. James?

[James] I'm James L. Sutter. I'm mostly on the tabletop side. I'm the co-creator of the Pathfinder and the Starfinder roleplaying games. But I've also done a little bit of videogame work. So, between us, we're hoping to cover everything folks want to know.

[Dan] Cool.

[Cassandra] [garbled… saying that]

[James] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We are very excited to have you with us. Mary Robinette and Howard and I also have a little bit, a tiny fraction, of game work, so at least we kind of know what we're talking about. But let's jump into this. Cassandra, our topic this week is intro to roleplaying games. What… Where do you want to start us?

[Cassandra] Well, let's go back to, like, the bare basics of this, the very simplest definition of it. A roleplaying game is essentially a game that allows you to inhabit a persona and sort of live out its life throughout the course of the game. In other words, you could be Bob the accountant in your daily life, but in a roleplaying game, you might be Somarian the Elf. What differentiates a roleplaying game from, say, an action game or an adventure game is that the outcome is not necessarily predetermined. There are ways to get to the end, but in between you have side quests with different possibilities, different ways they might go. It might end horrendously in an ending you might not have been expecting, kind of like real life. There are also inventories, there are stat-based systems, and, depending on what you're talking about, whether it is a AAA type or a tabletop game, those stats might come into play differently. It's something that I think James might be very good at discussing.

[James] Yeah. Well, especially because in tabletop roleplaying games, you have to do a lot of stuff on the fly potentially, because the nice thing about it is that in something like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, every… Your characters can do literally anything. That's the blessing, but also the curse. Because if you're running the game, you need to be able to account for all of that. So the thing to remember, when you're writing for a roleplaying game type thing is that you're writing a story, but someone else is writing the protagonist. So you've got this balancing act, because it's your job to make the story go where it needs to go, but it's the players job to make everything makes sense, make sense for their characters, to make sure the protagonist is doing what they think the character should do. Usually, you're playing with multiple characters at a time. So it's that question of how do you guide the players through choices that feel meaningful an independent and sensible for the character they've chosen to inhabit, but also is guiding them along the right general story path. So, I'm curious, Cass, what do you feel like are some good examples of that?

[Cassandra] At least in AAA games, I think Mass Effect might probably be one of the easiest examples to look at. Because you have the paragon and you have the renegade route. Even though you are still giving the player freedom of choice to go and do whatever they want, once you have it categorized as, all right, this is light side work and this is dark side work, you kind of teach them to go along the path that you need them to go towards to fit the conclusion without ever feeling like you're holding them on a leash. It's all about balancing predestination and free will. You are absolutely the invisible hand of fate.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Although occasionally you need to be a little bit less invisible, otherwise the players are just going to go off the rails. But what I think really is very interesting about writing for roleplaying games, especially, is that if you're transitioning from like say novel writing, you… Well, at least I did. I had the trouble of constantly wanting to make things linear. I expected the players would want to go a certain direction, they would need to follow the beats that I'd given them. But the trick about roleplaying games and designing them is you're giving them a setting, you're giving them a sandbox, you might be giving them a little bit of a map, like a toolkit, some directions on what to do, and you're kind of hoping that they will go in that direction. It is not necessarily true. To reuse a metaphor about novels, it's kind of like turning your novel into an amusement park, and then setting the boundaries along with it. But what's it like, doing similar things for, let's say, tabletop games, because it's so much more open ended with the game master's and so on? With video games, you have all those things preset by design, by audio, by the visuals… Man. I don't think those terms do exist with tabletop games.

 

[Howard] Years and years ago, 15 years ago, Steve Jackson said to me, "All games are physics simulations." That stuck with me. I keep coming back to it and asking, "Well, wait. This game isn't a… No, at some level, this is a physics simulation." The second one, and I can't remember who told this to me, "All roleplaying games are improvisational theater."

[Yeah]

[Howard] Talking about tabletop roleplaying games as improvisational theater. So, for me, writing or playing or game mastering a tabletop roleplaying game is a balancing act between this is a physics simulation and this is improvisational theater. I say improvisational theater rather than improvisational storytelling because we know we want the storytelling to happen, but the theater aspect is what suggests that this has to be entertaining rather than just narratively… Functional narrative. I want it to be fun.

[James] Yeah. I use that improv example a lot when trying to explain roleplaying games to folks. I often say, like, the game master, who's sort of running the show, is kind of like the director. Then, all of the players are like actors, each inhabiting a character. So you create a character and then sort of go through the story that the director's running, trying to just act as your character would act. Everybody's kind of building off of each other. That's what creates this loose fun story that can go in different directions. I think that one of the things about that is, like Cass was saying, you gotta be careful not to be too linear in your story. You want to make sure that situations allow for multiple successful resolutions. Right? Like, you want to think about… Even if you thought… Your first thought is, "Well, they'll fight their way through this situation." You also want to be ready for them to talk their way through the situation, or trick somebody, or cause a distraction. Really considering the whole possibility space, that's what you're creating as a game writer is sort of these situations. Yeah, Mary?

[Mary Robinette] So, something that occurred to me as you were talking is one of my favorite DMs, I'm going to do a shout out to David Spears, but he said something about roleplaying that I really… It resonates with me a lot, which was that as a DM, he felt like what he was responsible for was curating the experience his players wanted to have.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] For me, that made more sense than the improvisational theater director metaphor, because the director is trying to execute their own vision, and a curator is trying to shape it for the people, for the viewer. So, for me, it often feels more like that there's a certain amount of second person… Or interactive theater. That there is this path and that on one hand, you can do a thing which I used to do in theater all the time which is that you can give the audience the illusion of choice.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] On the other hand, you can say, "Okay. No, you do actually have a choice, and I will go with you on this journey and I will curate this." I feel like those are two different modes of roleplay.

[Cassandra] Definitely. I think…

[James] Yeah. I think they're both crucial. Right, Cass?

[Cassandra] They are, definitely. Sorry, I think Dan was going to say something. I saw a finger there.

[Dan] I… Yeah, I wanted to jump in with this illusion of choice. Two of the best pieces of advice I ever got when I first started writing for roleplaying games was, first of all, somebody said that as you're controlling this story, as you're presenting the options, you can… If the characters come to a two roads diverge in a yellow wood kind of situation, and you need them to get to a castle, either road is going to lead to the castle. But they get to choose which one they're going to go down. That's kind of a blunt force illusion of choice. But then what you can do is add on to that, and present… Just make sure that the choices that you're offering are entertaining. This is something that game master's can fall into accidentally, where they make a choice they don't want the players to make and they present it as being really interesting or entertaining, and then they're stuck and they have to improvise something. But when you're writing that, if you are presenting a scenario, you can just kind of fill it with a lot of interesting toys to play with that… And then the players are going to immediately latch onto the ones that are exciting to them. If they see there's a giant fruit cart in the middle of the street, then they might think, "Oh, we could turn that over," or we could do whatever. If you make sure to put interesting characters into the space, that will lure them into talking to them. If you make sure to include a bunch of security cameras, then they will think, "Oh, we might need to sneak around or find a way to disable those." Giving them interesting choices instead of just choices is a good way of guiding them.

 

[Howard] If you ever wanted a physical model, a visual representation of storytelling, good storytelling narrative flow, for tabletop roleplaying games, it's the pachinko machine.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The balls can bounce left or right, but they always go down. The balls cannot escape the machine. They start at the top, but then there are little decisions along the way. At the end, yeah, there's multiple possible places the ball could land. Tracy Hickman described this as narrative bumper pool. At any point, you have choices. But all of the choices are leading us in this direction, rather than in the open-ended, the world keeps getting bigger as my players running any possible direction.

[Cassandra] Oh, that makes me think of the first Walking Dead game, honestly. Which I think is a really good example of how that illusion of choice and that use of linearity just kind of worked… I remember articles just exploding after people started playing the game, because people were so infuriated that… With how they never really had a choice at all. The game would tell you that characters remembered what you did. It would set it up so that emotional resonance between one choice or another was just so harrowing. But, let's say a character you decided not to helping one situation, you would eventually see them later. They would play a role in another set piece. But the thing that struck me most with that game, and how it implements that illusion of choice, is the ending. I think the game has been out long enough that a spoiler is fine.

[Go for it]

[Cassandra] Essentially, the end, you have this 10-year-old girl seeing her surrogate father slowly transform into a zombie. You find yourself with two choices, and they're both incredibly horrible. One, you leave. Like, you run, you go as far as you can from this person you cannot save. Or you shoot him in the head. Mechanically speaking, none of this matters. The poor guy still dies. But the fact that this was presented to you with so much emotional weight. Like Dan was saying, like, these are toys. Very morbid [garbled] toys, but these are toys on each other side of the road. If you present things that are interesting and resonant enough with the player, it doesn't matter that they know they're still going to one ending.

[James] I think the big thing about that is that the choices need to be tied to the player. Right? Like in the example you just gave, both of those are things that really… Like, you're making the call to drive the story. I think that's something people often run into when they're not used to running a game is it's really tempting to make the players not the main characters. You'll have that GM insertion character, the like helpful nonplayer character, the sidekick, who just happens to be better than the players in all these different ways. The player tries to go one way, and they grab them and steer them back on course. Like, you can do a little bit of that, but you really always want to make sure that your choices are being made by the players and that they feel significant to the characters.

[Cassandra] We're all NPC scenario life, there's no reason to continue being one in a game.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's brilliant, and a little sad. But I love it.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] I want to interrupt here. I have let this discussion go on maybe a little longer than I should, because we should have paused several minutes ago for our book of the week.

[Oh, no]

[Dan] Or our game of the week is how we're going to do it during this intensive course. I believe our game of the week this time comes from James.

[James] Yeah. So the game of the week is going to be the Starfinder roleplaying game, which I was the original creative director on. That's all about… It's a classic pen-and-paper roleplaying game. It's all about space wizards and laser ninjas. It's science fantasy, so you can kind of do everything from Alien to Star Wars to Fifth Element, whatever sort of story you want to tell. If you want to be a lizard with a grenade launcher or a bug priest of the death goddess, do whatever you want. But I wanted to bring this one up because there's both the tabletop version that you can go find, and also there is an Alexa version, an audio single player version of the game that I got to write that is free that people can, if you have an Amazon Alexa device, you can just say, "Alexa, play Starfinder." I'm sure I just turned on a whole bunch of people's right now.

[Laughter]

[James] But I have no regrets. You should play the game, because it's produced by Audible Studios and has a full cast and it's really fun.

[Dan] Well, as of this recording, just yesterday or the day before, you want a bunch of awards for that, didn't you?

[James] Yeah, we won some nice industry awards. I think like best voice experience and best developers. So, yeah, it's really a fun kind of a new medium. So it was nice to be able to bring this game that I love in tabletop into a voice version that people can play without having a group. You can just be playing it by yourself in your kitchen while you're making dinner.

[Dan] Cool.

[James] Well, thank you.

[Howard] My first experience with the Starfinder tabletop roleplaying game book was opening it up and literally removing the pages so that I could use them as references, because I was illustrating the Munchkin Starfinder cards for Steve Jackson Games.

[Right]

[Howard] It was easier to have the pages of the book all over the couch and the floor in front of me.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then to have to pick up the book when I was drawing. I felt a little bad about it. But not bad enough to not do it. I got another copy of the book for me, anyway. So…

[Dan] Oh, man.

[James] Officially forgiven.

[Dan] Well, I love this, and thank you for using this is our first game of the week, because I think it's a great illustration of the fact that these… This is viable writing, like freelance or career employment opportunities. This is not just us talking about games because we love games. This is a job that people have, that people win awards for, that people get paid for. So, that's kind of why we're doing this whole class, is those writers who want to focus on games or on interactive… You know that it's a real thing and that it can be made to work. 

 

[Dan] Anyway, we have gone a little over time, but I want to… This is our first episode of the course, so let's take a little bit of extra time. Because I know that Cass and James want to talk a little bit about pet peeves in roleplaying games.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, if we don't get to talk about pet peeves, I will…

[Laughter]

[James] Yeah. Absolutely. We should open this up to everybody. Maybe, Cass, you want to go first, but I'm sure that everybody here has something they've seen before that they feel like, "Oh. Never do that."

[Cassandra] Dead ends. I loathe… I grew up with the Sierra games, I grew up with King's Quest, and never lost my absolute hatred for how the game would just stop if say you looked at the mouse at the wrong instant. With roleplaying games, I feel like… I guess it should be failure, but the consequences should be interesting. It should be fun to die. It should be fun to see your kingdom crumble away. Just so you know you can see, like, an octopus kingdom rise up from the ashes of it. What about everyone else? What are your pet peeves in roleplaying games?

[Mary Robinette] Mine is… So, I played D&D all through high school. And one of the things that was frustrating is that in this game in which I'm supposed to have all of these choices about who I can inhabit, there were all of these different body types, and just forms for male characters. All of the women were this single, very sexy, scantily clad type. Like, everybody had exactly the same model body. As a highschooler who was already dealing with all of the body insecurities, that was… It was like, "But what if I don't want to wear a metal bikini?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it's writers who are not thinking about all of the different types of people who want to play a game and therefore shut them out.

[James] Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like that diversity of choices can also be a thing, like people… Even if folks go, "Oh, okay. I need to make sure that I cater to people in terms of what their character looks like." You also have to remember to cater to all the different sorts of decisions that people might want to make. So, question your own things about like which characters get romantic subplots. Is it just the characters that you personally would be interested in? If that's the case, then you're making a mistake. Right? You need to remember that you are not your only audience.

[Dan] Yeah. I think Mass Effect, which Cass mentioned earlier, is a good example of doing that right. Because most of the characters are romancible, regardless of gender, regardless of species, regardless of anything else, and you can really kind of curate your own story that way as you go through it. Because they took the time to add in all of that extra choice. One thing that is a pet peeve of mine, I always used to think that I hated big read-aloud sections in roleplaying game campaigns, and then once I started writing them, I realized I actually like read-alouds, I just don't like long ones. If something goes on for more than a paragraph, it, in my opinion, might be a little too long. I remember I played a D&D campaign with James, and it begins with almost a full page of here, let me read you this gargantuan introduction. We were all just laughing by the end of it, because we couldn't even remember how it started. It was so long. Take the time… Use read-alouds to get across a mood or an ambience or to get across a really great character beat that you really want to be in there. But then, step back and let the game master and the players kind of tell their own story.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. I forgot that it's game master these days. I'm so old.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My own least favorite is, and this is a sin that can be committed by the game master or by other players. I don't like other people at the table telling me how my character feels about something.

[Oh, yeah]

[Howard] Don't… No. You describe what happens and give me the opportunity to react. Because that's why I'm at the table.

[James] I'd also just throw out, also, especially in tabletop where there is the game master and the players, there can sometimes be a feeling that it's the game master versus the players. Like we were saying before, like, that's never the case. Your job as game master is to make sure everybody there has a good time. That's the goal, right? So you want to… You don't want to be so easy that your players never feel fit… Never fear failure. Because that reduces tension. But you're also not trying to kill off your characters. It's not the characters versus you as the manifestation of their story. So, the number one thing is just make sure that everybody's having fun. Similarly, don't allow players to be jerks under the guise of, "Well, that's what my character would do." We're all still there to have fun and tell a story.

[Dan] Cass, what were you going to say?

[Cassandra] Oh. No. I was just going to say that autonomy is just, like, the imperative in this situation. Having jerks try to force their ideas on you, that pushes against a player's autonomy. Similarly, telling a player exactly how they feel… Nope. No. Those are just pet peeves of mine, too. I'm just sighing about them in the very short amount of time we have left on an episode that's already run over…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah. We do need to be done now.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] But I believe we have some homework.

[James] Yeah. So, homework hopefully will be pretty easy and fun for folks. I just want you to spend some time playing a roleplaying game. That can be a videogame, that can be tabletop. But, play a roleplaying game and take note of what's fun and what's not.

[Dan] Awesome. That sounds great. Okay. Thank you very much for listening to our episode. We are going to keep talking about game writing for the next seven weeks. We hope to see you again. Thank you very much. You are out of excuses. Now go write.