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/18-34-seventeen-years-of-foreshadowing

 

Key points: How can you take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing in it, how can you look back and edit to put good foreshadowing in, or how can you make what you've already written work? What are the foreshadowing tools? Use stuff that's already on the table. Take what you're already doing and make it intentional. Use both plot foreshadowing and emotional foreshadowing. Foreshadowing can be for red herrings, too!  Use alpha readers to find out what needs more emphasis, where to hang a lantern. Foreshadowing leads to a reveal, so make sure the pieces are in place to justify the reveal. Do you have to put foreshadowing in your work? What does foreshadowing do for us? No, not necessarily deliberately. But character drives plot, which is a form of foreshadowing. Plot, worldbuilding, character, theme, it all can contain foreshadowing, so the story makes sense. When you explain a story you are writing to someone, you stop and say, I need to explain X. That's something to foreshadow in your writing! Genre, telling a story, plot beats, they all are kinds of foreshadowing. Plant Chekhov's gun on plenty of mantles, and fire them as needed.

 

[Season 18, Episode 34]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing.

[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] Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing. In the previous episode, we talked about me ramping up to the finale of Schlock Mercenary, and the… I think it was Mary Robinette asked the question, "When did you know what the ending was going to be? When did you know you were going to have a big ending?" There's 17 years of foreshadowing going into the final three years of Schlock Mercenary. Because, even though I didn't know where I was going at the very beginning, I managed to make the early stuff work. That's part of what we want to talk about today is how to take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing at the very beginning, how to look back at what you've done and edit so that there's good foreshadowing in it, and, when, like perhaps a web cartoonist, you don't have the luxury to go back and edit and put in the foreshadowing, you can make what you've already written work. So, I'm going to pose this to our august body of…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Of hosts. What are your favorite foreshadowing tools? How do you like to do it?

[Mary Robinette] My favorite stuff is actually using things that are already on the table. I very rarely will be writing and think, "Um. I need to put this in because I'm going to use it later. Let me foreshadow this plan that I'm going to do." I'm much more likely to hit a point where I need to use something and then look back at stuff that I've already laid down, grab one of those things, and then go back and tighten it or tweak it and maybe put it in one additional place. The closest I've come to really… It's probably not true, but the closest that I can think of that I've come to doing additional… I mean, intentional foreshadowing in the Glamorous Histories, I was like, "And then Jane uses…" And I said bracket. I was like, "And then Jane," and I said bracket, "uses a technique of glamour that is going to become very important and plot specific later…"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then when I got to that point where I knew what that thing was, I came back and dropped it.

[Erin] I'd say I'm a pretty, like, instinctive whatever you call that type of writer these days, pantser or gardener or what have you. So, for me, a lot of times it's figuring out what have I… What's my subconscious already done, similarly, and then make it conscious. Take the things that I'm doing unintentionally and make them intentional. There's a story that I'm working on now that involves rhyming in it, which I promise is better than it sounds, and I realized that the rhymes were happening at random times in the story. I thought, "Well, what if they happened at moments… At specific types of emotional moments?" So I wanted to have these rhymes in the story, but could they be doing more? Then, that way, when you see the rhyme, the fifth or sixth time, even if you don't notice it on some level, you're going to see like that means that there's been a ramp up of emotion. So it's less the plot foreshadowing than an emotional one, but it's because I'm like, okay, if I'm going to do this thing, I might as well do it on purpose.

[Howard] I love that kind of micro-structuring. Absolutely love it. In the mixed mediums, cartooning is words plus pictures, there's even more of it available. The fact that you can cant the camera a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, and, if when a particular speaker is on, you always skew the camera just a little bit in one direction… It doesn't have to be much, five or 6 degrees is enough. The reader probably won't notice, but the reader's subconscious is going to be on board with there is something about this character that weird, that's tilted. The rhyming, a purely prose version, that's neat.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I will sometimes do… I said that I rarely do foreshadowing intentionally, is that sometimes I will, when I'm writing my story stuff, I will foreshadow as a way of laying down a red herring. Because I want the reader to spot it and go, "Oh, oop. She's foreshadowing something that's coming up." Then I don't use it. Like, it's deliberately putting the gun on the mantle with no intention of using it. So I will do that sometimes. Because I… When I am reading and I spot something where the author has put something in, and it's very clearly foreshadowing, it can often make me frustrated, because I can… It reminds me that I'm reading in some ways.

[Howard] It can knock you out of the story because you see… You start seeing the narrative scaffolding and… You're not supposed to see the scaffolding, you're supposed to live in the house.

 

[Erin] One thing I find really interesting about foreshadowing is to me it's a received action. So, someone has to take up what you are putting down. So, like, sometimes you think you have put so much scaffolding, you're like, "How could anyone not notice it?" People read it and be like, "I did not notice that that one, there was doing all the work that you thought it was doing, because you understand the entire story." So one thing that I find really fun to do about foreshadowing is to do it, and then give the story to someone and say, like, "What did you actually get?" Then adjust from there. I find personally that I read more into things like as a reader, I tend to take the tiniest things and think that they're foreshadowing. So I write that way. It turns out that sometimes I actually need to hit a point harder than I think I needed to. So sometimes what I do is just go back and take a moment that I'm like this was the teeniest bit of foreshadowing and then like shine more of a light on it. Because, to me, it was big, but to the other people it was small. It sort of feels like when you have a crush on someone and everything they do, you think is really momentous, but they're not noticing because it's all in your head. It's the writing version of that.

[DongWon] I've been having this problem a lot, not necessarily the crush part, but I've been having this problem a lot in general, which is, I've been doing a lot of [TDRBG?] GMing. So I've been running [garbled] campaigns and things like that, and I keep doing this thing where when you're starting a campaign, all you're doing is foreshadowing, you're laying out a huge buffet of plot hooks really, which will be foreshadowing things later. Then my players keep looking at me and being like, "We don't know what we're supposed to do now." So I think I'm having that thing of sometimes you really need to hang a lantern in a way that feels very obvious to you, the writer, that won't necessarily feel as obvious to the reader, because he'll be presented with so much information. Right? So putting your finger on the scale to make sure that this thing is highlighted in a certain way is such a challenge to sort of put yourself in the audiences shoes so they're set up to receive that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it's… It is that making sure that they notice it, but walking the line between not noticing it and being predictable.

[DongWon] Yup. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that happens to the creator is… The reason it's… Like, but it's so obvious, is because you know the end. You know all of the intentionality behind it. The reader does not.

[DongWon] Well, this is where you can hook into pattern recognition in your readers in a really useful way. This is kind of what Erin was talking about a little bit in just… You can set up these rhyming structures, because we've seen heist movies before. So we know when you're going to show the vault in a certain way, we have certain expectations of where that story's going to go. You can leverage these story beats, these tropes, whatever you want to call them, in a way that helps you emphasize the foreshadowing that you want, and then you can either subvert our expectations in terms of the red herring that Mary Robinette was talking about or you can fulfill them in satisfying ways, and then that'll feel, when the reader gets there, they'll be like, "Oh. They were telling me about this 50 pages ago. That's so satisfying." Right? So I think a lot of when you're starting a story, when you're in those early stages, and maybe you do or don't know where you want to go, but a lot of what you want to start doing is start laying out these early parts of different story patterns, and then figure out which ones you want to conclude, and pick up on, and which ones you want to like close the doors on as you go. Right? So, for me, sometimes thinking about those like little micro arcs, of like a character arc or a plot arc, can be really helpful in setting reader expectations and sort of priming the pump for them to get interested in what the eventual foreshadowing is going to result in.

[Howard] Well, the foreshadowing has to lead to a reveal. We will get to that reveal after our thing of the week.

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Babel by R. F. Kuang. This book just blew me away. One of the… I listened to it in audio. I highly recommend the audio edition, which is narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown. It is a story of a group of young students in Victorian Oxford who are translation students. It's a story about colonialism. It's a story about patriarchy. It's a story about friendship and found family. The magic system is so exciting, because the power of magic comes in the tension between words that cannot be translated into another language… Or, they can be translated, but that the process of translating, you lose some essential meaning of that. It's just really, really delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to highlight it for you is that she does this beautiful thing where it's this group of friends in the way they interact and behave with each other in the beginning when everything is going well foreshadows the way they are going to interact and behave with each other when things go poorly at the end. It's just… It's lovely because it sets up an inevitability and also is not predictable. Because you are hoping that things will go a different way. It's a beautiful book. One of the reasons I recommend the narration, the audiobook, in particular, is because you get… There are footnotes which are part of the structure of the book. But the footnotes are read by native speakers of the languages, so you can hear how the words are actually intended to be said. So that's Babel by R. F. Kuang.

 

[Howard] When I was 10 years old, I found a mystery novel and I started reading it, and immediately realized there was highlighting and handwriting all over these pages. I asked my dad what was going on. He said, "Oh, that's one of the books that grandpa read." Like, why did he write in the book? "Well, your grandfather loved reading these mystery novels, and every time he saw something that was a clue, he would write notes about it. He would highlight it. Because he wanted to be able to solve the mystery before the detective did." So he was putting in this conscious effort. I want to go on the record right now and say that is not how my foreshadowing works.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I write to the reveal. I don't write to you figuring out the reveal. I write to the reveal. So that when a thing happens, you look at it and you say, "Oh, of course that's what happens because there was this bit of foreshadowing." But, to use a silly example, if the camera has panned across gasoline dripping from the bottom of an automobile, then, well, there's going to be an explosion, and when you get the explosion, you're like, "Oh. Because there was gasoline and whatever." But there could also be no explosion because someone grabbed the fire extinguisher. It's… Whatever the reveal is, I want to have the pieces in place so that it feels justified. One of the only places I can remember consciously planning ahead for a big foreshadow was, and I think it was in book 15 or book 16, I had one of the characters talking about Fermi's Paradox. In a galactic society, where there's… The aliens have been around us for a thousand years, what does Fermi's Paradox even mean? Why is it even important? The answer is, well, um, galactic society should be a lot older. This galactic society is only about 40 or 50,000 years old. We are there other ones? What is happening? What is going on here? Having one character puzzling over that, and other people brushing it off, made for good comedy, but it also let me come around to, towards the end of Schlock Mercenary, coming up with my answer to Fermi's Paradox as a way to help drive the end of the story.

[DongWon] So you could have a plot load bearing academic concepts?

[Howard] Exactly. Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, as we've all been talking, it's actually occurred to me that we may be having some listeners out there going, "Oh, I'm not doing any of this." So, let me ask the question, do you have to put foreshadowing in? In your work? Then that leads to the follow-up question of what does foreshadowing actually do for us?

[DongWon] I want to say that, no, you don't have to do it in a conscious and deliberate way. But there is one aspect of this I want to touch on, and we haven't talked about much up until this point, which is one of my favorite modes of storytelling is what I think of as character as destiny. Where, I mean, this is… Game of Thrones is very famous for this, Fonda Lee's books do this incredibly well. There's a mode of storytelling that's very much about the plot is going to derive from these foibles or characteristics or essential aspects of who your characters are, and then how they're going to interact with each other. Right? Circe wants… Loves her children, loves her family, and therefore will do anything to defend them past the point of reason. Right? We know this fact about her. So that is a form of foreshadowing in certain ways for later events when she becomes completely unhinged. Right? Over the… Spoilers, I guess… Deaths of her children. Right? Those little things that character is destiny can operate as a form of foreshadowing. So I guess my answer to your question is, no, you don't have to have it explicitly in there in the way that we've been talking about in terms of like certain plot hooks, setting up certain plot beats later, but it will always kind of be there if you've written your characters well. Because your people… Your characters will make decisions that should make sense to the reader. Therefore, we will always have a certain satisfaction when they make choices that are true to the characters that we've met so far. That is, in itself, its own form of foreshadowing.

[Erin] Yeah, I think a lot of times we think of foreshadowing as such a plot…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Specific thing. Like… It's like a plot thing you need to do. But I actually think that all… I agree, like… Foreshadowing is kind of sense making. You help people make sense of the story. Sometimes you do that in a plot way and sometimes you do that in a worldbuilding way. Like, there is worldbuilding foreshadowing where in order for a thing to exist in your world at the end, it's probably good for people to understand that it is like… That there is something of that in the world earlier on. Otherwise, it feels like a deus ex machina, where it's like, "And then there were spaceships." You're like, "I thought we were in Lord of the Rings, so that was surprising to me." You need to somehow… Maybe there's wreckage of mechanics that people find along the way, and that's a foreshadowing of its own. But I really think that foreshadowing can be… Can, I think, lead people sometimes to put too much of it into the plot, and not enough in other places. Because one of the things I sometimes I find myself doing in stories is like I figured out how to make the plot make sense, but now the characters don't feel like they're in that plot.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The characters are just being dragged along by it. They're doing things to foreshadow the action, but their behavior hasn't been foreshadowed, so it doesn't seem true to the character. So I would sort of challenge folks to look for ways in which your story makes sense on every level, character, theme, world, as you move along, and not just think of foreshadowing as something that needs to move the action.

[Howard] For the discovery writer, it's useful to point out that at some level, foreshadowing is the inevitable outcome of the syntax of a narrative. If you have a narrative in which things happen one after the other, you can look at the things that happened earlier and they are foreshadowing for the things that happened later. At some level, that's all foreshadowing is. The larger foreshadowing, the example I gave of Fermi's Paradox, that's the case where I'm now working to an outline and I want to have something big happened. I wanted to be big and satisfying, so I have to do some advance planning. But if you're discovery writing, you can probably read back through your manuscript and find foreshadowing everywhere. Because it's a natural growth of the syntax of the narrative.

[Erin] I actually think humans are natural foreshadowers. But we do it in asides. When you're telling a friend a story about something that's happened to you, you will often pause midway through the story and go, "Okay, but to understand why I hate my boss, you've really got to think about like that time she broke the copier on purpose and I've never forgiven her." Do you know what I mean? We naturally foreshadow, we just don't do it in a very like artful way…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because we just stop and go like, "Now you need to know this thing." So, sometimes I find that if you actually talk about your storytelling to other people, you will find yourself explaining the story that you've been writing, and then you'll stop, and you'll be like, "Oh, wait, the thing I didn't explain is X." That's the thing that is really important to foreshadow. So, by doing it like artless Lee like to a friend over a drink, over coffee, you can actually figure out what you need to do more artfully on the page.

[DongWon] I would argue that one of the best storytelling podcast that's out there right now, it's a podcast that's very popular called Normal Gossip, which is people telling gossip stories to each other about normal people. It's not gossip about celebrities, it's gossip about somebody you know. It's the single most funny thing I've ever listened to in my life. But also, it's so useful because it's exactly the stuff that you're talking about. Where each story has to be so beautifully structured and crafted to get the right feeling and rhythm of storytelling out. I love this idea of that's… If we are always naturally foreshadowing because you want to communicate to the person that you're talking to what kind of story are we in? Is this funny? Is this sad? How is this character relevant? What kind… So often, it's like, well, I know that person's going to make some chaotic choices, because you're telling me a story about them. Right? Otherwise, this isn't going to resolve in an ordinary, normal way. We all know it's going to get crazy from here. So I think that's part of the joy of a certain kind of storytelling. So, just by the fact that you are telling a story, you are foreshadowing a certain kind of elements, a certain kind of plot beats. So, in some ways when we talk about foreshadowing as an official technique, it really is just turning the dial up a little bit on some of those features. It's intentionally ratcheting up what are already natural storytelling patterns that we all have, and that you're already doing if you're writing anything.

[Howard] When the next door neighbor's gas grill explodes, and somebody says, "Y'a know, this reminds me of a story," we are all paying attention. Because contextually, you've just foreshadowed something that I'm on board for. I want to start this last little bit by saying we're probably familiar with Chekhov's gun. I had people accuse me of using Chekhov's gun. "Howard, in Schlock Mercenary, there are so many mantles, and so many guns, and so many… We just expect there to be gunfire all over throughout the ending." Yeah, for my own part, I had lots and lots and lots of throwaway gags that I knew I could return to if I needed them in order to make something feel like it was inevitable.

 

[Howard] I have homework for you. Last week's homework, take one of your favorite things and write a new ending. Homework this week, take a throwaway gag from one of your favorite things. Something that was only a plot point in one episode or in one book or in one scene. Right… Outline a scene in which that turns out to have been foreshadowing for something of huge dramatic import.

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

 

[DongWon] This episode is made possible by our incredible Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&As, live streams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/31/17-31-everyone-has-an-agenda/

 

Key points: Characters want something. Dialogue is like a series of reveals, with each character trying to move their agenda forward. Interrogation scenes are a stark contrast, with what's at stake, and the gamesmanship of trying to get information out of you, while you are trying to hide that information. Characters may not use the right tool to accomplish their objective! People are unreliable communicators. Sometimes one character will draw another character out. Mysteries tend to slowly unveil things in dialogue, with delays, distractions, and obfuscations galore. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 31]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Four, Everyone Has an Agenda.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So we are going to talk about agendas today. Characters want something. That's why they are in your story. How... What does this... Maurice, what does this have to do with dialogue?

[Maurice] So I've been loving some of the analogies that we've been having during the course of this conversation. So, the whole idea of like a series of reveals has been just fascinating to me. So, when I think of each person having an agenda, I mean we… Each conversation means something. There's either something I'm trying to figure out or there's something I'm trying to hide. Now it becomes a game of us trying to move those two agendas forward. So that's a lot of ways that I tend to view dialogue. Which is why my favorite dialogue scenes to write are actually interrogation scenes. Because that's when it becomes a really stark contrast, what's at stake and how are we going to go about this sort of gamesmanship of you're trying to get information out of me, I'm trying to hide it, and yet, get information out of you, too, that you're trying to hide. So in a nutshell, that's, for me, is at the heart of everyone having agenda.

[Mary Robinette] This is that thing that I was talking about in episode one about the idea of area of intention, that there is an authorial area of intention, and then your character has their own area of intention. As Maurice says, everyone has a reason for doing something. Like, sometimes you're saying a thing because you're trying to appear smart. Sometimes you're saying it to score points. Sometimes you're saying it to convey information. Sometimes you're saying it to woo someone. Sometimes it's come out of your mouth and you're like, "Oh, I wish I had not said that out loud." So thinking about why… What your character's objective was for why they said that thing. They may not use the right tool for accomplishing that objective. Which is part of what makes dialogue fun is that it is… Its own version of a try-fail cycle.

[Dan] Yeah. I do love that idea. We talk about unreliable narrators sometimes, but I think we also need to remember that people are just unreliable communicators. We are often very bad at saying what we mean, or saying it in a way that will make people angry or that will not make people angry. What I often find myself thinking… We talked last episode about big conversations with multiple people. Those are one of my favorite things to write. From an author intent point of view, often one of the reasons that I will have a character speak is as an author I need to remind you they're in the room.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It's important to make sure that this character says something so that you don't forget that they're there. But the character needs their own motivation to speak.

[Mary Robinette] I'm here, I'm here!

[Laughter]

[Dan] They need to say something other than just, well, the author wants to make sure you didn't forget me. So, thinking about, well, what is their agenda? Making sure they have an agenda. Why are they in the conversation? Often, and I've been in these conversations before with friend groups and things like that, often I have no agenda in a conversation. Sometimes my only purpose in speaking is just to tell a joke to make people laugh. Maybe I'm bored. Maybe someone else is having a very meaningful conversation and I'm just stuck there awkwardly. Those are still motivations, even if they are not driving the story forward.

 

[Howard] I call some of those "look, I'm just happy to be here." What's fun about the "I'm just happy to be here" is often during the course of a conversation, there will be a reveal and "I'm just happy to be here" becomes "Wait. We're doing what?" Those… I mean, I've described it comedically. I'm reminded of… Oh, I can't remember the class and none of it's important. A passenger and a driver in a car, they're driving down the road and there is a fast food place up ahead. The passenger says, "I'm thirsty." What the passenger means is I like the milkshakes that they serve there and I want you to read my mind and let's go get milkshakes. But they haven't said that because even for themselves they don't… They haven't unpacked their own agenda. They just "I'm thirsty." "Yeah, we'll get something to drink when we get home." Then they're upset. Well, how come you didn't pull over? Well, because we didn't complete the conversation. Because the character had an intent that they didn't fully understand and which they didn't communicate.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to push back on that slightly as an interpretation, and just say that this is an example of, and we'll talk about this later, about where conflict can come from when two people have different understandings of the conversation. There's an idea of high context culture and low context culture. High context culture is full of this kind of indirect communication. So instead of saying, "Will you pass me the salt?" you say, "Is there any salt?" The code is this means I don't need you to say, "Yes there is salt." What I need you to do is pass me the salt. So sometimes someone is saying something like that because what they're act… The encoded stuff is basically around I would like to stop for a milkshake, but I don't want to put you out if you don't also want to stop for a milkshake.

[Maurice] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So this is… This gets back into the thing we've already talked about, knowing their agenda and knowing the character.

 

[Dan] I have an agenda right now. Which is that we need to pause for our book of the week.

[Howard] Oh. I've got the book of the week. The book of the week is kind of a technical manual. It's by Nate Piekos. It's called The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering. Why on earth would I hand you what is a graphic designer's technical manual if you're a writer? Let me read a little blurb off the back, because they said it better than I can. "Well-crafted comic book lettering is the visual soundtrack that guides a reader's eye along the page with the mode of dialogue, intuitively placed balloons, and dynamic sound effects. But these elements are just the beginning. In this book, you'll also learn the unique grammatical traditions of mainstream comics." I'm going to stop there for just a moment. If you want to write comics and you don't know the syntax of comic book dialogue, your letterer is going to choke. Your artist is going to choke. The whole project grinds to a halt because the writer is a novelist and not a comic book writer. The book is so loaded with information. Now, as a comic book guy, I'm probably getting more out of it than non-graphic designer folks will, but if you're using, for instance, Photoshop and Illustrator to build your own book covers, there are going to be elements in here that you're going to love to have. So, it is the Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering by Nate Piekos.

 

[Dan] Wonderful. Okay. So, Maurice, you had something you wanted to say before the break.

[Maurice] Oh, yeah. It's just something… Something actually my therapist told me once. I will use anything for applying to writing. But she was saying if people were clear communicators, she would be out of a job. It's just we rarely say what we feel when we feel it. So my application for that is just that, as I was listening to Howard talk earlier, is the whole idea of like when I… I tend to, as a person, make you work for it. You have to ask me directly. You have to… There's a lot of intentionality when I'm in a conversation with somebody. It drives my wife absolutely insane. But I realize that's a tick of mine. It's just like, oh, no, I'm not just going to casually say things. Everything is with intentionality. Then, if not, I will disappear in the room and not blink twice about it. I'm happy to disappear in a crowd. Which I know sounds counterintuitive for those who've actually met me and interacted with me. But I will happily disappear into that crowd unless someone draws me out of it. So I think about that a lot in terms of dialogue and my character interactions. So for that person in the room who disappears or who speaks just to remind people they're in the room, well, there are some people who are like, "No, no. I'm trying to avoid detection." So now what does this mean in terms of how you write dialogue or your main character trying to ferret out information they need?

[Dan] One good trick that you can use for that sort of situation is exactly what Mary Robinette did in our previous episode where I had not spoken in a while, so she asked me to talk about my own writing. Which is a way to draw people out if they are not speaking and you need a good character-based reason, that character intention, for them to be speaking. Have another character force them to…

[Mary Robinette] Or have them do something that Dan was talking about, like derailing things slightly. I… It's… It is… You can have them tell an inappropriate joke which can then introduce tension into the scene. You can have them say, "Does anyone want some tea?" And go and putter someplace, which can reveal character about them. It's like this is someone who's nurturing. This is someone who doesn't feel comfortable being not busy. There's a number of different things that you can do that can bring that character in. One of the things that… Going back to the authorial area of intention and character area of intention, that I will think about as a person, and then I will use that tool with my characters, that I will think, "What am I actually trying to accomplish here?" So, let's use, as an example, an apology. So an apology is a part of a conversation between two people. A character wants something when they apologize. There's a number of different things that that character can want. You can tell which one they want when you read that apology. You can tell, because you've read these bad apologies. You can tell when it's not an apology, they just want you to think nice things about them. You can tell when it's an apology, when they want to actually win the argument under the guise of pretending to apologize. You can tell it's an apology where they want to fix the problem that they have created and let you know that they are no longer a problem. All of those are different like areas of intention that inform the ways that they are constructing that apology. It's exposed in the language that they use. So the idea that everybody has an agenda, the reason that we want you to think about it is because it affects not just what your character says and how they say it, but also, like, the impact of it. Because if their agenda is one thing, I want people to think good things about me, and they do the apology that is not apology, the faux-pology, it's not going to fix the thing. People are not going to think good things. They're just going to get angrier. So that agenda item is a failure. Right? So they've got an agenda and what you've got there is then a try-fail cycle. So you… There's a thing they want to accomplish, they try something, and it fails. Which is part of why like understanding what your character's goal is is so important when you're constructing dialogue.

 

[Dan] Maurice, I have a question. I'm very intrigued by one of the lines in the outline you gave us that says slowly unveiling a mystery. What do you mean by that? How does that refer to this agenda dialogue conversation?

[Maurice] Well, I mean if the four of us are in a murder mystery, and someone's like, "Hey, who killed them?" And I go, "Oh, oh. My bad. I did that."

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] That kind of cuts the mystery pretty short.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's a great micro fiction, though.

[Maurice] Right.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] My bad, I did that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Who killed him? My bad, it was me.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Tada! So. I mean, again, it's just the problem in microcosm, it's like, all right, so, one of you being the detective, and I'm sitting there trying to hide this information. That now charges each one of our interactions. Right? So I'm going to be as indirect, I'm going to obfuscate, I'm going to allow for distraction as much as possible during any interchange that we have in order to hide the fact that my goal is I want to get away with this murder. Right? So that's kind of what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about that question.

[Mary Robinette] That is so often my goal.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That is one of the lessons that I had to learn very early on with dialogue is, I would have two characters talking. One had information they didn't want to give up. But I, as the author, knew that this scene was the scene where they gave it up. Yeah. It just ended up being clunky. I won't tell you, I won't tell you, I won't tell you, okay, here it is. Making something like that feel natural is so difficult sometimes. You need to allow for distractions like you were saying, one character is trying to delay the conversation, the other character is asking probing questions, because you can't just say, "Hey, did you kill the guy?" You have to start asking other things. For that specific conversation, there's a really wonderful series of YouTube channels where they will actually show police interrogations. I find those to be really fascinating. In particular, there's one, and I can't remember the name of the channel, where they will do police interrogations for people who are… Who are claiming to be insane. They're clearly trying to set up an insanity plea. So there's commentary along with it, saying, well, this is what they're trying to accomplish by this sentence or by this behavior. And here's why it doesn't work.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I love that kind of stuff.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] I remember the first time I played How to Host a Murder. I was the killer, and my what's my motivation book, the first two pages were stuck together, and I didn't know that I was the killer.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I totally won that game because I lied so convincingly. At one point, they said, "Hey. You're a rock climber, you brought rope with you. Obviously, you swung to the balcony and committed the murder." I was like, "Don't be ridiculous. Yes, I'm a rock climber. I'm not Tarzan." Just making fun of what they were saying, even though, from the clues that were presented in the book, oh, he's totally the killer. I totally got away with it because I didn't know. I learned a lot from that. You want to lie convincingly, hide the facts from yourself.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right, right. I was actually just thinking… I love watching police interrogations. But there was one that was recorded… It was literally following the Indianapolis police detectives. It was a reality show, they followed them around. There was this… This was like one of my all-time favorite police interrogations. But it would almost never work on the page. Because it was basically, "Did you do it?" "No, I didn't do it." "Did you do it?" "No. I didn't do it." "Man, I know your mama." "All right, so here's what happened."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] I mean, it's like… Really, he dumped out because the detective said, "I know your mama." It's like… Oh. Okay.

[Dan] I have found the specific YouTube channel that I was thinking of that's all about criminal psychology. So, Howard, I've given you that link. You can include it in the liner notes for when we post this episode live.

[Howard] Okay.

 

[Mary Robinette] Which means that we are probably at that point where we should talk about homework.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I have your homework. I want you to identify your character's area of intention. So go through and look at a scene with dialogue, and identify, just flag next to it, what is your character trying to accomplish when they say this? You should know what their area of intention is for the overall scene and also for each line of dialogue. When I say you should know, I want to be super clear that most of the time, this is stuff that you have internalized and you're doing it instinctively. This is something that you should know for the purposes of this exercise and, if you've ever got a scene where you can't get traction or it's not working, this is a tool that you can pull out. Identify their area of intention for the whole scene and also for each line of dialogue. Bonus, when I say your character, I do mean every character that is engaged in that dialogue.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/07/14-27-natural-setting-as-conflict/

 

Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.

[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.

[Brandon] Yeah, we are.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?

[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.

[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."

[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.

[Brandon] That's a very good point.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.

[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."

[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?

[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.

[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?

[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…

[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.

[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.

 

[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.

[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In a science fiction setting…

[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!

[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?

[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]

[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.

[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Coconut glass.

[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?

 

[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…

[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.

[Howard] Boy versus nature.

[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.

[Mary Robinette] Whoo!

[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.

[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.

[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.

[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.

 

[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?

[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…

[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.

[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.

[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.

[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?

[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…

[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.

 

[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.

[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/15/13-15-what-writers-get-wrong-with-mike-stop-continues/

 

Key points: Gay people just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about gay topics. Gay people often lean into stereotypes. Gay people create their own culture. There is a whole spectrum of ways that you enact being gay. Even passers support flamboyant gay people. The media does seem to have more flamboyant gay characters than subdued gay characters. Pay attention to the order of reveals. Happily married, loves sushi, and gay OR gay, happily married, loves sushi? Look at characters as a mystery, reveal clues, and then the big reveal. Be aware of you and your readers' defaults. Do your research, get gay readers from within the gay community, and talk to people on the Internet to write better gay characters. "What's his secret?" Mostly, just make characters who happen to be gay. 

 

 

[Dan] This was a really interesting discussion. So, do you have some writing homework you can give us?

[Mike] Yes. So take your work in progress. Take any… Start with a scene. Take any character in that scene, and make that character… Change their sexual identity. So it could be to gay, to lesbian, bisexual, asexual, pansexual. Whatever it is. Rewrite the scene. But see just how little you have to change to make that character a different… Have a different sexual identity. You'll be surprised. It might be zero words. You might have to change literally nothing.

[Dan] Awesome. I think that sounds fantastic. Well, thank you again. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.