Entries tagged with rewrite

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 20.27: The Lens of Why

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-27-the-lens-of-why

Key Points: The lens of why? Authorial intent. Why did you write this book? Theme and meaning? Meaning is what the reader brings to the book. Approach them as questions. Theme is what the author puts into a book, meaning is what the reader gets out of a book. What am I trying to say with this book? Theme and meaning and authorial intent are just a coffee coaster. Help? A story or story structure is a pitcher, that you can put anything in that you want. The reader brings their vessel, a cup, which you fill from that pitcher. A story asks a question, while a polemic answers it. Theme as a series of questions? Moments of discovery of what my theme is? Rewriting can be a joy.

[Season 20, Episode 27]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 27]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The Lens of Why.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mark] And I'm Mark.

[Howard] We are joined by our special guest Mark Ashiro here on Navigator of the Seas...

[Mary Robinette] You will have already been listening to Mark on some of our earlier episodes at the beginning of the year. Because we time-travel. We haven't recorded those yet, so we don't know what we've talked about.

[Howard] We're quite sure they're awesome.

[Mary Robinette] Brilliant. They are brilliant.

[Mark] I'm going to tank those ones on purpose now.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mark, will you take a moment and tell us about yourself?

[Mark] Of course. I am primarily a young adult and middle grade author. I have seven published books, many more to come. I'm also very lucky in that I am a multi-genre author and I get to genre hop. So I like taking deep dives into genre structure, all things nerdy.

[Howard] Outstanding. Well, let's talk for a moment about the lens of why. This is a category we're using to describe tone and frame, authorial intent. Theme and meaning. All kind of wrapped up under the question of why did you write this book? Why did you write this book? And I want to begin by focusing a little bit on just theme and meaning, because I always struggle with these. So I'm going to ask the question to my fellow hosts. How do you differentiate between theme and meaning?

[Mary Robinette] I… This is my own personal take. And I think about both of those as things that are not necessarily for me. So, theme, for me, is something that people who are writing essays or reviews are about, that it's big, sweeping arcs of stuff. Meaning, for me, is what the reader brings to it. There's stuff about the book that means stuff to me, but it's often a personal thing that never surfaces for the reader. So I tend to, when I'm going into this, approach them as questions. What is the question that I'm asking? And I think that that is essentially what people are talking about with theme. That… Like, I will… The novel that I'm working on right now, the question that I'm asking is how many times can you lie to someone you love? That's not… It's not my intention to answer that question. My intention is to explore it. And I think that's what people are talking about when they talk about theme. But, for me, theme… Like you, Howard, is an amorphous thing that someone… Because I also see people like, ah, yes, thematically, they've used the color blue throughout this. I'm like, or they liked it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It was on sale.

[Howard] Okay. I'm going to… I need to one trick pony this. My one trick is metaphors. Theme is how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop. And meaning is the owl doesn't care about the question, the owl is just going to bite the Tootsie pop. Meaning doesn't answer the question, necessarily. Meaning provides an answer in a different way, and theme asks the question without necessarily providing an answer.

[Mary Robinette] I think in another way you've demonstrated my thinking here, which is, with your metaphor, you've used a metaphor that kids these days won't get. And so you've got a meaning that is important and meaningful to you, but they're going to bring a completely different meaning to it when they read it. What are you thinking, Mark?

[Mark] So, my way into thinking about this is very similar to yours, is when I'm starting a project, it almost immediately always has a meaning to me. This is the reason why I want to write this, this is what I think is interesting. I don't often know the theme until much, much later. Because the theme will then diverge very much from the meaning that I intended or the meaning that I had for it. I think it's also interesting, as someone who is writing kid lit and is constantly interacting with readers, how often the readers, these kids will go on long five-minute tangents to me about what this book is about or what this story's about. And I'm just sitting there, nodding my head, like, that's totally what I intended. And seeing the way that someone can read something and find 20,000 different things you never intended, you never thought of. And so, for me, that's meaning. That's where meaning is. It is also fun, though, when you have these experiences where someone does see the theme that you have written in there, that is intentional. But, yeah, they don't always match up. I think it is fun, though, I will say, when the two, your meaning and the theme, matchup, and someone catches it. Those are the [garbled], that beautiful trifecta moments you have.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] At breakfast today, Kate McKean said… I asked the question…

[Mark] Yeah.

[Howard] She's going to be on some episodes with us this year.

[Mary Robinette] She will have already been on episodes.

[Howard] She will have already been on episodes…

[Laughter]

[Howard] With us this year.

[Mark] Time travel!

[Howard] Sorry, I keep forgetting to use the future has been tense.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] She said, oh, yeah, theme is what the author puts into the book, meaning is what the reader gets out of the book. Which is also a convenient definition. Dan, you were going to say something?

[Dan] I just thought… I'm really fascinated by this conversation, because I think I'm the opposite of you, Mark, entirely. I think about theme a lot. Theme, to me, is what is this about. What am I putting into it? I can't think of meaning… I can't think of a book I've written where I know what it means. Like, that is a completely foreign concept to me. What does this book mean? I don't know. Whereas the theme, what is this about, what am I trying to say with it, that's something that I do think about very consciously.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think about… I think this is why I liked the umbrella term of the why. It's like…

[Mark] Right.

[Mary Robinette] The why of the book. Why is this important to me? Why is this a book I want to tell? Why is this a journey that my characters want to go on? Because theme does have so many different meanings for so many different people.

[Howard] There's… We have in a couple of weeks an episode about specifically authorial intent, and, for me, the Venn diagram of theme and meaning and authorial intent… Boy, depending on what angle I'm looking at it, it's just a coffee coaster. It's just one circle, they all fit in the same thing. And so I struggle a lot with these definitions. Help? Help me.

[Dan] We all thought you were going somewhere with that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I am going somewhere. I am asking you a question.

[Mark] We thought you were providing us with guidance, and then you're like, I need the guidance.

[Mary Robinette] So this is something that… A metaphor that I use when I'm talking about a structure… Structure, but also the relationship with the audience. And I probably talked about this in an episode at some point, but… Hello, we're going to revisit. That when you're thinking about a story, a story structure, that it's a pitcher, that's a container. It contains whatever it is that you want to tell. Pitchers come in a bunch of different shapes and you can put anything in them you want. You can put gazpacho for reasons. You can put a Pinot Noir, you can put apple cider. You can put anything into that pitcher you want. Depending on the genre you're in, the pitchers may have different shapes. You may decide to become a glassblowers and make your own. That's the story as you intend it. When the reader comes to you, each reader brings their own vessel. And when you're looking at the vessel, a Pinot Noir glass is designed to shape the way you're experiencing Pinot Noir so it hits your palate in a specific way, brings out all of these bouquets and things. So if I have a Pinot Noir in my pitcher, and I pour it into your Pinot Noir glass, you are experiencing the story as I intended it. You're getting my theme and meaning. But if you come to me with a red solo cup, you're still going to enjoy that. If I've got hot apple cider, and you come to me with a ceramic mug, perfect! We got a good match there. If you come to me with that Riedel glass, which was so good for the Pinot Noir… It's likely to shatter from the hot apple cider. Which is not my intention. And so, for me, when I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about who in my writing for? But I'm also not… Like, I can't also think about, oh, I have to think about every possible vessel that may come to me. So, when I'm thinking about that meaning, like, for me, the meaning is the way the reader experiences the story. That's… And sometimes, as Mark was talking about, they do line up perfectly. So this is why I have found that if I think about the what question am I asking, why am I telling this, who am I telling it for, that those give me measurable things for myself that I can use to make decisions. I can measure against the is this going to make so-and-so laugh? Then that's… Yes. And that was… That's my intention. That's my… The meaning for this moment. Great. Then I can measure against that. If I want this… If I want a laugh here and it's not going to make them laugh… Other people may also laugh at that point, but also, sometimes, you put in, like, an in-joke that is for one very specific cup.

[Mark] I want to jump in here, because now you just triggered sort of a memory that might help with differentiating between theme and meaning. So my first book, Anger Is a Gift, I wrote… a secondary character is a trans-racial adoptee, like myself. If you're listening and unfamiliar with that term, it is someone who is adopted out of their ethnic and racial culture and into another one. It usually describes kids of color who are adopted by white people. So I have a white adopted mom and a Japanese Hawaiian adopted father. And so I wanted a dynamic I have almost never seen in fiction. Because usually adoption narratives are just… There's an adoption, it's usually not transracial, you might see foster care, orphans, or whatnot. But that specific experience is so specific, you don't see it. So I wrote this character who's dealing with being Latino who is adopted into a white family and the privilege that comes with that. That's my theme. The themes of privilege and how this person who is a person of color is in a very white society… Not only that, but in the neighborhood she lives in, and then how she interacts with her friends who are from a poorer neighborhood. That's my theme. What I'm talking about, what's the authorial intent. The second day this book was out, I was at a book event with Jason Reynolds in DC, and a man came up to me and said, "I read this whole book last night and I loved it. But I need you to know, like…" It was an older white gentleman and he's like, me and my husband adopted this young black girl, and I think I need to, like, talk to her, because I don't think I've raised her right. And I'm like holding this book open and I'm like, who do I make it out to? Like…

[Laughter]

[Mark] That man got the theme, but it had a different meaning. Because… And I love that you're talking about [garbled]

[Howard] And it had a very powerful meaning.

[Mark] Very powerful meaning, but, also, I was like, that's not it. I do… This is not for you. I was not writing for you, but that is a thing where the liquid I'm pouring out went into… I won't say the wrong cup, because I don't…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Mark] Want to make that judgment call…

[Mary Robinette] No, no.

[Mark] But a cup that shattered. And it was fascinating to me, because I'm like, I love that you did get the theme of this child's parents did not treat them well… Whoa, that is not the meaning I intended at all. Sorry if you happen to be listening and had an existential crisis for the last six years, but…

[Chuckles]

[Mark] But that's interesting because it's someone who understands the theme, but the meaning was still different for them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] But if that individual came away from your book and what they came away with first and foremost was I need to have a conversation with my adoptive daughter…

[Mark] Yeah.

[Howard] About transracial adoption and parenting. I don't see parents having conversations with their children as a bad thing.

[Mark] Oh, yeah. No.

[Howard] That's… I would not say that cup shattered. I think that someone got meaning from it that you didn't expect, and had a very powerful experience that you didn't intend, but that was probably a net good.

[Mark] Yeah, I agree. I agree with that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I also don't think that sometimes a cup shattering is always a bad thing, because sometimes you need a different cup.

[Mark] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I was thinking about was a conversation that I had with Elizabeth Bear years ago. It was, like, one of those conversations where you're sitting around at a convention, and someone drops a… Just a one sentence thing that blows your mind for the rest of time. And she said that a story was something that ask a question, and a polemic was something that answered it. And so, when you were talking about the questions that you are asking, how does she relate to the people that she knows, how does this impact… Those are all questions.

[Mark] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And what you're showing is one way in which it might be experienced. But I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say you're also showing multiple ways, multiple answers to that. And that is, I think, where you… For me, the thing… Thinking about theme in that way, as a series of questions as opposed to a series of answers, is that it allows space for the reader. And I think any time you can allow space for the reader to come into the story, any time you can invite them in, that you do have the potential for a more powerful meaning.

[Howard] And on the subject of space for the reader, our advertisers don't actually read this, but we're going to give them some space.

[Howard] I have an experience I want to share about when I thought… When… I look at it now and think back at it. And I think that learning my theme, learning my meaning, caused me to change what I was writing. Early Schlock Mercenary, I did not realize… This is going to sound a little silly, I know… I did not realize that I was writing social satire. Once I realized I was writing social satire, a lot of lights came on, and now I had, as a writer, I had a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. I knew what certain themes were going to be. My question for you, my fellow hosts, have you ever had a similar moment of discovery, where you realized, oh, wait. This is what this means. This is what my theme is. And you changed your course?

[Mary Robinette] Mark, I just watched you nod all the way through that, so [garbled]

[Mark] [garbled] And I love this too, especially because, it was for a book that was contemporary, and the theme could only manifest as speculative fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Ah

[Mark] So, my most recent YA book, into the Light, is a secret speculative fiction book, where the speculative fiction twist does not happen until like 325 pages in, when you realize you've been reading speculative fiction the whole time. Which, by the way, actually has made people very angry when they read it…

[Chuckles]

[Mark] Because it's so [garbled unlike]

[Howard] Dan has no experience with this.

[Laughter]

[Mark] Yes. And I'm sure you can speak to (one) it is a very creative… Creatively satisfying thing to do, but I even knew when I realized what the theme of this book was actually going to be, that it was going to be an unnerving and upsetting experience for the reader, because you thought I was leading you into one story, and your very much not being led into that story. And people… I do get why people go into a book and expect one genre and you don't get that. But I had written multiple drafts, I'd figured out structure. But I was having this problem with the two main characters where I was very frustrated because they sounded a little too similar. And what was it about the two of them that made them different enough to warrant this being a book? I had my meaning before I started the book. I had my meaning before I even started outlining it or brainstorming. I knew what the theme was before I started drafting. So I felt very secure in what I was about to do. But when I was actually writing these two narrators, something wasn't right. They felt disjointed, they felt angular. I was like, they're not clashing in ways that are interesting, their clashing in a way that's just upsetting. Why can't I get them to be what I want them to be? It was in a conversation that I was having that I… On the phone with my editor, where I said something very similar, like, they cannot be what I want them to be, and I was like, oh! That's actually the theme. The theme is of this whole…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Mark] Kind of why I was struggling with this is it is a book about religious repression and rejection, it's about two kids who are tricked into conversion therapy. And they go through very different experiences with it. And the theme that I was struggling to vocalize is, for some people in this world, you'll never be good enough.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Mark] And I just was sitting there and I'm like, I'm doing it now, I'm saying they're not good enough and they aren't fitting the mold that I want them to. And I'm like, oh, my God, that's it! And I mean, unfortunately, you have that moment where I was on the phone with my editor, Miriam Weinberg at Tor, where she's like, you're going to have to rewrite the whole thing, aren't you? And I'm like, yeah…

[Chuckles]

[Mark] This is the third rewrite, and I'm like, yeah, I'm going to have to, but I know what it is, in the way I figured out how to… Without spoiling it, was it required something extremely bombastic and very, very speculative fiction. But… And I'm curious to hear, too, for people who have had this, that moment of, like, oh, this is right, this is it. I'm exactly where I need to be.

[Howard] I shared with a student yesterday morning… We were talking about the necessity for rewrites, and I said, yeah, I got bad news for you. If you love having written, finding that you need to rewrite the whole thing is terrible. But, if you actually love to write, the opportunity to make this discovery and go back and rewrite it can be a joy.

[Mark] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Because now you get to do it again.

[Mark] With… At least for me, this sort of, like, infectious certainty.

[Howard] You get to do it better.

[Mark] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Mark] Where you've [sussed?] out as you are making decisions, and then you get to make even more because you feel good about the decision you made.

[Dan] I've talked about this a little bit before, but I've had this experience with three of the John Cleaver books. Four, five, and then, in between them, a novella called Next of Kin. Which I think of as my basically Alzheimer's trauma books…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because they were about memory. The kind of basic premise of the John Cleaver series is that there are monsters who lack something and they steal it from us. And I wanted to have one who didn't have his own memories and so he had to take ours. And does that by… Does that in order to survive. And realized very quickly once I started writing that, that I was trauma dumping my grandfather's Alzheimer's experience all over the readers, and I… Then had that moment of, well, I need to go back and make this a little more palatable and a little more acceptable, but also, wow, I didn't realize that that's what this book was about, and it absolutely, that's what this book is about. That's what all three of those books are about, is me trying to work through my own history with loss of memory and the impermanence that this creates in your life and the other people around you. And having that experience halfway through really changed how I saw what those books were and what their theme was.

[Howard] All right. Well, if we have answered for you the question about what theme and meaning are, and how they are different from each other, please let me know, because I still am not confident in that. But I'm okay with not being confident in it. I feel like this is a place where the definitions we each come up with are going to function as the lens of why.

[Howard] And I have a homework for you which should be fun. Take a popular book to film or book to TV adaptation and ask yourself if the film changed the meaning or changed the theme of the book. And then, ask yourself in what ways it did it.

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

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 19.39: A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-39-a-close-reading-on-tension-tying-it-all-together

Key points: anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. How do you decide what to use when? Think about one thing and do that the best you can. Then go back and fix the others. Do little bits of lots of things. Ask yourself questions at the end of a try-fail cycle. Use an inverted pyramid, to do the least rewriting. A mille-feuille of elements! Multiple threads of tension. Bake your structure as you go! Add tension in rewriting. Tension is not just conflict. Don't just add more explosions. Tension comes from caring, stakes too. That needs relationships. Relatable moments. Focus! Variation and change.

[Season 19, Episode 39]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm excited that... Well, I'm sad that we're winding up our whole piece on Ring Shout. But I'm excited to talk about all the things that we've been talking about over the last few weeks and figuring out how do you put it all together. We've been talking about anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. If you're writing, trying to write something as tense as Ring Shout, how do you decide which tools you're going to be using at which moment to make it work?

[choking sound]

[Howard] I'm laughing because there are so many disciplines… That as a web cartoonist I had to learn so many different disciplines and in every last one of them, I found that I knew more things than I could track at once when I was trying to do a thing. So, for me, the answer is think about one thing. Do it as best you can. Then come back and figure out where you made the mistakes in all of the other things and now try to do them.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is been such a fun module because we were able to cover some many different techniques, so many different types of things. I think P. Djèlí Clark is really virtuoso-ly demonstrating a lot of these techniques at once. So one of the things to kind of take away from it is what you want to be doing is doing little bits of lots of different things. Right? I think this kind of goes back to what we were talking about last episode in terms of how to keep something from feeling super trope-y is having that variation. You want to subvert a little bit here, you want to like deny someone a resolution here, and then you want to complete the pattern here so that we're in the rhythm of the story and your drawing us forward. Right? This really ties to a lot of the stuff we've said before, we're just framing it slightly differently in terms of try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, like all of these kind of things that help move someone through the story which we usually talk about in terms of plot, really are tension techniques. Because tension is the thing that makes a reader excited to continue reading. That's when you get that page turning effect. That's how you get the more like quote unquote transparent prose effect where it makes something more quote unquote commercial. Right? I'm going to just keep saying quote unquote around…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] All these publishing terms. But tension is so much of what like drives the story, because you can get to the emotional core of the characters, you can get to the core of the relationships, and you can set stakes in really efficient ways.

[Erin] I love what you said about try-fail cycles, because one thing I've been thinking about for myself is, like, how to incorporate all of this. Because it's one thing to read it in somebody else's work, like you were saying, Howard. It's another thing to try to put it all in yours. I was thinking if I broke my work down… A work I was still doing, into a try-fail cycle, maybe these are all questions I could be asking myself at the end of that cycle. So it's like, okay, I'm trying, like… What am I… What are the characters anticipating in this try-fail cycle? What have I resolved at the last try-fail cycle? Where am I moving towards? Instead of look for some of these moments of tension, because, sort of as you were saying, though the try and fail is a lot about the… Like, the action. But not necessarily the tension. So, thinking about what's the tension that moves that action forward, or that makes that action important, might be a cool thing for me to think about, like, when I'm trying to figure out an outline or if I've written something and I'm like, "That doesn't seem very tense. How can I add more to it?"

[Howard] I love the try-fail cycle aspect of it, because try-fail cycles are one of those things structurally that you kind of want to know early on. Because if you get them wrong, you have to do a whole lot of rewriting. I think about… Tying it all together, all of the techniques, I think about which do I need to do first in order to do the least amount of rewriting. It's kind of an inverted pyramid. Worldbuilding. For me, is the very first, especially with a historical alt history piece like this. You get something wrong, oh my goodness, the amount of rewriting that has to go on. But the amount of history that your readers are actually seeing on the page is very small compared to things like dialect, dialogue, all of those other tension techniques we've been talking about. So, for me, tying it all together is an inverted pyramid. Start with the structural things that will make the biggest mass if I get them wrong, and finish with the structural things that are like the fine grit sandpaper.

[DongWon] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. One way to think about how to apply what you're talking about and sort of what we were talking about earlier in terms of all these techniques is I often think of a novel as a layer cake is the metaphor I use a lot. Right? Not like a three layer birthday cake, but like of mille-feuille with all these different elements. One thing I want people to think about in terms of how to keep tension rolling forward, how to keep that momentum up, is if you're resolving one thread of tension, if you're coming to the end of a pattern, make sure you have another one set up that's going to carry them forward. Right? So as you're resolving one, so… Say it's resolving her arc of understanding what happened in the barn, then underneath that you have the second arc of the broken sword. So that's going to carry you forward. As one ends, there's already rolling forward tension and momentum on another plot line. Ideally, like two or three others. Right? This is partially why what we were talking about in one of our earlier episodes about contextual tension can be so useful. Because the contextual tension is this ambient tension that pulls us through the whole book as were trying to understand how does this tie into the real world history, how does this tie into the actual plan, into the history of quote unquote the nation and all of those things.

[Erin] I also think I will say, like, as a very messy writer, I am not a great structural like planner. So I think it's also maybe, maybe not, a way to like bake your structure as you go. So I'm thinking about that opening scene where they're fighting… Let's say I was just like I want to write a scene where the clan are monsters and somebody is fighting them, and I'm going to figure out the rest once I get there. So it's like the scene has ended. Okay. They fought them. Then it's like what is left unresolved on the stage. Like, what is left? What's actually left is the next thing they do, which is the pieces. So I'm thinking, like, okay, now they've killed these things, they've got to, I assume, get out of wherever they are. Okay. That needs to be resolved. They need to, like, take the bits of monster somewhere and do something with them.

[Howard] Oh, and they gotta steal some whiskey.

[Erin] And they gotta steal some… There's always time to steal some whiskey. One of my life mottos. Not really. But then, like, by thinking about that, then it's like, okay, maybe that gets me to the next scene. Then I can figure out, okay, now I've figured out where they take the pieces. Oh, I thought up a new character, maybe that character provide some new tension. Will it be a lot jankier, and you're going to have to go… It's like a cake… You ever make those cakes where it didn't quite work out?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I mean, not frosting the heck out of it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You're like, no, no.

[DongWon] [garbled] Flat and round. Right?

[Erin] Exactly. That's all you need. So you may have to fix it in post. But I think sometimes, for me, like, I will often get stuck when I'm writing at transitions. I think a lot of times it's because I haven't figured out where the tension is going.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So it feels like you just ended a sentence with a really, like, heavy period. That sounds very odd. You just ended a sentence with a very definite ending.

[DongWon] You want to keep the flow going.

[Howard] You know what, let's keep that. And speaking of flow, should we take a break for things of the week?

[Erin] Sure, while I get myself together.

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. What to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about a novella that I translated from Icelandic. Yeah, I know. Icelandic. It's a whole other story. The thing I want to talk to you about is this novella. The author, Hildur Knutsdottir, is an award-winning writer in her home country, and we met at Ice Con in 2021. I fell in love with her writing, but it wasn't available in English. The Night Guest is a creepy horror novella which starts out with a totally relatable situation. The main character goes to the doctor because she keeps waking up tired and with mystery bruises. That's not the relatable part. The relatable part is that her concerns are dismissed because she's being quote hysterical. But each night, the injuries get worse. Hildur has this beautiful spare language that manages to create dread in the seemingly most innocuous moment. I loved this book enough to translate it. Check out The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir.

[DongWon] Howard, I love what you're saying about thinking about how to write efficiently. How to figure out how to do the least rewriting. The one thing I do want to say on that, though, is I think tension is the thing that needs rewriting the most often. You know what, as an editor, the thing that I see the most, the feedback I give the most is, characters are great, worldbuilding is great, the plot is great, it just doesn't have enough momentum. It needs somebody to… The line I always say is it didn't pull me through the story in the way I need it to. Right? So that's always a tension critique when I give that. So what you're saying, Erin, makes a lot of sense to me too, in terms of like when you do it, you have these individual scenes, is getting the momentum and sliding from one scene to the next. Tension is how you create that elision, moving from one beat to the next beat. So figuring out how to layer that in sometimes will not be too obvious for you in the planning stages, and maybe something you find as you go. So if you're struggling with that, I don't want you to, like, worry too much about things in the outlining and planning stages. Obviously, have an eye on it, think about it. I think it can be really helpful. But it's okay if you feel like this needs a lot of rewriting to get the kind of tension in there that you want.

[Howard] You know what, I want to be clear here. When I say the least amount of work, I'm not talking about no work.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There is so much rewriting that needs to be done. But I don't want to have to take this magnificent set of layers and instead of doing some trimming, I turn a dobos torte into a dobos tortilla. There's... Okay, I only have one layer I can use. Now I gotta rebuild the whole thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] For a tension rewrite, what I prefer is to be able to say, "Oh, this chapter isn't working the way it needs to work. I will rewrite this chapter." Rather than, "Oh, this chapter doesn't even fit in this book. I have to restructure it and everything that comes after it." That's the work that I want to avoid.

[Erin] I think that one of the reasons… I agree with everything. But I think that one of the reasons that tension often happens in the rewriting is because tension is different than conflict. I think sometimes when we get stuck in writing, or maybe it's just me, like, the instinct might be to, like, Michael Bay it and…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Just be like more explosions! More things! More enemies! Like, and just like build it out bigger and bigger and bigger. But that doesn't necessarily make it any more tense.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's like if you're up against 50 people trying to kill you or 60 people trying to kill you, it's pretty bad either way. It's not more tense, you're pretty dead. So you have to think about a lot of times, it's small things…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] That create tension. It's emotional things, it's personal things. I think that's what I love about Ring Shout is that things that we talked about in tension, the girl, the sword, they're important, but they're not the big set pieces.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] They're not the huge battles in a lot of ways. They're the smaller moments that pull you from one big set piece to the next. I think they can be harder to find until the rewrite, because you don't know what small details you put in chapter 3 until you write it out. Then you go, oh, I mentioned a cloak. Maybe that's a source of tension that I can bring through…

[DongWon] I think the lesser version of the opening of this book is one that starts with the trap blowing up. Right? But he doesn't do that. He starts with a conversation. Starts with a long conversation between the key characters of the story. I think that leads to the kind of tension that's interesting. Because now we have a sense of who these people are, we're starting to care about them. Then, for me, the fight scene in the warehouse is fine until she draws the sword. Then it's like, oh, damn. This is interesting now. Right? Because that, for me… I… We talk about this a lot, but death isn't very interesting stakes. Right? Like, if the character dies, I'm sort of like, okay, characters dead, let's move on. It's how the other characters feel about the character's death that makes it hit hard. It's the sense of, like, oh, they had something to accomplish that they didn't accomplish. Because we, as people, care about other people. Right? We don't necessarily care about one thing in isolation, we care about communities and relationships. So when I say that this needs stakes, I almost always mean that this needs a relationship of some sort. To another person, to a group, even to like themselves in a certain way. An aspiration for themselves. That's the thing we're going to feel emotions about. So, that's why starting in an action scene is something that, like, I always recommend against. When you think about action scenes in general, as Erin was saying, it's not about the explosions, it's not about the cool fight scenes, it's about the intensity of emotion, it's about caring about the relationship, it's about what's the consequence of losing this fight. That consequence is in the regard of their community and their family, whatever it is.

[Howard] The community and family. There's a scene about… I want to say a third of the way into the book, where the community is coming together for shared meals, and we talk about the food and we talk about the music and what's happening. When a scene like that is done well, I want to eat. I am now connected. If you do something that like removes their ability to get crayfish anymore, I'm tense. Because I… Food. That's important.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] So these sorts of celebratory moments a third of the way into the book… Granted, my meta-reader is saying, "Oh, Howard, don't learn to love this food or these people or whatever else. P. Djèlí Clark is just setting you up to care about things that could be taken away." Yeah, set my meta-reader aside and just enjoy it. Because it's a lovely scene that connects me and allows the author to create stakes that matter.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Rather than, oh, no, somebody's gonna die. Oh, no, this community might fracture.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's so grounding. Like… You said food, it made me think, many of us may have been in life or death situations against multiples of people, but many have not. But we've all eaten. I would assume. Oh, boy…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So I think that a lot of times in… It makes me think about one of the challenges of fantasy and science fiction, which is that sometimes you're talking about things that we have no frame of reference for. Like, I have never been tense about a ship exploding, because I'm not on a spaceship. But I am tense about letting the people on my crew down. Or, like, disappointment is something that we understand. So I think a lot of times where I can sometimes get lost in fiction is when so much of the tension is focused on the thing that I can't ground myself into, and not enough, like you're talking about, in the relationships.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think when people hear "add more stakes," sometimes they think…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Add bigger things blowing up.

[DongWon] One other thing I want to add to my layer cake metaphor here…

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] And sort of what we're talking about in general is I think one of the problems with adding more explosions is you lose focus. Right? So I'm saying have lots of layers, but have one of those tensions be the focus of your scene. Right? Then as you resolve that, you shift the focus to something else. When you're just adding more noise, you lose sight of the tension, so the tension drops, actually. Right? So thing to remember is that, like, if you think about the juke joint fight scene, right, she's running around looking for her lover through all that, and the tension is coming from that, primarily. There's other elements there. Right? There's the relationship with Sadie, there's whatever's going on outside with the butcher, there's… Again, the stuff with the sword, her memories, those are all present in the scene, but the dominant note, going back to our music metaphor, the dominant theme in that is her relationship with this guy as she's coming to terms with how much she cares about him.

[Howard] You mentioned don't raise stakes like Michael Bay by blowing more things up. Funny story. I think it's the third Transformers film where they were shooting in 3D, and it was the most enjoyable and comprehensible for me. It turns out it's because the 3D tech people went to Michael Bay and said, "That thing you keep doing with the cameras? Stop it. We can't do 3D if you jiggle around a lot." So they, for technical reasons, they forced him to, as you were saying, focus our attention on something.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Which let me care about it. Which made things comprehensible.

[DongWon] Yeah. I saw an interview with George Miller the other day where he was talking about the most important thing that he learned to do, and he learned it from making Happy Feet 2…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Which he made immediately before Mad Max Fury Road, which is very funny to me. But once you spot it, you can see why it makes Mad Max so good, is he learned that you communicate who the protagonist is by what the camera is looking at. Right? So all throughout Fury Road, you will notice these scenes… You talk about, like, Michael Bay level action, a million things are happening at once, but you're always focused on a character, what that character's experiencing, thinking, and you can tell what that character feels about the other characters in the scene. Right? You can see the growing trust and affection between Max and Furiosa simply by watching how they move, how they respond to each other. Then when they start fighting in tandem, it's this beautiful moment of two people coming together for survival. So, I know we've wandered off of Ring Shout…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But think about that focus when you're thinking about how to create and maintain tension.

[Erin] Yeah. I also want to, just before we wrap up this episode, you were talking about music earlier also made me think about something that I've seen that happens a lot at karaoke. Which is that if you have somebody who has the most beautiful voice in the world and they start singing at the same volume and, no matter how beautiful it is, after about 30 seconds, people will stop. The thing they do where they start listening, they're like, "Wow, you can really sing," and then go back to their conversations. Because it is the change that actually makes…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] People pay attention. Our human brains are really good at taking things that there use to and screening them out. It's actually… Whole nother podcast on why that actually is unfortunate, because if you're happy, sometimes you could get really accustomed to it and start thinking you're not happy anymore, because that's what the human brain does. But it does the same thing when you're reading. So when you were talking about the one scene in her looking for her lover, that's the note of that scene. But it's not the note of the entire book.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] Because if you hit the same note over and over and over again, nothing wrong with explosions, I think the reason Michael Bay gets a lot of heat is because when you go to the same well over and over, it's like that singer holding the same note, same pitch, same timber, for 10 minutes. Eventually, you're just like, oh, got that. Now I need something new.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Speaking of something new, we have new homework for you.

[DongWon] Yeah. I've got your homework for you this week. What I want you to do to tie this all together is to take a look at your own outline. Move one of the major conflict points in that outline into a different act. Move it forward. So, say you have the resolution of Act I. See if you can stretch that into what happens if you move that to the end of Act II. If you have something in Act IV, what happens if you move that to Act III? See how that changes the pacing, see how it changes the tension, see if moving things forward or back increases or decreases the speed of reading the book and the momentum of your story.

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

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

Current Mood: popped

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses

Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/01/writing-excuses-7-14-writing-excuses/

Good Reasons Not to be Writing: Writing is Hard! Relax first. You're not as good as Tolkien, and he spent 20 years worldbuilding. Don't forget cat vacuuming! Clean your keyboard. If you start, be willing to throw it away after writing a page of crap, and write it again. Many times. Give yourself a reward for rewriting that page! Consider taking a Walden Pond break. Or hide everything you write in a drawer (aka The Emily Dickinson Ploy). Set up a pulley and bucket! Or try the George RR Martin approach to fame, don't give the fans what they want, postpone! The thesaurus, notecards, and cats can help you explore the many arrangements of your first page. Try to catch sydlexia. Grow a beard! Research valid character voice by listening to all the audible.com samples of books read by famous actors. Don't forget to organize the results. Then choose which actors should play the characters in the book you aren't writing. Keep in touch with pop culture -- watch plenty of TV, keep up with the memes, definitely track YouTube. Consider hosting YouTube parties! Write your own rejection letters, give your internal editor some exercise. Collect Magic cards and other rewards to motivate yourself. Sort your books (and cards) by color. Invent some new letters, or a whole new alphabet. Try writing in second person omnipotent. Practice bomb threats.
( Apropos April Fools... )
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. We've given you lots of excuses. You have no excuse to not write, now. I think.
[Mary] If not, come back to us and we can give you some more.
[Brandon] Thanks for listening.
[Howard] Please don't make a bomb.