Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

Apr. 3rd, 2025 05:06 pm
mbarker: (Smile)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person 
 
 
Key points: First person. What does it do well? Direct address to the reader, the aside. Subjective unreliable point of view. Intimacy. What is first person not effective at? Clarity, complex scenes. Multi POV ensemble cast! Mirror moments, what does the character look like? Tools for first person? Avoid navelgazing by adding a activity. Multiple senses! Cadence. Why use first person? Proximity, emotion. Genres of the body, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Tapping into emotional subjective experience. Plot reveals! Character change. Coming of age stories. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? When character's goals shift. What is the lie that the character believes? 
 
[Season 20, Episode 13]
 
[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 13]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] First person.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are beginning today a small cycle of episodes in which we're going to talk about the lens of proximity, how close you are to a character and how much you get to know about that character's reactions and motivations and so on and so on. We're going to begin today by talking about first person. First person feels as if it might be the most natural way to tell a story, because that's the way we talk about ourselves. Though obviously, the other persons that we will discuss in future episodes are also and equally useful, just useful in different situations. So I want to start by asking what is first-person good at? What kinds of situations do we love first-person? What does first-person do well?
[Mary Robinette] I think the direct address to the reader, the aside, where it's like, this is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm feeling in the moment. It's not just about the internal thoughts. It's one… It's a… The thing that I've found that first-person can do that kind of nothing else gets to is hang on, let me just explain this one thing to you. So that kind of direct address of here's some exposition. I think one of the things that it has is that it immediately connects it to why it is important to the character and that is it's sometimes harder to surface things.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about first-person is it's a thing that you can do in text, in prose, in a way that's incredibly difficult or artificial to do in other media. You can have first-person asides, like the aside in theater, being… Or a soliloquy, and you can sort of fake it in films through voiceovers and things like that. But in a novel, you can have it in direct access into the interiority of a character in a way that you can't in almost any other medium. So there's something really special about the ability for prose writers to use that first-person perspective to say explicitly here's what the character's thinking, here's what the character is perceiving. And when you want to root someone very much in a subjective unreliable point of view, first-person is the go to in your toolkit.
[Dan] Well, that unreliability is so fun to play with, too. Talking about this direct aside to the reader… You could do that in third person. But in first-person, it feels like there is no artifice there. It feels like you're getting it much more directly. But… Of course there's artifice there. Because you are telling this through some other person that you've invented. It's the first person. It's not actually me, it's John Cleaver or whoever I'm writing about. So there's still a lot of artifice, there's still a lot of kind of artificiality about it, but it feels truer, it feels more direct, and that allows you to be unreliable and shaky and shenaniganry.
[Erin] I also think it creates a feeling of intimacy, or it can create a feeling of intimacy between the character and the reader. Because it's like… Like the direct aside, it's like somebody has sat down and said, okay, I'm going to tell you something. I'm just going to tell you, the reader, this thing. And nobody else in the story will understand how I feel about this at the core, nobody else will know my internal thoughts except for you. One of the reasons I love writing in first person is because you can really lean into the voice in a way that I think third person can do, especially third person where it's very close, but it doesn't have that quite the same feel as, like, a friend sat down. And part of what I'm trying to do as a writer is to capture that friend's voice and how they would tell the story in a way that nobody else could.
 
[DongWon] There's something really, really interesting about first person, because it is both our oldest form of storytelling, because just the way that we tell a story is I was walking down the street the other day. I was going to the store. The dog jumped out in the street, and I chased after it. Right? Like, that is just how we tell stories, and the way people have told stories as long as they were telling stories. But as a literary convention, as a part of the novel, it's one of the newest forms. At least in a dominant way. Like, there are examples that go back. But in terms of being so dominant in terms of how it exists in the contemporary novel, it is very much a thing that arose in, like, modern days, in like early mid twentieth century. Right? So one thing that I see people struggle with, when people push back against first-person, which I still see kind of a shocking amount. But when I see that pushback, it's… There's like an artificiality to first-person that can be a tough hurdle for some readers to get past. Because you're reading a text, but the text is being told to you as if a person is narrating it. So who is narrating it to you in that moment becomes a question in certain reader's minds. So there's like a… There is both an incredible immediacy, intimacy, and familiarity to first-person, and a layer of artificiality that requires one extra jump for the reader.
[Howard] And… That's weird, because I will accept that there is magic and spaceships and vampires, but I'm really struggling with the fact that there is a book.
[Mary Robinette] I think it's not so much that it's… Like, I can think of a bajillion examples of first-person. Because the novel would often start… When you're looking at the trajectory of the novel as a travelogue. Then you're looking at Poe, who often used first-person.
[DongWon] It's like where does epistolary end…
[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly.
[DongWon] And first-person begin is a we… The distinction that you and I are drawing here. But [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. But… But I think the thing is that one of the reasons it fell out of fashion is that people started to get hung up on the… But really did they have time to write this while they were being dragged away by eldritch horrors?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Yes. Always yes.
[Dan] Yeah. At what point in the story is this account being given? Well, I like you mentioned the kind of newness of it. It is… First person is going through a huge Renaissance right now in certain corners of the market. A lot of book tubers, books to grammars, book talkers… There's a big trend going around. I see where they will just flat out refuse to read something unless it's in first-person.
[DongWon] Huh.
 
[Dan] That's obviously not everybody, and it's not the whole market. But it's kind of having a heyday right now, which I think is really interesting. I want to ask the question what is first-person bad at? As long as we're talking about it, what can you not do very effectively with it?
[DongWon] Clarity.
[Howard] Avoid the capital I.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I think first-person… It can be harder to truly communicate to the reader what's happening in a complex scene. Because you're anchored to one perspective and one understanding of what's happening in a particular moment. So there's an immediacy to that. But when you think about your subjective experience of a large event, you're not getting the full picture because you're only seeing a little piece of it. Right? So I think we think of first-hand experience as the most true, but in a lot of ways, the way we consume information about what happened is somebody explaining from multiple perspectives. So when you're limiting yourself to one POV in a story, you are removing access to a lot of tools that you have that you would have in cinema, for example. You think cinematically, all the things the camera sees are just what the character's actually seeing, what the character's seeing is very different. Right? So you're much more constrained. So if you want real true like grounded clarity about feelings, emotions, what happened in a complex scene, first-person's pretty tough to make that happen.
[Howard] Your multi POV ensemble cast…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] In a heist thing… Yeah, that's difficult to pull off in first-person.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I think, first-person… You can cheat when we get to third person, you can cheat to show us what a character looks like even when you're in tight third person, but when you're in first-person, unless they step up and have a mirror moment, which… I was walking down the hall and I stopped to regard myself in the mirror.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I had curly red hair, bright green eyes, and was extremely buxom.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I think that everyone thinks about themselves [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Exactly.
[Erin] Just in that tone. Well, I agree with it. Like, clarity is part of it, and also just knowledge. Like the characters… A lot of times, you have, like, but the reader knows and what the character knows. In first-person, they get… They are the same. Because… Unless… Now there are ways to cheat out of this, but in general, you only know what the character knows about the world, about the situation, about the experience. So if there's something that you really need, like description, self-description, the reader to know, but there's no reason for the character to know that, you're going to have to figure out a workaround. Even in unreliable… Like, one of the things I really like doing in pieces with unreliable narrators is setting up a reliable outsider that is… That can be established, like, because they hold a position of authority or you see them being reliable in several scenes, and can point out through dialogue or through their own actions what's happening outside of the first-person, that character's first-person experience.
[DongWon] They can also…
[Erin] They can then misinterpret what that reliable person does, but the reader… It's clear enough to the reader, like, what happens. I think about a scene I wrote in my story Wolfy Things where the mom is crying and the sun misinterprets it that he's like…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] She's trying to salt the food with her tears. Like… Because no one's going to do that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, you, as a reader, know that seems unlikely. Probably she's just crying over the soup.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But he cannot accept that. But because it's something clear enough to the reader, it comes through. But it requires a lot of work to do that. Where is in a third person, you could probably just say, like, she's crying and then you would know.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] You could cheat that also with chapter bumps. You insert in universe material that appears at the top of the chapter, and then the first-person account either accounts for that or doesn't account for that. That can argue with the character just fine.
[Dan] All right. Let's take a moment here to pause, and when we come back, we'll discuss this further.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is yoru opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Dan] All right. So we've talked about things that first-person does well and does less well. Let's talk now about how. How can we use first-person effectively? What are some good tools for using first person as a perspective?
[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about one of the traps of first-person is a way of bringing us around to an effective tool. One of the traps of first-person is navelgazing. So it is, I think, one of the things that it does really well is that you can get into the character's interiority, but you can, like, have a character just sit in a room and think about themselves and never move on. So, for me, one of the tools that I often try to use when I'm doing that to combat the navelgazing is that if I have a scene where my character needs to think about something for whatever reason, I try to pair it with an activity that is somehow plot related. So, like, if there's this is a conspiracy, I think a conspiracy thing is happening, I will have them trying to repair a rover. Then, as they're repairing the rover, and having conversations, different things will then trigger for them. It's like hum, I think this is… You just said something very fishy, and what's going on with your face right now? But it is… Having that interaction with the outside world keeps… For me, keeps my navelgazing to a minimum.
[Howard] Yeah. It's the multi sensory approach. Only saying what the character is thinking about is just the navelgazing. But, I'm thinking about this. I'm seeing that. I smell this. I heard that. I'm touching this. My heart is pounding or I have a headache. I have… There's a whole huge spectrum of senses that you can tap into with first-person. If you don't use at least three of them, I feel like you're leaving too much unsaid.
[Erin] A tool that I really like that… To play around with with first-person is cadence. What the rhythm of that person's thoughts are as they're driving things. Because it tells you about the emotions. One thing that's really… You can have a very self-aware first-person character, but a lot of times they're not sure what's going on, exactly. They're afraid, but they may not say, like, I am afraid right now. They may just be experiencing fear. But what you can do is go with a faster Kayden. All of a sudden, like breathing heavy, like the heartbeat racing, when you're afraid. They're noticing things that are fearful, but also, the entire cadence of the piece as that sort of taut feeling to it, and then when they're safety, the cadence slows down. It gives a completely different feeling without you needing to signal it from the outside.
[Mary Robinette] Also, that is something that is extremely apparent when I'm doing audiobooks. When I'm narrating and the author is thinking about that, it shows up on the page and you can really hear it. It is much easier to [garbled]
[Howard] [garbled] makes your job easier.
[Mary Robinette] So much easier. I actually think that that's one of the reasons we're seeing the surgeon audio, in first-person narratives, is because they do better in audiobook. But there are times when I have to narrate something and the writer has not paid attention to the Kayden, and attempting to get the emotion into that scene is significantly harder, even though you have the added layer of I do cool things with my voice. It is undercut by the cadence.
[Howard] One of the reasons, Mary Robinette, that your first half of the episode mirrors scene was so humorous is that it breaks the true cadence of that person. That is not the pattern that you would use, that is not the cadence of… At least not of my inner voice. When I look in the mirror…
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Howard] My inner voice… Well, I'm not saying mirrors scenes are bad. I will look in the mirror and the cadence for my mirror scene is, Howard, you gonna go outside looking like that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Yep. Then I'm off. Now the reader has an insight into how I feel about how I look and how much I care. That's all we need.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, most of my mirror scenes would actually be…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] How did you sleep on your hair to get [garbled]
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like that.
 
[Dan] So, if we are using first person as a lens… Let me rephrase. If are using proximity as a lens, this is how we want to look at our work and we… What are some of the reasons we might choose first-person then? What is going to guide us? What… I guess this kind of comes back to the question we asked in the beginning of what does first-person do that the others can't. But what are some situations where we will say you know what this really needs? First-person.
[DongWon] It's so intimate. Right? We're talking about proximity. Right? First-person is… You're right up on that perspective, you're in their head with them. So when you need anything that is raw emotion. Right? That's why it works so well in YA, why we see it there so much. That's why you see it a ton in what I think of as genres of the body. Right? So, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Right? Like, horror in particular, first-person is just so valuable there because as a person is experiencing disruption, fear, sensations in their body, all of those things, are stuff that you can get to so quickly and so closely as first-person that can take extra work when you're having to do the work of third person limited or omniscient of describing a broader scene. Right?
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] So I think whenever you want to tap into someone's like emotional subjective experience, first person does so well for that. I think that's why it's doing so well on things like book talk right now.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] When you've got a plot reveal that that moment, first-person can do that so well. Because we are right there. The Revelation of whatever it is, the plot twist, the monster, the whatever, the reader is getting that reveal at the same time the character is getting that reveal at the end. Yeah. Immediacy and proximity. And, as a writer, that lens of proximity… You may choose to look at your reveal's pacifically at the reveal you have in mind and say, you know what? This is going to work better in first-person than anything else I can do. So maybe that's the way I need to shape the rest of the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. I think that a lot of times, I think of first-person stories as stories of perspective. Because you've chosen to use this particular… That character is the lens into the story more than anything else. Because you are filtering everything through the way that character experiences things. So, choosing it when you're going to have a reveal that shifts that character's perspective, where they understand something they didn't understand before, that they couldn't understand before, is where something… Where it really appeals to me. Where there is a reason in which that person as a filter is the best filter for the story.
[Mary Robinette] That ties into one of my absolute favorite things that you can do with first-person that you cannot do with any of the others. It's the proximity thing. That you can have the character change by the act of telling the story. Like, some of my favorite stories are ones… It's one of the reasons I love the John Cleaver books so much is that John is not the same person at the beginning is at the end, and the way John is relating to the reader has changed. That is so… I think that's so interesting. It works really… I think, really, really well in coming-of-age stories. I think that's one of the reasons we often see first-person paired with younger protagonists, because you more commonly have a coming-of-age story with them. But it is something that is just so delicious, so intimate.
[Dan] Yeah. I know that we are kind of running up against the end of time here…
[Erin] The end of time!
[Dan] The end of all… Not necessarily all time, but the end of our time for this. I do want to get back to…
[Mary Robinette] As I was sitting on the couch, Dan told me that I was running up against the end of time. I paused to look in the mirror…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Are you really going outside like that?
[Dan] This is part of the lens of where and when.
[Erin] Exactly. At least I'll look good during my final [garbled]
 
[Dan] I do want to circle back to unreliability. Because not only… That was something we mentioned not only as a strength of first-person, but it's one of the things that is… One of the downsides of first-person. Not necessarily a downside, is that it's really hard to not be unreliable with it. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? This isn't really an unreliable narration episode, but it's so closely linked to first-person. You were talking about the John Cleaver books. That's leaning so heavily on that, the idea that what he is telling you is what he thinks is true, not what is actually true. That dramatic irony of being able to listen to him talk about himself and know, oh, dude, you are wrong about so many things. What is the value of unreliability and why might a reader, an author, I mean, choose to put that into their story?
[DongWon] I mean, going back several episodes to goals and motivations. Right? A character's goals often involve them lying to themselves a little bit because they think they want X, but what they really need is Y. Right? So the movement from understanding what your original goal was to what your new goals are is one of that unreliability coming to the fore so you realize that, like, oh, my understanding of the world is shifting. The reason why first-person is sort of inherently unreliable, because character growth necessarily changes what is quote unquote real for the audience experience. Right? So you're shifting… Which is both what makes first-person fun and so challenging is that it's always already moving around you at all times.
[Mary Robinette] There's the idea that we talk about periodically, what is the lie the character believes? There's a bunch of different forms that that takes, but I think one of the things that you can really play with in first-person is that you can reveal character by what the character is lying to themselves about and how they are lying to themselves and the lengths that they will go to to preserve those lies. That's something that's, I think, much easier to do in first-person because of the navelgazing. But because they can do a soliloquy in ways that a third person really can't. Then, that in itself, can become a form of conflict as they are struggling with the fact that all of their reasons are breaking down.
[DongWon] I call that narrative parallax because the slight shift in perspective lets you reveal more.
[Erin] Something that just occurs to me as you asked this question is that the reason because I love unreliable narration. It's like my favorite thing ever. I think it's because I like characters that don't necessarily change or grow. Which means that the forward momentum in the story has to be the reader realization of the truth of who that character is. So, like, if they're not, like, because if they were doing… They externally sort of do the same things, but you… They understand more about the world, you understand more about them. It grows in context, as opposed to in action. Sometimes I think unreliability works well because it feels like you're moving forward as they continue to misinterpret the world, even though they don't do anything different. It still gives it a sense of a forward lean in the reader's mind.
[Howard] I think two of my favorite examples of unreliable narrators are in first-person our books where you don't realize until the very end that this is a single POV that has been telling you a story in multiple POVs. The Fifth Season and Player of Games by Iain Banks. Fifth Season by N K Jemison. You discover late in the stories, oh, this story has a first-person narrator who is part of the action, and they been lying to me about their involvement the whole time, until the very end. That's not really a first-person narrative, and maybe that's a segue into how we mess with proximity later.
 
[Dan] Well, now we finally have arrived at the end of times…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] So, it's homework time. What I would like you to do is go pick up a book that you love, something that you enjoy. Find a scene that you think is really great that is not in first-person, and take a crack at rewriting it in first-person from the point of view of one of the characters in it. Pay attention to what types of changes this requires you to make, how information comes across differently.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.49: Getting to Know You

Dec. 10th, 2024 04:51 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.49: Getting to Know You
 
 
Key points: Romance elements you might use in your story. Buddy films! A bond of some kind. The meat cube... meet cute! Two characters meet because something goes wrong. A bit in common. Or the odd couple meeting. Conflict to friendship. Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. The half orange, the person who completes. Two aspects, the characters gaining knowledge about each other, and the reader gaining knowledge about the characters. DREAM: Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. Enemies/rivals to friends. Use other characters as foils. Catalyst actions. Flip the polarity, allies to enemies. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 49]
 
[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 19, Episode 49]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Getting to Know You.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about using elements of romance in your story. This does not, I have to say, necessarily mean that you have to have a love story or even romantic attraction. You can use romance elements for... This is what buddy films are. It is the coming together as a team, as a couple, as hey, we have a bond. So we're going to be talking about some of the tools that you can use when you're doing that. One of them, we foreshadowed last week when we talked about the meat cube...
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] The meet cute. This is a romance trope in which your characters meet each other. Does anyone want to chime in and talk a little bit about how they...
[Howard] So they both walk into the flesh pot...
[Laughter]
[Dan] It's a cyberpunk story now.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] Or the new Netflix reality TV show.
[Erin] Right. [garbled] I think what I like about... I love a good romance. What I like about meet cutes is they're usually a situation in which there's a tiny amount of tension because something is kind of going wrong. But the cute part is, like, my dogs got away from me and they jumped on you or, like, I almost spilled my coffee on you. It's something very small and one character's able to put the other one at ease in the way that they approach it shows that there's something that's very simpatico in the way that they deal with the world, see the world, or deal with conflict. I think that helps to foreshadow the way that they will deal with each other going forward.
[Mary Robinette] That is a great way to describe it. The other thing that I think that happens about that is that there's always, in addition to the thing going wrong, and that moment of oh, yes, I care about you, there's the desire for that connection to linger. And there's usually some revelation about something that they have in common. Something that is an unexpected thing that they have in common. It's like, oh, we both go to the same gym, or, what? Your grandmother's name is Emelda as well? It's some common thing that starts to… Is kind of the first thing that's cementing the friendship.
[Howard] Yeah. You mentioned how romances and buddy cop films… Buddy films, are both at some level, fundamentally the same formula. I pose the question, what does the meet cute look like in a buddy cop film? It may end up being something like these two law enforcement officers or these two professionals at arms both come to the same scene from different agencies and there is gunplay and there is a little bit of mutual respect and then, oh, no, you two have to be partners. I work alone. And off we go.
[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about the meet cute is… It forces the characters to actually interact. Right? Interact about something. There's so many times when I'll read a book and I feel like the author's assuming that these two characters are in the same space. They're working in the same office. They're both in the same patrol car. Therefore, there's a relationship. Right? But we, as the audience, are not seeing that interaction. We're not getting a sense of that relationship. So, the meet cute, by having a thing that goes wrong in it, again, we're talking about sort of, like, those little micro tropes we talked about last episode. Where there's almost, like, that thriller component of, like, oh, no, something has happened. But the end result is one where we're leaning into interaction as opposed to a plot event and a plot hook in that way. Right? So those characters interacting, having a conversation, one person solving a problem for another person, and then leaving us on a note where it's like, oh, there's a possibility for future interaction here, because they share something in common, or they exchange numbers, or some aspect of it that lets us carry that thread into the future. Right? So you really want to make sure, as you're exiting that interaction, that there's something that carries us out of it with momentum.
 
[Dan] I don't want to get into a long definitional conversation about what is and isn't a meet cute. So I'm just going to say this is a different kind of meeting now to talk about, because there's one thing that you also see in a lot of relationship stories, is not the cute meeting where they kind of have some common ground that they can see, but the odd couple meeting. Where they are forced into conflict with each other. This is really common, I think, in a lot of buddy comedies, because they have that sense of butting heads. Until they become friends. But you see this in romance as well all the time. You asked about, Howard, what does the meeting look like in a buddy comedy. For my money, the best buddy comedy ever is The Nice Guys by Shane Black. And that… The time the two characters meet is when Russell Crowe breaks into Brian Gosling's house and breaks his arm. Like, that sets them up as antagonists, and then we get to watch them come together and become friends.
[Erin] I think, to build on what you're saying about the kind of buddy… Because I had the same thought. Like, it's like they're forced into the same patrol car, but I think it's like a moment of intrigue in the, like, most blasé versions of that, which is that, like, oh, we maybe have something in common. Again, it's finding the commonality. It's the, like, you do this by the book, and I like to just shoot things. But also, we both like kittens.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, a lot of times in buddy… Like, it's about finding the commonality in an unexpected place. So whereas a meet cute is I never thought I would meet you here today, in a buddy like film, I think it's more like I never thought I would find anything interesting about you, who I have already met.
[DongWon] Or any respect for you in some way.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So there is a… There's this theory that my mother-in-law has, which I call the Kowal relationship axes…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Based on her dating advice she gave to my husband, but it's great for characters, which is that if you think about these as sliders, the more things you have in common, the greater your compatibility is. So, it's mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. So, mind is that the closer they are in intelligence, the more compatible they are. Money, same opinions about money, what it's used for, not necessarily the same amount of money. Morals, the same ideas of what is right and wrong. Manners is the same idea of what is polite, correct behavior. So this is why you can have someone that you get along with, they're so charming in person, and terrible monsters on the Internet. Because their morals… Morals are completely opposed, but their manners are aligned. Monogamy is not actually you have to be monogamous, but you have the same idea of what the relationship is. You all have had the person that totally thinks that you're BFFs, and you're just like we kind of vaguely know each other. And then mirth, that you have the same sense of humor. So you only have to tip one of these off just a little bit, one or two of them off, to have like major conflicts and fractures. When you look at Lizzie and Darcy, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, they are actually really closely aligned in pretty much everything except manners because of her family and a little bit on mirth. Then, in the proposal scene happening, they're wildly misaligned on monogamy.
[DongWon] Excuse me while I spend the rest of this episode having a minor crisis about my last few relationships.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Sorry. Well, let me ease your mind a little bit. Okay?
[Erin] All you need is a meet cute.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Where does one find a meet cute these days? I've been going to the park and…
 
[Dan] It's all on the Internet. So, to ease your mind, a little bit, because while this is true, I also think that there is a lot to be said for the half orange. I talk about this a lot in relationships, that what a person, what a character really needs is the other half of themselves.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Someone who completes them, someone who has all the qualities they don't have so that together they are a single complete person. So, yes, you need to be aligned, you need to think about some of the things in the same way, but also, you very specifically, I think, need to have someone who can do things you can't do, who thinks of things in a way that you don't.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it doesn't talk about personality. So, introvert, extrovert? Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree with you that you need someone who balances you. That is one of the things that I love about these is that they're both correct, I think.
[Howard] The title of this episode, getting to know you, I'm ready to visit that in a little more detail after our break.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Erin] Today, I want to talk to you about the podcast Ancient History Fangirl. It's a history podcast and the hosts tell you history through story. Ancient historical figures like Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, [Rudicuff?] Or even the mythological [Coolcollon] have never felt more like real people to me as they did when Jen and Jenny told me their stories and brought them to life. They do in-depth research, and then weave it into a fantastic way to learn more about history. They have a lot of seasons and episodes, so I suggest finding a season or an arc that appeals to you. I started with their sci-fian episode, and I highly recommend it. You can find them on any major podcast platforms or at ancienthistoryfangirl.com.
 
[Howard] So, getting to know you. There are two aspects to this. One is the characters growing in character knowledge about each other, and the other is the reader gaining knowledge about these characters. You have to pull off both. You can't just say, A now knew all about B, you have to give the reader something to chew on. Something to enjoy.
[Mary Robinette] I have a tool for that. Which is, looking at the escalation, the arc, of the relationship. Much like the… One of the reasons that meet cute works is that it is the disruption of the normal, going back to our thriller episode. But there's this other thing called DREAM which I learned from Elizabeth Boyle. Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. So this is the arc that a person goes through… She got it from an anger management class, but…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] She is a romance writer, and she's like, oh, this is…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The building block of every romance ever. So, denial is that they deny that there is any kind of problem at all. What you do is you pick an externalization of that, you pick an action that the character takes in which they are clinging to that original identity. It's like, oh, who would go out with them? So, you make very… They're going to be at what? No, I'm definitely not going to that. So what action do they take? Then, resistance, that's when you acknowledge that, okay, I see why some people find him attractive, but I will never date him. Then exploration is where you start to think about it just a little bit. All right, well, maybe one date. Then, acceptance is, oh, no, I'm in love. Then matrimony is what you do with that. Or… Uh, excuse me. Manifestation is what you do with that. In a classic romance, it's matrimony. But if you think about the end of Casablanca, when Rick realizes that he is in love with Ilsa still, and that she's still in love with him, and his manifestation is not matrimony, it's to send her off and to take himself away because that is actually what's better for everybody that's involved. So what you do with that knowledge, the action that you take. And what's fun about this is that you can go through this cycle multiple times in a single book. What I see people do a lot is the characters will just hang out in denial, and then suddenly they get married.
[Howard] I've found that… 27 years of being married has probably taught me some of this. Demonstrations of one character's understanding of another usually take the shape of actions. Okay. Blow my own horn a little bit here. The whole cast went out falconing in the cold, except for me. I made a point of arriving at the house with hot drinks because I knew everyone would be cold.
[Mary Robinette] You were correct.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Was that thoughtful? Okay, yes. Sure. But the fact that I was thinking about these other people and had an idea of what they would need and the fact that they trusted me to bring something that they could drink, that gives us a picture of a relationship. Wow, these people are friends. They like each other. In a way that us saying, oh, thank you so much for the stuff. Oh, you're welcome. Just doesn't.
 
[DongWon] Having covered some of the tools, can we dive into another one of the classic tropes of the category?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Oh, yes.
[DongWon] So, one of my favorite setups is always the enemies or rivals who are caught in each other's orbit who have to build a relationship and grow to some kind of understanding or accord by the end, if not full on romance. To me, this is always such an interesting dynamic, because you… As we were talking about, you need to have the understanding between characters, but you also need the audience understanding of these individuals as well. So, often one is more in focus than the other, so we're getting the perspective of our protagonist and only bit by bit are we learning more information about the rival to begin to understand where they come from and why they are. So it's almost like building the romance for the reader in addition to building the romance for the character. Initially, we're like, wow, that person's a jerk. They're being so mean to the person I like. They might be hot, but, like, I hate them. So, learning bit by bit why we could respect them or be interested in them, I think is one of the delicious parts of this category.
 
[Erin] Yeah. You can also use other characters as a foil there. So, it's like you've got the rival who's a jerk, but then you've got, like, the truly evil, like, not even rival, like, person who makes the rival seem like, well, I disagree with their tactics, maybe, but at least I understand where they're coming from, unlike this new person. It's one of the things I loved growing up, watching soap operas, was that there's always characters in different stages of romance so that you're always… There's always one couple falling in love, one couple getting married, one couple settling down, and one couple breaking up. So there's always… So you know, like, when you see two people interacting, you're like, oh, this fits into this type of romance. I'm not going to mistake this couple falling in love for a married couple, because I have another example on the page, and it's also a way to give you something like, oh, this is something for this new couple to aim for. So I'm excited to see them make this journey down the line.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I think that goes with that with the couple that's making the journey, tying back into what you were talking about with the friends still lovers or variations of that, is there's always some, like, catalyst action that is happening. There's a point at which everything gets re-contextualized for the POV character, where they been watching this thing happening, and then there's suddenly, like, oh. This person that I thought was an asshole is actually leaving abruptly because he's taking care of his aging mother. Or when, again, Darcy and Elizabeth, when she suddenly realizes the reason he's been such a jerk to Wickham is because of the history with his sister. That's… It like recontextualizes every interaction that she's had with them up to that point. That's one of my favorite things, is that recontextualization.
[Dan] One of the things that I love about this type of relationship… At least for me, it's one of the things that separates it from odd couple. Odd couple is these two people, their personalities clash. One of them's messy and one of them's clean. Whatever it is. Whereas kind of enemies and rivals, or enemies to lovers, they are specifically opposed to each other, and they are trying to one up each other or they're trying to attack each other or whatever it is. What that allows you to do is crank the competence of both characters way, way up. Higher than you could do in a lot or most other relationships. That helps build that reader attachment. We don't like this person, but we also kind of really love this person, because they are so good at being terrible that when you get to whatever point midway or two thirds of the way through the story where suddenly they find themselves on the same side, we know that they're going to be an incredible team because we watch them be incredible on their own.
 
[Howard] Now, let's say for a moment that you're not writing a buddy show, you're not writing a romance, you are writing a thriller, you are writing a mystery. All of these tools apply, and you can go all Jordi Laforge and flip the polarity and have the trope be allies to enemies and it works exactly the same way. The more they learn about each other, there's a twist, there's a reveal, and now we have a broken relationship at the end.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah, it's funny, thinking about when you were mentioning the genres, I was thinking fantasy and science fiction, I think character relationships and dynamics are really at the heart of a lot of the classics. Like, your crew that's going out into space, like, has to… How do they get along with each other? This person doesn't quite like this person, but they accept it, they're a great engineer. Or when you have your fantasy party, like, going across the country, can the Bard stand the fighter? Like, a lot of these smaller dynamics, you can have as people's relationships change help to make things interesting, and I think why it's good for this week is, helps to make it interesting for you when you're like, I don't know what's going to happen next in the plot, they're not even halfway to the mountain of doom yet. That's a good time for, like, what's going on in their relationship? Is there a small thing that can happen that can make two people grow closer together or further apart? That makes your story, like, come alive to you a little bit as you explore how they, like each other or don't?
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that that brings us to our homework. So, your homework for this week is, in this scene, the one that you're working on right now, what is something that your character finds attractive about the other person in the scene? And no, this does not need to be a romantic attraction. And then the other thing is what does your character think is their own least attractive trait, and how can you make them more anxious about that right now?
 
[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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

Mar. 23rd, 2023 05:34 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions
 
 
Key Points: How do you postpone answering questions? First, we haven't gotten there yet. More specifically, you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer, but it's the wrong one. Or you have an answer, but there's more to uncover. Try-fail cycles! Yes-but, no-and! Plan your information arc, where are they gathering information, where is it revealed. Hide the real question! Cell phones and Google -- I don't know who to call, or I don't know how to ask the right question puts a speedbump in the way. Let the familiar become strange. Go ahead and tell us, and see what happens then. Give us some information that is satisfying and compelling, and build the trust that you will tell us about the other stuff later. Let another character ask the questions the reader wants to know. Use red herrings, things that seem connected but really aren't. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 12]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] There are questions that we have that are unanswered. In our continuing exploration of tension, one of the favorite tricks for tension is questions that are unanswered. This can take a number of different forms. You classically see them in mysteries, but you also see them in romance, like, "Will they get together?" So, let's talk about some ways to avoid answering questions without it being super gimmicky.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I have mentioned before my use of my small dog, or of my character's small dog to interrupt questions as… For people not on the video feed…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Erin's cat is also providing a running commentary.
[DongWon] Which has completely prevented us from answering questions about unanswered questions.
[Erin] Her main unanswered question is, "Why no treats? I don't understand."
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] I think it's worth pointing out that when you write a book, when you're reading a book, fundamentally, information is being hidden from you because you haven't gotten to the end of the book yet. Just the ordering of the material is such that I'm not hiding the answer, I'm getting to it. We're getting there, we're just not there yet. You don't have to… The moment someone in the story or on the screen or on the page has the answer to the unanswered question, that is not necessarily the moment at which that answer would be revealed to anybody. Because the story unfolds at a pace at which that hasn't happened yet. So, I mean, that's the easiest tool.
[Dan] So, to be a little more granular about that, some specific things you can do to kind of stall that answer is you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer that turns out to be the wrong one. Or you come up with an answer that doesn't actually solve the mystery, it doesn't answer the main question, it just spends you off in a new direction, and then suddenly you have together more evidence and answer different questions.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, I think for a mystery type story, this is really the heart of the try-fail cycle. Right? The thing you are trying to do is gain more information. The way you as the author withhold that is you have your characters fail at that or get misleading information or only a piece of it. Right? I mean, this is, going back to another of Mary Robinette's favorite tools, the yes-but, no-and, you can apply that to yes, you now know this one piece of information, but there's a complication because that leads you down to a dead end. Right? So you can think about it in terms of… I think we often give try-fail cycles around action in terms of trying to rescue someone or trying to fix something. But you can apply that to information gathering, because when you're in a mystery, fundamentally, your main tool is the information that's in front of you right now.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think the… One of the things I like to think about a lot when I'm writing is information arc as an additional type of arc in a story. Like, you have your character arc, maybe your plot arc, but where is information being gathered, it's where is it being revealed to the reader, and then maybe separately to the characters, really planning that out. Because I think where unanswered questions become annoying to readers is when it feels like you just didn't… You forgot you raised the question, or you just didn't bother getting around to answering it, versus that it was something intentional that you're doing about the way you give out information.
[Dan] Another great thing that I've seen done before is just kind of hiding what the real question actually is. We've used romance several times, which is another great source of tension. The first season of Bridgerton does this brilliantly. In a romance, we often expect the main question to be will these characters fall in love? Yes, clearly, by like episode three, that's answered. But there's more going on. Will they get married? Yeah, like by episode five, I think, they're married. But there's more going on. Ultimately, we realize the actual question that that season is asking is, will they be happy together? Will they resolve their other issues and have a happy life together? Which is just taking it much further than what we initially thought we were asking.
 
[DongWon] That kind of brings me to what I think is the greatest failure state of how information is released to the audience in a novel. One of the those things is when it's not connected to character. Right? I think one of the best ways to sort of appease an audience when you give them bad information or if they're not getting the answer that they wanted is making sure you're getting more information about who the character is and you're tying that process of trying to get more information into something revealing about who the character is. I'm thinking of like the game Hades, which is a fantastic game. It's a [rogue?] Like, so you're just… It's designed so that you will fail and die. Every time you die, you're rewarded with a little bit more story, as you get to interact with all the characters of this world. So the loop is, we're punishing you for the fact that you've failed, which you're supposed to do, and rewarding you by giving you character. So if you think about like how satisfying the loop in Hades is, think about that in terms of your reader going through the try-fail cycles of your book. Make sure that your rewarding them with something, even as the characters themselves are failing.
[Mary Robinette] That brings me to a great point that when we're talking about these questions, the unanswered questions, there are unanswered questions that the character has and there are also unanswered questions that the reader has. If you want to… I find that when you're trying to emotionally link the reader and the character, but if you give them both the same unanswered questions that that puts the character… The reader on the character's path. But sometimes you'll have a situation where the character knows an answer… This is my traumatic piece of back story… And the reader doesn't know the answer. So that… The reader tension is what is the character's traumatic back story? The character obviously knows it. So that's like… That's a way that you can ratchet the tension up by withholding something from the reader as long as the reader doesn't feel overtly manipulated. The I'll think about that later. That you have to have a reason for them to not think about it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of reasons to not think about the rest of that and how are we going to do it, I'm going to pose a question, which is, how are we going to keep people from feeling like they're overtly manipulated when they didn't get the answer that they want, and we're going to answer that after our break. Our thing of the week is Ted Lasso. It is currently a two season series. There is supposed to be a third season. I am eagerly awaiting it. It… On the surface, this is nothing that I would like. It is a show about soccer. I love this show so deeply, because it is a show about what happens when you make the kinder choice, ultimately. Because of that, and because of the way they are handling tension and tropes. It's as if they said, "What's a common TV trope? We're going to set that up, then we're going to subvert it by having the character make the kind and understanding response to it." It is funny. It is heartwarming. I care about soccer in ways that I have never cared about them. It has some of the best secondary and tertiary characters of anything that I've ever seen. Highly recommended. Ted Lasso. All of the seasons. If you're only going to watch one thing, that one thing should be Ted Lasso. Except DongWon will arm wrestle me about some other things. But…
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So I posed a question before we went to break. That question was how do you interrupt a question… How do you withhold the question from the reader…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And make them feel not overtly manipulated? That moment when someone's like…
[Howard] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] Here's a thing that everyone in the room knows, but the reader is not allowed to know it.
[Howard] 15 years ago or so, there was this up ending of the whole industry of writing and plotting things, because suddenly viewers, readers, listeners, whoever recognized that just about everybody had the sum of all human knowledge in the palms of their hands and could call just about anybody. So if there was a question that couldn't be answered by the people in the room, but they knew someone else had the answer, they would just call them. Screenwriters and writers of fiction and writers of everything had to find new ways to say, "Well, why wouldn't they just call them?" The first answer was terrible, and that's, "Oh, I've got no bars. I've got no signal." There are 10 minute YouTube videos of people in movies holding up their phones and having no signal, because the audience needed to be manipulated, because we needed to not have the answer right now. The right way to do it is illustrated in what happens when someone else's Google Fu is better than mine. I don't know how to ask the right question to get the answer from my phone. I don't know what the right question is. I don't know how to phrase this so I can find the answer. I don't know who to talk to who will have the answer, but maybe if I talk to somebody else, they can help me. That starts putting speedbumps in the… In between me and the answer to the question.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was one of the things that I had to do in the Spare Man was… It is set in 2075 or 2074, I can't remember. Anyway. My own book. Whatever. Point being, everybody is constantly interconnected. So I had to come up with a reason to turn that off. It was fun, in some ways, because I made it a punitive thing that was being withheld from them. Because they were being falsely accused of a crime, so they were not allowed to connect to the Internet. But that also then allowed me to make it a strong character thing, because it then became a thing that had to be fixed. Also, the frustrations that go with I'm used to being able to just send a ping to my husband, and now I can't. Like, one of the things that I enjoyed was her constantly trying to contact him and not being able to. The reflex of it.
[Erin] I also think that communication devices, just that specific thing, as like the reason you can't get the answer, can also be a way to ratchet up that tension in kind of a similar way that if you're used to something, something is familiar and it goes to becoming unfamiliar, that's always I think a great source of tension in horror. The familiar becomes strange. So if you pick up your phone to Google something and instead your phone is doing something very odd, or you get a picture of a dead body, or something else that's both distracting… So, like, throw something shiny the reader's way. To distract them, for one thing, but also with something you thought was going to happen. You had an anticipation of getting the answer, then that was yanked away from you. That can provide new information and new questions that then the reader will fixate on instead of the one that you didn't answer in that moment.
 
[DongWon] I'm going to come out with a little bit of a chaotic answer to this, which is if you are really struggling how to figure out the key… How to keep your audience from feeling manipulated by withholding information, try just telling them the thing. Right? I think so often I see writers going through these back loops and just like contorting themselves to withhold information where I'm like, "No no no no. Just tell us what's going on!" It'll be more interesting if we, or even if your characters, know exactly what's happening and they still have to solve this problem. Right? I think one of the week parts of a mystery is sometimes knowing what happened doesn't actually change anything. To spoil Glass Onion a little bit, it has an aspect of this, where, like, the resolution of the mystery still leaves a really big unanswered question of like, "Well, what do we do about this?" In a way that is truly fascinating. Right? So I think sometimes if you find yourself stuck, and your like grinding on this question, try writing it from the perspective of just give them the information. Let their phone connect to the Internet. Let that person call person C and be like, "Hey, the killer is so-and-so." Then what does person C do? It doesn't mean they're going to survive. Right? It could make a much more interesting scenario for you and kick your book in an exciting new direction.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, that often I find that when I just let my character tell the other person the thing, that what actually happens is it just… It opens new questions and they're significantly more interesting questions.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Which allows me to keep ramping that tension up.
[DongWon] If you're stuck, you might be asking the wrong questions, is really what I'm saying.
 
[Dan] So I see this a lot with doing chapter critiques and stuff at conferences and classes. We will be sitting around in like a writing group environment. We've read chapter one of seven different people's things. Especially with fantasy and science fiction, a lot of the questions are, "Well, I don't understand this. I don't understand X or Y thing about your story." I have to remind them, you usually don't in chapter one. There's worldbuilding, you have to give us time to settle into it. But what I find fascinating is that I usually don't get that question when the chapter is providing us a ton of other fascinating information. If you are giving us something that is satisfying and compelling and makes us… It's scratching that itch to know stuff, then those other kind of unanswered questions don't seem as pressing. Because part of that is the distraction that Erin talked about, you throw some shiny at us, but a lot of it is just you're building trust with your reader. You're giving them information, so then I know that you're going to give me this other information if I am patient and wait for it.
[Howard] It's super useful to anticipate the question that a reader might have and to give that question to another one of the characters. If one of the characters does a thing, and you know the readers are going to be like, "Wow, why did they do that thing?" Let another character ask that question. "Why did you do that?" The person who did it said, "You know what? That's a long painful story and we're not going to have that conversation right now. Right now we're busy running." Now I have acknowledged to the reader that there is information you don't have yet, you know who has the information, you know who isn't giving you the information, and everybody in the story to this point is behaving in character.
[Mary Robinette] I will flag though that you do need to make sure though that it is actually a long painful complicated story.
[Howard] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Because the number of times I have seen someone say, "I'm not going to tell you that right now. We don't have time." And really, all they needed to say was like a five word sentence.
[Chuckles]
[yes]
[Mary Robinette] It's… Make sure that there is a legit reason. There was one other thing that I was going to say. What was that?
[Pause]
[DongWon] I guess we'll never know.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I guess I'm going to have to…
[Howard] I have to say none of us know and all of our cell phones work.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] Oh, I know what… There was actually a thing. Red… I do want to just briefly touch on how to construct a good red herring. Because red herrings are one of the ways that you can… Are linked to the unanswered question, because they are the question… The line of questioning that pulls your detective down the wrong dark alley. In Glass Onion, it's one of the most blatant red herrings in the history of ever is wandering around in a bathrobe for much of the film. But what you're looking for is something that appears related to the story, that you feel like everyone else should be able to draw connections to whatever it is, and ultimately ends up not being connected. I have a red herring going on in Spare Man. The way I constructed that one… And I will attempt to discuss it without spoilers for the people who haven't read the book yet… Is basically, I did it was that I gave one of the characters a secret so they were clearly hiding something, which is obviously to the reader going to be related to the murder. But it had… That secret had nothing to do with the murder. So that's a real simple way to give… To insert a red herring is to give someone a secret, that's just not the right secret. Which then leads to more unanswered questions.
 
[Mary Robinette] And… Your unanswered question right now is what is our homework assignment?
[Dan] Well, as tempting as it is to just never answer that question, I will tell you. I will spoil the homework. What we want you to do is take a look at whatever you're working on right now, your work in progress, something that you're writing or creating, and figure out what questions you are asking to the reader. Sometimes that might be an overt mystery question, how does this thing work, where did this body come from, who did the thing? Sometimes it's worldbuilding questions. You've proposed some kinds of things about the way a technology or a magic or a society works. Figure out what those questions are. Write them down. So that you can decide later when and how or if to answer them.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.1: Genre and Media are Promises

Jan. 6th, 2022 01:02 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.1: Genre and Media are Promises
 
 
Key points: Romance novels need a happily ever after, or a happy at least for now. Genres, both bookshelf genres and elemental genres, make promises. Cozy mystery needs a murder! Superheroes need an epic fight. Animation is not just for kids. Novels do third person limited really well. Animation uses visual cues to tell part of the story. Lore miners like visual shows, where they can mine the background visuals for added depth. The Kuleshov effect! Remember, use all the tools in your arsenal to set the mood and story.
 
[Season 17, Episode 1]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Genre and Media are Promises.
[Kaela] 15 minutes long.
[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Megan] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Kaela] I'm Kaela.
[Sandra] I'm Sandra.
[Megan] And I'm Meg.
 
[Howard] I'm here to tell you that if your romance novel doesn't have happily ever after or happy at least for now, it's not a romance novel. You're not actually writing to that genre. It's a bold stake in the ground, I know, but there are promises that the genres in which we write, the bookshelf genres in which our publishers place our books, the elemental genres in which we determine what's the thing that makes people turn pages, those make promises. Right from the outset. Let's talk about some examples. I've already spilled the easy one of romance. What are some other examples of genres and the promises those genres make?
[Kaela] Cozy mystery is extremely like… There are very, very strict beats to hit and moments to deliver that if you do not, you will have disappointed your audience. Because they…
[Howard] I don't know what those are. Can you enumerate a few?
[Sandra] Miss Marple or any… Murder, She Wrote is a cozy mystery. It is basically a very frie… There's going to be a murder. Somebody's going to die. But it's not somebody we…
[Oh, good]
[Sandra] Like… Yeah. So, like, it's… Murder, She Wrote. She's going about her cozy little life and then… Oh, no, there's a body. We now need to solve it without offending to many people's worlds. Then, at the end, it's all okay again. You can see this with a lot of BBC… They're like Father Brown…
[Father Brown]
[Sandra] Is one of them. Yeah, Father Brown is one of them. It is very contained and very safe, even though every single book or episode has a couple of murders in it. Yet the audience knows at the end of it, the bad guys are caught, they're put away, everybody's safe, it's all going to be fine. If there's a cat or a dog, the cat and dog are always going to be safe, and probably will help solve the mystery. So, like, seriously, this is the cozy mystery genre. The people who come to this genre, well, it's kind of like Meg was talking about in the last episode with Police Procedurals. You are expecting and wanting to get those beats exactly where you expect them. If you don't, you will actually make the audience anxious and upset with you.
[Megan] I have an example of when I was deeply betrayed by a cozy mystery series. I don't want to drop the title, because this is a huge spoiler. But there is a main detective character that the audience loves and cares about very much, and about three seasons in, decided he didn't want to do the show anymore. Instead of having him retire, they killed him. The next person to come in and solve his murder was the new main character. I was like [garbled] No!
[Howard] I'll go ahead and spoil it. Was that Death in Paradise?
[Megan] Yes.
[Howard] BBC? Yeah.
[Megan] I'm still not over it. Yet. [Garbled] But see, that's… There's an expectation that just shows up with the genre. I came to a cozy mystery because I wanted a mystery, and I wanted to be able to feel smart and solve the puzzle, but I never want to feel threatened and I never want my favorite characters to feel threatened. I just want to hang out with fun people while we solve puzzles.
 
[Howard] Yep. Okay. Let's pick another genre. Kaela, you got something for us?
[Kaela] Yes. Superheroes and how it means fights. Epic fights. Like, you can use all kinds of different structures in superhero movies and comics and things like that. As we have seen through Marvel's explorations. Everything from a heist through like more of a drama to the classic hero's journey. But we want epic fights that feel like they have weight. They're not just… I think that's one of the things that sets apart, that satisfies…
[Howard] It's not… We see this in the… Was it 2013 Avengers movie?
[I think it was 2012]
[Howard] It's not just fights. It's the fight bracket… The bracketing of we need to see what happens when it's Thor versus Hulk. We need to see Black Widow versus Hulk. We need to see… Through the series. We get Iron Man versus Hulk, eventually. We bracket so that everybody fights everybody else, even if they're on the same team. They have to have some sort of reason to fight. Black Widow fought Hawkeye. Hawkeye briefly fought Loki. So, yeah, you look at the superhero genre, and one of the expectations there is, "Man, I've got six superheroes here. Well, I want to know what happens if hero three and hero four fight, because that would be cool." If you solve this by giving villains mirrored powers, then it's just boring.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Then it's just Iron Man One, which is Iron Man versus a chunkier Iron Man, or the Hulk movie from the same year, which was Hulk versus a spikier, chunkier Hulk.
[Megan] Kind of broke the promise. 
[Howard] So, yeah, superheroes and the fighting. What else?
[Megan] Then you even build a whole movie around it with Civil War. Where… I mean, there is an eternal bad guy, of course, but the big scene, the big Act III scene, was everybody in the airport parking lot and how do these powers go against these powers, or these accessories interact with these magical things?
[Kaela] Can I just say that that is the, like, one of the perfect se… Like, ways that audience has helped cultivate or helped shape the genre, as well, the way the audience interacts with it. Because, like, I remember having fights with people about who would beat who, with your favorite superhero. I'm like, "Uhuh. Spider-Man would beat any of them, because of his Spidey sense."
[Laughter]
[Kaela] You end up fighting about it. That's like you want to see how your favorite superhero is going to fare. Kind of like wrestling, right? Like professional wrestling. You want to see what the matchups look like as well. So it's a part of the genre, because it's also part of what the audience wants to know. They want to see how it goes. So you're like, "Okay. Well, let's make this interesting. Let's… I'll just keep doing this. Let's keep adding it in."
 
[Howard] Hey, let's do a book of the week. Who's got that for us?
[Sandra] I believe that I… Yes, I do. The book I was super excited about right now is Mine by Delilah Dawson. We haven't actually talked about horror as a genre yet, and the implications there. But this is a middle grade horror novel. It does a beautiful job of using horror tropes, pitching them appropriately to a 12 to 13-year-old audience or even just a little bit younger than that, letting it be just scary enough for that age range, and delivering the beats and points. It's just… It's a delightful story. I highly recommend it. So, Mine by Delilah Dawson.
[Howard] Very cool.
[Sandra] Yes.
 
[Howard] Very cool. So we've talked about genre. Let's talk about mediums, media, a little bit. Because the kinds of stories you tell change dramatically based on what the tools are you're using to tell them, whether it's a novel or a comic or a film and TV…
[Sandra] What you got for us, Meg?
[Megan] Hi. My name is Meg, and I want to talk about animation. There is this deep set conviction, especially in American audiences, that if something is animated, it's just for children. Which can be a problem, because there are many animated projects that are not made for children that some unsuspecting parents may see in the video rental store and say, "Watership Down? Rabbits? Animated? That's for my four-year-old."
[Chuckles]
[Megan] It's not. What's been so exciting is in the last few years…
[Howard] Is that why you became an animator? Was to save all the rabbits?
[Megan] No. No. It was to kill all the rabbits and then show the grown-ups [garbled]. No, I became an animator because I think it is every single artform combined into one in the absolute coolest way. But until very recently, most animated productions in the US were either made for kids, kids serialized action adventure, or very raunchy comedy for grown-ups. Because to make sure we know it's for grown-ups, we have to turn all the grown up content to the extreme. But there's a lot of international work, particularly anime from Japan, which targets many different audiences. So we're seeing a lot of creators who grew up watching those kind of stories wanting to branch out and basically get as many different types of stories in animation as you get stories and books in traditional publishing. It's very fun to be part of that shift.
[Howard] So… Now, part of what you've said here is that there is an incorrect expectation in the United States that the animation… Animation as a medium means the story is for kids. Specifically, though, are there promises that animation makes about the way it's going to tell a story? For instance, like with a novel, there's a thing that novels can do that almost nobody else can do well. That's the third person limited point of view, which is that I am narrating the story from the point of view of the character who we are following around right now, and we're getting their thoughts, we're getting this internal stuff. You can't do that in film. Well, Dune, the David Lynch version, tried to do it…
[Laughter]
[Howard] With people who kept whispering these voiceovers. That almost worked. That's all I'm going to say about that.
[Almost]
[Howard] Almost worked. What is it that animation does that other things can't do that becomes an expectation of animation?
[Megan] How it looks. The actual design of the characters often indicates the type of story you're going to get. Usually, stuff for kids? Bigger heads, bigger eyes. Stuff for grown-ups. Smaller heads, smaller eyes. That's a very gross oversimplification. But you'll see a lot of adult comedies take a lot of design cues from shows like The Simpsons. With large eyes but tiny pupils. Which is, I think… Sandra?
[Sandra] I was going to say, I think it's on Netflix, Centaurworld.
[Gasp]
[Sandra] It actually does some very beautiful things visually to indicate character growth. The visual design of the main character actually changes as the story progresses. So you can actually see how far along their character arc they are by how they look on the screen. That is a beautiful thing that animation can do, and it's an expectation that I would love to see more animation shows taking advantage of. Obviously, they can't quite do it in the same way that Centaurworld is set up to do, but this is the kind of expectation, is that with a visual medium, some of the story has to be delivered visually. You see this with picture books as well. I'm doing a lot of learning and writing picture books, and over and over and over again, as a writer of short stories and prose, I'm told, "You're describing too much, you're describing too much. You have to let your…"
[Howard] Let the illustrator do their job now.
[Sandra] "Illustrator tell the story in the pictures. You have to trust them." So that's an expectation for picture books that the art and the words will interact to create a third thing which is the story.
 
[Howard] Kaela.
[Kaela] Yeah. So, I was just thinking about how one of my favorite things in TV shows… What I… Mostly animation, I'll be honest, because that's what I do, I like watching it. But that… In all shows, even, one of my favorite things to do… How to interact with that type of media, is lore mining. I love to mine the backgrounds, the little things, the visual cues in the background that aren't addressed by the story. I'm like, "Ooh. Wait. What does that mean? That nearly matches that one. In [garbled] that's missing half of this thing. I guess that does mean that they're long-lost connected. They have to be, right?" I will just like literally talk out loud by myself, putting all of that together, lore mining the background. That's my favorite thing. But you can't do that in books. Yes, Megan?
[Megan] I was going to say, are you a Gravity Falls fan?
[Kaela] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Megan] Zero Gravity Falls.
[Howard] Gravity Falls. Here's the way I described… And I came to Gravity Falls late. Gravity Falls is X-Files for kids and for grown-ups who were righteously disappointed in X-Files.
[Laughter]
[I love it. Yeah.]
[Howard] So, well done in that way. One of the things that I want to point out about the differences between some of these genres is… There are things that are pointed up by the recent and now canceled live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, is that in the animation, the Cowboy Bebop anime, the characters are having feelings, but there's really only so much you can do with an animated face to show us a complex series of emotions without tipping into the uncanny valley or doing something weird. So, often what they do is they'll cut away from the face in the anime and show us pouring a glass of whiskey. Show us the hand doing something. Show us something else in order to tell the story behind what's happening on the face. But in live-action, dang it. Cho is a fantastic actor. Just give him his back story, aim the camera at his face, let him say two lines of dialogue and then act, and we'll have it. That's not what they did. Meg, you were flailing about. What?
[Megan] Sandra's had her hand up for such a long time.
[Sandra] That's fine. That's fine.
[Megan] So, there is something in film making called the Kuleshov effect. Which is the shot…
[Howard] Kuleshov? Say that again.
[Megan] Sorry. The Kuleshov effect.
[Howard] Okay. Kuleshov.
[Megan] It's the idea that even if you are presented with a neutral face, the shot that comes after… What the camera looks at exactly after will inform the audience of how the person is feeling.
[Cool]
[Megan] Something that the animated series did, that I felt the live-action did not, was use all of the tools in their arsenal to set their mood and story. Because actor's face is an incredible tool, actor's body language, but that's only one very small part of what you have to consider in any sort of film sequence. You have where the camera's set, how quickly you cut, what the background noise is, but the background music is, what your lighting cues are. There's so many different pieces that the original Cowboy Bebop absolutely mastered. That's one of the best and most solidly animated series that have ever existed. You can't just take certain pieces of that, certain hallmarks of that, and get the same effect. Because a visual only tribute isn't a real reproduction.
[Right. Yup. Yeah.]
[Howard] We could clearly keep talking about this and talking about this and talking about this, because genre and media, as things that make promises to the audience… I mean, there's a million of these.
 
[Howard] So, I think we need to cut from here straight to the homework. Meg, I think that might be you?
[Megan] All right. That is me. All right. For the homework this week, what do you plan on having your work in progress deliver? Does the genre or medium you're working in support the promise of that deliverable? If not, write out a one-page outline in which you change the genre or medium to support the promise you're making.
[Howard] Ooo, I like it. I like it. Hey, this has been Writing Excuses. You have your homework. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Jan. 22nd, 2020 12:32 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing
 
 
Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun! 
 
[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.
[Nandi] 15 minutes long.
[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.
[Tamie] And we're not that smart.
[Bridget] But we are all self published.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]
[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]
[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]
[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]
[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.
[Whoo! Applause!]
 
[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?
[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.
[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.
[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.
[Howard] That's a solid number.
[Bridget] For my first year.
[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?
[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.
[Howard] Tamie?
[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.
[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?
 
[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.
[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.
[Nandi] Yes.
[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?
[Nandi] Yes.
[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?
[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.
 
[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?
[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.
[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?
[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.
[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.
[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.
 
[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?
[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.
[Howard] Okay.
[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels
 
[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.
[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.
 
[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.
[Victorine] Yep. Yup.
[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…
[Howard] When you say three of us…
[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…
[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.
[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.
[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.
 
[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?
[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.
 
[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?
[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.
[Chuckles]
[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.
[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.
[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?
[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.
 
[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?
[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.
[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.
[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.
[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.
 
[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?
[Nandi?] Absolutely.
[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.
[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…
[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.
[Garble]
[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.
[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."
[Cheers]
[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…
[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.
 
[Howard] Who's got our homework?
[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.
[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

Dec. 27th, 2017 09:49 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/12/24/12-52-cross-genres-as-gateways/

Key Points: Cross-genre books can be gateways to get readers to read in new genres. People who don't read a genre often pretend it is monolithic, because the iconic stories in a genre do so well. But each genre has blends and hybrids and explorations of new directions and interesting things! Romance is the genre that other genres like to pick on. Set aside the notion that some genre is untouchable, start with an open mind. Young adult used to be not segregated by genre. Most Americans think comic books are all superhero stories. Gateway cross-genre books are fun! Give readers more possibilities for reading and enjoying. Listen to Season 16... no, make that 11! Elemental genres let you mix the concepts. But don't just do windowdressing, or paint on the walls, build your genres in so they can't be easily separated. Cross-genre stories can help reluctant readers find what they love. So mix it up! Science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, mystery... cross the genres and build gateways into new and fascinating world! The familiar, and the strange.
( Crossgenres and hopscotch? )

[Brandon] I am going to close us out with a writing prompt. Our writing prompt is I want you to write a story where one of the characters thinks they're in a different genre from what the story actually is. They think they're in a story from a different genre. How does it go? This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.43: Serialized Storytelling

Oct. 25th, 2017 10:36 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 12.43: Serialized Storytelling

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/22/12-43-serialized-storytelling/

Key Points: Character progression in the long run, or don't bore the reader with arcs? First, beware of breaking relationships or character to make an arc. Try changing character focus to get an interesting character arc in each story. Separate your iconic heroes, who don't have character development, from your epic heroes, who do. Romance often has one character who is the star of the first book, then later books take characters from the side cast of the first book and give them a romance. To keep it fresh, give them different issues, different love triangles and problems, and often, an overarching background struggle. Use the set of characters as a framework or structure for the series. Another approach is to keep the same character or characters, but have different challenges for them to react to in each book. Different sets of characters, who is working together on what, also can keep it fresh. Avoiding power creep? Different problems. Also, consider a design space that provides consistent problems, character growth, powers, etc. across the series. Not "save it for the sequel" but "here is the set of cool things for the series, which ones am I going to do in detail in this book?" Beware the perfect romance. Yes, characters can resolve issues and be strong, but they should still need the relationship and each other.

( Cliffhangers and other cereal dangers? )

[Howard] You need me to do homework, Brandon?
[Brandon] I need you to do homework.
[Howard] okay. I've talked about beat charts before. Where you write down the iconic moments, the character arcs, whatever for your story. Build a beat charts for a series. Identify iconic heroic moments in which the hero does something awesome. Put each one down on an index card. Identify character arcs. Learns to love. Has a descent into madness. Put those down on cards. Identify what the reveals are. Then take this stack of cards, and spread them out into multiple stories. Order yourself a series in which everything gets to happen, but it doesn't all happen at once.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

Jan. 21st, 2016 11:47 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/17/11-03-layering-the-elemental-genres/

Key points: Borrow elemental genres (ideas, emotions) from other stories and inject them into your stories as subplots, character arcs, or mashups. Layer your elemental genres to create sequels that are the same, but different. Let each character's arc be a different elemental genre. You can use design elements, set dressing, to keep the story together, and mix-and-match elemental genres underneath that to tell different stories. Check your underpinnings -- what is the feeling you like? Drill down into the elemental genre behind the design elements. Turn your wall into a trench, or darkness, or... with a great unknown hidden behind it.

( Is there icing in between the layers? )
[Brandon] We're going to leave you with some homework. Mary's got the homework for us, and it relates to the homework we gave you last time.
[Mary] All right. So last time we asked you to identify the major driving emotion of the story that you are interested in working on. What I want you to do now is I want you to think of a contrasting emotion. So essentially what you're doing is you're creating a foil plot, a foil emotion for your primary emotion. Because this is going to allow you to showcase ever... Or do a contrast between the darkness of one and the happy emotions of the other. So think about not the design elements, but think about the emotional elements and think about... You don't have to worry about our proprietary vocabulary yet. I just want you to identify the emotion that you want to elicit in yourself if you were hacking your brain.
[Brandon] Now by this point, we will have all 11 of the ideas we've come up with put on our website and we will post them such... We will put them in a place that they are easy to find each week, if you want to come glance over them again. As you can tell from this episode, we're still getting used to this terminology ourselves.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Hopefully, across the course of the year, we'll all start really using the same terminology. This is the purpose...
[Howard] I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say that by the end of the season, we will have altered some of the terminology and changed the list, because it just makes more sense.
[Mary] Yep. You guys will probably be better versed in it that we will, because we just talked about it once.
[Brandon] All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
  • Current Mood: let them eat cake!
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Writing Excuses 5.31: Writing Romance

Apr. 7th, 2011 04:02 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.31: Writing Romance

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/04/03/writing-excuses-5-31-writing-romance/

Key points: How to write romance? Write it well. Bad romance scenes are thrown in, filler -- good romance scenes have a build up and an emotional payoff. The reader needs to like the romantic interest as much as the character does. The reader needs to understand the reason that the character is falling in love. Fulfilling relationships need characters that meet a need in each other. They need to complete each other.
( hearts and roses )
[Dan] You're out of excuses. If you sat through all two hours of this, we apologize. But thank you very much for coming.
  • Current Mood: Spring fever
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 10: Writing for Young Adults

Feb. 22nd, 2011 10:41 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 10: Writing for Young Adults

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/03/14/writing-excuses-4-10-writing-for-young-adults/

Key points: YA, middle grade, and adult are mostly bookstore marketing labels -- where do we shelve it and who do we sell it to? Focus on writing for teens. Think about how to appeal to them, mostly by providing something they can relate to. The YA genre definition says school and romance are key interests. 16-year-olds are at a crux, where they can make decisions and do things, yet they are still told what to do. Teens may adopt the easy, superficial analysis just because they haven't got the experience to make them realize that's too simple. Be wary of writing teens as "little adults." Consider the character's background, experiences, and setting -- but don't overdo it.
( between school and romance... )
[Jessica] Your writing prompt is to take a young protagonist, at least younger than 16, and put them in a situation where they are in charge of some adults. You have to have a good reason why they are in charge.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
  • Current Mood: Summer vacation?
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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Nine: Romance

Feb. 6th, 2011 05:11 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Nine: Romance

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/12/07/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-9-romance-with-dave-wolverton/

Key points: Start with characterization. Fulfill the fantasy of what romance should be like. Tie the conflicts together -- internal development, romance, plot/setting, theme. Make every character the star of their own story. Romance is terrifying, and people stumble through it -- write it that way. Be terrified.
( x's and o's? )
[Dan] Writing Prompt: your main character walks into a room and sees three people whom he or she could end up with and you don't know which one it will be at this point.
  • Current Mood: romantic
  • Current Music: Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Leann Rimes
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Writing Excuses Episode 28: Webcomics

Feb. 1st, 2011 07:19 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Episode 28: Webcomics

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/08/18/writing-excuses-episode-28-writing-for-comics-and-graphic-novels/

Live from WorldCon, with Phil and Kaja Foglio of Girl Genius (see http://www.girlgenius.net/ which takes you to http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ )

Plug: It's adventure, romance, and MAD SCIENCE! Who could ask for anything more? [and Brandon adds: it's steampunk, too]
( Lota notes . . . )
Parting Words
  • making a living in web comics is like making bear soup. Step one, catch a live bear. steps two through 10 are just making soup. The hard part is to catch a bear. Stick with it, make your art -- write about what you are passionate about, be excited about it, know that you're going to get your face clawed off your head and don't back down.
  • Current Mood: retconned
  • Current Music: The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia, Reba McEntire
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