wetranscripts | Entries tagged with scene

Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-41-a-close-reading-on-structure-an-overview-and-why-fifth-season

Key Points: Structure and The Fifth Season. Spoilers galore! Structurally audacious. Structure. Start with divisions, what are the parts? POVs. Inversion. Parallelism. Sequence or order. Perspective. Tradition and innovation. Structure is usually pacing, order of information, scene and sequel. POV character is the one in the most pain. POV character is the one who can best tell the joke. Second person. Structure as tension, voice, who's narrating. Character as structure. "And you would not exist." Surprising, yet inevitable. Table of contents and chapter titles.

[Season 19, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] Hi, friends. I want to tell you about this very cool special edition of one of our close read books for this season. It's the Orbit Gold Edition of The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemison. This is so beautiful. The set includes, get this, an exclusive box illustrated by Justin Cherry nephelomancer, a signed copy of The Fifth Season, fabric bound hardcover editions of the trilogy, gilded silver edges, color endpaper art, oh, my God. Brand-new foil stamped covers, a ribbon bookmark, and an exclusive bonus scene from The Fifth Season. The bonus scene… I wants it. Just preorder before November nineteenth to get 20 percent off and you can lock in your signed copy, again, I say, your signed copy of The Fifth Season. Visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order.

[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 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be reading and talking about The Fifth Season. I need to let you know that we are going to be spoiling this up and down and sideways. You need to have read this book before you go into it, unless you're okay with spoilers, in which case, fair game. Have fun. But this is your warning. All of the spoilers, all of the time, as we go through.

[DongWon] Yeah. Because it's structure, we really can't talk about this book without getting into a lot of the nitty-gritty of how things unfold.

[Howard] To be quite honest, to be quite frank about this, if you haven't read this book, the discussions that we are having about structure are not going to be as meaningful for you, and you are not going to learn the things that we believe you, as a writer, really want to learn.

[Mary Robinette] But, having said that, we also know that sometimes you can't wait to listen to something without having read the book. Hopefully, you'll still be able to get stuff from the larger conversation. But if you have plans on reading the book, just do it before you continue listening.

[DongWon] I will also encourage you to look up content warnings for this book. Because there is some pretty intense and dark stuff in there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, why did we pick this book? One of the reasons is that it is structurally audacious. When I finished reading this… I'm friends with the author, N. K. Jemison, and the first time I saw Nora after seeing this, I walked up and I said, "Nora. Just finished Fifth Season. So good. F U."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] "You have some nerve. Because now the rest of us have to live with this book being out in the world." So we wanted to talk about it, because it is breaking so many of the conventions, and it is structurally so solid, but it's not using an existing recipe.

[DongWon] Exactly. On top of that, it really is one of my favorite fantasies I've read in decades. I think, as an epic fantasy novel, it does such a good job of fulfilling so many things that we look for when we go to epic fantasy, in terms of big worlds, politics, multi perspectives, and exciting magic systems. Right? It's sort of really checks a lot of those boxes, but does something that feels very fresh and innovative with it to me.

[Erin] This is a great book.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] [laughter] We were like, let's figure it out. Because I think it's… One of the things that I really love about having conversations on this podcast and teaching in general is that sometimes you do want to figure out why did something work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The best way to do that is to dig into it. Because it's easy to put it away and be like, oh, that was so much fun. But, like, having a really good meal that you want to be able to replicate in some way, we want to figure out, what's the salt, fat, acid, heat, of this book.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, that's a great segue. I was going to ask you, when you think about structure, what are the things that you think about? Like, what are some of the things that we are going to be thinking about as we're talking about this book?

[Howard] I start with divisions, really. Where are the… What are the three parts? Or what are the five parts? That is… When I'm creating a thing, that's where I begin. Because that informs all of the decisions I make about the things that will be building those parts. This… For me, this book felt like it was built out of points of view. But, structurally, you could argue it's built out of time. Or it is built out of punctuated catastrophes. Or… There's any number of ways to think about carving it up.

[DongWon] Yeah. I… As a reader, and as an editor, I don't actually think about structure that often. It's a little bit of a thing that… I just don't pay that much attention to it. It's not something I'm particularly interested in poking at. Obviously, we do structural edits and move things around, but when I'm doing that, it's more about character arc, it's more about tension, it's more about all the other things we've talked about so far. So, I think Fifth Season really jumps out at me because it is one of the times when I'm actively thinking about structure, because it is not being applied in a passive way. It is being applied as an active engagement with the reader of how structure works in this book. The three different POVs, the reveal around what is going on with those POVs, the inversion from the beginning to the end, all the narrative rhyming and parallelism that happens throughout the book. We're going to dig into all these topics in detail. But, for me, it's hard for me not to think about Fifth Season and think about the structure of the work almost as its own character. Almost as… It is the device through which we are understanding this world in a way that feels so radical compared to what we see in most fiction of A to B to C to D.

[Howard] You might think that you don't think about structure when you read or when you watch or whatever else. But I always come back to that moment when my 10-year-old and I were watching a movie, I think it was ParaNorman. I turned to him and said, "Do you think this plan's going to work?" He looked at me, he rolled his eyes, and looked at me. "Dad, if it works, we don't have a whole movie."

[Laughter]

[Howard] 10 years old.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] Already understood the meta. I think we all have that happening subconsciously.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] For me, and this is not some… This has nothing to do with this book. But to answer your question. I actually think that games and working on games has started to, like, really rewire the way that I think about story and structure as being sort of very divided from each other. Because the way that a lot of games work, you don't have as much control as you do in a book about the way that people take in story information. So you always have to be thinking, like, how do all of these different pieces of information, how do all of these different pieces of narrative, actually create forward motion. Even if people pick them up at different times, and in different ways. It's started to affect the way that I write stories, where I'm like, I want to write stories where you can read things out of order. That is where it does come back to this book, which is, I think a really great way of saying, you can play around with structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You can play around with order, and you can be really upfront with it. I think you said audacious, someone said audacious earlier. I think there's something really great about that. Because it gets you to challenge the way that we have been told that stories have to exist. In a world where… It's not just me, gaming and movies and television impact a lot of the way that we take in narrative. It's nice to see books playing with that as well. Just because it's in print, doesn't mean we can't have fun with the form.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think one of the things you said about the… Being able to… Writing in things that you were reading out of sequence. That that's one of the things that's interesting about Fifth Season, is that the timeline is not sequential. Structurally, the things that she's using that for… That controlling that order of information, that control of time, to play with things that we'll be talking about later with parallelism and inversion, but even on a very, hello, I'm an early career writer, thinking about the order of information that you portray to the reader, that is one of the basic elements of story structure that she plays with all the way through this.

[DongWon] It's interesting because time is one of the first clues of what's happening in the meta-narrative.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] The timeline is one of the first… Howard, you and I were talking about this off mic, but realizing that the world is not ending in these other storylines, that humans still exist in these other storylines, is the thing that starts to clue us into, wait, something else exciting is happening here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of timelines, I believe that it is time for us to take a small break.

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

[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Rest in Pieces, which is a short game about being roommates with the Grim Reaper. It uses, instead of dice, a Jengo tower which you'll see in other games like Dread, but in this case, half of the blocks are painted black and half of them are painted white. So, as you go through the game, you have to do something, you will pull a block, and if the tower falls, something terrible happens. But in this case, whether you're going to act in a selfish way or a selfish way determines what color block you have to pull. That is a very compelling dynamic that changes the way that you play the game, the decisions that you make. It's a really wonderful idea. The game is a lot of fun, and has a lot of cute art in it as well. Once again, that game is called Rest in Pieces.

[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back into this, one of the other things that I am interested in hearing you all talk about is some of… To foreshadow, some of the things that we'll be talking about later. We're going to be touching on things like… Topics that we'll be hitting are whose perspective is it anyway, parallelism and inversion, and tradition and innovation. So, I just want to give our readers a prologue…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Of why we think it's important to talk about these things. Because these are not structural elements that most people talk about.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Most of the time, when people talk about structure, they're talking about pacing. They're talking about the order of information that I brought up before. They're talking about scene and sequel. We're not going to be talking about any of that. So why is it important to be thinking about the things that we're going to be talking about with structure? What can… Like, give us a little [garbled taste]

[Howard] You want teasers?

[Mary Robinette] I want teasers.

[DongWon] I think, for me… I mean, this connects to what Erin was saying earlier, and the idea that the structure of this book is audacious. This might just come from my perspective of reading so many books and seeing so many things at various stages of their drafting, but any time… I want people to be more playful with structure. But I would love these people to understand that you can play with time, you can play with perspective, you can play with the sequencing of things to get across your core thematic elements more than you are getting across your plot beats. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] So much of structure as it's currently taught, whether that's like Save the Cat or something like that, is… Or Hero's Journey, is so much about how do you get across clearly the A to B to C to D. To me, that can sometimes feel very flat or not in service of the actual goal of your story. Right? So if you step back a moment and think about what story am I trying to tell here, and what the best way is to tell that, because this is what I'm writing about, this is why this story's important to me. We're going to be talking to N. K. Jemison at the end of this cycle, and one of the things I'm so excited to hear from her is that she write this out of order or did she write this in order and reassemble it into the form that we see now. I suspect she wrote it out of order, but I'm kind of curious at what point in the process it occurred to her to use this structure.

[Erin] Also, for perspective, I think it's a little bit about challenging some of the assumptions of structure. So I think a lot of times, we think of perspective, POV, as like a decision that you make at the beginning, and you go, okay, I'm going to do this POV, and now I'm going to write the story, and, like, it's a thing that, like, it cannot change. But, like, you made the decision. It's like… I'm like I must stay in this perspective because I told myself I have to. Or because that's the way I think books are written, or it's the way that the books that I've read have been. What I like about this is it shows that even the things we think of as assumptions or as early decisions can be tools that we decide to wield intentionally…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In the story in ways that are not the ways that necessarily the books we're used to have wielded them. Plus, I feel like this it is, to be honest, a story where if you don't speak about perspective on some level…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You're doing a disservice to, like, one of the major tools that is used within the book.

[Howard] Way back in Writing Excuses Season One, I figured out… And just so we're clear, Writing Excuses Season One is the story of Howard figuring out what it is he's actually doing…

[Snort laughter]

[Howard] Up until that time, I did not know what POV meant. I did not… Yeah, I did not know that I was writing social sat… I did not know anything. I was so much more not that smart than I am now. The point though is that I did know that the story was being told based on a principle that is sometimes articulated as your POV character should be the one who is in the most pain. Mine was the POV character or the camera angle should be who is in the best position to tell a joke about what's going on right now. Okay. That principle right there, that POV principle right there, for me, dictated mountains of structure. Because I had to move things around in order for it to make sense of the camera to be pointed at this person so I can tell… So I can deliver this joke. So when we talk about perspective as a structural tool, it's absolutely a structural tool because if the perspective is important, it is going to be dictating all of the structural elements that go into justifying it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that… Beginning our spoilers now. One of the things that happens in this, is that Nora breaks one of the rules, which is that second person is not the done thing. As you get through the story, you realize that it's not actually second person we're getting. That's a very structural decision about when to… Why to use that and when to use it. For me, one of the things that is interesting about it, and why I like using this book to talk about structure, is that the reason to not use second person is that it can be distancing. That is exactly what that character is going through is that distancing. There's also a transformation that happens through the book. So there are all of these different small structural tools that she's kind of taking and blowing up.

[DongWon] Yeah. We could have used this book to teach any of the segments…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That we've done this year. Right? What I found fascinating is that she somehow turns each of those elements into structure. The structure of the book is where the tension lies, the voice is tied to structure, in the ways that you're talking about, about the switches to second person, who's narrating it. Character is structure, because the parallels of the three versions of the same character across this book. It's just endlessly fascinating to me to see the ways in which structure is such the centerpiece that holds up all the other parts of this book in a way that is more visible and more active than we see in other fiction.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's one of the things that you as a listener can think about with your own book, if you been thinking about, oh, I have to use the Save the Cat structure. Why? That particular one. I often think about story structure as a recipe. That you can have a recipe, and you can make a really good recipe. But if you say, okay, according to this, every recipe needs to have leavening, which is great if you're doing a cake…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But not so good for soup. And it's irrelevant for soup. Leavening is completely irrelevant. So what's fun for me with this one is that I feel like I'm watching an improvisational cook go into the kitchen. Or, I feel like I'm watching someone doing molecular gastronomy, where there like, okay, this looks like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but actually…

[DongWon] It is ham and cheese. [Garbled]

[Howard] I… There is a line in… I think it's the prologue, I'm going to go ahead and read this real quick.

"The woman I mentioned, the one whose son is dead. She was not in Yumenes, thankfully, or this would be a very short tale. And you would not exist."

[Howard] That last bit, and you would not exist. Wait. Me, the reader? In my tied into this? Then we get to those chapters where the point of view is second person and you… Oh. Oh, that means… And then the you point of view would not exist, because… I still haven't decoded at this point in my reading, I still have not decoded what this means, but that is not a throwaway line. That is a hook upon which a whole bunch of structure is going to hang, and I love it.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you brought that one up, because I… In the reread of this, I hit that line, like, oh!

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I need to call Nora and yell at her again.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because she tells you upfront what she's doing.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, oh…

[Howard] And you would not exist. Really?

[DongWon] That was my reaction. In my head, so many of the reveals come so late, or, like… In my head, like, the second person was used so sparingly, and it's right there, in the prologue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's there from the jump. It is all throughout. And it's almost… The reveal is that she wasn't hiding anything from us.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It just took us a long time to understand.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It's the surprising yet inevitable. Where you look at it and say, "Well, obviously it was inevitable, but now I'm angry that you surprised me that way."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the other things that… Just when we're talking about it, one of the other tools that she uses is actually the titles of the chapters. When you look at the table of contents, the prologue, you are here. Chapter 1, you, at the end. Chapter 2, Damaya, in winters past. It's like, I'm telling you straight up front what's happening. Three, you're on your way. It is fascinating to me that this is also, because of the two interludes, arguably a classic three act structure, but it is profoundly not a three act structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because there are so many moving pieces that are happening simultaneously.

[DongWon] Again, she's using so many classic things like the chapter titles that we don't see anymore. It's a call back, it's a throwback to an older mode of storytelling, and yet it… The end result feels so contemporary and fresh.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that, let's go ahead and give you some homework. I actually want you to look at the table of contents… And for those of you who have read the book, this is specifically for you. Look at the table of contents, and without opening the book again, write down the one important thing you remember from that chapter. Then, through the course of the next several episodes, as we talk through things, refer back to that list and see what you need to add to it that is also important that you missed on the first reading.

[Mary Robinette] 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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-47-nanowrimo-week-4-climaxes-or-oh-my-god-no

Key Points: Making the turn from opening to closing. Beware the three-quarters mark! Switching modes, from opening questions, introducing new problems, etc. to solving problems and wrapping things up. Treat yourself with candy bar scenes! Switch from yes-but to yes-and. Keep track of the questions and promises from the beginning. Use the MICE Quotient! What's the impossible choice the character faces here? Concentric circles of nested problems! Write yourself notes. Leave notes in square brackets. Ask your writing group what you forgot. Ask yourself what new goals your character has.

[Season 18, Episode 47]

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[Season 18, Episode 47]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 4. The three-quarter mark. Making the turn from opening to closing.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Erin] Today, we're going to talk about, as we move from the opening part, the gallop away of writing through NaNoWriMo, to the end. Which is near. But my question for you all is what is the difference between the way that you write when you're starting something in the way that you write when you're ending something? Because we're going to be transitioning between these two. What are we transitioning between?

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that it took me forever to figure out. Why I always bogged down at the three-quarter mark. I think it's because you're switching modes. So, for me, what I find is at the beginning, I am opening questions, I'm throwing out possibilities, I'm making things worse. I'm introducing new problems. At the end, I have to start solving problems and wrapping things up. It's like the difference between when you arrive on vacation and you've got a bag and you just open it and you pull your stuff out, and then when it's time to go home and you have to somehow get everything back into the suitcase. It never goes back into the suitcase the way you think it's going to. But also, you don't want to. Because you just want to keep pulling things out. So, for me, it's the difference between asking questions, in a general sense, and answering them.

[Erin] That makes sense, but it almost sounds like it's the anticipation of that ending part. So, like, it's not the last… You're not throwing the things in the suitcase yet, but you're figuring out what you're going to wear the day before the last day, and you're like, "Oh, gosh. There's stuff all over this hotel room."

[Chuckles]

[Erin] All over this cruise cabin, and at some point, I'm going to have to do it. It can almost make you not enjoy the thing that you're doing right now, as you're like thinking ahead to what's coming.

[Dan] One of my favorite stories about writing is an interview Neil Gaiman gave when he was writing… I think it was Coraline, it might have been The Graveyard Book… He said that he hit this point in the book where he just hated everything, the book was not working, the characters didn't work, the story was terrible. He called his agent and he said, "I'm sorry, I don't think I can write this. It's awful." She laughed and said, "Oh, you're at the three-quarter's mark aren't you?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "You call me every single time and give me the same thing. Keep going, you'll be fine." A lot of it is just our tendency to get inside of our own heads and to think I'm almost to the end of the tight rope. Of course, I'm going to fall off these last few feet. No you're not. You're doing great. We have to… Like Mary Robinette said, start answering questions instead of asking them. Asking questions is so easy because we can ask anything we want. That's a problem for future Dan...

[gasp]

[Dan] But then…

[DongWon] Now you're future Dan.

[Dan] Now I'm future Dan, and some jerk asked a bunch of questions. I have to find not only answers, but good answers that make sense and pull all the threads together that I've been carefully laying out and make them into this beautiful, beautiful perfect ending. It can be incredibly overwhelming even if it isn't actually difficult. It's just it looks like it's going to be so hard.

[DongWon] I can't tell you how many times I've had that exact same phone call…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Where I told my writers, "It's okay. You're most of the way through a book. You're two thirds, you're three quarters. It just feels not great sometimes when you're there." I do think it's really interesting to hear from your perspective why that is, that making this turn from rising action, where you get to be introducing things, and now you start having to answer the questions that you've asked. Right? So, I guess my question for you guys is how do you start answering those? Right? Like, how do you start bringing people moving away from each other and having to have them re-intersect, having your villains and your heroes, your antagonists, romantic interests, whatever it is, start actually reaching the point that they're on their collision paths and start colliding?

[Erin] I think that's a great question. But, actually even before that, just to kill this metaphor of the vacation, is that there's something nice about like you've got the outfit that you feel really great in for that particular day, and it's that you want to find something that you can treat yourself with in this part of the book. Like, there's something at the three quarters mark that you get to do, which is that the big huge explosions, whatever those are, whether they're literal explosions or emotional explosions, like those get to happen at this moment. There's a person that I know calls them candy bar scenes. The scenes that you're sort of waiting for that are rewarding yourself. So, if you think, yes, I do have to bring everything back together, but also, this is the part where I get to open and eat this candy, it's a way to keep yourself excited while you answer that question of how you're going to pull everything back together.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a great idea. I've talked before about how there's scenes that I've been waiting to get to. Like, just eager to write. One of the tricks that I use is that I shift the way that I'm handling try-fail cycles. So, up to about this point, I've been doing the yes, they succeed, but something goes wrong. So if you think about yes as a progress towards a goal, and no as progress away from a goal. Reversals. But you think about and as a continuation of motion, and but as a reversal. So, I switch from going yes-but to yes-and. So I start giving my characters bonus actions. Like, we're trying to break into this safe. Does it work? Yes. And there's also this other piece of secret information in the safe that we weren't expecting to find. So I'll give them bonus actions. With the no, it's like are we able… If, instead I'd been like, are we able to get into the safe? No. But in the process of doing that, we accidentally set off the alarms, which is now preventing the cops from getting to us. So we have extra time. So, like that, giving them that tiny bonus action, I start sprinkling those in. So when I'm starting to move to the end and I can sort of feel story bloat happening, I will look at it and be like, "Okay. How can you give them success and a little bit of a bonus action?" If I want to keep the tension going, then I give them no and then a little bit of a bonus action.

[DongWon] I love this idea of candy bar scenes. This plays really well into what you're saying in terms of switching from one model to the yes-and. Because there should be joy as you're heading into the climax. There should be emotional resolution. Right? I was thinking about the Spider-Man into the Spiderverse. Right? Where before you get to the big climactic battle, there are all of these like incredibly heartfelt emotional scenes that lead to this... one of the most triumphant scenes I've ever seen in cinema, when Miles like finally owns his own power and does an incredible jump off the building. That's such an iconic shot. It's like you have these incredible emotional highs in that that come from getting to have… The candy bars of his dad telling him that he loves him and he's proud of him and all these things. Of him believing in himself. Like, we've been going through it with him for so long and so hungry for that, that by the time we get that treat, it's a whole feast. It's such a powerful moment. So, I think when you're thinking about how to go into… We started by talking about why this is also hard. This doesn't make it easy necessarily, but I love this idea of framing it as a treat for you, the writer, a treat for the character, and a treat for the audience. This is the reward we've been hanging out for this entire time.

[Dan] It always helps me to remember that so many writers are also bad at this.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Right? We talk so much about movies. How many action movies have you seen that have two acts, an hour and a half, whatever, of brilliant dialogue and funny stuff, and then Act III is just a gunfight or a chase scene and then it ends? Right? Like, most of the Marvel movies are this way. Incredibly interesting questions in Winter Soldier about the… Where's the line between safety and security? How far can we push this? What are we going to do? What's the answer to this question? At the end, the movie doesn't answer that question, it just has a big fight scene. But then, one of the ones where they did it really well was in Endgame. Where, yes, the 3rd act is a giant fight scene, but it is filled with these candy bar scenes, these character moments. That's when we get on your left, and all the people show up. That's when we get Avengers Assemble that we've been waiting 23 movies for. That's when we get all these little heroic stand up and cheer moments. So it's not just a fight scene, it's more than that.

[Erin] And, at this moment, we're going to take a break. When we come back, more candy.

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating, but you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all my decision-making for the stories. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh's chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak ripeness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping. Yeah, that's right. 50WX. 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

[DongWon] Hey, writers. You're doing a hard and difficult thing. I'm sure at this point it feels like you've been doing it forever, and will be doing it forever. That said, I'm not going to tell you it gets better. I'm here to tell you that you can survive this. Doing hard things is hard. That's okay. Making art should be hard. Especially in the middle of it when you're past the initial rush of starting and you can't yet see the finish line. It's like walking a very long way. When you're doing something like that, I think a lot about the mile markers. For me, they're a blessing and a curse. They remind me of how far I've come, and how far I have to go. For me, surviving any kind of endurance activity requires focusing on the present moment. Thinking about the next step that's in front of me and putting out of my mind how far away the end is. So, sometimes I try to ignore the mile markers. To refuse to acknowledge how long I've been walking and how long I will be walking. But the problem with that is it means I forget to have joy in the process. I forget the mile marker means I've accomplished something great, I walked another mile. I took another step. If the answer is to be truly present in the moment, that also means honoring what it means to have made it this far. So, I'm asking you now to stay in the moment. I want you to celebrate today's word count. Don't focus on the total. Focus on the accomplishment. Focus on what you've done. I know it's hard. I know it's long. But you've come this far, and I'm so proud of you for doing so. You've got this. Keep taking that next step. Keep putting the next word down and keep going. I'll see you at the end.

[Erin] All right. So we are back from our break. I actually want us to answer… Sort of answer a little more the question, DongWon, that you asked earlier before we got distracted. Which was how do you actually start bringing things back in. So you're treating yourself, but you can't treat yourself so much that you forget the story that you're telling. I think one way, actually, is to be more explicit about the questions that you're asking. Because I think what happens in those action movies, Dan, that you were talking about is that sometimes the story gets so excited by the treats that it forgets the questions that it's set up in the first half and actually doesn't think to answer them because there's so much like, "Oh, I've gotta do this," or, "I've gotta get to the ending." But you forget that you left out the questions about safety and security, or these bigger thematic issues. So, I'm curious, how do you keep track of like the promises that you made at the beginning and sort of how to make sure that you're keeping track of them as you move towards the end?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, this is why I lean on the M.I.C.E. Quotient so much. Because it… Usually, there's a fairly clear question-y kind of thing at the beginning and… So, like… I often describe this area of the book is one of the places where the character has to face an impossible choice between their goal and a failure state, or between which goal they're willing to sacrifice in order to obtain the other. So, like, if they're afraid of heights, they're absolutely going to have to go out on a ledge right now. So, I will often look back at what I have at the front of the book. Part of my mechanical process, which is harder doing Nano, but I will often pause at the three quarters point and read through what I've already written. Then keep going with the pieces I'm excited about, knowing that some of the stuff I've written I'm going to discard because it's less exciting to me. So it's less candy. But, for me, those are some things. The other thing, for me, mechanically, is something that Dan taught me, which is the 7 point plot structure. This is the point where I'm going to look at Dan meaningfully…

[Dan] Oh.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was excited for you to just talk about how smart I am for a while.

[Mary Robinette] so, yeah, the 7 point plot structure is specifically… There's the point where, right around in here, the hero finally has all of the tools that they need in order to solve the problem. So, recognizing… It's like, "Oh. This is something that I can do on purpose. I can look for what does my main character need? What are the problems? What is the goal and the failure state?" They're going to have to make that impossible choice. Then, like, what tools… we're coming up on that impossible choice. What tools do I need to have in their hand so that when they get to that choice, they can make it?

[Dan] Yeah. I love to think of these choices specifically as like kind of concentric circles of nested problems. The example that leaps to mind is The Nice Guys. That's probably my favorite detective movie ever. So we start with this kind of outside problem. Here's a weird mystery, we need to solve it. Then, we introduce, here's this detective who's an absolute mess and his daughter doesn't respect him. Then we introduce here's this other detective who the daughter thinks is probably a bad guy. Then we're going to resolve those in opposite order. In the final fight scene, we get Mr.… Is it Haley or Holly, whatever his name is… If you kill that man, I will never speak to you again. Of course, at this point in the movie, that means something coming from this 12-year-old girl. We love her. She's the best character in the story. So he leaves the person alive, and we get… We've tied off that inner circle. He has proved himself a good person to this girl. Then we tie off the next one. Ryan Ghosling succeeds, he saves the day, he doesn't screw up for the first time in his life, and his daughter smiles at him. Okay. We've got that respect. Then, at the very end, we tie off the whole thing, we've solved the mystery, we know what's going on. So if you think about it in those terms, of there's not just one conflict, there's several, you can nest them like that and then solve them in reverse order. That gives your ending a lot of structure that you might not have known was already there.

[DongWon] This really ties into one of the things we were talking about last week when we were discussing raising the stakes, which is introducing multiple threads of stakes. Right? This gives you the opportunity to build to your… Keep increasing the tension and ratcheting things up, even though you're closing things off, because if you do have those nested stakes, if you do have that multiple thread, your heroes can defeat a mini bot, have an emotional resolution. The big conflict is still coming, the last sort of act of this is still playing out, but you have these beats to give you those candy scenes, to give you those points of resolution. The more you have those little things closing off, that is a signal to your audience that, okay, we are in the denoue… Not denouement, but we're making the turn here. Right? We're in the three quarters mark, we're moving towards the big climax here. So giving people those little signals can be a great way to build tension as well.

[Erin] This can be difficult, definitely, all of this during Nano because you're just… You're moving at a pace. You're going really quickly. But one thing that I like doing during a Nano project is actually writing myself notes about what threads might be or what the concentric circles might be as I'm going. So, like, at the end of the day, I might write, like, one note of, like, the coolest thing that I randomly wrote that day. Like, I'll be like, "He [garbled smashed?] the spider."

[Laughter garbled comments]

[Erin] Maybe that doesn't come up again because I forget about it but then when I get to that three quarters mark, I can't do the thing Mary Robinette was talking about, where you read the whole book, but I can read back a page of very slightly incoherent notes, and be like, "Oh, yes, that is a spider…"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] "This is a chance for me to like make that kind of come back."

[DongWon] Erin, I'm not sure about this Spider-Man reboot. I know it's like any other one, but this one might be a little tough for me.

[Dan] I'm hoping this is part of the "the house is full of bees" universe.

[Laughter]

[Erin] It is.

[Mary Robinette] That's why it's so traumatic for him. I do a very similar thing during Nano because, as you say, I do not have time to read through the whole thing at this point. But I… All through the process, I am leaving notes for myself in square brackets. So I will, at this point, just look for any note that I have left for myself to see, like, what great idea I had earlier that I'd totally forgotten about by the time I get to this. Because you've probably left something to yourself, a note someplace. It doesn't make any sense. That's okay. You can still, like, try to fold it in here.

[Erin] Yeah. Even if you haven't left a note to yourself, a lot of times people work collaboratively during Nano so if you have any friends that you're working with in your writing group, you can ask them, "Is there something I was mentioning like 2 weeks ago maybe…"

[Laughter]

[Erin] "That you haven't heard me say anything about recently?" They'll be like, "Yes. There was a spider dead." You're like, "Yes. The time is now."

[DongWon] That's what it was.

[Erin] Spider dead and the bees.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's one of the reasons I find writing group so useful, is because if there's something you forgotten about, they haven't. Because you have asked this intriguing question and they really want to know the answer to it. They'll be like, "Why haven't we ever gotten back to his dad being a spider?" Like, "Oh! Yes! Don't worry, I have some really cool plans."

[DongWon] Again, all of the things we're talking about our big structural tools. Right? These are stuff that will be as useful to you in editing and in drafting when maybe you are trying to hit this insane deadline every week of getting certain words out. But, hopefully, all of this is at least giving you some framework and some ways to think about, "Okay. How am I approaching this week of work?" Right? Now that we're in week 4, how am I thinking about the words I'm going to get down on the page?

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that you can do, particularly as a Nano thing and if you're discovery writing, remember way back when we were talking about objective and super objective, one of the things that will happen to the character is that their goals will shift as they change. So you can look at it now and say what new goal does my character have based on their new understanding of who they are. Because… Like, it still needs to be tied to that super objective and to those initial opening questions, but, like, what is their new solution? That will often help you get towards the final final climactic battle because the new solution is an easier thing to solve. Or their new… Like, oh, this is what I can do. Their new goal is an easier thing to solve then whatever thing they have been continually failing at.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] This sounds like a great point to get some homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, this is a trick that I picked up from Dan. Which is, read through what you wrote the session before. Not the day, not everything, but just the session. So if you wrote for 10 minutes, that's all you get to reread. You can make minor edits if you're adding words. But you can't cut anything because it's Nano and every word counts. Use brackets to make notes to yourself about stuff you want to go back and plant earlier, things that you are going to need for your character to solve what's coming up, but you don't have to actually go back and do that right now. You're just going to use this as a launching pad to move on.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/13/17-11-structuring-with-multiple-timelines/

Key points: One way to use multiple timelines is to dramatize backstory, telling it in scene rather than in an infodump. Flashbacks, in media res. You can use multiple timelines to feed the reader information, or for pacing. Do beware of killing progress with in-depth flashbacks. Sometimes you may use the past timeline to legitimize something to the reader. You can also compare and contrast the two timelines.

[Season 17, Episode 11]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring with Multiple Timelines.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're multiply in a hurry on several timelines.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] I'm getting carried away.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Howard.

[Dan] That was Howard, by the way.

[Dan] So, last week we talked about multiple POVs. Now we have multiple timelines. Which is a much more overtly structural thing, or more obviously structural. Peng, when… Where do we start here? When might it be a good idea to use multiple timelines, and how do you do it?

[Peng] Oh, I love multiple timelines. I think they might be my favorite structure technique. But, so what I think multiple timelines are great… Well, they're great for a million things, but one of the biggest benefits to using multiple timelines is if you've got a story that has… It's got, like, an old buried secrets that come to light years later type plot, and it's a really good way for you to dramatize back story in scene instead of having to just info dump it. Because if you've got this huge back story that happened decades ago, you don't really want to just throw that right there in the beginning or have a big section that's separated from the rest. You want to be able to weave it in really well. One of the ways to do that is to go back and forth between this back story and do it in scene as opposed to just having like an info dump. I think a really great example of that... Has everyone read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon?

[Dan] I have not.

[Peng] Oh, it's a gre… Well, put it on your list. It is a book about basically a little boy who when he's reeling from the loss of his mother who's just died, and his father takes him to the cemetery of lost books, I think it's called. He says… It's basically a secret bookstore and everybody who goes there gets to choose one book and you have to take care of it for the rest of your life and it's yours. So he ends up choosing a book by a mysterious author and he falls in love with it. He decides that he is going to find more of this author's work because the book is just so good. But it turns out that all other copies of every other book has been destroyed. So it's this mystery about who destroyed those books, where is the author, what happened. So as the boy goes on this investigation, rather than just having big info dumps of what he finds out at every stage of his investigation, which is what you would do if you did the whole thing in present, just one timeline, we end up every time he comes upon a new epiphany, we jump back in time and we get that epiphany as it happens in narration rather than as a something just being told back to him. It works so well, it makes the past just as compelling as the present.

[Howard] I wanted to take a moment to just pin some terms down. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has introduced us to the idea that timeline means multiple realities. But for the most part, what we're talking about here is a single timeline that has multiple pointers on it that we will be jumping into and visiting. Current time, flashback, in media res, that kind of thing. Now, that said, Terry Pratchett's… Oh, I forget which book it was. It was one of the Vime's books. Has a forked timeline in the climax. It happens when Vime takes his magical day planner thingy and drops it into the wrong pocket in his trousers. It's described as the trousers of time, and they're in the wrong pocket. There's this war going on that he has been trying to stop. In the timeline he's in, he's successfully putting a stop to things. His day planner is now on the other timeline and keeps beeping things about our favorite characters dying. It's a fascinating way, here in the multiple… In true multiple forked timelines, to say, "Congratulations. You chose the better one."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] This… Another really good example of this is the one that I used as a book of the week a couple weeks ago. The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina. What the book's plot is kind of sort of about is the inheritance that this grandmother leaves to her family includes a debt to some kind of very mysterious, very dangerous person. If we had gotten everything in chronological order, the life of the grandmother growing up and then all of the family trying to deal with it after the fact, we would already know everything about that mysterious person and the danger that he represents before the family comes into play and struggles against it. So, by jumping back and forth between these two periods of history, we get to discover with the family all of the things that are happening at the same time that we get to see them happening to the grandmother in the past. So having the chapters alternate back and forth is this really smart structural choice that doesn't give away the ending before it matters.

[Mary Robinette] So, you just said that we get to see it happening at the same time that we're seeing something else happen. I just want to remind readers that even when we're talking about a nonlinear storytelling, like multiple timelines, that your reader is still experiencing things in a linear fashion. So as you're thinking about this, recognize that one of the tools that you're manipulating is when you are feeding them information. You're also using it to control pacing, as well as… So it's not just about now we get this thing, now we get that. It's also a way of controlling a lot of different pieces. So when you're… I'm going to flag a danger with multiple timelines. Which is, sometimes flashbacks can stop progress in a story while you sit down and explore something deeply. So when you're thinking about this, remember that you also want to make sure that whatever timeline that we're jumping into carries tension, that it's still serving as a good interesting story in and of itself, not just a way to try to mask an info dump.

[Howard] My rule of thumb on this is that if there's going to be a flashback, the flashback should be an answer to a question that just landed on the reader, rather than an opportunity to ask a new question or don't new information so that the story can move forward. I've found that… Yeah, the flashbacks that I hate, the flashbacks where I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go get a sandwich," if I'm watching on TV, are the flashbacks where it has arrived and I didn't want it because it's not answering a question I had.

[Dan] All right. We are going to pause here for the book of the week. We've got a really awesome one this week because it is Peng's book. Peng, tell us about The Cartographers.

[Peng] Yay. The Cartographers is my second novel. It is a story about mapmaking and family secrets. It follows Nell Young, who's a young woman whose greatest passion is the art of cartography. She's been… She's spent her whole life trying to live up to her father who's the legendary cartographer, Dr. Daniel Young. But they haven't spoken for seven years since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her professional reputation over… It was during an argument over an old cheap gas station highway map. When the book kicks off, her father is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library with that very same seemingly worthless map hidden away in his desk. So, of course, Nell can't resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map holds, like, this incredible deadly mystery. So she sets out to uncover both what the map and her late father have been hiding for decades. It is a… It's coming out right about now. It comes out on March 15. I'm really excited for everybody to read it.

[Dan] Well, awesome. That sounds great. So that is The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. So go look that up. Go buy it. Do your thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Okay. Let's get back to our…

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to say, Peng is a heck of a writer, so you are in for a real treat with this.

[Peng] Well, thank you.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Dan] So. What are some other… We talked about using multiple timelines to provide information. What are some other good uses of multiple timelines in a story? When might you want to do this?

[Howard] I think one of the most fascinating and easy to consume examples is the movie Julie & Julia, which follows Julia Child, the beginning of her career in the 1950s, and a woman named Julie Powell who created a blog in which she was going to try and cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook. This story bounces back and forth between the 1950s and the early 2000s. Directed by Nora Efrain. It was actually Nora Efrain's last movie. She wrote it, she directed it. It's a beautiful way to tell two different stories, each of which if you're familiar with Freitag's triangle or the narrative curve, each of those stories has its own narrative curve to it, and by jumping back and forth between the two of them, we increase the tension, we increase emotional investment, we reach our climaxes at the same… At about the same time. It's a delightful film. Also, just talking about it has made me hungry.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Another really good example is Vicious by V. E. Schwab. Each scene begins with something like 10 years before, five minutes before, three days before. It's… They're absolutely… There's no linearity to when those hop in. But it does this thing of enriching the world and deepening the character motivations. It is a structure that makes me deeply jealous.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because I'm like… I don't have any understanding of how you write something like this. One of the things that I think that she does, which gets to Howard's earlier point about making sure that you're answering a question that was just dropped, is that she doesn't always do that. But she has built trust with the reader so that you understand that if we are doing this jump, that there is a reason for it, and you'll understand it later. But she has built trust by setting… By, at the beginning, that that's the way it's going to work.

[Peng] I think another really good way that multiple timelines can be used is this same sort of, along these same lines as answering a question. If you've got a story in which you have something that you need to sell to the reader that's a little bit difficult to believe were you think you're going to have trouble getting them to buy, whether it's like a worldbuilding aspect or it's a plot point or something about a character, if you put that into the past timeline, just by putting it there, the existence of that history or of that previous mention is kind of automatically legitimizing. So, it sort of works the same way as if you've got a legend in the story. The more times you mention a legend or the more times you mention something about magic, the more it just starts to feel real and believable, just through the repetition. So a lot of times, multiple timelines will have that same effect, where if something… If you tell the reader that something has happened in the past, it just automatically makes it more believable. It's a really easy way to sell something to readers that you need them to buy for the present narrative.

[Dan] It's so weird that… The way that works. Because you're absolutely right. Everything in a fantasy book, for example, is just stuff we made up. Right? But it's… The idea that this has happened before… If I tell you it happens now or if I tell you it happened 10 years ago, either way I just made it up. But that 10 years ago thing does really kind of hack the reader's brain into saying, "Oh. This is very unbelievable, but if it happened 10 years ago, it must be true."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Then that helps us kind of suspend our disbelief of it a little better by setting an artificial precedent. It's so weird that that works, but it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Extending that trick, if you say, "Oh, this exact same thing happened 100 years ago." Yeah, wow, that's kind of cool. But if you say, "This exact same thing happened 122 years ago, only it was in the summer instead of the winter." Holy crap. I am so onboard.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Wow. Because now… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Wheel of Time…

[Dan] There's a specificity to it.

[Mary Robinette] Wheel of Time is based on…

[Dan] There's one more example I want to mention really quickly, just because. It's the movie Frequency which is about a father who is a firefighter and dies in a fire and his son who grows up to become a cop. The story is told with watching them both when their about the same age in life, scenes inter-cutting back and forth, but what's different is that through a weird quirk of science fiction, they actually can talk to each other and the two timelines interact with each other over the radio. It's a really interesting take on this narrative premise.

[Mary Robinette] All right. While we're doing examples, there are two that I want to just throw in there because they are structurally so different and interesting. One is Firebird by Susanna Kearsley. It is both multiple timeline and multiple POV in that she has a character who's in I think the 1500s and one who is in the early 2000s. Those characters never interact. Their stories are connected only by one artifact that they both possess. It's this… It's just… It's a beautiful meditation on time and place. But what she does by going between those two timelines is that the contrast between them also makes you appreciate the commonalities, the things that don't change over time. She's a… It's beautiful, beautiful writing. The other one which is completely different structurally is a picture book called When I Wake Up by Seth Fishman. It's a kid wakes up in the morning and says, "Today I could…" And the story splits into four distinct timelines, each color code… Each are happening simultaneously on the page and color-coded. So I could go to the park. I could make breakfast for my parents. I could… It's this beautiful thing of like this is how my day… It's basically sliding doors for a kid in four timelines with colors. It's really lovely. But, it is, again, it's… What I like about each of them even though they use different versions of the multiple timeline is that they are exploring the texture of contrasts.

[Dan] That's awesome. All right, Howard, bring it home. What's our homework?

[Howard] Okay. Your current work in progress. Look at adding a second timeline, time stream to it. A couple of ways you can do this. Take a character whose back story perhaps you haven't told yet. Write a fun back story for them and find a way to weave that into the existing story bouncing through multiple timelines. Alternatively, you might take your current work in progress and the ideas you have for your second book and see if the first book story could be told as a flashback in the course of the second story. But, dig in and try to do this. I don't want to make it easy. Drill into it and break some things and when they are broken, step back and say, "Howard, you're a jerk. You did this to me." And we will all have had fun.

[Dan] That sounds great. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.48: Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/28/16-48-believable-worlds-part-2-creating-texture/

Key points: Similarity, specificity, and selective depth help you create texture in your world. Help give the sense that your world is lived in, that the characters are interacting with it. Let them move through their world in their daily lives, just like you do. Put conversations in different places. Along with the purpose of your scenes, consider the activity, what the characters are doing in that scene. Don't just think about big things, think about what people do in their daily lives. Give your characters strong opinions. Remember that a little goes a long way.

[Season 16, Episode 48]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] All right. So we are still talking about believable worlds. Last week was the illusion of real, and this week we're going to talk about creating texture. What is texture in a story in worldbuilding?

[Fonda] Well, this really is a continuation of what we talked about last week, because a lot of the things that we mentioned, similarity, specificity, selective depth, help you create texture in the world. When I say texture, I mean the sense that your world is lived in. That is not just sort of a stage backdrop to your characters, but that your characters are interacting with that world. One of the ways that I try to make this happen in my stories is to have the characters move through their world in their daily lives, the way we move through ours. School, religion, shopping, daily transactions that you make, transportation, getting from one place to another. If you can do this while also advancing the plot, you will do a lot of worldbuilding in the background in a way that feels very organic. So if you have characters who need to have important meetings and they need to meet with other characters to exchange information, or to have confrontations and to have different things going on from a plot level, one of the best ways to world build is just to have those conversations happen out in the world in different places. So don't have them all happening in the headquarters or in whatever, in their home. Like, have them get out there. I have a scene in which… It's a very tense situation, and it's this confrontation with the two characters, but it happens in a temple. So you get to see the temple and get a sense of what religion is like in this world and the fact that one character bows in the temple but the other does not also tells you something about the characters. I also have a scene where two characters meet at a sporting event. So, those are… That's a way to have the world move by almost like you would in film. Where of… In film, things are happening and there's so much of the world building that is in the background with the costumes and the sets and all that, and you're not paying attention to it, but you're absorbing it. You can do the same thing as a prose writer.

[Howard] Yeah. A couple of examples that leap to mind. The used universe of the first Star Wars film in 1977 which so influenced the genre. This was the idea that things get dirty. Even spaceships got dirty. They were used, and they had dents and scuffs and scrapes and whatever else. When Ridley Scott produced Aliens, he called that look Trucking in Space. It was very informative to us, and it let us feel like we were living there. Contrast that with when Lucas shot the prequels, so many of the sets were designed it just as green screen that a great many of the scenes were a pair of characters carrying on a conversation while walking down a hallway in which they interact with nothing. Even though they then built lavish whatever's around them, it felt stale. So, for us as authors, having people conversing in a temple, having people at a sporting event, where the conversation, the scene requires interaction with what is around them, that's crucial.

[Mary Robinette] There is actually an industry shorthand called touch the puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which sounds different. But it is exactly this. That when you have three-dimensional figures that the actors, the human actors, can interact with the puppet actors, and it feels very real. Whereas when you have CG characters, there's often no interaction. So it feels like they're existing in two different worlds. One of the things that I do when I'm plotting is that I will write down purpose of scene, which is my narrative intention for the scene, but then I'll write down activity. The activity is the thing that the characters are doing in that scene, which often has nothing to do with the purpose of the scene. So if they are plotting… It's like we're going to plot this heist. They're doing it over… While cooking a spaghetti dinner. The thing that does for me is it makes the world richer, but it also allows me to introduce micro tensions, because that's… There can be things that are going wrong in the scene, like the water starts to boil over. Which can mask the fact that they're just exchanging information in prepping for something. But it also, again, has that texture of making the world feel more real, because small things go wrong in day-to-day life. Like, in one of the episodes that we recorded previously, we had to start over because outside the booth, my cat had knocked over the cat feeder and had, like, jumped in it. If we had left that, this would have felt so very real.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We removed our vital worldbuilding details. This is one of the benefits that novels have over a lot of other mediums, in that you're essentially unconstrained by budget or time. If you're making a movie or a TV show, then, yeah, you probably only have a handful of scenic locations that you can use in your story. If you are writing a novel, you can have as many as you want. You can have that meeting take place at a temple or a sporting event, because you don't have to pay extra to get a whole sports arena into your book. You just put it in there.

[Howard] I remember my first iPhone. It was expensive, and at one point I cracked the screen and could not just run out and replace it. See item 1. It was expensive. For a while, finger swiping across the screen, there was a texture as I ran my finger across the crack. It was the texture of regret for having dropped it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It was the texture of need for not having enough money. I felt it every time I use the phone. Okay? That was a little tiny rib feeling under one finger. Those kinds of details will give you way more insight into your characters than you just got into me.

[Dan] All right. So, our book of the week this week is one that does this so, so well. Releasing this week into the world, we're so excited, Fonda, tell us about your book.

[Fonda] I guess I should mention that I have a book coming out this week.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So, I am finishing off the Green Bone saga with Jade Legacy, which is the third and final book. It is coming out November 30th in the U. S., December 2nd in the U. K. and internationally. It is… I've described the green bone Green Bone saga as an epic urban fantasy Asian inspired gangster family saga. That's probably as succinct as I've ever been in describing it. But it is about… It takes place in a modern era Metropolis, and one in which there is a resource, magic Jade, which endows certain people with very cool abilities. It is the story of two clans in conflict. I'm just super excited to bring the story to a close. It has been a long journey and I'm glad I got to come on here and talk to you guys about it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. The Green Bone saga is one of my very favorite fantasy series ever. So excited for Jade Legacy to come out. So, the first one is called Jade City, the second Jade War, and then this new one, Jade Legacy. So if you're unfamiliar with it, start at the beginning.

[Mary Robinette] They are so good. They are so, so good.

[Dan] If you like… If you have been waiting so eagerly, like the rest of us… Mary Robinette, you're a cover quote on it, aren't you?

[Mary Robinette] I am. I say that it's like your favorite wire work film crossed with The Godfather. It's just… But it's so good. Such, just beautiful intimate portraits of people. I just love it a lot. Also magic.

[Dan] Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee. Go buy it right now.

[Dan] Anyway, back into our world building and creating texture. What are some of the elements that are often overlooked when we are trying to create texture in a world?

[Fonda] So there are… There's many that people don't automatically think of, because they think worldbuilding, and they think lineage of Kings and government and geography and so on. But things that are very much a part of our own world, like pop culture and entertainment. What are people doing for fun? Fashion trends. Schooling or education. Fitness. Sports. We mentioned food earlier in this master class. Religious life. Daily commerce. These are all… Just sort of think about how you go through your day and the ways you interact with the world. Are you doing that in your fantasy world?

[Dan] Yeah. The… So I play a lot of role-playing games, and one of my favorites is Warhammer Fantasy, which is set in kind of a low magic, fake magic Europe. That world always feels much more real and grounded to me than most of the D&D settings, even though I love them as well. I was trying to figure out why. What about that feels more real? It's this concept of texture. The idea that any given Warhammer Fantasy supplement in describing the world is also going to have a sidebar that tells you about the specific names of all the pub games that they play in the taverns, or they won't just be food, they'll have names for this type of meat pie or something like that, to just add extra specificity, like we talked about last week. But then also kind of give those context, so it's not just we're in a pub, but we're in a pub playing this game of dice which is called this because of this, and the last guy who played it lost in his name is still carved into the table and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] The other… With those things, the pub food, games, all of that, give your characters strong opinions about something. Like that's… And maybe give them a foil who has a counter opinion. Again, it can give you micro tension within a scene, but it can make things feel more real if it's like he hears the sound of the arcade game and it haunts him because he broke up with his teenage girlfriend and lost the top score and has never been able to reclaim it. I don't know. I'm making things up wildly.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But… Because I was…

[Dan] It's a good writing prompt.

[Howard] The smell…

[Mary Robinette] That's where I was going.

[Howard] The smell of a dresser drawer, that at one point had mothballs in it, but hasn't for probably decades, is the smell that will always bring me back to me being 12 years old and visiting my grandmother's house for the first time. That's… But most people will smell that and think, "Oh, how do you… You haven't gotten the mothball smell out of that drawer, have you?" That's not the reaction I have.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm sorry… I'm… Weirdly, I'm going to wind up quoting Hemingway, which I did not expect to do in this episode.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But this goes back to something that Fonda was talking about much earlier about similarities, that you can look for similarities in these specific details. Everyone has heard the write what you know Hemingway quote. I'm going to take a moment to read the… Like, the length… The actual quote. Because it actually gets to what we're talking about here. So… It's not what most people think it is. "You see, I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life across. Not to just depict life or criticize it, but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. Write about what you know, and write truly, and tell them all where they can place it. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study about. Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about." So you know what it is to really like the taste of something. You can give that sensation to your character with a thing that is specific to that world. You can have someone in that world… Or a type of music that you know intimately what it is like to love as a fan. You can attach that to a new type of music that you have made up for this world. That's going to make it feel specific and real and textural and grounded.

[Fonda] Yeah. I definitely think that that phrase write what you know gets misunderstood a lot, and that really, what you're talking about, Mary Robinette, is writing what you know on a deeper level, on an emotional experiential level. Taking that and applying it to new contexts in your fictional world. One thing I want to say to all the readers here is a little goes a long way. Like, we may be giving you the impression that you have to just now all of a sudden just over describe everything and fill it with nuance and context. But that's not necessarily true. You want to pick your places. Show those moments, those glimpses that imply that the whole world has that same texture. I use the example of, like, the Hollywood back lot tour. Where I went to Hollywood studios… Or Universal Studios, and you take the little tram, and the streets on this back lot look so real. Like, down to the bubblegum that's stuck on the railing or the chipped paint on the windowsill. It's entirely convincing. Then you turn the corner, and, like, it's just held up by like boards. There's no building behind it. It's just the front. But what you do show has texture and feels very real and lived in. The reader or the audience fills in all the rest for you.

[Dan] Awesome. All right. So, what is our homework for this week?

[Fonda] I would like readers… Listeners to go and take a character that they have in the project that they're working on and free write your character with a day off. Have them just spend it doing what they would do on a day off. Where do they go, what do they see, how do they get around? What interactions do they have? After this exercise, see if you can't find a few cool details that you learned in the process of this free writing that you can use in the background of your main story.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/30/16-22-scenes-and-set-pieces/

Key Points: Scenes and set pieces? Start with setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development. Setting? Wow factor and tactical implications. Environments let players get creative. Challenge? Variety, and catering to different players. Sneak, battle, talk? Unique elements. Make your challenges hinge on character abilities, not player abilities. Adversaries. Introduce bad guys early, and make things personal. Give them distinct abilities. What's their motivation? In prose, we often challenge characters outside their area of expertise, but in games, we usually challenge players in their skill sets. Rewards, or consequences, and story development. Rewards, gear, show the reader they are making progress. Story development. Make sure characters have incentives to do the encounters, and that there are stakes. Think about how a scene pushes things forward. What are the ramification, what are the potential callbacks?

[Season 16, Episode 22]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are talking about scenes and set pieces today. We've got a lot to cover, so were just going to jump right into it. James? Get us started.

[James] Yeah. So when I'm designing an encounter or a scene or whatever you want to call it, I like to break it up into several different categories. So I like to think about the setting, the challenge, the adversaries, the rewards, and also story development. So we're going to hit each of those in turn. I just want to start off with, so, for setting, Cass… Oh, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] I just want to say… I just want to jump in real fast and say all of the prose writers have been riding along with this because they're interested and curious about it. This episode in particular has stuff that directly applies to what you do. Because every point that we're about to hit is something that you should be thinking about in your prose scenes as well.

[Setting]

[James] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think, Cass and I both write fiction as well and I'm sure we probably bring everything we've said in this class to those as well. But, so I want to just right now with Cass, when you're designing the setting for a scene or an encounter, what do you think about?

[Cassandra] Well, there are two things, primarily. The wow factor and the tactical implications of your environment. The wow factor can be a whole bunch of things. With video games, in particular, it's all about the visuals, it is all about the audio, and it's also about cinematography. You can have the best graphics in the world, you can have the best music, but if it's a very static kind of thing, or it's just a character walking in, it's not going to work out for everyone. It's also about individual imaginative [garbled]. In prose, for example, it could be things like how things smell, how things taste, texture. But in games, it can also be about emotional beats. My favorite example of that is Persona 5. When you start the game, you are midway through a heist. There are people with shadow faces leading you on through it. You're running through it. It's great and everything, but it's not terribly impactful because it's weird. However, at the climax of the game, after you have everything explained to you, you actually revisit that first place with the exact same parameters. It's suddenly so much more powerful, because you just had 40 hours of context drilled into your head. Well, we've come to the tactical side, since most of my design goes through actual designers. I'm curious about how you develop them into the RPGs, James?

[James] Yeah. So, in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or Starfinder that's all about more or less killing things and taking their stuff, or occasionally other variations on that, environments can be really important to the design of scenes, especially combats, because it allows the characters to get really creative. It allows… And it makes, frankly, things seem more interesting than just fighting skeletons in a blank room over and over again. When you add an environment, suddenly the players have a lot more things they can work with. So, for instance, you get the players coming up with all these interesting ideas where they'll go, "Okay, if I tie the badminton net to the goat, and then I scare the goat with the airhorn, then they'll run up the end." Like, players are really creative. You want to give them props to do stuff with. So that's where I feel like the environment can really be handy. Which… Oh, Dan, did you want to jump in?

[Dan] Yeah, I was just going to say that this is a lesson that I learned watching Star Wars movies, actually. Because the first time I played a tabletop wargame about spaceships, I very quickly realized that it's super boring. Because there's no terrain in space. So there isn't really an environment to interact with. It's the absolute epitome of an empty room. Then you watch the Star Wars movies and realize, "Oh, this space battle, they're running through a trench. This one, they're dodging asteroids. This one, they're flying through debris. This one, there's the big giant shield and it's all about which side of the shield are you on, and is it going to be brought down in time." There's always some kind of dynamic interactive element to make those encounters more interesting.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about the setting that I just wanted to get in here for prose writers, is that the same thing is true. Like, when you're thinking about the setting, how is your character going to use that setting? How is it going to play into the overall arc of the story?

[Challenge]

[James] That brings us right into the second one, which is talking about the type of challenge. I really like variety, like you were saying. I really want to mixup the enemy types with the types of challenges. So it just doesn't become wave after wave. Thinking about challenges that cater to the different character types and player types. Because some people are going to want to sneak, some people are going to want to battle their way through. Mary Robinette's probably going to want to make friends with them if they're giant apple trolls, like from last episode.

[Laughter]

[James] So, you want to make sure that there's sort of something for everybody. But, Cass, what do you think about?

[Cassandra] Well, the balance is definitely one of the most necessary things. But I think it's also important to focus on the elements that make your game unique. If your game is all about a character with an energy whip, create challenges that explore every possible use of that whip. Let her swing across chasms, electrocuting things, retrieving objects… I remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I picked up this weird Taser-like ability, and my favorite thing to do would be to knock out people and just very gently, like, fill the water full of electricity to watch them very gently buzz to death.

[Laughter]

[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…

[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.

[Cassandra] Be sure that your challenges hinge on character abilities and not just player abilities. The players who spent points building a detective should have an easier time solving mysteries. Even if the player playing the barbarian is naturally better at puzzles.

[James] That's so important. I feel like I've absolutely been in that game where I'm the wizard with the 18 intelligence, but I'm naturally just terrible at most puzzles compared to the people I play with. So it'll be the barbarian being like, "No, it's this and this and this."

[Chuckles]

[James] I'm like, "Dude. You shouldn't know that, and I should."

[Dan] Yeah. The first time that I wrote, it was actually an adventure for Starfinder, typically the game writing that I have done has been in much more narrative systems. Starfinder is much more of a crunchy numbers-based thing. So, the main comment that the editor sent back after I submitted the first draft was, "Dan. Players like to roll dice."

[Yeah. Laughter]

[Dan] I realized that I had not really given them any skill checks. It was all based on just kind of interaction. You can ask these questions and learn this information and then you know where to go. He's like, "No. There's like 20 skills in this game. You haven't used any of them. They put points into those skills and they like to roll dice. Give them a chance to do what they're good at."

[Cassandra] That sort of reminds me, I think, of my favorite tabletop RPG story that is in [garbled]. There was a comment going around a few years ago, of this group of Avengers trying to fight, I think, this Orc Lord. Everyone was kind of dropping over dead and it was just terrible and they were all going to lose. There was this one dude left. He was like, "Okay. What? Screw it. My character has like really high charm. I am going to try to seduce the Orc Lord." He rolled a natural 20.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] There was just this long pause. He was like, "You know what, I am going to go for it. I am going to declare my love and just stop the war." He kept rolling natural 20s. By the end of the game, his character was leading this Orc Warlord home and going like, "Mom, this is my new husband."

[James] See, that's what I love about tabletop role-playing games. Because in a videogame, maybe you spend the resources to build out that possibility, even though it's a very, very faint possibility. But in a tabletop role-playing game, you can just change on the fly and go with that. I think that's really one of the things that has kept games like Dungeons & Dragons alive in the era of video games.

[Mary Robinette]. If you been listening to all of these things, the variety of challenges that your character faces in prose is as important as it is in a game. You don't want a character who's constantly just fighting things. You want a character who's having to solve the things in different ways. Often in ways that do not play to their skill sets. That's what often will make an interesting challenge in prose.

[Adversaries]

[James] Actually, that's a great segue into talking about adversaries. So, I think it's really important when you're thinking about the adversaries in your encounter, you want to introduce any big bad guys early and give players a reason to care. You want to make things personal. So, yeah, what do you folks do in terms of trying to establish a good adversary?

[Cassandra] You want to give them a few distinct abilities that strongly point towards who they are and what they are, and possibly, at least for me, have at least one encounter that completely cements their personality. I think a good example of this is Borderlands and Handsome Jack. Very early on, you meet him and you kind of get a sense of exactly who he is and why you should absolutely hate him. These things need to be done quickly. I think if you're designing a tabletop role-playing game, these parameters have to be set very clearly as well. Because players have the whole game to learn how to use a complex character effectively. A game master who is looking at your notes, he only has minutes. I'm curious about what people have done in regards to that [garbled]

[Howard] Yeah.

[Cassandra] Adversaries.

[Howard] For my own part, the word adversary is hugely informative here. If you run across something, somebody, some animal, whatever, and it just wants to kill you, that's not an adversary. That's just obstacle, it's an enemy. An adversary that I'm going to care about? Well, look, the party and I, we are trying to build a bridge across the street. But the Otter King has decided that there shall be no bridge across the stream, and he takes issue with our entire project, sabotaging us at every turn. But if we don't build the bridge, our eventual plan to unify the clans on both sides of… You see where I'm going?

[James] I romance the Otter King.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yes. Please. Romance the Otter King, because everybody loves otters. Ultimately, if… For the adversary to feel real, and for us to feel invested, they have to be working logically and passionately and investedly in something that runs counter to what we're trying to do.

[James] I just want to throw out that in my current Starfinder game, I have a player who is literally playing an otter marriage counselor. That's her whole deal. She's incredibly effective. It's… We've talked our way through half the encounters.

[Mary Robinette] So, the thing with adversaries, we been talking about and around, comes back to a thing that I bring from theater for you prose writers. What's my motivation? The Otter King? Like, sure, the Otter King wants to stop you from building the bridge, but why do they want to stop you from building the bridge? That why can make your adversary often significantly more interesting. So think about what that motivation is.

[James] One other thing I want to throw out before we go to our game of the week is that something Cass had said about keeping abilities narrow. This is especially important in tabletop role-playing games, and which I always tell people who are designing new monsters or new adversaries is that really, you're only… If you're not going to use an ability in the first couple rounds of combat, that's often all that an enemy is on stage for. So you don't want to build an enemy with a dozen different abilities if they're only ever going to use three of them. Because that just makes it harder for the game master to process quickly. So pick a couple of things and that'll both let the GM know how to run them and let the PCs know how to fight them.

[James] But, let's pause for our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] So, book of the week, or game of the week, is Shadow Point Observatory. Which is a game for Oculus Quest 2. It's a puzzle game. But I picked it up because it's beautiful. It's about observatories, which are totally my jam. You're trying to solve this thing where this young girl has been ripped out of time. It's the character that you're going in and you're trying to figure out how to restore her to her time. But because she's been ripped out of time, every time you encounter her, each layer of the puzzle, she gets older and older. It takes decades in her… For her for you to figure this out. There's this one point… It's a spoiler, but this is also like… The kind of excruciating thing that they're doing. Because you're in this beautiful environment, and she begs you not to leave. You're like, "But I have to go, because I have to finish solving these puzzles in order to bring you back." It's so painful to walk away from her. It's just… It's really nicely done. I liked it a lot. My dad likes it too. So. Shadow Point Observatory. Highly recommended.

[Dan] Super cool. Before we move on to the next thing, I cannot get this thing out of my head that Mary Robinette said earlier, when we were talking about challenges. She said that for prose, it is often, and I would say usually, really important to challenge the character in something that is not their area of expertise. Which is the exact opposite of what we were saying about game writing. Where often you want to let people do what they are good at. I think that that's a really key thing to bring out, that in games, the players want to excel. They want to have a chance to use their powers. They want to show how awesome they are. In fiction, we often kind of… We want to let our characters demonstrate their awesomeness, but we also want to force them to be weak and to overcome those weaknesses. Which, I think, is a really interesting dichotomy.

[James] Well, it's important to remember that when you're doing a game, you're designing for a range of characters, often in a role-playing game. You don't necessarily know which one you're getting. So you want to make sure that the challenge you design is hard enough to challenge the person who specializes in that particular type of challenge, so that it's a satisfying thing, but they can succeed. But it still needs to be beatable by characters who aren't specialized in that. So you want to make sure that you are accommodating for all of the above.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even… In both cases, I think, the thing that will happen is the thing that happens in real life, which is that whatever tools you bring to the table, whether it's your characters bringing it to the table in prose or in games, they're going to solve it with the tools that they have on hand. So, just because the challenges and set up for them to be like this is the… The character who in prose who walks into the room and is like, "Oh, there's a lot of people here that I'm supposed to shoot at and I can't… I don't actually know how to use a gun. But I'm very good at sneaking." So they do this… They use the skills, even though the challenge in front of them is set up for them to fail.

[Howard] I want to do a quick call back to something Cassandra said two or three episodes ago about choices yielding consequences. The reward being consequences. I don't mind failing a challenge in a role-playing game, provided the failure isn't, "Oop. Wawawawawa. Game over. Start again." If the challenge going back to the Otter King… I failed to talk to the Otter King, now we have to fight the entire otter tribe. Well, that's a sad failure, because I don't want to fight the otters, I want to befriend the otters. If you build the challenges in such a way that the failures alter the choices we can make, then failure isn't catastrophic. I feel like in role-playing games, failure should be fun.

[James] Yeah.

[Rewards]

[Mary Robinette] I feel like that is a natural segue to talking about rewards as part of the consequences.

[James] Yeah. Absolutely. Rewards, and even putting rewards and story development together. Because in many ways, like you were just saying, there kinds of the same thing. The rewards, the consequences, and the development, all fall into the same category. So how do you all handle that?

[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] The entire feel of a player's experience can be ruined, honestly, if they end up with, let's say equipment that is meant for them in the end dungeon. Now, for some players, again, I am a power player, I am happiest when I can just bulldoze through things. It makes me laugh. But for other players, it just takes away the enjoyment, because all the challenges are gone. The environment, the varieties you build in the consequences, they no longer matter if one strike of the sword is enough to stop an adversary cold. So you do not want to end up with a character that is overpowered. Similarly, it's important to track the rewards, because an underpowered character is just going to be miserable. The grind isn't fun when you're dedicating a few hours of your life to fun.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I think about in prose is that the rewards are part of the way of letting the reader know that you're making progress. It's not just about the gear that you pick up, but that yes, this slog is worth it. Because it's really easy in prose, we talk a lot about yes-but, no-and, and making things worse for the character, and it's really easy to forget the importance of the yes, which is the reward. Even if there is a consequence for that reward. It's still that forward momentum, that forward progress, is still important to think about.

[Howard] One of the mechanics we built into Planet Mercenary, if players embrace in character their failures, they get role-play points. You can spend the role-play points to boost die rolls, to reroll dies, to reroll dice, to… There's all kinds of uses for them we didn't put limitations per game around on how you spent these. One of the players in one of the play tests I ran, to my great joy, figured this out, so that when we got to the point where it's time to defuse the nuclear weapon, he has accrued all of his role played failures and plays this stuff and Bam! The weapon is defused. Nothing about that felt steamroll-y. Everything felt earned. Because he had done such a good job of owning all of the earlier failures.

[Dan] That's great. One thing about rewards, when we're talking about gear, I keep talking about Star Wars and I apologize for that. I don't know why that's the example that leaps to my mind. But when you're talking about giving overpowered gear to a character too early, Luke Skywalker gets his lightsaber like 20 minutes into the first movie. That's the best weapon in the game, so to speak. But what's fascinating about it is that he… The reward is not the gear. It's his own skill with it. We have to get into the middle section of the second movie before he really learns how to use it. It's not until the end of the third movie that he gets it into a full-blown lightsaber battle where he gets to show off all his skills. So sometimes rewards are… It can be really valuable to give someone the crazy equipment early on, and then just let them learn how to use it.

[Story Development]

[Cassandra] Last of all, one you really do need to consider is how story development ties in with encounters they are creating. Make sure that your characters are incentivized to actually do the encounters. Make sure there are stakes. They don't need to be big stakes, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had this one [cat] that you could find and [stick, take] to your boat. It was a completely separate, quiet quest. Mechanically, it did nothing. It's just a decorative item. But, good Lord, it's also a kitty that you can have on your Viking boat for the rest of the game. James, do you have anything to add on that point before we run away [garbled]?

[James] Yeah. You want to think about how does a given scene push things forward. What are the ramifications? What elements do you want to tag for future reference, so that, as we said before, you can call back to something? What can the outcomes of this scene lead to later so that when, three scenes down the road, somebody calls back to a thing you just did, you've laid the groundwork for that?

[Mary Robinette] You all had homework for us, I think?

[Cassandra] We did. We would like you to design an encounter for a game that you've enjoyed, getting all of the factors that we mentioned. Setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development.

[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. This is been a long, but I think, really fantastic episode. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/29/15-48-deliberate-discomfort-part-two/

Key Points: Have you been uncomfortable writing something? Writing about my own bad mental health issues. Writing about fitting into Canada as an immigrant. Trying to write live in front of an audience. Having someone reading over my shoulder while I'm writing. An explicit lead in to a fade-to-black scene. How do you do it? Remind yourself that your audience doesn't have the same experience. Read and analyze how some other author does it. Some lines I'm not likely to cross, but others... The most uncomfortable scene for me to write was a spanking, a disempowerment of an antagonist. How do you decide to include something that makes you uncomfortable? Basically, if I think the book needs it, try it. Then look and see if it works. Think of an actor, inhabit the character and write from their perspective. I have two lines, one for things I don't do, but it's not wrong for my characters to do, and another for things that I probably won't depict in detail.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 48.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deliberate Discomfort Two, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] Fifteen minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

[Dan] Awesome. We are recording this live. When this airs, you will be able to go and look up a YouTube video and watch us do this. But right now, we're very excited to be talking about deliberate discomfort. We didn't episode on this topic earlier in the year that focused on writing things that are uncomfortable for your readers. Topics like sexism or racism or things like that that you know could be triggering issues for your readers and how to handle that appropriately. This episode, we're going to focus on writing things that are uncomfortable for you as an author. Maybe that is a sex scene, or maybe you got a character who swears a lot, something that you're worried your mom is going to read or that a character does or thinks something that you would never say, but your character does. All of those kind of questions. So what I would love to start with is actually just asking our podcasters if they have some experience they want to share where they had to write something that kind of made them uncomfortable to write it.

[Howard] The best example I can offer for me is the piece that I wrote for the… I've forgotten the title of it, the Robison Wells benefit anthology.

[Dan] Altered Perceptions?

[Howard] Altered Perceptions, called No, I'm Fine, in which I was writing about a bad mental health episode that I had. As I began writing, it began to hurt. I mean, it was actually physically painful. The sensation that I sometimes get when I'm depressed is that I'm so sad that I'm feeling pain. There's a physical pain associated with it. As I was writing, I was excited to sit down and write, because the story was in my head and I was good to go. But putting the words on the page was painful. Sandra and the kids, we were taking a little spring break at a cabin, and they had gone to see… They'd gone out to see the sights or something. They came back and Sandra took one look at me and was like, "What happened to you?" I said, "Well, I wrote for two hours and this piece is done and it's beautiful and please don't ask me to ever write this again because it hurts so much to do." After having done it, pretty much all of the other things I'm afraid to write about because they make me uncomfortable, I sort of shrug off and I'm like, "Eh. When the time comes I need to do 'em, I'll do 'em because I've already eaten the live spider today. Everything else is easy."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, to be clear for people who aren't familiar with that other anthology, this is kind of a first-person perspective on your own mental health issues and not wanting to have to rely on medication for them.

[Howard] Yup.

[Dan] Which was very painful to write.

[Howard] I can link to it in the writer notes. It's free for people to read now.

[Dan] Awesome. Brandon or Mahtab, have you got an experience of writing something that was uncomfortable or painful to write?

[Mahtab] Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. A few years ago, a friend, a writer friend, had asked me to contribute to an anthology. This is the only nonfiction piece that I've ever written. But it was about stories about fitting into Canada as an immigrant. I was like, "Yes, sure, no problem. I'll write it." But as I actually started writing it, I just found myself being so uncomfortable because there were so many painful things about fitting into Canada, not knowing the people, of course luckily language is not an issue. But just… Some of the stupid things that I did. I just remember that I really had to dig deep to be able to write my experience of how I spent the first year out here, not knowing people, working a job for a very long time and then… It was actually cathartic when I finally finished writing it, but I found myself cringing, very, very uncomfortable. But I think the main thing is I pushed through it, and it was one of the best things that I wrote.

[Dan] Oh, that's awesome.

[Brandon] For me, it's a little bit different of an experience I want to share. What I… Probably the most uncomfortable I've ever been when writing was when I tried to do it live in front of an audience. This was at Jordan Con. They… We were going to run a charity drive for Worldbuilders. Pat Rothfuss was the guest of honor at Jordan Con that year and I thought we'll just do a kind of live writing session where I brainstorm with a crowd and start writing a story and we did it on Twitch. Then, Pat would stop by and answer some questions, and I thought this would actually be easy for me for two reasons. One, in my class, we often do live brainstorming sessions where we come up with a story. So I thought I've done this before. Number two, I'm not very precious about my early draft. I released Warbreaker, one of my novels, chapter by chapter as I wrote it. It doesn't really bother me for people to read unpolished work of mine. So I thought these two things would combine together. I found it enormously uncomfortable to be writing… For whatever reason, it was the idea that there were now several thousand eyes looking over my shoulder at everything I did. Even when I present an unfinished draft to people, it's at least something that I'm aware of what it is, right? I'm comfortable with it and I say release this. As I'm writing, I'm not sure what's going to come out. I'm not sure how things are going to flow, how the words are going to look. It was really, really uncomfortable. To the point that I've never done another one again. Despite raising $1000 for Worldbuilders, I think, during that session, which was pretty good.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It shocked me by how uncomfortable I was.

[Dan] That makes a lot of sense to me. That is, for me, one of the most violating feelings in the world is knowing that somebody's reading over my shoulder as I am writing. If my wife comes into the office, or one of my kids comes in, I have to stop, because I can't write while someone's looking at it. It feels so wrong. I don't know how to explain it. Some of my own experiences… The one that I wanted to point out was my most recent novel, Ghost Station, which is a Cold War spy novel on Audible. There is a… Not a sex scene, but definitely a fade-to-black, these people are about to have sex, kind of scene. Which I've never written before. Even as lightweight and as preliminary as it was, it took a lot for me to put that in there. The explicit this is what's about to happen, we all know it, that's put this in this book. Maybe it's because I come from a primarily YA background, maybe it's because I am a very religious person, I don't know what it was, but it was hard for me to write that. It's interesting to me that it was harder for me to write that then to write all of the grisly murder stuff that's in my horror novels. But there are certain lines that are harder to cross then others. I think that's very individual.

[Dan] So, as you were working on these, as you had to write these uncomfortable things we've been talking about, what did you do? How did you psych yourself up? Or what did you tell yourself that says, "It's okay, I can do this?"

[Brandon] One thing, for me, while I was working on this thing, like, as it became uncomfortable, I had to keep telling myself, no one else thinks that this is awkward. Right? Like, no one is pointing and saying, "Oh, you typed that word wrong, how can you possibly…" All of these things that were going through my head, they weren't true. Despite them being valid emotions, I could counter them with a little bit of logic and saying, "Look, people are enjoying this. This is what they expected when they showed up. Yes, it's uncomfortable for me, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad experience."

[Mahtab] Yeah. For me, I don't think I've still managed to write… I mean, though I write mostly middle grade, I did attempt a YA a few years ago in which I did want to write some sex scenes, but it was so badly written and it… I mean, I'm lucky… I'm so glad that the book is not sold yet. But it was hard. So I started reading other books to see how well they did it. I love the way Diana Gabaldon writes her Outlander series. It comes so naturally, her… I mean, her sex scenes are fantastic. I was like… That's… I'm not cringing reading that because it's so well-written, and it's… It just sounds so natural. All I can say is I have still not discovered exactly how to do that because a great part of my culture is such that we did not have open discussions about this. We don't have talks about sex or body or feelings and stuff like that. So it's really hard as a writer to make myself do that. So, I'm still struggling with it, and maybe at some point in time, I might pull out my YA book again and see if I've become braver. But, at the moment, I'm so glad that I'm in the MG world and I don't have to cross that line.

[Dan] I want to ask Brandon, speaking of sex scenes, I remember when you were kind of given the reins of the Wheel of Time, there was a lot of discussion about this online. Because the Robert Jordan books did have… I mean, not like erotica, but there were sexual situations which up to that point readers did not think that you could write that kind of stuff. Outside of maybe one scene in the Mistborn series, you hadn't really written that kind of stuff. So, how did… What did you do to kind of get into that, to ease yourself over that obstacle?

[Brandon] Honestly, it wasn't hard for me. I have a certain threshold that I just personally am not likely to cross. Perhaps that will change. Wheel of Time had never crossed that, reading it, for me. Right? Wheel of Time does mostly fade to black. With some… A little bit of explicit things before. Actually, way more uncomfortable for me… I'd say the most uncomfortable scene for me to write in the Wheel of Time was a different one, which is… There is a scene where a character takes another character over his knee and spanks her.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Maybe it's a woman that takes a character over… Anyway. They… It's an intentional disempowerment of a female antagonist. He had written for me to do this scene. I think I probably would not have put it in if I were writing it today. It just made me uncomfortable, because I thought this feels like the wrong way to disempower a character. But this is a book series kind of from another generation. This sort of thing had been more common in the Wheel of Time. It's not something that I commonly put in my books. The sex scenes, two characters consenting who are in love, that didn't bother me. Right? Now I have different standards in my life, but I think that this is kind of what life is about. We choose our lines and we think about them and we may change them as we go through life. That's what life is for. Someone having different lines for me just means that they're looking at this differently. Certainly, I didn't have a problem writing those scenes. But something like that… Does that make sense? Like, in that case, I think it's a different thing. I think, looking back, because I was a newer author then, I think I would have gone to Harriet and said, "I just don't think this is the right way to disempower a character. I would rather not put this in the book." And see what she said. So there's an example of something uncomfortable that I'm writing that I think perhaps should have nudged me the other direction and not had it be in the book.

[Dan] That is great. I definitely want to have a discussion about that. But first, we need to do our book of the week. That's actually me. I'm doing not a book but a role-playing game. This is one that some of you may have heard of, because it has an Amazon series. It's called Tales from the Loop, which is a really neat kind of 80s nostalgia weird science fiction game. The reason that I thought it applied to this topic is because it doesn't have traditional hit points or damage or anything like that. But as bad things happen to your characters, you instead take conditions. Those conditions are things like upset, scared, exhausted, injured. Then the way that you get rid of those, the way you heal yourself, is that you have to go and have a conversation, a meaningful conversation with an important person in your life. Which just feels like a really fascinating way, in fiction, to deal with those kinds of trauma issues and, for players and authors to work through those through the kind of role-playing improvisation. So, Tales from the Loop. It's by Free League. It's a really great game. That's our book of the week.

[Howard] All my characters are going to be dead by act two.

[Laughter]

[Dan] All right. So, let's get back to what Brandon was talking about, because I think that's really interesting, this discussion of everyone has lines they won't cross, and what I really think were talking about in this episode is what happens when my characters have lines that are different from my own. I need, I have decided as an author that this person is going to use words that I don't or this person is going to do something that I would never do. That makes me uncomfortable, because those lines are different. So I want to ask, first, how do you make that decision when you're writing a story that you really want to include something that makes you uncomfortable? How and why do you decide that?

[Howard] Honestly, if the thought crosses my mind that this story needs this and such a scene, that's not the sort of scene that I'm comfortable writing because reasons. But if I had the thought that this is possibly the right sort of scene, then the odds are pretty good, at least in this stage of my career, the odds are pretty good that I need to trust my instinct and acknowledge that this book needs me to write something I'm not comfortable with. If, after I've written it, or after I've struggled to write it, I go back and look at it and I feel like, no, this is wrong, this has changed the tone of the story, or I didn't do it well, or I did it so badly I'm not allowed to say I didn't do it well… Which, I gave that two votes because that's what's most likely going to happen. Then, I'll revisit it and… Oh, I can't count the number of times in Schlock Mercenary I had an idea for a panel and realized I do not have the skill within the format I've created for myself to illustrate that the way my brain is illustrating it. So I'm going to move the camera. I've made that compromise a lot of times because I'm not as good at things as I want to be. But I'll never get good unless I try to write the scene, unless I try to draw the picture, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me, so I can step back from it and say, "Well, that was miserable. Did I do it well?"

[Mahtab] I got some very good advice from one of the editors that I worked with on a previous novel called The Tiffin. There were some scenes of violence against a child. I was having a bit of difficulty writing it. One of the… My mentor at that time said, "Think of yourself as an actor." An actor sometimes has to do a lot of different roles. They just have to inhabit the character. So inhabit your character's skin and write from the character's perspective so that… You basically have to forget yourself, you have to forget that you're the author writing the story. Inhabit what your characters are going through or the violence that is happening against your character, and just write as honestly as possible. Somehow, removing yourself from the equation and just writing from inhabiting the character's world helped me get through my barrier and write that particular scene. So, sometimes just have to do that. I don't know if that makes sense.

[Dan] No, it does. I think that's great advice. Brandon, do you have any last thoughts on this topic before we end?

[Brandon] It is something that I've thought about quite a bit as a writer. It's something I had to be comfortable with early in my career. I've told this story before, about my younger sister, Lauren, my youngest sister, when I was writing Mistborn. I mean, the cursing in Mistborn is very light, but I don't just generally curse at all, and my characters were. Why did I do that? It's because… I often come up with fantasy curses in my books. In this particular book, it was a gang of thieves and the fantasy curses were sounding silly coming out of these characters' mouths. It's something I'm very conscious of. In certain worldbuilding you can make, and with certain fantasy worlds, you can make them not sound silly. But sometimes they just do. Depending on how you're making them. That was ruining the tone of the story. I said, I'm just going to have to come to our world swears for these characters. Again, they're very light. Right? Most people wouldn't even consider them curses. But my little sister was one of my beta readers at like age 14. She crossed them all out. With a black marker.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] She was super offended. It was my first experience of this, people are going to be like, "Wow, Brandon is cursing." Right? Like, it is the weakest. But everyone again has their different lines. So I had to kind of ask myself. I said, "Well, it didn't bother me." I decided I was going to go forward with it. But there are certain curses I've just never used in my books. There are certain derogatory terms for people that I just don't use. I don't anticipate myself ever using them because of the way… I don't like what those words add to our society. So I don't. That's just kind of a personal choice on my part. So it's like I have two lines. I have a line of things that I don't generally do, but that I don't think actually are… That's not wrong for my characters to do. Then I have lines that I probably won't depict, at least in explicit detail, my characters ever doing. Because it's just not something that I want to write. It's odd, because I don't necessarily think these things are bad for other writers to write. But it's just not where I want to take my stories.

[Dan] Awesome. So, let's give you some homework to finish up. If you have decided that you want to put some kind of these elements into your fiction, but it's hard kind of getting over that first little hump, breaking the ice, here is an exercise. For this one, I'm using swearwords. I just want you to open a file and write down every swearword you know. Every cuss, every bad word you can think of. Put them into sentences, write them as dialogue. It will be uncomfortable, but it is going to kind of… Like I said, it's going to break that ice a little bit. Then, after that, delete the file, burn the paper you wrote it on, destroy it forever. It doesn't matter. Because it just kind of… Once you've written them down once, then later it will be much easier. Anyway, that was our episode. Thank you so much for watching. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/16/15-33-the-long-dark-second-act-of-the-soul/

Key Points: How do you make the second act interesting? When you're stuck, make something happen. Also, admit that it is going to be rewritten. Think about the second act as the fun part, where trailer scenes come from. Play with things, build fun scenes. Connect the dots! Know what you have to do, and find the most exciting ways to do it. Treat your chapters and scenes like episodes, with plenty of escalating miniature arcs. Act one, introduce things, Act three, blow them up. Act two, make trailer moments, show us a new context. Fill the second act with try-fail cycles. Foreshadowing moments, little lessons and pieces of information building towards the resolution. Use the inherent tension of how. Make the problem larger, involve more characters, expand the scope. Try-fail cycles can give the reader some awesome, too! It's not just a hamster wheel, more of a winding path towards the climax. Character change. Don't worry too much about this during writing, but use it for outlining, revision, and when you get stuck. Get your Muppet chest buster.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Howard named this episode, if you couldn't tell.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Second acts. Let's talk about second acts. We got a lot of questions about how to make middles of your story interesting. One question is, "I'm pantsing my SF book and started with a vague wouldn't it be a cool idea to begin with and went from there. I quite like how the character's progressing, but I'm basically stuck in the second act."

[Howard] The best advice that I've got for pantsers. It's in two parts. The first part is, when you are stuck like this, make something happen. Blow something up, burn something down, a couple of people get in a fight, just make something happen. The second is admit to yourself that this is going to need to be rewritten. That you may need to chop off the front, you may need to rewrite the ending, you may need to prune bits out of the middle. But, for me, when I pantsed, getting unstuck was way more important than sitting down and outlining the end. On several occasions, that exercise of getting unstuck… I'm going to make something really exciting happened… Reinvigorated me and I realized, "Oh. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's what I wanted to do." And off I go. The thing, in about half the cases, didn't end up exploding. It did something else.

[Dan] So, one of the things that made me change the way I think about second acts was I was reading a screenwriting book. It was talking about the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. In talking about the second act, it said, "This is the fun part where most of the scenes in the trailer come from." I thought I've never thought of it that way. This is the part where the characters have entered a new situation or they've gained some new powers, they're doing something new and they're playing with all of those new things. So now I try to put that into my second acts, and say, this isn't just the part you slog through to get to the end. This is where you get to play with all your fun toys and build the fun scenes that are going to end up in the trailer.

[Victoria] I mean, the hard part is, right… The first act, you get to introduce all your toys. The third act, you get to make them blow up. You get to put them where they're going to land. In the second act, somehow, you have to get between those two points. I mean, I fully admit, I am not a pantser. But, even before my extreme outlining days, where I am now like finding so much joy in execution, I would try and give myself what I used to call the connect-the-dots theory. Which I would try and make between 3 to 6 points in my story. Even if I didn't know where the story was going or how I was going to get between those two points, even having three meant that I had something I was moving towards. I could say, "Okay, here I am in the story, and I have this one spot, one thing I know I want to have happen before the end, and I am moving toward it. What's something that could happen between here and there?" And I figure out another dot. Now I've got half the distance between. I go, "What's something that could happen?" You're essentially playing a choose your own adventure game. I had a friend who used to say, "How do you make it worse?" Basically, like, she wrote a zombie novel, and the zombies chased these two kids up the tree. There up the tree and it seems like it's pretty bad. The question is how do you make it worse. She set the tree on fire. Right? Like, it's that moment. Sometimes it's just finding ways to play, but I do think this is the hard part. It can't just be play, because you also need to progress the story. Nothing is more frustrating than when you get to a really interesting book that has an amazing first act, you get to the second act, and all of a sudden, they're in the fire swamp, right? They're just like wandering through it, without any real purpose except to kill time.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] And maybe gain assets and like toys and things that they're going to need to fight the final battles.

[Dan] So, let's look at Star Wars. I'm old enough that when I say Star Wars, I mean Episode IV. Okay? Act Two Is the Death Star. The things that have to happen narratively are we need to rescue the princess and we need to lose our mentor. Both of those are opportunities for big set pieces. We lose the mentor, and it's not just well, we're going to… They die in the fire swamp. It's a lightsaber battle. That's the only lightsaber battle we get in that movie. Rescuing the princess… There's this whole gun chase, and then they get thrown into a pit with a monster that tries to eat them, and then they drown and all these things. So, knowing what you have to do, and then finding the most exciting way of accomplishing that is kind of what the second act is for.

[Brandon] I think readers/viewers are really sensitive to the second act thing, without knowing it.

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] This is one of these things that, just by consuming media, you pick up on. I've noticed that a lot of the movies that people love and the sequels that people love are all ones that are surprisingly good in the second act. Right? Star Wars is a great example. But even when people say, what are the best sequels of all time? It's always the second movie that you expect to be bad because the first one was good, and we've been trained that the middle's the weakest. Yet, the best Star Wars movie, a lot of people say it's the second one. The best Godfather movie, The second one. The best Toy Story's movie is the second one. I think this is partially because people are expecting it to be bad, and it's good. Those expectations are then subverted. If you can do a good second act in your story, I think that that will just make the readers unconsciously say, "Wow, this is fantastic. I don't expect this to be the most exciting part, and it is."

[Victoria] I mean, this is one of the reasons we discussed in a previous episode that I was on where we disc… I discussed treating my chapters and scenes like episodes. I think it's in part to help me avoid the lull of the second act by creating miniature arcs within the story that bring their own satisfaction, and then stitch together into something. To me, a part of it, and we can talk about this more later, is I pretend there is no second act. I don't break it into three. I find that very, very stressful. I work forward from the beginning and backwards from the end, and I populate it with escalating arcs, because I think we put so much pressure on the second act that it becomes a place of dread. The middle of a book is already a place of dread because it's when you're most likely to quit writing it. It's when the shiny new idea sweeps in, it's when you're full of distraction, and you're beginning to get bored because everything's becoming familiar and you have to begin delivering on promises that you made in the first act. It's a very treacherous place to be. So I do think maybe also like take some of the pressure away of thinking of it as the 2A and 2B, of thinking of it as this central part of your narrative which has to hold the whole roof up. Start to look at those exciting episodes like in Star Wars where there are things that need to be accomplished and there's a very exciting way to do those things.

[Howard] Something you said earlier, Victoria, about the first act is where we're introducing all the things, and that's fine and that shiny. The last act is where we're blowing them up, or there blowing each other up. For me, if I don't break things into three acts, I will continue to introduce things through Act Two, and that breaks the story. Because it just… It bloats in bad ways. So it's useful for me to think about it as if we're describing the items in a room during Act One. Act Two, we change the lighting in the room, and now everything looks different. It's the same thing, we're just now seeing them all in a different light and were tripping over them. It's now whatever. Then, Act Three, the house is on fire. I don't know. It's a dumb metaphor.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The idea here is that the point at which you stop introducing things structurally kind of defines the second act. So that's a point for you to create these trailer moments, like Dan was saying.

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] By changing the lighting, by changing the environment, by changing the context. That'll make it a lot more exciting, I think, than just a fire swamp.

[Dan] One of the reasons I think people get intimidated by Act II is because Act I sets stuff up, Act 3 resolves it. What do I do… I'm treading water for half my book. So one of the things that I try to do is make sure the second act is filled with try-fail cycles. It's not that my characters know they have to wait to a certain point before they can end the story. They spend all of second act trying to end the story.

[Brandon] It should always be upping the stakes and escalating. Your sense of progress for that middle is that things are getting worse or the stakes are getting bigger and bigger.

[Victoria] I think of… So, obviously, we referenced the fire swamp. The Princess bride is one of my favorite examples of an archetypal narrative that follows this very, very well. You meet your players by the end of Act One, then spend Act Two with Wesley and the Princess trying to flee, being continuously failed, being abductive, being separated, trying to reassemble. We reassemble the teams by the end of Act Two, and then in Act Three, we have the fight in the war and the conclusion. It's a beautifully simple story. But it's a very satisfying story across all three acts. It starts… One of the other things that Act Two gets to do is introduce the foreshadowing moments, the little lessons and pieces of information that we're going to need in that resolution. So in a… I always say it's like it's getting all of your weapons together, it's gathering all of your forces. These are beautiful moments in Act Two, through that try-fail cycle, to achieve the motifs and the little things which are going to come back around in Act Three.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You actually, Dan, have a book you were talking about how great the second act is.

[Dan] Yeah. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which I talked about a while ago. Tiffany Aching is my favorite Terry Pratchett series by a mile. Wintersmith is an interesting one to bring up in a structural episode, because it has a very weird structure. But its second act is its strongest one by far. Its second act is basically Tiffany Aching is apprenticed to an older witch named Miss Treason. Miss Treason is very weird and she's very dark and she's very spooky. It's very slice of life-y. We know from the prologue that there's going to be this big evil problem with the Wintersmith. The third act, we deal with the Wintersmith. In the middle, it's just Tiffany learning how to be a witch. She will go through kind of the daily life and she will learn various lessons. It's so powerfully done because it is framed with her arriving there and it ends with Miss Treason… Spoiler warning… She dies. We get her funeral. We know she dies chapters before she does, because she's a witch, so she knows everything. But the way that it is built, I think really is a fantastic example of how to do a powerful second act.

[Brandon] So, let me ask about this. Along those second act ideas. I feel like it can get frustrating for a reader in that second act because it feels like you're going nowhere, as we've mentioned, but also the heroes, the protagonists, are often failing over and over again. How do you keep a sense of momentum when you're failing over and over again? The reader knows, in the back of their head, because they have the page count, that they can't succeed here. So, how do you work with that as authors?

[Victoria] I like to break it up. I like to break up the literal team. I often write ensemble casts. That's one of my favorite times, where they get separated and they're finding their way not only toward the goal but back towards each other. I like to put them in peril. I like it because you know, with so much of the book left, that they're going to find a way through that, that there's going to be things that happen. Then, the question becomes how. I think that there is an inherent tension in the how of something, in the understanding that there's a lot of book left, what feels like it might be a climactic moment is almost like a tease. Then it becomes a lot like, "How are they going to pull this off? How are they going to achieve this goal?" I think we can sometimes underestimate the inherent tension of how.

[Dan] One of… So the book and movie Crazy Rich Asians does something very cool in its second act. I think one of the ways to do what you're talking about is to expand the scope, use the second act to expand the scope of what we're looking. The problem itself gets larger or it starts to involve more characters. Crazy Rich Asians does this with the cousin Astrid. A lot of the plot focuses around the main character trying to fit in better with the very Asian sensibilities of the fiancé's family. She doesn't have any allies. So, second act throws Astrid at her, the cousin who A) becomes a powerful ally, but B) is rejecting a lot of the very Asian attitudes. Becomes much more independent and much more Western in the way that she views her own family. So it's exploring the same themes from a different direction and including more characters, but all in a way that eventually is going to give the main character the tools she needs in the third act.

[Howard] I think that the try-fail cycle model, Dan, that… Or… Yeah, Dan, it was you that had described the try-fail cycle, coupled with the idea of scenes from the trailers. Yes, the viewer… I remember my son, we were watching a movie and I asked him… I just turned to him and said, "You think their plan's going to work?" He was 10. He says, "If their plan works, we don't have a whole movie."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was so proud. I was so proud. I wept in that moment. It had nothing to do with the film. But the reader knows that the plan isn't going to succeed, because they can tell how far through the book we are. They can tell through the page count. So, the try-fail cycle has to give us… Has to give us one of these trailer moments. Has to give us some awesome. We should come out of it not with a sense of, "Oh, that didn't work," but with a sense of, "Hah! That went terribly, but now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Then we're cheering during the second act.

[Brandon] Well, I always also like the structure that in the second act, you try something, you succeed, and then you realize…

[Howard] You've made it worse.

[Brandon] You've made it worse. This happens in the story structure… What is it, the seven points, the nine points?

[Dan] Seven point.

[Brandon] The seven point, that Dan really likes. When I was reading about that once, there's this broadening of goals during the second act, where you realize the thing that you wanted, even if you achieve it, is not the thing you wanted all along. Suddenly, you realize, "Oh, by achieving this thing, we are in much bigger trouble." To reference Diehard again, "Oh, the FBI's here, everything's okay. Oh, crap, that was part of the plan." Those sorts of moments are really great.

[Victoria] Yeah. I agree. I think that it's also… When we talk about try-fail cycle, I think there's an erroneous visual that happens, of like a hamster wheel. That's not what it is at all, because when you get forward and you realize something's wrong, and when you fall backwards, you gain some advantage. There's always something happening, which is giving you kind of a winding path towards your climax.

[Dan] Well, I'm glad that you brought up the kind of the character change that can happen in the second act. Because sometimes that is I'm about to get what I want and realize that'll make everything worse. But just as often, it can be… The second act is where they change their attitude. They realize the goal they been pursuing is actually bad, and they decide to pursue a different one. That is going to change the focus of the rest of the story.

[Victoria] Can I say one last thing before we run out of time? I also just… I'm going to be the devil's advocate here of I don't think about these things when I'm writing.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Like we're articulating things in a way that I do not sit down and think, "Oh, I'm here in the second act, I better think about the way that my character is going to evolve." I think part of that is like, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, there is an intuitive level here. I think it can be really overwhelming when it becomes a codified level. Like, yes, these are things which you should be able to analyze, perhaps in the revision cycle or if you get stuck, but I think it's also okay if you're operating on a draft level in an intuitive way, and you don't feel like you're stopping and checking your map for these kinds of things every step.

[Brandon] That's really great to bring up. It can't be reinforced too much. The idea that a lot of what we do, we're doing by instinct. The more I've written, the more I am conscious of these things during outlining and revision. I still, when I'm actually writing, am not focused on this nearly as much as it might sound that we are. But when I wrote my early books, I wasn't focused on it at all. I was just learning how to write a story. Some of those books got published, and people loved them. Even though I wasn't as conscious about it. It's talking about it, it's teaching it really that forces you to analyze these things and look at what you're doing.

[Victoria] I just refer to it as developing an internal story monster, which is like a tiny Jim Henson-esque monster that lives in your chest and feeds on narrative. The more that you watch and the more that you read and the more that you write, the more you teach that internal demon figure what works and what doesn't, and the more…

[Howard] You've given me a Muppet chest buster.

[Victoria] Exactly. Exactly.

[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that visual. Thank you.

[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] I do. I just turn the page from it, which was a very silly… Ah, there it is. Pick your favorite book or movie, or favorite entertainment of whatever kind. Identify where the second act begins, where the second act ends. Then, with a notebook in hand, make a list of the things that you love about that second act. Now, if your favorite thing, the second act is your least favorite part about it, make a list of the things that allowed you to muscle through the second part in order to get to the ending that you love. But, this is homework that involves writing. Because you're going to take that list of the things that you love, and you're going to try to map that onto the second acts where you are stuck.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/19/15-29-barbie-pre-writing-with-janci-patterson-and-megan-walker/

Key points: Barbie Pre-Writing? Start with a rough outline, pick dolls for the characters, and role-play the story, beginning to end with dolls. Role-play, then take notes, then write. This really helps with characters, it gets you immersed in their heads. You'll get new scenes, characters will reveal things, and it's more natural and suits our characters. The dolls, or miniatures, act as a focal point for the characters. As for collaboration, we come up with ideas together, we text a lot, we use a notes file in OneNote, and we build a rough outline. Then we game it out, both the plotted scenes, and others that appear organically. Then we take notes, and decide what we really need to include, and who's going to write what. One big advantage to collaborative writing and role-play gaming is the synergy, the way it sparks the imagination.

[Transcriptionist Note: I have probably confused Janci and Megan at some points. My apologies for any mistakes.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 29.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have two special guest stars, Janci Patterson and Megan Walker.

[Megan] Hi.

[Janci] I am so excited we got to make Brandon say Barbie Pre-Writing.

[Megan] Yeah. This was a big moment in our lives.

[Brandon] Janci is a long-time friend of the podcast, and a long-time friend and colleague of ours. We are glad to have you back, and Megan, your first time.

[Megan] Yes, I am.

[Brandon] I want to start off by saying, "What the heck?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Dan told me the title of this, and said, "We're just going to call it this." What?

[Janci] So, we, for pre-writing… We are co-writers. We write romance and epic fantasy together. With our epic fantasy, we have a third co-writer, our friend Warren. Before we write the book, but after we have a rough idea of what the books are going to be about and who the characters are, we have entire rooms full of Barbie dioramas and we pick out dolls for the characters and then we role-play through the entire story, beginning to end, with the dolls. Sometimes, if it doesn't go the way we want, we do it again.

[Megan] And it's super fun.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do you film this?

[No]

[Janci] We don't want to watch or listen to ourselves. No.

[Brandon] Do you take notes? How do you…

[Janci] Afterwards, usually. Not after each individual scene, because we are so into the story, we just kind of keep going, keep going. But usually it… Like, either later that night, or like days later, we'll take notes of the main things we remember from the scene, how the flow of it went. That also keeps us from writing down each and every little individual thing that we said, because not all of that's going to be good in a book. You know…

[Megan] It's all improv, right.

[Janci] Sometimes a scene will go five hours, because we love it. That's going to be 10 pages in the book. So we don't need everything that we said. So, mostly, between the two of us, what we can remember…

[Megan] What we remember as being exceptionally good from that scene.

[Howard] I am remembering being a big brother, and what a horrible person I was, and how fortunate we all are that none of this was happening where I was nearby, because…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Brandon] I have so many questions. This is really cool.

[Janci] Awesome. That's what we're here for.

[Dan] This is super cool.

[Brandon] This is the best. So, what do you find this does for you? Like, what do you get? What is the… How is it different to pre-write this way?

[Janci] The thing that we get most is the characters. Because we… Essentially, we're sitting there, and… People who don't role-play, what it is is we sit there and one of us is one of the characters and one of us is the other. Megan takes all of the girls, I take all the guys, we write a lot of romance, so usually it's… Most of what we're doing. We sit there, and we set up the scenes, and then I will talk as if I am my character and she will talk as if she's her character, and we go and we just have a conversation. It gets you so deeply immersed in the character's head, because for a while, you are that person. We find all sorts of reactions that we wouldn't have necessarily thought of, like, intellectually, that are just a basic gut instinct.

[Megan] Yeah, like, leads to new scenes that, like, we'll do a scene, and then will realize, like, it went totally different than we anticipated it going, and, oh, no, now my character, she needs to go talk to her mom about this, where… Or she needs to go do this, and that wasn't something we anticipated. But when you're so firmly in the character's head, you know what they're wanting to do.

[Janci] It also gives us a lot of moments where it's like, "They just destroyed our entire plot, what are we going to do now?"

[Megan] That happens a lot.

[Janci] One of the things we hear a lot about our books is that we're so brave, that we let our characters just talk out things that would have been, in a normal romance novel, the whole conflict, and it's over in a couple of scenes. Then we have a different conflict. It's not because we're so brave, it's because our characters talked about…

[Megan] Our characters talked about, "What are we going to do now?"

[Janci] No, I want to tell him this thing that's supposed to be a secret.

[Howard] That's kind of what people are like when they're allowed to talk.

[Janci] Right. Right. Exactly. We find that's kind of what happens naturally, and yet, every time, we tend to have the tendency of plotting these things out, thinking that the characters will be able to hold this information back.

[Megan] Then they destroy our book.

[Janci] They destroy our book, almost every time.

[Megan] But we come up with a better one, because it's more natural and more like thorough…

[Janci] And suits our characters and…

[Howard] Okay. So I have to ask, could you do this without the dioramas? Could you do this without the dolls? Could you do this without either? I'm not asking because I think those are unnecessary. I want to know what those bring because that expands my business expense budget…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For Star Wars toys…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] By like a billion dollars.

[Janci] The dioramas and such add a lot to the budget. Yeah.

[Dan] One of the big things they bring is… I follow Janci on Facebook, because we've been friends forever. I love all the pictures. She's like, "We're plotting a new book. Here's some dude with a haircut and like…"

[Gasp]

[Dan] It's awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Janci] So, I've found that at least… I mean, the dioramas I feel like are the less necessary part of it. I mean, it's awesome to have it, and it adds a lot to a scene. But for me, I feel like… I personally have always felt like I needed the dolls to have almost this like focal point so it's slightly removed from me. I think it's potentially a self-consciousness thing, or potentially… I'm not sure exactly, but for some reason having the dolls… I use to actually do this with my friend Warren, the one who's working epic fantasy with us. We used to do this, when we were like teenagers, we would use miniatures from like D&D, that kind of thing. We didn't know how to play D&D, we didn't know anyone who play D&D, but we got the little miniatures and we essentially just played Barbies and created stories with them. But I've always just use something as like a focal point for this is my character.

[Brandon] This is so cool. It really is.

[Janci] It is so cool.

[Brandon] Let me ask you this. When you sit down to write, do you each write your… The character you are playing? Or do you not?

[Janci] Not necessarily.

[Megan] Not necessarily.

[Janci] We tend to divide it that way just because it's fun for us to write our own characters. But if it comes down to it and there's… We need to get the book done and there's stuff, one of us isn't going to be able to get to it, then we write each other's characters. That's no big deal.

[Megan] Yeah, we're able to do that.

[Brandon] Oh, okay.

[Megan] Because we also, one advantage too, you get to know the other person's characters as well...

[Janci] So well.

[Megan] When we talk about it so much in the scenes and everything.

[Janci] After the scenes, we'll sit down and be like, "This is what was going on in my character's head that they didn't say." So we both know all of the motivations that are happening, even if they didn't actually make it into the scene.

[Brandon] I've heard a lot of writers say that it's really handy to speak out loud your dialogue, or even get a table read, right, of a given scene, where everyone, you get several friends, you each take a character, you read them through. This goes even further than that.

[Janci] It does.

[Brandon] I can only imagine. I wish Mary Robinette were here, because…

[Janci] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Being a puppeteer, she would just love this idea, I'm sure.

[Howard] I actually have two questions. One of them is related to I wish Mary Robinette were here. That's that when you are holding the dolls and having them talk, are you moving the arms and posing them and…

[Janci] So, we mostly set them in the dioramas and let them be still. Then, if one of them is going to move, like, since we do a lot of romance, if one of them puts the arm around the other, we'll either say he does this, or we'll move the dolls and have them do that. But we don't, like, move them and articulate them.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Megan] Usually they just set there. Yeah.

[Howard] The second question com… Not completely unrelated. When you are writing, do you ever find yourself needing to go get the doll or look at the diorama as a mnemonic? Is there stuff that you don't remember until you went back and looked at…

[Dan] The visual aids.

[Janci] Not for me, usually. No, I think that… I think acting out the scenes actually, like, sticks them in my head better anyway, just as a visual thing, personally.

[Megan] When we say we take notes, sometimes it takes us an hour to take notes on a scene, because we're sitting there going, "Oh, and remember they said this. Oh, before that, she said that." Because it's so stuck in our heads.

[Janci] One thing that the dolls are really good for, though, is clothes. I'm personally terrible at describing clothes and books. But now I just describe what they were wearing.

[Laughter]

[Megan] You have all the outfits.

[Janci] It's amazing.

[Megan] So we have a vast wardrobe for them.

[Janci] Both in epic fantasy and contemporary. So…

[Brandon] Well, let's stop and talk about some of these books themselves for the books of the week. Tell us about some of the books you've done this with.

[Janci] Well, the first… I guess the one that… Contemporary romance series. The first one of that is called The Extra. This one is basically a girl, named Gabby, who lives in LA and her roommate is an actress on a soap opera set, and she ends up becoming, Gabby ends up becoming an extra on that soap opera set. Then, basically, the book is just… It's a fun rom com, basically. All the hijinks that take… That happened behind the scenes are just as crazy as the stuff that's on the soap opera itself. So that's a lot of fun. And a lot of fun to game out.

[Megan] You can get the first book for free on e-book retailers and the second book for free by joining our reader's list. So.

[Brandon] My wife has been consuming these voraciously.

[Yay!]

[Brandon] So she loves them.

[Oh, that makes me happy.]

[Howard] And those are by Janci Patterson, Megan Walker, and…

[Brandon] [garbled]

[No, just the two of us. Yeah.]

[Janci] So, the other series will be coming out next summer, so by the time this airs, they'll be coming out. They are under the pseudonym Cara Witter, since there's three of us. We're not putting three names on the book. But the first book is called Godfire. It's in epic fantasy about a girl whose father is a dictator, and she doesn't realize that he has used dark blood magic to make her. So she's not actually a person, she is his weapon. Those will also be available, the first book for free and then the second one for free with our reader's list everywhere.

[Brandon] Awesome. For those of our listeners who are interested in this, the business side of it, these two are very shrewd in the way they've been approaching this with, you hear, they are doing what, one book a month?

[Janci] In the first year.

[Brandon] For an entire year. You get the first one for free and the second one for the mailing list. It's just a really shrewd way to do the marketing, so… If you ever want to talk about marketing your books…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We don't have time on this podcast, but grab one of these two and chat with them.

[Brandon] I want to ask you right now about collaboration. Like, Janci, you used to write all your books by yourself. Then, I remember when you came to me and said, "I've discovered collaboration and I will never go back."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What… Tell me about your process, both of you, and why you like it so much?

[Megan] Oh, boy. Keep the faith.

[Janci] We start with the Barbies, so our process… I collaborate actually with several different people. All of those collaborations are awesome. The great thing about collaborations is you don't have to do all the sucky parts yourself. There's somebody else to bounce things off of and somebody else who's just as invested as you are, which is awesome. Our partnership, we pretty much all have our hands… Both have our hands in everything. We come up with the ideas together, we text… Our text chain is a million miles long, and we text like 100 times a day back and forth. I had an idea about this. I had an idea about that. Oh, that works with this. When we're smart, we move it into our notes file on OneNote that we can both see. When we're not, a year later we're like, "We had ideas." They're buried in our text chain. Then we get together and we talk through it, a rough outline.

[Megan] Then, usually after that point, we end up with… Once we have sort of the rough outline, again. Knowing that most likely our game is going to destroy it, and we're going to have to reconfigure things. We do end up like gaming out the scenes we have plotted, and then whatever scenes kind of come from, organically from, that. Then we take the notes and basically… Usually we go through the notes and kind of decide, like… We kind of turn off our gameplaying brains and turn on our writers brains and be like, "Okay, what aspects of this don't need to be in the book." Like, what…

[Janci] There are always great things that our gaming brain thought needed to be in the book, and sometimes we even put in a note, "This needs to go in the book." Then our outlining brains are like, "That needs to go in the book?"

[Megan] That was not good.

[Janci] No. So, yes. Then we do that. Then, we usually like split up the chapters that we're going to write, again, usually, by the characters that we are, but not always, depending on what other things we're working on.

[Brandon] So, the romances are mostly two viewpoint romances?

[Janci] Yeah. The first one isn't. But the ones thereafter have been. Yeah.

[Megan] It's not always split evenly, even in the book. So, sometimes one character has fewer chapters than the other.

[Brandon] Are these… I believe, where each book is a different character, set of characters, that are related tangentially to the first book?

[Janci] Right. We're actually doing both. Kind of a sequel for romance. We have… The first book is one character, the second book is her roommate. Then the third book is the main character's brother. But then we get to book 6… Somewhere around book 6, we go back to our main character. She has kind of a love story. She hasn't broken up with her boyfriend, they're together, but it's kind of a story about their relationship.

[Megan] Like… Yeah, what they're like now, a few years later, and what issues have come up in their relationship and stuff like that. So we go back and revisit some of the original characters and…

[Howard] But, by expanding the core POV cast, you've increased the range of business expense for Barbies.

[Laughter]

[Janci] That's always my goal. Get more Barbies.

[Howard] I'm sorry to keep coming back to that [garbled toys]

[Janci] Barbies, if you don't know, aren't cheap when they're collector Barbies.

[Dan] Yeah. But on this note, it's probably worth pointing out that there's a lot of ways to do this...

[Oh, yeah]

[Dan] Without the visual aids, or with different visual aids. A lot of authors use role-playing campaigns or games. There's actually a role-playing game called Microscope that is… It's not narrative, it's worldbuilding. You, as a role-playing group, come up with a world as part of playing the game. I talked to a handful of other authors that use that when they're starting a new series, and that helps do their worldbuilding for them. So, this kind of collaborative gaming process of outlining is pretty common. There's a lot of different flavors of it.

[Brandon] I actually know some people who are doing a triple-A videogame at one of the big studios that they have, part of their workday is a role-playing session in the world before they go to actually building it, because that's really expensive in video games, getting all the architecture done. They're role-playing it to find all of the problems with the worldbuilding…

[Mmmm]

[Brandon] That they think the players will eventually spot, and try to fix those before they sit down. They're doing it through a role-playing session.

[Howard] Because it's cheaper to play D&D than to work.

[Brandon] Yeah, it is.

[Laughter]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like…

[Dan] Unless you're the guy paying the checks.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] One thing that I feel like is a huge advantage to this, at least for me, because I've written books by myself before as well and had that experience, but there's just this synergy of not only writing collaboratively, I feel, but also in the gaming itself, that it just sparks the imagination. There someone else who I kind of like play off of, and it just, for me, it really helps.

[Janci] Especially with the comedy.

[Megan] Oh, the comedy. Yeah.

[Janci] With our… Even in our epic fantasy that is darker, we have some comedic elements, and when we… We know when we really have something when we do a scene and we're both in stitches and we can't finish the scene because we're laughing so hard, and then when we go to take the notes, we're remembering and we're laughing so hard…

[Megan] We start laughing.

[Janci] Again, and we stop taking the notes, and then when we outline it. We just find this so hilarious. Then we know that we've hit on something that's going to be really good.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Well, you now own what is probably the most distinctive title of a Writing Excuses episode ever.

[Yes!]

[Brandon] We are out of time. Do you guys have a writing prompt, maybe, you could give our audience?

[Janci] So, not that this counts as so much of a writing prompt, but this…

[Howard] Homework.

[Janci] Okay. It counts. But the suggestion is, if you're a writer, take a scene from your book or a scene you're wanting to write or something and get some toys and a friend and get like, Barbies or miniatures from a D&D or like your kid's old action figures. Your old He-Man action figures…

[Dan] My kid's? Can I just use my own?

[Janci] Whatever. You can use your own.

[Dan] Okay.

[Janci] Basically, find a friend who's willing to do this with you, and act out the scene.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] That is great.

[Dan] This is a great time to point out that Brandon and I are working on our second collaboration. We need to borrow Janci's Barbie collection at some point.

[Janci] You can come play in the Barbie room.

[Megan] Yeah, you're invited.

[Brandon] Thank you, audience, at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] Thank you, Janci and Megan, for being on the podcast. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go play with your Barbies.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/10/15-19-as-you-know-this-episode-is-about-exposition/

Key Points: As you know, Bob, maid-and-butler dialogue is all about exposition, and not very convincing. The good news is that at least you're thinking about exposition. Levels? First, dialogue is more fun to read than an infodump. Second, natural dialogue, not exposition dummies. Third! Too much dialogue, using it for everything. Answer? Symbols! Make sure your scenes have a plot movement as well as dialogue. Only tell the reader what they need to know, and tie it to conflict and character. Context! Be careful not to add actions and beats to every line of dialogue. Write your dialogue outward from the point. Why are these people having this conversation? All conversation is combat, is conflict. Focus on the details of what each character wants and notices. Use the person coming into the conversation late to fast-track exposition. How do you add description and exposition? Write five sentences, then pare it down. Try emulating screenwriting, setting the scene with just enough for a director or artist to know what to do, what the mood needs to be. Consider spatial intimacy. You don't paint an entire city, you paint one room, one street. You may build an entire house and decorate it, but give the reader just a glimpse, enough for them to infer the rest from the reflection off your iceberg.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 19.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're Bob.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm not Bob.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As you know, Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sorry. That's the classic, as you know, Bob. The maid-and-butler dialogue where two people talk about a thing that both of them already understand, but they talk about it so they can exposite to the reader. So, fair reader, listener, if you didn't get the joke…

[Dan] Don't do that.

[Howard] Yeah, don't do that. If you didn't get the joke, now you do.

[Victoria] Can we talk about how meta it is that you just like explained the entire show?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Expositioned it… Expositioned it. Well, because it's… Never mind.

[Brandon] It's actually kind of nice to see in my students. As you know, Bob, or whatever, I call it maid-and-butler dialogue, it's nice to see in one way because they're at least thinking about exposition, right? Like, your first level up is when you realize dialogue is just way more fun to read than a big infodump. So I'll put this into dialogue. But then, your next level up is realizing that dialogue needs to feel natural and you need to construct a scene in such a way that the dialogue feels like it's coming from real people rather than exposition dummies there to give the exposition.

[Dan] If you want to see this done wrong, CSI Miami was shocking sometimes at the level that two forensic scientists would sit there and recite textbooks at each other while looking at a body or whatever.

[Brandon] Now, most of our questions, or most of our episodes this year are coming from questions from readers. There's actually a really… Readers? Listeners. There's a really great question starting this off, which is the next level up moment. This listener says, "I've noticed that a lot of my scenes are little more than conversations, typically with other actions used to set in a secondary capacity, if at all. Back story, plot revelations, growth, all shown through conversations." I'm going to assume this character… This read…

[Howard] This listener.

[Brandon] This listener, noticing that, is not writing maid-and-butler dialogue. They're writing good dialogue, but they're noticing, I'm doing… Making my dialogue do a ton of heavy lifting on this. I've noticed this in my own writing as well. So it's something that I worry about.

[Dan] So, this is something that can be handled really well with symbols. I don't mean symbolism in the AP English sense. I mean that you assign a visible thing or an action to a thing. The really obvious one is Luke, you've turned off your targeting computer. Right? We don't have to come out and say Luke has learned that he needs to use the Force. Because he turns off his targeting computer, and everyone goes, "Oh. Okay, I understand what this means. They establish that earlier. With the blast shield down, I can't even see. How am I supposed to fight? We get that same thing, reversed. Another really beautiful one is actually in the movie Toy Story where the first scene is we're going to spy on the little boy's birthday party and see what the new present is. It's all… Woody's in charge, and he's doing this thing, and he wants to make sure he maintains his position as the favorite toy. The final scene is that exact scene re-done, but now he has a friend. Now he's with Buzz, and they're partners. So without coming out and saying, "I have learned the value of other people and that friendship is important and I don't have to be the favorite toy to be valued," we get all of that through the use of this really stark visual symbol that just relays it to us.

[Victoria] Two things. I personally feel like this is a plot problem. I feel like this is a reflection, if the only purpose of your scene is this dialogue, then you need to separate out the verbal content of the conversation from what you're trying to accomplish in a plot sense of the scene. If the only forward movement in the scene is through the dialogue, then I think your scene is not working as a holistic scene, moving the overarching plot forward as well. I come from the anime school of worldbuilding. The anime school of worldbuilding states, basically, we do not infodump because we don't tell you anything except what you need to know going in. Everything that you learn, be it dialogue or exposition, is tied to conflict and character. So when I see scenes like this when I'm teaching or when I'm reviewing for people, and I see these large chunks of conversation, then that starts to happen in a vacuum in my mind. They're just hovering there in space. So I start to ask those authors, those writers, to start separating out the two lines, almost as if you're making a song, and you would separate the musical instruments or separate the lines and say, "What else is this scene accomplishing?" Because the nice thing about conversation, the beautiful thing about dialogue, it can happen in a context and then some. You get twice as much out of your scenes when there's a physical underlying context to the scene as well as a conversational context.

[Brandon] Let me ask you this, though. One of the things that I've just started becoming may be hyperaware of, too aware of, is that people using non-dialogue beats and actions and things in order to replace writing better dialogue.

[Howard] Well…

[Brandon] It gets really bothersome when I see my students and every line of dialogue is modified by a sentence saying what they're doing. They've learned that if someone slams their coffee cup down, it helps add an exclamation point. So every character with every beat is doing something.

[Victoria] But that is the equivalent of somebody thinking that they're revising by moving commas around. That is not actually fixing the motion of the scene, right? Those are crutches of the scene. So I actually think it's a lot better, I'll advise students to create a block of the scene and then a block of dialogue. Like, work us between the two. I actually think that a paragraph of the scene bracketing the dialogue is a lot more efficient than slicing up your bracketing scenes as notes throughout the dialogue.

[Brandon] I tend to agree with that as well. I like it, personally, with reading when you go into dialogue, the dialogue has been tightly worked so that it just gets across emotions and things without… With as very little outside the dialogue is possible, and then you transition back into motion and…

[Victoria] It also comes down… I know this is a tangential thing that relates to this, but let's talk about dialogue for a moment. Because I'm shocked by how many people think that when you write dialogue, you begin at the beginning and you go to the end. When, like, the truth is most conversations have a point. So when I write dialogue, I build outward from the point. What is the thing that the two or three or four people engaged in this conversation are trying to get to? I think when you build out from the point, instead of the hello, hello, goodbye, goodbye of it, then you start to understand why they're having the conversation. Really, like, we don't have conversations in a void. We have conversations in a context. So often when I see a lot of dialogue happening, a lot of information being conveyed this way, I start to wonder why there's an absence of context. Sometimes the context can replace some of the dialogue. Absolutely, it's a balance that you find in the writing. Like so many things that we talk about, you learn the right balance by doing it wrong and by doing it right. But I think… I mean, this is the time where you have to remember that all writers are readers. Find the things that really work. Find the good examples of it, and study them, the way that you would study anything.

[Howard] I think it's important to recognize that… And I use this as a punchline in a Schlock Mercenary strip a decade ago. Good Lord. The punchline was, "Captain, all conversation is combat."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The Captain's response is along the lines of I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot more now. The idea that we converse because there is a… There are competing ideas, and at the end of the conversation, those ideas will have changed in status. At a almost theological level, the religion of the sharing of information, conversation is conflict.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Howard] Even if we agree, there is conflict here, because if there wasn't conflict, we wouldn't need to talk. So, as you know, Bob, is broken because there is no conflict, there's no reason for me to tell you what you know. But, if I'm saying a thing… If I'm trying to explain a piece of worldbuilding to someone who doesn't know it, the disagreement… The conflict there is not I am providing information that you need. The more interesting conflict is I'm providing information that you don't believe, and you're now going to refuse or refute. It becomes an argument. You layer that atop character conflict, atop other things, and suddenly… I will read page after page after page of that, because it can be fun.

[Victoria] I think the pointedness of exposition is important. Either the fact that in dialogue, no two people come together to have the same conversation. We each come to a conversation with an idea that we want to convey to the other. So often, what's the interesting part of dialogue is when we miss each other in the conversation, when each of us is trying to basically have a monologue to the other one, and we have to have that collision point. I also, on the character building exposition side of it, I feel strongly that… This so often gets put into first person, but when you think about writing, regardless of whether your writing third person or first person or second person, you are writing a perspective. Every single character will notice different things. Every single character that you write is moving through their world and their environment differently. They see the world differently, they have different philosophies, and they're going to notice different things. So often, unless you're writing a purely omniscient world, you can tie the details of the things that we notice, of the things that we perceive that are relevant, to the attention of the character that you are writing about. So remembering that each of us has a bias, a way of moving through the world, each of the characters that you write is going to perceive different things about the world around them. Honing it into those details can help it from feeling infodumpy, can help the exposition from feeling it doesn't serve a point.

[Howard] One of my favorite stupid tricks is the person… We have this happen all the time, all of us. Someone walks into the room late and tries to join the conversation, but they don't know what's been said yet. Everybody is now instantly mad. "We just covered this!" "Yeah, but I wasn't here." "Why do we care that you know?" "I care that I know."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One, there's comedy inherent in it because we've all been there, we've all been annoyed, and we are now watching the lessening in status of the person that we would like to see drop. One of my… One of the rules of comedy. But the other thing is, it allows you now to fast-track the exposition and give them the equivalent of the as you know, Bob, in a way that has conflict just running… Just oozing off of it.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week.

[Dan] Book of the week, this week. One of my very favorite things in the entire universe is…

[Howard] Me?

[Dan] When… Well, you're related to it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] When Writing Excuses listeners, students at our retreat, people who listen to the podcast, come to me and show me their book that they wrote and have published. Like, that is just… Makes me so happy. That happened recently. Suyi Davies Okungbowa, who is one of our scholarship winners for the 2019 cruise, has got a fantasy book published. It is called David Mogo Godhunter. He gave me a copy. It's super, super good. It's basically the Dresden Files if it took place in Lagos, Nigeria. About a guy who is hunting fallen gods for a wizard. It's really good stuff. Really well written. He is presenting a very new, unique world that he does a great job of exposing that information to us. So… It applies to our episode as well.

[Brandon] Title and author, one more time?

[Dan] David Mogo Godhunter. The author is Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

[Brandon] All right. So, the other question we have for this week is about adding description. How do you add description when it doesn't come easily? How do you find the balance between worldbuilding and exposition?

[Victoria] I am one of those people that believe you write five sentences, and then you ask yourself if one sentence will do the same amount of work. That's not to say that you should underwrite. I think you're totally fine to overwrite. But I usually believe that if you take a paragraph to describe anything, and then you ask yourself if every sentence in that paragraph is pulling the same amount of weight, you can usually get it down to one or two very powerful sentences. I think sometimes, especially in the fantasy tradition, we think more is more. Sometimes, more is more. But usually… I come from a poetry background. So, usually, what I think is especially in moments where we're truly setting up world, where the exposition and the description is not actively engaged with any one thing, with conflict, with character, with anything, but we feel the need to set the scene, that in that case, less can be more, when it is done pointedly.

[Howard] I think that the tradition of writing… When I say tradition, the form, the syntax of writing for the screen and writing for comics, where at some point, you are telling the director, you are telling the cameraman, you're telling the artist what to do. As the writer, there is a line you don't want to cross, where you may have told them too much. Yet, there's also this point where all you've given them is a white room full of people talking and they don't have anything to work with. When I talk about writing comic scripts, often what I will focus on, and this is useful for writing other things, is colors and moods and shapes. I'll say, "Establishing shot, longshot, super desaturated background to show distance, trees in the foreground, characters in the immediate foreground, brightly lit, whatever." That establishes a mood, where we are close up on the characters and they are in a huge space. Well, if I were to write this in prose, obviously I wouldn't write it that way. But I would want to talk about the tree that is nearest. I would want to mention that we can see for miles. It feels like we can see to the end of the world. Something poetic that establishes this same feeling of huge space with people in it up close. So, it may be that an exercise for description is to look at screenplays and the way they handle some of these scenes, and then look at how you would write it in prose to accomplish the mood. Rather than to say these are all of the millions of things that were in that picture.

[Victoria] So, this kind of comes back, for me, to the idea of spatial intimacy. Right? You cannot paint an entire city. Not in any way that a person can keep in their mind. But you can paint a room or a street in that city. I have this theory that there are two kinds of fantasy authors. There are… Or really any genre authors. There are authors who build you an entire house, decorate every room of that house, then give you as the reader the key to that house. You now get to explore every room. If you don't see it, it doesn't exist there. That's like the Tolkein philosophy, right? Then there are authors who build the entire house, decorate the entire house, and instead of giving the reader the key, they leave one curtain open. What you can essentially see then is one room, perhaps an open doorway, a hall beyond, and you're given just enough details to be able to infer the house beyond. I think that when you're writing fantasy or something where you feel like there's a lot of room for description, remembering that a few key details instead can have that iceberg philosophy, can show you and be reflective of an entire world.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I like to go back… Going back to what you said earlier and kind of tying this all together, if your worry… One of your worries is you're doing too much conversation, a few of those very well described tight… Like… This is when one paragraph is better than 17. A really, really like curious paragraph that gives you that window, that gives you that drape, that shows you… And brings you right in there is a wonderful powerful balance to some of these dialogues.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Brandon] We are out of time on the podcast today. I am going to give you some homework. What I want you to do is I want you to take a favorite piece of media of yours, whether it's a book, a television show, a movie. I'm going to use Star Wars for this example because it's pretty universal, a lot of people have seen it. I want you than to make a list of all the worldbuilding elements that are necessary to understand Star Wars. Right? To understand how that movie, how that world works, how that society works. Then, once you've got that done, I want you to watch the movie, read the book, the show again, and see at what pace the creators of that media put all of those things in. So you can get a sense for how somebody else is doing it, how they are using their learning curve and their description and their exposition to give that information to you. So, have fun doing that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/04/12/15-15-dialog/

Key Points: First question: If all your dialog scenes turn into logic-based debates, is that a problem? Yes. One scene like that, okay. Lots? Not so good. Make sure your scenes have two goals, a physical goal and a conversational goal. Logic-based debate sounds like a conflict of ideas, competing ideas. Sometimes you should have other kinds of conversations. Don't forget that most decisions are emotional, not logical. As an exercise, try removing every third line of dialog. Then add bridging material. Do all your character voices sound the same? Manipulate pacing, accent, and attitude for different voices. Punctuation, sentence structure and word choice, and how the person feels. Learn to use punctuation, experiment with m-dashes, colons, semicolons, commas, and ellipses. Second question: How can I create more variety in my dialogue scenes? Move the scene to another interesting setting. Give them two goals, a physical goal and a verbal/emotional goal. Think about the reader's reward. Think about the authorial intent, why do you need this scene, and the character's intention, what are they trying to accomplish?

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm having a conversation with my friends, Brandon, Mary Robinette, and Dan.

[Brandon] We are once again using your questions to sculpt these specific episodes. While the title is very generic, Dialog, there's a specific aspect of dialog you're asking questions about. Here is the first question. Most of my dialog seems to end up being… Turning into logic-based debates between whatever characters are in the room. Is this a problem?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There are times… I shouldn't say that. If it's all of your scenes are turning into that, that's a problem. Having a scene that's like that, that's not a problem. So there's a bunch of things that you can do to address that. One of them is to make sure that there's… If you give two goals in the room, one is a physical goal and the other is a conversational goal, that's immediately going to cause things to shift for the [garbled]

[Brandon] Yeah. Agreed. Now, going back to your first point, Mary Robinette, it's not necessarily a problem unless it's all the time. What this means is, having different scenes feel different is part of what makes a book work. Having some of your dialog scenes that read like Aaron Sorkin dialog, where it's just like back-and-forth, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, is great. It can be really exciting, it can yank you through a scene really quick, it can make you smile, it can make you just have a blast. But if every page is only that, it starts to, like anything in writing,…

[Dan] It can be exhausting.

[Brandon] Yeah. It gets exhausting.

[Howard] Let's open up for a moment and look at the logic-based debate between two characters. Fundamentally, what you have there, it sounds like, is a conflict of ideas, and that is what… If that's what every scene is ending up being, then every scene in which you have dialog, the conflict is competing ideas. There is… If we categorize the types of conversation people have, one type of conversation that can be very dramatic is the one where one person is trying to tell a story without revealing a key secret, and the other person is trying to learn the key secret and doesn't care about the story. They're… Now they're not arguing, but there is tension, there is conflict.

[Dan] The fact that this is a logic-based debate also potentially highlights another issue which is that most people make decisions based on emotion, rather than on logic. I used to work in advertising and marketing, and that was our hallmark. People think they make decisions based on logic…

[Laughter]

[Dan] But at the end of the day, it comes down to whatever emotional connection they have forged between themselves and the solution. So making… If your characters are being very careful to plan out exactly the best possible course of action or determine in steady debate who is right and who is wrong, most conversations in the real world don't go that way. Some do. But most of them are a lot more emotional than that.

[Mary Robinette] There's a trick that I have, for when I discover that I have accidentally written one of those things. Aside from the introducing physical conflict. This is to go through… This is a totally mechanical exercise that's super fun. I go through and I remove every third line of dialog, because one of the things that happens when you're conversing with someone that you're familiar with is that you'll jump ahead. You'll see where they're heading and you'll jump to the next point. So when you pull out every third line of dialog… I want to be really clear. This is an exercise, this doesn't work for everything.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But when you do it, what happens is that those natural jumps ahead begin to happen. You do have to put in some bridging material to cover them. But it gets really interesting, and often has a more naturalistic flow. It compresses the scene, too.

[Brandon] One of the worries I have from this question is, again, if everything is a logic-based debate, I worry about character voices all sounding the same. One of the things I look for as a reader that really makes scenes work for me is when there's a lot of variety to motivations, to how people approach a conversation. Dan mentioned this, a lot of people make decisions based on emotions. Having somebody think that they're logic-based, but there really emotional, facing someone who is very logic-based, or someone who's front about their emotions is often a more interesting scene than a platonic debate or a Socratic debate about here is… Are the logical points that I'm making. Often times, that's just really boring to read, because we want to see the character's investment in this.

[Mary Robinette] There are some tricks to changing the nature of a character voice that I learned from doing audiobook narration. There are five things that make a character voice in audio. Pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch and placement, you can't do a darn thing with on the page except refer to them. Pacing, accent, and attitude are absolutely things you can manipulate. The length of time… So, pacing, you control with punctuation. How long the sentences are, where you put the commas, whether or not a character gets commas. Someone who speaks in a run-on sentence is going to have a very different feel than someone who has lots of short sentences. Accent is the sentence structure and the word choice. So if you take a training phrase, like, "What did you say?" That is serving to say, "I want you to tell me more." It can take a lot of different forms, but a British nanny is going to say, "Pardon me, Dearie?" And a drill sergeant is going to say, "What do you say, maggot!"

[Brandon] [uh-hu]

[Mary Robinette] So, looking at the word choice and sentence structure. Then, the attitude is what the person… How the person feels. Again, that changes the word choices that we make. It changes our pacing. So looking at your use of punctuation, and your word choice, and sentence structure, is a great way to shift the language of your characters.

[Brandon] So, one of the things I noticed teaching my classes at the University over these last years, is that a lot of my students aren't very fluent with punctuation. Now, these are high-level students. It's usually… To get in my class, there's 15 slots, and we usually have 100 or more applications, and we picket based solely on how good are these… The sample chapters that they sent. So these are high-level amateur writers. I just assumed because they are high-level amateur writers that if they're not using certain punctuation structures, they've made a stylistic decision. Right? It's okay not to like m-dashes, for instance.

[Mary Robinette] Sure.

[Brandon] I love them. Other people are like, "You know what, I don't like this punctuation, it becomes a crutch, whatever." Totally all right. But I started to mention to people, like, "Hey, this might use an m-dash. I know you probably aren't stylistically interested in them, but you might want to experiment." They're like, "An m-dash?" I realized a lot of high-level writing student get there by practicing a ton, but they aren't using all the tools because they haven't been able to figure out how to take those boring, dry English major classes…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And apply them to actually writing stories. Using m-dashes, colons, semicolons, commas, ellipses in your dialog… That's like something that's vital to me, in order to make it feel right. I'm realizing more and more a lot of my students don't use it just because they've never been… Had those tools explained as potential tools for controlling how the reader reads a scene.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. That is The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.

[Mary Robinette] By Natasha Pulley. I love this book. The first book is The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. I had enough time in between reading that one and when I got The Lost Future of Pepperharrow that I think that you can actually read this as a standalone. Obviously, there are some nuances. But, basically. The main character is a composer and a synesthete. He has synesthesia. It's set in Victorian England. There's another character who is clairvoyant. It's this whole interesting thing of, like, what is free will, what are the choices that you make, and then there's a clockwork octopus that steals socks. It's just beautifully, beautifully written.

[Howard] That actually explains a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So many things. So beautifully written. I love these books with abandon. One of the other things that I also love is that there's a little girl character whose name is Six. She is… to a modern eye, she's probably autistic. But they don't have the word and the people just accept that this is who she is. They don't try to make her be someone else. She's just allowed to live her life, and there's no like "We're going to cure her" subplot or anything like that. It's just characters who are fascinating. I just love these books a lot. I'm going to ramble about them for days. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. One of the reasons that I actually wanted to bring this up with dialog is that much of It takes place in Japan, where people are speaking Japanese. She has made the choice to render it in slang that is class linked to Victorian England, because the character who is interpreting it is a Victorian. So when someone is lower-class, in his head, he hears them as Cockney. Because…

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It's so good. It's really interesting.

[Brandon] Awesome. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.

[Brandon] All right. So, the second question we have for this week is what can I do to create more variety in my dialog structure, or in my dialog scenes? One of the things you can do is something that I love to do. When I notice one of these scenes… Sometimes I just keep it, right? My dialog scene is working. Sometimes I'm like I have had too many scenes like this. These are the equivalents… I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before. In movies, you will occasionally have scenes where two characters walk down a hallway, stop, and then there's a shot, reverse shot, as they have a conversation, then they walk a little further down the hallway, then they stop, and there's a shot, reverse shot, and then they walk a little further, and then shot, reverse shot. These scenes are okay, but they're kind of the cinematic version of sometimes you just need to summarize in your book. They're the sort of things that you don't want to have to use unless it's the exact right tool at the exact right time. They're a little bit lazy, and they're a little bit boring. In books, sometimes you have these scenes of dialog where you're like, "I just need to get this information across. I know I need to get it across. I don't want to do it as a big infodump. So I'm going to have characters have a conversation about it and do my best to not make it feel maid and butler." I have found most of the time, if I can move that scene into some other interesting setting… Let me give you an example from Oathbringer. I had one of these. It was boring.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It was one of the worst scenes in the book. I just threw it away. I instead had a character… I'm like, "Who is this character? What is happening?" Well, it's Dalinar. He is a warlord who is kind of repentant and becoming a different person, but he kind of wants to hold on to the fact that I'm a tough warrior. So he goes down and he wants to do some wrestling, right? It's this whole thing, I'm going to go recapture some of my youth. He just gets trounced by these younger men. In the meantime, his wife shows up and says, "We were supposed to have a meeting. We're going to talk about this." He's like, "Do it right now." It was during the wrestling match. You would think that this doesn't work, but it worked perfectly, because I was able to over… To give the subtext of he's trying to capture his youth without ever saying it. With the things she's saying representing his new life that he's supposed to be getting better at instead of going trying to recapture his youth. The scene just played wonderfully in this setting where he's getting pinned by these younger men.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That are feeling kind of embarrassed that they're taking their king and basically just… He can't do it anymore. Just changing that scene… When I ran that one through the writing group, one of my writing group members said, "Wow. This is the best scene in the whole sequence. The whole sequence of chapters." It started as the worst one. So just kind of giving some more flavor to the scene can be really handy.

[Mary Robinette] That gets back to one of the things we were talking about ahead of… At the early thing, was giving them two different goals, the physical goal and the verbal emotional goal. Sometimes those two things are vastly… They just are fighting themselves. That sounds like so much fun.

[Howard] I think in terms a lot of what is the reader's reward for having read this chapter or this scene or whatever. I mean, the scene has a purpose, and in some cases the purpose is, "Oh, I gotta do a bunch of exposition so that I can do a bunch of plot later." The scene's purpose is not the reward. One of the purposes should be a reward of some sort. Some page-turn-y bit. Taking the shot versus shot example… Or the whole hallway walking scene. One, yes, those are terribly lazy. But if in that scene, we are traversing a space between two very interesting spaces, and we arrive someplace where the camera opens up onto something wondrous, and the conversation stops because we are now in a new place looking at something interesting… Well, now that whole thing was justified because we set up pacing for an eye candy. Whatever.

[Brandon] Agreed. I love some of those things.

[Howard] I always think about it in terms of what's the reward for the reader? If there isn't one, what can I put in?

[Mary Robinette] You said something that made me think of a thing which is that when you are looking at these scenes, they actually serve two functions. There's the authorial intent, the reason you, the author, need that book… That scene in there. But then there's the character intention. Every time we're talking, we're speaking for a reason. There's something that we are trying to accomplish. Sometimes it's I want to look clever, sometimes I want to get information, sometimes it's I want to prevent someone… It's… There's a purpose behind that. So if you can think about exactly why the character is saying that, and you make sure that that is present in the scene… It's not a scene that's just, "Hello, here is my authorial intent."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah, that's what I wanted to mention as well, because when we start scenes, we often think about what our goal as the writer is, what is this scene intended to accomplish. Making sure that you know what their goals are… Not only does it provide more characterization like that, but usually what it does is it brings a lot of imbalance into the scene. People want to have a different conversation than the person they're talking to wants to have. Or, you will have a power imbalance, where one character is trying to convince their teenager or their employee or something to do something, like, "I don't want to be a part of this conversation at all." Or just a child talking to an adult and not being treated seriously. Those imbalances, wherever they come from and however they manifest, can add a lot of texture in there as well.

[Brandon] All right. That was a really good conversation about dialog.

[Dan] Hey!

[Brandon] Look at that. Let's go ahead and go to our homework, which Mary Robinette is going to give to us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, what I want you to do is I want you to take a scene with dialog. This can be a scene from something that's already written or something that… A published thing or something that you've written. I want you to remove all of the description from it. So that you're just left with dialog. Then I want you to do that thing I mentioned earlier, I want you to remove every third line of dialog. Put the context back in and use body language and internal motivation, where the character is thinking. Build bridging things in there so that the scene now flows, with those pieces of dialog missing.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/16/15-07-creating-chapters/

Key Points: How do you make chapters? Feeling! Some people create them, others chop things into chapters. Chapters have a beginning, middle, and an end, like a short story. Chapters have a miniature arc of action. Chapters are like episodes, climbing towards a finale. Chapters interlock, forming a part of a book. Take your outline, which describes scenes, and think about what scenes can be combined into a single chapter, thematically or emotionally. Pay attention to the page turn! The chapter break forces a new beginning. How do you begin and end chapters? Do you do cliffhangers or not? Chapter titles, first lines, first paragraphs may signal what a chapter is going to be about. The beginning of a chapter is like the first line of a book, a place to grab the reader and pull them into reading more. Use cliffhangers sparingly. Try to use cliffhangers with a promise of what you are going to get, rather than just question marks. Pay attention to genre, thrillers need tension. Make your chapters rewarding, but keep your readers wanting more, too.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Chapters.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are, again, taking questions that we have been given and creating episodes around them. This one is a common question we get asked, which is, how do you make chapters? How do you decide where to break your stories up, and how to divide them up? I get this a lot, like in Q&A sessions that I'll do and things like that. It's always kind of hard to answer, because it's not a thing I studied. It's not a thing I ever looked at in anyone else's books. It's just a thing that I just started doing, and it just felt natural. I talk to a lot of writers, and that's how it goes. Right?

[Victoria] Yeah, it's hard to sit here and think about what are the mechanics or what are the rules. I feel like we're going to be able to talk about a lot of our personal guiding principles, but not necessarily any codified guidelines for something like this.

[Dan] Yeah. Although the good news is, based on what we're saying, listeners, you can take away that, at the very least, this isn't something that matters is much as you think it does. Right? You can kind of fake your way through it until you get a feel for it, and it will turn out better than you expect it to.

[Howard] We had a difficult time naming this episode. I think… I just realized the disconnect for me is that I don't create chapters, I chop things into chapters. I had a thing that is… I have a thing that exists, and I am deciding where the breakpoints are. Rather than saying, "Wow, I need a chapter here." As we prepared for the recording sessions today, we have a craft services table with food for us. I got to unwrap a block of cheese. That block of cheese is probably way less interesting than the novel, but it needed to be cut into chapters, it needed to be cut into pieces so that Howard didn't just walk away with a fistful of cheese. That's the way I think about it. These are…

[Dan] I mean, he still did, but…

[Howard] Well, that's because cranberry wensleydale is crack.

[Brandon] See, it's interesting because I do create chapters. I'm not taking the whole and just chopping it up. When I'm creating an outline, one of the things I'm doing is I'm… I'm just getting it all on there. But when I sit down for the day's work, I say, "All right, what do I need to achieve today? How can I form a chapter out of that? How can I have a rising action, how can I have questions be answered, how can I actually create something that feels like it has a beginning, middle, and an end?" Basically, I'm going to create a short story set in the world that is a continuation of other short stories.

[Howard] So, your chapters take shape after the initial outlines. I don't want to suggest that I do chapters when the final prose is done. Yeah, I'm the same way. In that I outline, but I don't outline to the chapters. They take shape later.

[Victoria] I think I'm in Brandon's camp here in that I don't like thinking about how hard it is to write a book.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] A book is a very long, very daunting thing. What my plots do is essentially function like a series of escalating episodes. I treat each chapter as a short story, as a short story of kind of interlocking stories. Almost like a season of television than a movie. So when I'm approaching a chapter, whether it's a short chapter for middle grade or a longer chapter for a fantasy, I make sure that I have a miniature arc of action happening within that chapter. I want to fulfill certain promises. I want to not only move my characters from A to B physically and emotionally, but I almost wanted to feel like an exciting little episode that does something in the interest of climbing the steps toward my finale.

[Brandon] Yeah, the great thing about this also is once you learn this with chapters, like… I don't want to imply this isn't important to learn. That's not what I was meaning at the beginning, because I think it is. But it's something you can pick up on your own. The great thing is, once you start to learn it… People ask, "How do you create a thousand page fantasy novel? How do you create…" I've got Stormlight Archive which is two arcs of five in a 10 book series, and each… It gets, like, that is way easier than learning to create chapters, which you do over time, practicing, at least I did. Once I got able to interlock these scenes, basically episodes, I could be like, all right, these 10 episodes make a part of the book. Three of those make an entire novel. Three of those make a super arc through a series. Then you start to do this, and the chapter is where that all begins for me.

[Victoria] I do the same thing, I think. Shades of Magic is broken into something like 10 parts, each part has maybe 5 to 6 chapters in it. Each part is functioning as almost a season arc. The entire book is like a TV show. Each chapter within the arc is like an episode of the season. I know that I want to create a certain pace. But also, I do this from a complete self-preservation standpoint of I would get completely overwhelmed if I couldn't break it down into a substantial… Like substantially a smaller piece. On top of that, I like the satisfaction of a chapter that feels like we go through all of the emotional beats that I want you to. I wanted to feel… I have books where I have had a one-page chapter. I'm not saying you can't do that, to a different effect. But in something like… The longer the format, the more daunting it is, the more I recommend that writers begin to think of them as many, many bricks in a wall.

[Dan] When I started, my chapters were basically just how much can I write in one day. Which is why in Serial Killer, every chapter is about 2500 words. Because that's what I was doing back then. That's still my most successful book, so maybe that's a good way to do it. But, like, by the time I got to Makeover, which was like my 16th published book, I had… I'd become much more of an outliner. So when I create an outline, it's this big massive thing that tells me scene by scene everything that's going to happen. Then I will look at that and go, okay, which of these scenes need to be combined into a single chapter? Which is a little different than what you're talking about, at least narratively. Because there's not a single thread of storyline that goes from the beginning of this chapter to the end, because it will have two or three different scenes and possibly different viewpoints in it. But I try to do that in a way where they're all thematically linked together, or where there is an emotional through-line through it. So we're going to talk about this aspect of the story or the world or the technology or the magic. We're going to see one character deal with it, and then a different character deal with it in a different way. They will inform each other. That will form a chapter.

[Howard] Chapters and prose really are the one place where prose and comics share a structure, and that is the guarantee to page turn. With comics, you're always writing to the page turn. Because there is a visual reveal that is huge when you turn the page. With prose, you never think about that because you don't know where the pagination is going to be yet. With electronic publishing, you know even less. Except for the chapter break. You are… I have yet to read an e-book where I was forced to see the beginning of the next chapter while I could still see the end of the previous chapter. For me, that's huge. Because it means there is this psychological shift tween that thing I just read and not being able to read anything… I'm making the gesture, turning the page with my hands… And now there is all new information all at once. That is… I think that's important to think about, because even if they're just pushing a button to do it, you, the writer, now have a moment of physical puppetry control over the reader. You know they're doing anything. What can you do with words in order to make that more effective? I probably just made it a lot more difficult for everybody, didn't I?

[Dan] No. That's actually brilliant. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I can look back… Even that first one, at Serial Killer, and see places where I did that. Where, hey, you need to be… "I'll see you in the morning." Then the chapter break is, "By the time I got there, they were already dead." You can do tricks like that. That's… Now I'm going to have to think about that and try and do it on purpose.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, the book of the week is Docile by K. M. Sparza. It's a debut novel, coming out in April. It's a really, really fascinating examination of consent under capitalism. It is a slight near future alternate history in which our debt crisis has reached a point in which people are selling themselves into kind of an indentured servitude for a variety of functions. In order to forget this part of their lives when they do choose to sell it… In order to erase their family's debt, they take a drug called Dociline. It's about two young men in the story. One who has decided to sell his family's debt off, and with it, himself, and has decided to refuse Dociline because of what it did to his mother. The other one is the one who buys his contract and is the heir to the Dociline Empire. It is about an examination of consent, of really, really interesting gender and sexuality, a lot of fascinating themes, and also, just a delightful read.

[Brandon] Excellent. Docile by K. M. Sparza.

]Transcriptionist note; Google Books says Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.]

[Brandon] Coming back to this, let's talk about… One of the other questions asks about how we begin chapters. I want to talk both about beginnings and endings. Because, thinking about it, where I break a chapter is often based on where I began a chapter. Because chapters work very well for me if I have some sort of note I can hit again near the end to signal, hey, we've completed this arc, or a character's looking for something, the character finds something. It's this MICE quotient thing Mary Robinette likes to talk about, I'm using very instinctively in creating chapters. So, how do you begin and end chapters, and then, kind of a question of this, if you want to talk about… Sometimes you want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, sometimes you don't. What's the difference there?

[Victoria] Um… Go ahead.

[Dan] So, when I wrote Zero G and started my middle grade series, I wanted to give chapter titles. Because that's kind of a very good middle grade thing, I always loved chapter titles when I was a kid. That enabled me to set things up… This chapter is about X. Like, you know that right off the bat because there's a title that tells you. I realized, in the process of doing that, that that's kind of what I had previously been using first lines or first paragraphs to do. As a way of signaling a little more subtly this chapter is going to be about this character trying to do X. Some way of setting up, here's what you're in for, this is my promise, this is my establishing shot.

[Howard] Chapters, for me, are… The first line of a chapter is an opportunity for me to revisit the experience of the first line of the book, because often the first line of the book gets so much attention that, for me, anyway, the pros ins up far more refined. Not purple necessarily, but every word is exactly in place. I try to give that consideration to the beginnings of chapters because I see those as decision points for the reader. The… A lot of times, when I'm reading a book, I will turn the page to a chapter and realize, "Oh. Oh, this character. I'm not all this interested in this point of view." But, if there is some turn of phrase or some something right there at the beginning, to reward me for having turned the page… I'll muscle through it. But I'm a bad reader.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Don't write for me.

[Victoria] Yeah, because I write my chapters like short stories, I do put the same amount of emphasis into the beginning and end of each chapter as I would the beginning and end of the novel. I also really… I love it, like I come out of a poetry background, I love the challenge of trying to distill, not necessarily a premonition of what that chapter's going to be, but I write multiple perspectives. For me, that opening line of each chapter is a way to instantly ground you in the voice. Because I don't mark it. I don't start the chapter by telling you whose perspective it's in. So I'm relying on the moment of perception. I write it from third person, so it's just a close third. But the moment of perception at the beginning of the chapter can tell you so much about the person that you're following, about the things that they notice, not only what they're going to be going through in kind of a hinting way, but just where their emotions are at, where their mind is that, all those things. Then, yes, like Brandon, I am somebody who because I write them like short stories, and one of my favorite things in short stories is the full circle moment, I love finding a way to echo by the end of the chapter where we are at. Then, every now and then, I try really hard not to overuse the cliffhanger ending because I think it gets tired. I think you have to use it sparingly. I think there's a difference between having enough tension to make you turn the page and having a dum dum dum moment.

[Brandon] Right. I've… We've talked about this before on the podcast. I've… The further I've come in my career, the more I've disliked the cliffhanger that says, "And he went to open the door and…" dum dum dum. I've liked the cliffhanger that says, "And he opened the door and his ex-wife was there." Right? Like, the cliffhanger that promises you something rather what you're going to get rather than promising you a question mark. When you can make those work, I like them. I do like to use chapters occasionally to force the page turn. I think you do have to use those, particularly in epic fantasy, you have to use it wisely. The longer your book, the fewer of these, I think, you can actually use. Which is counterintuitive. But if it's a short book, it's… You feel less guilty making them read it all in one or two sittings. If it's a long book, that will get exhausting.

[Dan] Well, that's what I was going to say, too, is, in addition to book length, consider the book genre. Writing in thrillers, you want every chapter to end on something tense. Maybe a cliffhanger, maybe not, but if you ever get to a point of rest where your reader can say, "Oh, okay, everything's cool. No one's in danger right now, I can go to sleep." You're writing your thriller weirdly.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, I have a big fantasy series that I feel like behaves more in these epic ways, where you have to use them sparingly, where every chapter really functions like an episode. Then, I have a series wherein I wanted to feel like a comic book without pictures. In that case, it is the chop, chop, chop of the turn. It is treating every chapter like a moment. In that case, there is more grouping of chapters into a smaller arc. But it's about… You can use brevity to the same effect that you can use length. You can use any element, like we're obviously talking a lot about the opening line and the ending line, but every aspect of a chapter is the utility that you have, from the voice to the length to the paragraph formatting, everything that you choose to do. To how many scenes you want, whether you want to have scene breaks within the chapter or not. I think it's about setting rules and expectations for your reader. It's really weird if every chapter of your book is like 30 pages long, except for two, unless those two moments are affecting something that is extremely dramatic.

[Howard] Episode five of season two of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, one of my favorite episodes, and it structures for me, it outlines what I kind of feel like a perfect chapter is, because, all of the threads come together in this moment of triumph, and then we get a POV and realize, oh, wait, that wasn't all the threads. Oh, a bad thing happened. End of episode. Page turn. So it's enormously rewarding, and then there's this piece at the end. It's not that it's super short, there's this piece at the end which absolutely draws me further in. Yeah, my philosophy on chapters is that I want every one of them to be rewarding. I want people to be excited that they read that, but I want to leave them wanting more, so that the next chapter is something they'll turn to.

[Victoria] Well, I just want to say, I think rewarding is a key word here, because rewarding is different from dramatic. Right? Like, I think there's a cheat code sense that if you want the chapter to be the most exciting version of itself, for the most rewarding version of itself, you have to end in this like dum dum dum, whether implied dum dum dum or actual dum dum dum. Sometimes, the most rewarding thing that a chapter can do is give you the equivalent of a full meal, and then the promise of something new. I think it's about also… It's about balance. It's about varying it between those things.

[Dan] So, just last week, I read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is part of the Tiffany Aching series, one of my favorite ones. There was a chapter in there with a funeral. It ends with the funeral. There's no cliffhanger whatsoever. There's absolutely nothing to drive you forward. It is completely final. But. The way that the ending was written was so beautiful. It was this perfect capstone to the dead person's life, to the survivors moving on and still going forward, that I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. Because I'm like, "This is so beautiful. How can I not be reading this?"

[Brandon] Curiously, the Terry Pratchett young adult novels use chapters and his adult novels don't. There's no chapters, they just are scene, scene, scene, no numbers. I've always found that very interesting. Why he chose to do one way or another, I'm sure he answered at some point.

[Brandon] We are out of time for this episode. Although I have some homework for you. I would like you to take something you've written, and try moving the chapter breaks around. See how it feels to you to force yourself to end in the middle of what you thought was a scene. How to add more onto your chapter and end there. I bet you will find that you're doing this pretty naturally, that you're already creating these arcs. But maybe you'll learn something interesting about your writing and be a little more intentional about it. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/26/15-04-revision-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: How do you know what needs to be changed? Trust your own reader reactions. Mark it up, Awesome, Bored, Confused, Disbelief. Walk away from it, then come back and ask yourself do things need to change? Or write something else, read something else, then ask yourself. Also, try breaking your story down to scenes, or even French scenes, and identify the purposes for each scene. If you are using a structure, make sure it doesn't feel like canned beans, that all the pieces are there, and that it is what you wanted to do. Think about MICE, and check the threads. Do you have extra threads that aren't needed, or that are never resolved? You may want to pull them out. Consider moments of tension and resolution. What do you do if a secondary character is taking over? Don't worry about it. You can have multiple interesting characters in your stories.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Four.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We are super excited to have a special guest for you today, Pat Rothfuss. Pat, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Pat] I write fantasy novels sometimes and I do charity sometimes and I'm a dad sometimes.

[Dan] Awesome. Your main book that most people know you for is…

[Pat] The Name of the Wind.

[Dan] The Name of the Wind. One of the best-selling fantasies and best written fantasies…

[Pat] Oooh.

[Dan] In my opinion.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we've got you on to talk about revision.

[Dan] Revision. So let's… We're going to talk about, and the first thing that I want to ask the… You guys is, how do you know what needs to be changed? When you look… You've finished your first draft, you're ready to start revision, and it is time to cut something out or make something better. How do you know which parts need to be cut out or made better?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I do is I actually trust my reader reactions. I… I'm talking about before I hand it to a beta reader, that… Or sometimes even after I hand it to a beta reader. One of the things that I look at are the ways that I respond to it. When I get a piece of media that I love… Like, I cannot tell you how many times I've seen the Princess Bride. I still have an emotional response to it. So I can trust that if there's something that I really love, I will continue to have an emotional response to it, even though I know exactly what's going to happen. Therefore, I should still be having an emotional response to my own work, even though I know what's going to happen to it. So what I do is I pay attention to places where I'm bored, or when I'm reading it and I'm like, "What? What? What does that mean?" Like, when I don't know…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What I meant with my own stuff, like, that's a problem.

[Dan] That never happens to me.

[Laughter]

[go ahead]

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes… So, I have awesome, where I'm like, "Hey, that's good!" Which you do have, you know. Bored, confused, and disbelief, where I'm like, "What?" Sometimes the disbelief is it's just like an itch. It's like that doesn't quite… It feels off. So I pay attention to those. Generally speaking, what I found is that most of the awesome things, I can leave alone. Not all of them, but most of them, I can leave alone. The bored ones are usually an indication of a pacing issue, which means I need to tighten it or I need to unpack it to give the reader a reason to care. The confused ones are always an order of information thing, where I just haven't passed it to them in the right order. Sometimes it's still in my head. The disbelief is something where I've violated their sense of the world. Either the natural world, the physical world, or the metaphysical world, which is the character's life. So I address those based on my own reactions. But I have to like pay attention and trust it. The thing that I do is I mark it, but I don't make the changes, because that flips me out of my reader brain.

[Pat] Hum. That's cool.

[Dan] Now, I couldn't help but notice though that that's A, B, C, D.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That's awesome. I'm going to add to that Evil. If you want to go all the way to E. Because writing horror, if my readers write back and say, "How dare you do this? Why are you such a monster?" That's something I know I probably want to keep in.

[Guffaw]

[Mary Robinette] I would call that awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Might have been a [scream]

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When you do that.

[Howard] That also begins with A. For my own part, I don't get to begin with what needs to change. I have to begin with do things need to change? Because when I'm scripting the comic, I will sit down, I will script a week of scripts, and I want to sit down and I want to start drawing. I want to move to the next stage. If I put art on a bad script…

[Groan]

[Howard] I've wasted a whole bunch of time. So my rule is I write it. Then I walk away from it. I come back to it, and I look at it, and rarely, rarely do I allow myself to put art on something I wrote that day. Because the answer to if… Does it really need to be edited, is always yes. The answer is always yes. But it's not the Howard who woke up this morning and wrote it who will say that. It is the Howard who went to bed having written it and woke up the next day and realized that yesterday's Howard is just not as smart as he thought he was.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I actually… I love that, because I always talk to like my students, or if I'm talking to people about writing, like, how do you get distance? That's what you always need from your writing is distance, and it's so hard to get objective space away from something you made yourself. Sometimes it's time, but honestly, time is magnified by a good night's sleep. Or, like physical distance, or change of venue, in addition to other things. But, yeah, a good night's sleep, especially if you didn't… I would say, the night's sleep is almost… The benefit of that is eradicated if you do what I do, which is you write until you're exhausted, and then you immediately fall into bed.

[Howard] Collapse.

[Pat] Then, like you wake up, and it might as well have been five minutes ago that you wrote it. Even though you might have been asleep for eight hours.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I think about… Like, I do the things that you're talking about. But the other one that I find useful to speed up, like when you're on deadline and you don't have time to take time, to like set it down and let it breathe for six months or year or what have you. I found that narrative distance will often help me. That if I write something else or I read something else, that it resets my brain. So that I'm coming back to it as a new story. It resets my reader expectations.

[Howard] Going back to the well is not going back to the well because I need water, it's going back to the well because I need to throw myself into the well…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And climb back out, new.

[Mary Robinette] I will say that this for me is a revision thing. It doesn't work for me as a drafting thing. Drafting thing, I have to be careful about holding the right story in my head…

[Yes]

[Pat] I always think of that is effectively like loading up into active memory the world. Although, honestly, if I'm revising plot or structure, I need to hold all of the world and the structure and the tension and the pacing. So that still needs to be in active memory, which is why that's dangerous for me to like really get engaged in a compelling piece of TV or… But especially print stuff.

[Dan] So… When the time comes, then… We've talked about getting distance from the work. We've talked about using readers and trusting in their feedback. What other methods do you have for knowing what needs to be changed?

[Pat] I've got a good one structurally that I didn't mention today, that I kind of wish I would have remembered. This was way back in the early days of Name of the Wind. I was trying to get the beginning to work. I struggled with the beginning more than any other part of Name of the Wind. Even so, I got it to the point where it's passable. I honestly still don't think it's good. But I broke down… I… Every chapter into scenes, and every scene, by which I mean every… Where I broke it with asterisks. Then I subdivided it even further into French scenes. Which I don't know if that's a common term, other than in like the study of Shakespearean drama. Because you have like Hamlet, Act II, scene four. But every time somebody enters or leaves the stage, it is a new French scene. Even if there's not a scene break. One of my drama professors pointed out that every time someone entered or left, it was a different scene, and there was a new purpose to the scene that Shakespeare was fulfilling. Because Shakespeare was a really amazingly tight writer. So I broke down every single French scene in the first huge chunk of the book, and I talked about what I was… What the purpose of them was. Some of them had like three purposes. That was great. But some of them only had one purpose. Then, stacked up against each other, it said it was like Kvothe is smart and cool. Shows Kvothe is smart and cool. Shows Kvothe is smart and cool. I'm like, "Oh. That's why this is draggy and dumb. I'm doing the same thing again and again." These all also kind of talk about the world, or they build character, but their central element is all the same. That's why this seems boring and it's not compelling and it's not tracking along like it should. So that helped me spot the problem that I then needed to like figure out how to fix.

[Dan] Was… If I can ask, just to dig a little deeper here, was there something specific that you're like, you know, if all of these are just showing Kvothe is smart and cool, what did you decide to add? Like, I'm going to have a scene that shows he's fallible. Or were you thinking more tonal, or…

[Pat] That was actually back in… I can't remember where I was writing up this document. That was in 2001. So it was still six years before I was published. So this was really in the early days of me getting a good grasp on how I thought about tension and pacing and reader curiosity and all the things that now I consider myself quite good at, although I think of them… I think I conceptualize them a lot differently than a lot of people who like have studied them or worked in writers groups. Just because I was sort of like foraging in the wilderness, and I came up with my own weird things. So now, like I look at the old Star Trek, and I'm like, "Oh. A plot, B plot. That's what they're doing." This is a story shape. So I was like if I have a short arc, then I just need to make sure you start something, and then eventually you have tension until it resolves and you need to support it and tell it resolves. But you also don't want to have… You don't want to started in one chapter and end it in the next, because then you haven't given any room for tension to grow and your reader to be curious and engaged. So, I just wanted… I always now make sure that there's space and difference. But I don't do A plot, B plot. It's a mess.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I mean, mine is… It's all held together with like bailing twine and barbed wire.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, barbed wire holds things together pretty darn well.

[Pat] Yeah, but it's painful. Like, don't follow those footsteps. It's… It works, but it's not a system that I think can be necessarily emulated or recommended.

[Howard] Funny you should say that, because in terms of defining a structure using A plot, B plot as an example, if I can look at something I've written and, after the fact, tell myself, "Ah, I'm doing A plot, B plot." That's awesome, because it's something that I know the reader knows how to resonate with. If I'm working… If I can't tell what the form is, what sort of structure I'm working in, unless I have done something to tell the reader that their expectations are going to be subverted, unless I've warned them, they're going to run into that and perhaps have problems. So I love finding that I'm working in a given structure, because then I can say, "Ah. Okay, I'm doing A plot, B plot. How do I do it so that it doesn't feel like canned beans?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "How do I… What are the pieces that are missing, what are the pieces I'm doing right?" And, the question that I always have to ask the moment I discover I'm doing something structurally or trope-wise or whatever is, "Wait. Is that what I meant?"

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Is that what I wanted to do? But I love finding it because I know that if I speak using a structure… Three act format, hero's journey, A plot B plot, whatever, the reader will know how to respond.

[Dan] Okay. I've got another really cool question I want to ask you guys, but first… Let's break for our book of the week. Well, it's actually… Oh, it is a book this time. Yes. Tell us about it.

[Pat] I have to gush about The Murderbot Diaries, which I'm guessing a lot of you already know about. They won a ton of awards last year. They're a series of four novellas by Martha Wells. I… No offense, Mary, but…

[Mary Robinette] They're really…

[Pat] They're my favorite things that I read…

[Mary Robinette] They're really good.

[Pat] In, like, these last couple of years. They're so good. I have not empathized with a character, with a murderbot, with a character more than murderbot maybe ever in my life. I cried. They're amazing. So good I actually hugely geeked out on Martha Wells at the Hugos…

[Laughter]

[Pat] It was so embarrassing, because I was just like… I was just like, "Oh, I want to mention that I like her books." But I was just, "Bwah..." I'm just like, oh, I did that. That's so embarrassing. I can do it, too.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] They're so good. Make sure you read them in order, though. Read the first one, because there's a continuous storyline. I can't recommend them highly enough.

[Dan] Awesome. That is The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Who has an excellent last name.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now, before I get into my other question, you… Mary Robinette, you looked like you were going to say something?

[Mary Robinette] So, we were talking about tension. One of the things that can happen when you're looking at revisions and you're trying to decide, you're like, "Oh, this doesn't have tension. This doesn't have a thread." Like, deciding which thing to keep and which thing to get rid of can be tricky sometimes. So, I talk about the MICE quotient in terms of frame a lot. But it's also really good for defining which pieces of conflict to keep in a story. What I find is, like, if I have an inquiry story, what I know is that the story ends when my character answers a question. So all of the conflicts in the story need to be preventing the character from asking a question. So, if that's one of those 14 plot threads that are going through the story, then I can't let the character actually get to that question. So if I have a thread in there that is… If this scene is like… Is about an inquiry, and it's about a different inquiry than the main one that I've been asking, then that may be a thread that I don't need. Or, if it's something that I never resolve later, it's like get rid of that. I just went through, I… I blame Brandon, but I just finished writing the Relentless Moon. My finished draft was 180,000 words. The previous novel in the series was 99,000 words.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… I completely blame Brandon, but I wanted to cut it down significantly.

[Howard] Now you have two more books.

[Mary Robinette] Now I have two more books. Exactly. So one of the things that I looked at… Looked for were threads that I never really used. A lot of times, you use something and it raises tension in a scene. It's great in the scene, but you don't pay it off later. So those things when you pull them out can dramatically reduce the length of your work, but also tighten it and make it structurally a lot more solid. It's not that everything needs to wrap up at the end, because life is messy. Sometimes, it is nice to have something that's still a little fuzzy at the end. But that's… Those are things that you look for. It's like, is this serving the story? Does this have a payoff at the end? That's the kind of thing I look for.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to absolutely second that. We'll make sure to put this in the liner notes, but I recommend you all go and find the YouTube videos by Lindsey Ellis. She's a film critic and she has one on three act structure where she re-contextualizes three act structure entirely around moments of tension and resolution. Which redefined it for me in a way that I had never understood it before. It really has changed the way that I revise, because now I'm not looking at, well, is this thing done, but what is the tension of this scene or this act or this whatever and when is that going to get resolved. So it's really great.

[Dan] So, anyway, I want to ask another question that I'm excited about. Which is, let's say that you are looking at your work, you've finished one or more drafts and you realize that a secondary character has become far more interesting than your primary character. How do you fix that problem? How do you approach that? Do you just make that character more boring, do you make the main character more interesting, like, what do you do?

[Pat] My… Because this happened to me, and I struggled with it a lot early on, because it is scary. You're working hard to make your main character compelling. Then, suddenly, you create like sort of a charming fairy who steals every scene in the opening, when what you need is for everyone to be interested in your mysterious innkeeper. And…

[Mary Robinette] What are you talking about?

[Laughter]

[Pat] Just in theory. These are archetypes.

[Howard] They are now.

[Pat] In the tarot. Mysterious innkeeper. I should do my own… Oh, sorry. But the big solution, I feel, is don't worry about it. Because you certainly don't want to say, "Oh, this part is too cool. I better take it out." That's always a losing proposition. Okay? Come at me, later…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] Because what I just said isn't true.

[Laughter]

[Pat] But the vast majority of the time, what is lovable about Bast is that Bast is simple. Bast is… He is not actually one note, but he seems very one note, and simple things are easy to digest and sort of… Some of these, like Han Solo, like lovable rogue type characters, are sort of compelling in themselves. Whereas more complex characters… It's the difference between your high school crush and the person that you marry for 10 years. You marry that person and you stay with them for 10 years because you have a rich important relationship with them, but that doesn't mean that like, that week you went to Morocco, you didn't have something really amazing and tempestuous with a dark-eyed woman there. Both of those are good, and honestly, in the same way that I think having both of those leads to like a rich and satisfying life, you want both of those things in a book. It's just they both satisfy different needs, even if one of them is a little shinier on the surface.

[Mary Robinette] I completely agree with you. I'm going to say that I got distracted by the analogy, and I would love for you to do a different analogy that's slightly less sexist.

[Pat] Yeah. Well, I mean I… Mary, which part is sexist? Like…

[Howard] Morocco?

[Pat] Morocco?

[Mary Robinette] No, the… If… Comparing… Sorry. I've seen you use this analogy before, and it bothers me every time. Comparing moments of writing with women.

[Pat] I see. I think of it as I have relationships with characters, and I have relationships with women. So I'm mostly thinking of my own experience, but I see what you're saying because what you're kind of coming at is I'm presenting this as a universal as opposed to my personal experience.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Pat] That does seem sexist. Yeah. So…

[Dan] Do we want to… I mean, we'll keep rolling. But do we want to go back and cut that out?

[Mary Robinette] That's up to Pat.

[Pat] I could do it either way. I mean, I think it's valuable to see a misstep and correction for some people. It kind of depends on the tone that you want to achieve here. It sort of eats up some airtime.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean we are talking about revision. So this is actually a good revision.

[Laughter]

[Pat] Yeah.

[Dan] Well, actually…

[Mary Robinette] Like, when you get called on something in a critique and you have a pushback, you have a no, I don't think this is right. But then you think about it, and you're like, "Okay, well, what is my area of intention with this, and how do I get this across without triggering that again?"

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Pat] That actually is great, because like… I was like, "Oh. I was trying to achieve this." You're like, "You might have been trying for that, but here's actually the effect of what you said." I'm like, "Oh. Right. I probably, for some of my audience, I hit that effect with this, because I was coming at this from my own experience. I wasn't anticipating the effect on other people." So, now, an attempt to revise, like… That's the tricky bit of revision for me, is thinking… This one came out of me very naturally and it seems compelling because of its organic nature. But now I've got to stop and sort of disentangle myself from the affection of the original. Because it came out of sort of an honest emotional place in my personal experience. Then I've got to think how does that work? Than that, in my opinion, is the real work of writing. Because when it comes naturally and it's good, you're golden. That's not work. The work is looking at it and saying, "Uck. I've got to lay some bricks." Honestly, I don't know what I would do. I don't know how I would revise that analogy.

[Howard] Can I take a stab at it?

[Pat] Yeah, yeah. Help me.

[Howard] Can I take a stab at it? There is the music that I write to, and there is karaoke night.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] Karaoke night is a thing that… It is music. It is performative. It is songs that we are familiar with, but karaoke night is not what I want to listen to when I am trying to write. I have thousands of hours logged on the same 200, 300 songs in a playlist that I use for writing. Those are my go to, those are my main character. But without karaoke night, that's kind of lifeless. Without singing in the shower, without these other pieces. So coming back to the original question, which was, what do you do when a character is… When a secondary character is overshadowing your main character. What do you do when karaoke night… Everybody is loving that way more than the main musical theme of your book.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, what is it that there loving about karaoke night more? Why is it… Oh, well, it's because the characters are interacting here in a way that is energetic and fun. Why is that missing from my main character?

[Mary Robinette] This is why I don't play D&D more than a one shot, because that narrative…

[Pat] Becomes…

[Mary Robinette] is often… Is that becomes more compelling to me. That's a side quest in my quest for writing. It is the secondary character that has become more interesting. But I did like what you are talking about the relationship that you have with the thing. You were going to say something.

[Pat] That's what I want to ask. Because what you did… When you were talking about that, I'm like, that makes sense. But it also gave me a moment to sort of stop, and to back away from it, and think about the primary issue you had with it. Was it the fact that I was talking about relationships, or the fact that they were gendered female?

[Mary Robinette] It was that they were gendered female, but specifically, that they were gendered female and based on appearance.

[Pat] Well, the first one wasn't. I said the marriage of 10 years…

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Oh, that's true.

[Pat] The other one was…

[Mary Robinette] But the second one…

[Pat] No, the other one was a week in Morocco. It was a vacation. I said a beautiful dark-eyed woman. What if I said a dark-eyed beauty and a marriage of 10 years? Does that resolve the sexism?

[Mary Robinette] Oh. That…

[Pat] Because that might be a simpler fix than changing my entire analogy.

[Mary Robinette] That is an interesting idea. I'm not…

[Pat] This is revision. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That may in fact have solved it for me. Although I think because beauty is still a gendered word in modern…

[Pat] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That I would still probably read it the same way. Also, because… There's also than the Morocco and dark-eyed and what are you [implying] there…

[Pat] There's some racism stuff there potentially. This is why we revise.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I really wish we could say that we had planned this, because I think it worked out perfectly to tell you all these points of revision and then to demonstrate them all in order…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Like trusting reader feedback, then work shopping, and all these different things that we did, to getting distance from it. But that is all the time we have. I'm really glad that this worked out the way it did. This is been a fantastic episode about revision. We have… We want to leave you with some homework to do, which Mary Robinette has.

[Mary Robinette] No, I think Pat actually had this.

[Dan] Was it Pat? I don't remember who it was.

[Mary Robinette] I think we both had the same one.

[Dan] Okay. Well, we're going to have Pat say it, then.

[Pat] Mine actually might have been the one that I already mentioned, where, go through your chapters and list your purpose. Because if you have never done that, it is incredibly informative. Also, it helped me realize that I want the scene to have at least three purposes, so that if two of them don't land, there's still something in it for the reader. But what was your's?

[Dan] You get to homeworks this time.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. It was the 10% solution.

[Pat] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which was… Which I think we've done on the podcast before, and it is still worth revisiting. Which is to examine your work and look at cutting it by 10%. You can go through and say, "Okay, I'm going to cut this paragraph by 10% or this page by 10%." But this process forces you to examine it and think about why is this word here? What is it supporting? A lot of times, you cut that 10% from your thing by saying, you know what, I'm going to pull this entire subplot out.

[Pat] Yeah. This is something I did repeatedly to Name of the Wind. I would always think, well, that's it. I cut everything that could be cut. But then another couple of months later, I would go through it again, and I'm like, "Actually, now that it's cleaner and tighter, I can see other things that weren't as clean and tight." And I do… I aim for every page 10%. So if I'm not cutting a line or a sentence or a phrase… It really forces me to consider what is essential on a page.

[Mary Robinette] If you're someone who writes short, which happens too sometimes, it is also worth, as an experiment, adding 10%.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To decide where things need to be fleshed out.

[Dan] Cool. Well, that's great. This has been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/01/14-35-what-you-leave-out/

Key Points: Worldbuilding an iceberg? Just build the tip of the iceberg, and make readers think the rest of it is there, too. Build what's needed for verisimilitude. Figure out where your scenes are set, then figure out what that looks like and how it works. What are you going to be using the most? What will my characters be directly interacting with? Give the reader information in ways that asks questions, instead of answers them. Use relationships to other events, rather than exact times. Leave it out, if it doesn't help the story. Think about what the book is, then do the research. Do you need to show the event happening or can you just tell the reader that the event happened and had an outcome? Sometimes, you don't want to go there. Postpone that decision until you need it! Be aware of the uncanny valley of worldbuilding -- far off, skip the details, it's okay, we got the broad strokes. Too close, too many details, and suddenly readers start asking questions. Don't fall into that valley! Watch out for the super-detailed realistic piece that makes everything else look fake. Focus on what you actually need to keep the story from falling apart. Avoid worldbuilding details that would ruin the story.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 35.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What You Leave Out.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] That probably wasn't what I was supposed to leave out, but go ahead.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We all just sat there, going, "What is he? Oh!"

[Mary Robinette] And you are?

[Dan] I'm Dan, I guess.

[Howard] And I'm Howard. And unapologetic.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right. What you leave out.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled not amused]

[Brandon] So when I teach my students about this topic, one of the things I mention is when I was a newer writer, one of the things I got told frequently is that you want to, in worldbuilding, worldbuild a ton. But not put all of it in. Put enough of it in that the reader… You're indicating to the reader that it's like an iceberg, right? You can see the tip and you can see that there is so much more beneath. The more I became a published writer, the more I worked in it, the more I realized that that was… not a fantasy, but perhaps people in the business making it sound a little more grandiose than it is. Because most people I know do not worldbuild the entire iceberg and then show you the tip. What they do is they worldbuild the tip, and then they find a way to worldbuild a hollow iceberg that makes you think that there is the rest…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Underneath there. The goal in worldbuilding is not to do everything, just to do as little as you can and still look like you've done everything.

[Howard] Two nights ago, I was watching the special features for the movie Deepwater Horizon, for that film. They built an 85% scale oil rig over a little 3 foot deep pond. The reason they did it was so that when the actors were outside up high, shooting scenes, the actors are reacting as if they are outside and up high. They could have done the whole thing green screen, but they didn't. They needed that level of verisimilitude. Then there was this point where the VFX guy said, "So, we didn't actually build the whole oil rig. We only built the front." You see this scene where the helicopter is coming in and the camera has panned around the oil rig and it is just… Like 25%, 20% of the oil rig. Then the VFX says, "This is what we had to build," and throws all the other stuff in. After hearing how much time they spent building 20% of the oil rig for verisimilitude, the peace that they needed, this iceberg thing totally makes sense. Build the piece that's required for verisimilitude. Drill all the way down on that. Then fix the rest in post.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, how do we apply this to our worldbuilding? What do you guys do when you are worldbuilding? How do you give this indication that there's more underneath there? How do you decide what to leave out of your story? How do you decide what not to worldbuild?

[Dan] So, following along with this set building metaphor here, I remember reading an early interview with Gene Roddenberry when they were doing the original Star Trek series. He said that he wanted to have an engine room, and they weren't going to build him one, until he put that scene into the pilot episode. He's like, "Look, well, we have to have a scene here. I'm sorry, there's no way around it." So they gave him an engineering. What I do when I'm building my worlds and planning my books is I figure out, "Well, where are my scenes set? Where do I want those scenes to be set?" Am I going to be talking enough about main engineering, for example, that I need to figure out what it looks like and where it is and how it works, or is my story going to focus on some other thing? So they didn't build the entire, or even 20%, of the Starship Enterprise. They built a bridge and an engineering room and a transporter room, and that's kind of it. Maybe some hallways. Because that's where they knew their story was going to take place. So I try to figure out what am I focusing on, what am I going to be using the most, and that's what I focus on.

[Mary Robinette] I'm very much the same way. I really only worry about the things that my characters are going to be directly interacting with. I want to make sure that I understand enough of how they interact, of how it works, so that the interaction makes sense. But, like, when we move through our daily life, we interact with a lot of stuff that… There's a number of houses that you passed on the street and you have no idea what's in those houses. But they're still houses. You go to Disneyland. You don't actually know what it takes to make Disneyland work. It's just the front facing stuff. So one of the things that I do is that I think about the pieces that my character is going to have that direct interaction with, like you were talking about. One of the ones that I find works really well our past events. Referring to things… Usually these are things that I have no idea of what they actually are. But instead of saying, "Well, this happened in 1457." Like, I don't actually want to figure out how long ago a thing happened. I don't know. So I'll say, "Well, it happened during the… Right after the battle of the seven red armies." Everyone's like, "Oh, well, the battle of the seven red armies."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Clearly, she spent all of this time thinking about that. What that's done is it saved me from actually working out a timeline. Because I've… Now I can place the battle of the seven red armies anywhere I need to be.

[Dan] One of the things that that suggests to me is that you have given them the information in a way that asks more questions rather than answers them. That gives a gre… I mean, we know when it took place, but we know it based on a relation to an event rather than an exact number of years. In the audience's mind, it's not answering the question so much as it's saying, "Don't worry, I've got this. Also, here's something else to worry about."

[Brandon] Have you ever spent a lot of time in your worldbuilding before writing or during writing a story and then decided to leave that out of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[Brandon] When, why, and what made you make that decision?

[Mary Robinette] In the Glamorous Histories, for Without a Summer, I spent a great deal of time figuring out how Parliament worked in relationship to glamour, and what laws were being passed and not passed, and got into the novel and realized that that entire plot structure was completely irrelevant. I like knew… I had spent all of this research on this one particular historical figure who never appears in the novel now. It was basically, it just didn't help the book. Chucked it. It was one of the things that made me realize that I really need to think about what the book is and then do the research. I will say that I approach my research now the same way that I… I mean, I approach my worldbuilding the same way that I approach my research, which is that all do like these broad strokes, but I only really drill down on the stuff that I actually need to.

[Brandon] I spent a lot of time in the Stormlight Archive before I was writing it, working on the writing systems. The glyphs that they were going to draw and things like this. I left that all out because once I actually wrote the book and I looked back at the stuff I'd done, I realized I'm not an artist.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Beyond that, I'm not an expert in languages and… I just hired that out. So I took all the stuff I did… I didn't even give it to them. Because I'm like, "You know what, I'm going to use the text that I've written in the book." I'm going to give this to the artist and I'm going to say, "What would you imagine this to be?" Isaac came up with stuff that was waaay better than any of the stuff that I had come up with. It kind of taught me, also, that maybe I should spend my effort where I know I'm going to be using it in the story, and then I can, after the fact, I can hire some of these things out.

[Dan] Brandon, you and I just did this yesterday, actually, on the project we're collaborating on. The Apocalypse Guard. We've been wrestling with this book for months now, and yesterday made the decision that kind of the main thing we need to do to fix it is to axe one of the magic systems.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] It was something very cool that we considered foundational to the story, but now that we're looking at the book in its current form, it's kind of beside the point.

[Brandon] It's also the thing that is causing the biggest problem with the story, because where the story is spiraling out of control are all these scenes where I spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the worldbuilding and the history. Scenes that Dan cut out a lot of when he did his revision.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But the effect of it's still there. It's leading to this big confusing ending where I have… Do what I do, tie all these worldbuilding elements together. But in ways that were cool for those worldbuilding elements and don't really work for the story.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] It's a point where we have to cut out… One of the things that is my signature is a magic system. Granted, we have multiples. So it's still going to be cool. But it's going to be a way better book if we just streamline.

[Howard] My approach here is often to ask where the line is between show versus tell. There are times in the story where it's absolutely required for the reader, because it's fun, because there's emotional content, whatever, to show an event happening. Then there are times when all the reader needs is to know that the event happened and there was an outcome. So entire scenes will vanish from the writing, because what I needed to do, with the story needed, was for somebody to say, "Battle was fought. So-and-so won." "Oh, really, that sounds terrible." And off we go with the core story.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So our book of the week is Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. I got to read this, an arc of it. It is fantastic. This is near future. It's an Internet of Things. A young woman discovers that her father has been murdered. She thinks. Everyone else thinks that it was a… Just an accident. Then people start coming after her. How do you disappear when everything is connected? So it's really, really cool. It feels like he has thought of everything. But the stuff that we're actually seeing is just the stuff that she interacts with directly. It's great worldbuilding, great characterization. I mean, it's a really good book. It also happens to illustrate some of these points.

[Brandon] Excellent. That was Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder.

[Brandon] So, we've talked about worldbuilding elements that we cut out. Are there ever things that you have decided even before you launch into the book, you're like, "I'm just not going to touch that. I'm not going to go that direction with the worldbuilding." Things that you just… Why have you done this?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, like in the Lady Astronaut books, I very carefully do not talk about what the rocket engine is that is driving this ship to Mars. I like really carefully do not talk about that. Because of the amount of research that I was going to have to do. But also, my character is not a rocket engineer. Right? She pilots things. She needs to know how to pilot things, and she does math. So, she needs to do those things. But I did not need to know how the rocket engine worked. And as soon as I worked on figuring that out, that was going to lock me into certain decisions. Like, if I decide that it is atomic oxygen, that locks me into one line of technology. If I decide that it is nuclear, that locks me into another line of technology. Because I don't know what subsequent books are going to need, I decided to not make that decision and to leave room for it to be any of those things, and just… I establish some trust with the reader early on, so that I can just… Like, just get in there and…

[Brandon] You know…

[Mary Robinette] It's like, they're going to Mars. Obviously, they've solved how they get there.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I had a conversation with this… About this same topic with a writer that I know… That we were kind of brainstorming on some worldbuilding and things. The way I presented it as there's like an uncanny valley of worldbuilding where at a certain point, it's far off, and you're leaving out the right details from what we're doing so that nobody starts to question really how it works. Like, if you don't do enough, people are confused and you start to lose them. You do the right amount, and people are willing to take your word on it. They suspend their disbelief, they accept the worldbuilding, it feels really logical to them, you've got the couple of corner cases that they would assume. Then there's a stage where you start explaining it so much that the rational part of their brain kicks in and says, "Well, wait a minute. This and this and this and this," and you start to hit this sort of uncanny valley where suddenly you lose them. They aren't willing to suspend their disbelief anymore. That can be a really fine balance to walk.

[Mary Robinette] We have this problem in theater, with… All the time. Where you've got a set, and if you go very minimalist with it, you're asking the audience to be engaged. You go too minimalist with some shows, and everything falls apart. But if you've got like a set where everything looks really nice, and then there's this one piece that is hyper realistic, everything else in the story feels just awful. Beauty and the Beast, the animation… When they had… That was the first stuff of the computer animation…

[Dan] They introduced CG in the ballroom scene.

[Mary Robinette] The ballroom scene looks… It looks wrong, because it is more rendered than everything else. Then everything else starts to look false.

[Dan] I did a black box production of Assassins in college. It was all just super minimal sets, but we had a super realistic like rolltop desk, and it just… It looked terrible. Because it made the rest of the show looked terrible.

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite pieces of set design that I ever did… This is a side tangent, but a good example. A friend of mine called me on a… On Monday and said, "We had a reading this weekend and are set designer did not show up with the set. I have just found out that she has skipped town with all of the money which she has spent on drugs. We open on Friday. Help me. I have $75."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I'm like, "Okay." We sat down and we talked about what are the things that have to be on stage or the show will fall apart. It was a tree, the moon, and a wall. That was basically it. So I bought some foamcore, and I got some paint, and I did this dry brush minimalist New Yorker style thing of a tree, a moon, and the wall. I think I gave him a chair, too. As a bonus.

[Dan] 'Cause you're a benevolent god.

[Howard] You had eight dollars left.

[Mary Robinette] I still had eight dollars. I had to get paid out of that $75, you know. So I… But we stripped it down to what you actually need or the show will fall apart. When the review came out, it raved about the minimalist design and delicate ethereal touches of the set. Meanwhile, in the program, I am listed as scene proctologist, because I pulled that set out of my ass.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, point being, just look at the worldbuilding details that you need to keep the show from falling apart.

[Dan] Well, it can also be helpful to look at the worldbuilding details that would ruin things. When I did my cyberpunk series, I specifically avoided artificial intelligence. There's algorithms, there's swarm intelligence, but there is no self-aware thing because that is a singularity that I was not prepared to deal with. So, that's not in the story, it's not a possible technology in that world.

[Brandon] This story of Mary Robinette's actually leads us really well into our homework. Which Howard is going to give us.

[Howard] Yup. I want you to take your worldbuilding slider and I want you to pull it all the way to zero for one of your chapters. Take a chapter that's got some worldbuilding exposition in it, that's got some cues about what's going on in your world that are deepening things, and pull all those out. Leave yourself with zero worldbuilding. Have a look at that chapter and see which elements of the story fail and which elements of the story still work. This is not so that you can tell yourself that you don't need to worldbuild. This is so you can tell yourself… What the…

[Dan] I need a tree and a moon and a wall…

[Howard] I need a tree and a moon and a wall, and I will give myself a chair.

[Mary Robinette] As a bonus, in the liner notes, I'm going to give you a copy of the first scene of Shades of Milk and Honey in which I have done this exercise. So I have stripped out everything that I identified as exposition. I have to say, that scene is a mess.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/10/14/13-41-fixing-character-problems-part-ii/

Key points: Fixing broken characters, part II! When a story just stops, you may need to spend more time developing the characters before hand. When a story stops, check either the character building or the world building. Sometimes you may need to add another character to bring out another side of a character. Sometimes brokenness shows up when outlining. Without a sense of the character, you can't write (or outline) the scene. Look at the blanks, that may be where your story is. Put the plot aside, and focus on who the character is and why this is a problem. Sometimes, with a big cast and many storylines, you may need to map them out, and combine characters. Sometimes, just lean into the prose. Ignore the story issues, structure, character, or plot, and just lean into the prose. Sometimes you just unravel part of the story, then crotchet or knit it back together again.

( Here comes the words! )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fixing Character Problems, Part II.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] And we have broken characters. How do we fix'em?

[Eee!]

[Brandon] This is part II. We talked about this previously with the other podcasting team. I really want to get Amal and Maurice's thoughts on what they do when a character just isn't working. Have you ever had a character, when you get done with your piece, or even midway through it, that you know the character isn't working?

[Maurice] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Okay. Podcast over.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It's happened a couple of different ways. I remember early on I had a story, it was a young woman, and I was very much in her head, story's going along just fine, and then I killed off her husband. Then the story stopped. I'm just like, "Yeah, but what do you do next? What…" Nothing. Nothing came after that. That was like the first time when a… I started filing away the whole idea of, you know what, I have to spend more time developing these characters before hand, because… Like I said, this was early in my career, so I hadn't quite reached that whole let's spend weeks with the character and really get to know them, because I hadn't done all that work, that back work yet. I didn't realize that back work still needed to be done. That's actually become my big hint is the work isn't done because the story stops. So either I haven't done enough character building at that point, or I haven't done enough world building. Because sometimes the story stops because I haven't developed the character… The world as a character enough, and the story stops.

[Brandon] Okay. So with you, when the story stops… Is this most of the time, if you've got a problem, it's a need to go back and I have not spent enough time with the characters?

[Maurice] Yeah. Usually that's the case. But there was a time when it was pointed out to me that a character wasn't working for me. That was, ironically, with The Usual Suspects, my middle grade novel. The editor wrote back, and among the editor notes, they were like, "You do know that… I love your main character. But he always has a hard edge to him. He's always hard. That works when he's in the school situation, but he becomes almost one note because he's always doing that." So, her suggestion was, why don't you add another character to bring out his softer side? So I ended up…

[Mary] A foil? Ingenious.

[Maurice] Right. A foil.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] In this case, the foil was a little sister. Because he would act one way at school with his defenses up, but around his little sister, he can't help but lower his guards around her. That brought a whole new dimension to the character, and a whole new… Basically, a whole new arc to the story. I was just like… I was so pleased by the time it was done, going in and inserting those scenes of the two of them interacting. I was like, "All right, maybe editors aren't the enemy."

[Laughter]

[Amal] So, in my case, because I mostly write short fiction, I find that… The identifying the brokenness of a character almost always happens at the outlining stage. I say outlining, I don't act… I mean, my… The way that I tend to write is very slowly, but then my final draft… My first draft is usually very close to my final draft. So there's a lot of that time that spent kind of figuring out the story, before I start actually diving into prose. It's usually at that stage that I'll see a yeah, this character is just not… Like, I mean, if I don't have the sense of the character, I just can't write the scene. So it hasn't yet happened for me that I've written a whole draft of something and been like, "Mm, that character's actually not working. I need to do something." But the problems that I'll encounter as I'm trying to do it are usually dependent on whether or not the character has come out of the needs of the plot or whether the plot as come from the character, the idea of the character. So that a story I've mentioned before, Madeleine, where with the kind of like memory flashback hallucination thing, that was the idea that I wanted to play with. It actually came out with… I wanted to write… I thought to myself, I want to write a time travel story where the way that you time travel is through sense memory, is through like being triggered through your senses, and it's an involuntary thing, and you're literally traveling through time. It was as I was trying to work out the implications of what that meant, that I decided actually, I think what I want to do is tell a story more about someone experiencing this. So it's less a high concept thing, and more about the experience of memory. I had to sort of keep zooming in on that idea until I had a character, and even then, when I figured, okay, well, so this is the character, I know that her mother had Alzheimer's, but… But what else? Those blanks were where the story ended up living. The way that I ended up fixing that was basically just by… By putting the plot aside completely and thinking like, "Well, who is she? Why is it a problem that this is happening?" Like, all these other things came out. Like, she's really, really lonely in the wake of having tended to a parent in the last stages of a really terrible illness. She's… Her friends have more or less abandoned her, because they can't deal with how terrible that pain is… How sustained and terrible that pain is. Like, all of those things, they kind of just came together.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] So, I'm curious. You both talked about like the story stops, or looking for the story and kind of the space and putting the plot aside. Are there symptoms that tend to… That you've now learned that oh, when the story is breaking in this particular way, this is the kind of fix that I usually end up applying to it?

[Maurice] One of them, one of the fixes happened with my urban fantasy series, because again, I had that big sprawling cast, and again, part of the issue was I had all these different storylines I was trying to track. Then I didn't realize until actually I was starting to map some of them out, there was like, "Okay, some of these just stop and go nowhere." I would introduce something that I would never pick up ever again. So what I ended up doing was, and it helped… It actually solved another problem in the book, which was I had so many characters in the book that what I ended up doing was combining characters, which (a) cut down the sum of the characters and (b) it allowed for some character growth and whole arcs at that point.

[Amal] For me, what I've realized I do, to the point where now I design workshops around this, is that I feel like the break or the problem happens because I'm trying too hard in one direction. What I end up doing is leaning into the prose. Like, this is going to sound weird and super inside baseball-y, I guess, but what I end up doing is because I also write poetry and I tell all my students that I feel like there's a day brain and a night brain for poetry, which is a concept that I first heard articulated by my friend [garbled]. But, similarly to the way that when you sing, you use different parts of your brain than when you speak, so that if you have speech impediments with your speech, you might not have them if you sing, I find that if I'm really, really focused on a lot of prose… Like, a lot of story issue stuff, structure or character or plot, if I let myself just lean into the prose that I'm writing and let my poetry brain take over, then I can sometimes just jump over the skip in the record or the scratch in the record rather, and just move into something else and keep going. So that definitely happened in this story. And I… It's weird. I can't definitely remember what the line was. I just remember very, very clearly that there was a line where I was like, "I have no idea where I'm going with this," and I just tried to follow the poetry logic of the line. It took me somewhere unexpected, and into a different metaphor, and then suddenly everything just kind of fell into place for the character.

[Mary] I will let you guys know a thing, because I do… I didn't have that language for it, lean into the prose, but like you can spot this in my fiction. If you see my character doing an activity, thinking about what it is that they are… How am I going to solve this problem, and Jane is like working with glamour and how is she going to solve this relationship thing? And then she's like, "Aha!" And she puts the glamour down and goes away. That is me freewriting…

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] To try to figure out a plot problem with my character.

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] That I'm like I can't get her from this point to this point. I can't get her over this decision hump. What is the thing that she needs to do? I'll usually go back and trim that sucker down, and sometimes I'll pull it out altogether, but one of the things that I have found is that I do like lean into the prose, that I will freewrite as my character and I will give her an activity that she's doing while she's trying to figure it out.

[Brandon] This is really interesting to me. It's going to be a slight tangent, but it kind of plays into a theory I have, where… When I was younger and when I was becoming a writer, I always imagined writing as more of a craft. It's like you are building something brick by brick by brick and whatnot, and the more I've been a writer, the more I realize it's more a performance art.

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] You go over something over and over, at least for me, I'm a planner, over and over in my head. I practice it, I practice certain skills, and then I sit down, and it's like, "Blam." This thing happens, and then I'm left with this thing. Now I'm going to cultivate it, but the actual creating of the story, it's like doing a play where this is performance night. Then I get to go back and revise it. It's this really weird shift that's happened in my brain, the more I've become a writer, which is an odd shift for someone who is kind of an outliner, like me. That always kind of saw it brick by brick.

[Mary] I mean, this is a thing that I think I talked about in my very first episode with Writing Excuses, before I was a full-time cast member. That my training as a puppeteer was to break techniques apart so that when you got into the art of it, you worked thinking about the technique anymore, you could just do the performance. I think that that's a thing that early career writers, we're still thinking about all of the technique. So when you're trying to figure out a character problem, it's… Like a character problem can lie in so many different aspects of character. It can be a motivation issue, it can be a back story issue, it can be a goal issue, it can be the personality issue, that the character's personality doesn't fit with the thing you need them to do. Learning to identify where these problems lie is difficult. Once you figure that out, a lot of it does become very intuitive.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Book of the week is actually The Only Harmless Great Thing.

[Amal] Oh. Yes. Oh, my gosh, I love this so much. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a Tor.com novella by Brooke Bolander. It's amazing. It's about… Oh, it's about… Ostensibly, it's about the fact that during wartime on Coney Island, they started teaching elephants to use paintbrushes so that they could paint, I think, what was it, clocks with radium or something like that. So they basically offloaded the extremely dangerous and terrible task of interacting with radium onto elephants, because they could survive longer than the underprivileged women who had been doing it until that point. So it's about this woman who is teaching this elephant how to do this at first. But it's a narrative. It's also broken up by a kind of… It's an alternate future sort of where those events took place. So imagine an alternate future from that same actual real thing that happened, but it's intercut with elephant folklore, like folklore that elephants have with mythologies that elephants have, so it imagines that elephants have this storytelling tradition that reaches back to the mammoths, and that they have incorporated this incident into their own mythology. So it's this beautiful, beautiful defamiliarization of a bunch… It's doing so much stuff that I could go on and on about, but the thing that struck me was that because Tor.com also put out novellas about other megafauna and alternate histories, which are Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth and The Taste of Marrow. Those are like rollicking heist novels, novellas. So because Brooke Bolander's stuff that I've read up until this point has been very fast-paced, very… Like, just like… I think it's like… Whiskey is the way I talk about it, it's like knocking whiskey back, is like what Bolander's stuff…

[Mary] Why would you do that?

[Amal] I know. Well, when it's hard and you're angry and you want the burn, like there's… Right. So. But, so that's what I was expecting from this. I knew it would be difficult and full of unhappy things, but I still expected it to be what I think of as a Bolander story. Instead, it's slow. It's like… It's like sipping that whiskey. It's like a slow, long pour of something. The voices are so distinct and so sustained and it's just beautiful. Like the… Being in the mammoth space and that kind of like elephant mythology voice, just forces you to slow down, and really appreciate everything beautiful that's going on in the prose. It's absolutely wonderful. It comes… Yeah. It came out in January. So…

[Brandon] Awesome. So let me throw a question at you guys that I threw at the other podcasters, which is, is there a time where you pushed yourself on a character that maybe was giving you trouble, or that when you were outlining, you were like, "This is going to be a little bit tough," that was rewarding? That you're glad you did?

[Mm… Hum.]

[Amal] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] This is exactly how we all answered it.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I'm trying to think of an exclusively character instance. Because the one that I want to use is the character in The Truth about Owls, who is a girl named Annise. Anisa, rather. I made that mistake. Anyways, she… Like initially when I… This kind of plays into some of the things that we were talking about in other episodes. Initially, I was going to have her be Indian, and I had wanted the story to be about gender, and I was going to explore those things through the Blodeuwedd story, which is a Welsh story about a woman made of flowers who gets turned into an owl. I had like all these important structural things I wanted to do. Then I realized I couldn't do any of them, because I had no idea who this character was if she was Indian. Like, I had no access to the things that I wanted to talk about. I had like some thought processes for why I had wanted that, but it was insufficient. This discouraged me to the point where I just didn't want to write the story. I literally wrote to the editors and went, "You know what, I just don't think I can do this. I'm sorry. I'm going to back out early while it doesn't have a problem." The editors, Julia Rios in particular, went, "But, we really want a story from you. Can you not just tell this story, like through backgrounds that you're more familiar with?" I ended up making this character Middle Eastern instead. I ended up making her of Lebanese extraction, and everything fell into place. Every single thing that fell into place, I fought. Basically. Because I did not... I was like, "Okay. She's going to be… Her family is from Lebanon, but I really don't want to write a story about war, so I'm… I'm… No. I'm just not going to do that part." Then I realized that the time constraints that I had chosen set it squarely in the time when Lebanon was being bombarded by Israel in 2006. I was like, "Crap." Okay. So. Well, I'm going to put her in this other part of Lebanon, where she won't have experienced any of that, because most of the bombing was on Beirut. I put her in Rayak, which is my mom's village, which is a place that I spent time in. Then did a tiny bit of research and realized the only other airfield in Lebanon is in Rayak…

[Laughter]

[Amal] It also got bombed. I was like, "Oh, God. There's just no escaping this. I'm going to write this stupid war into this story, and I didn't want it to be about any of this." But as soon as I made those decisions, then the writing came out, and it all sort of happened. Every difficulty, everything that was like, "No, like I just, I didn't want to do this." As soon as I decided to like, "Fuck it. Fine, I will do it." It ended up working out.

[Maurice] So, I already talked a little bit about the process of writing a middle grade. That would have been one example. I can give two examples that all revolve around the same issue. The issue was agency. So one… I'll give one example where I fixed the problem in one example where it kind of slipped by all of us. Which was an interesting experience. So my… The story that I have with Uncanny Magazine, Ache of Home. I'd sent the story in, they loved the story. They were just like, "Yeah, but that ending. You know, your main character, she doesn't seem to have enough agency in solving the problem. Is there a way that…" We need to fix that, basically. So they gave me some notes. So it basically involved going back and… Actually, whenever I think about fixing character problems, I have this visual view, like when you're, I know, [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary] You're looking very frightened right now.

[Maurice] But, like you were crocheting the other day or something, and just the whole idea of just… You sat there, and you'd be like, "And now we're going to unravel."

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh. Yeah.

[Maurice] That's what the process was like. I was like, "Okay, now I'm going to unravel the last third of my story."

[Mary] I'm so glad that you said that, because that was… That's a thing that as an early career writer, when you're fixing character problems, one of the most liberating things for me was realizing that I could just pull a giant chunk of text out and write a different chunk of text and it cost nothing.

[Maurice] Not a thing.

[Mary] It's like the thing I enjoy personally about writing is writing, so… It was like… My husband said this. He was watching me pull a bunch of crochet out, and he's like, "But… But… You did all of that work." I'm like, "Yeah. But I get to crochet again."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Right.

[Mary] Like, I'm still getting to crochet.

[Maurice] Yep. So, when I unraveled, and then I got to re-knit it back together. The re-knitting, for me, it just looked like… In a lot of ways, it was just a matter of reordering and reprioritizing, just doing a series of just little shifts here and there. Ultimately, that's all it took, was just some little shifts here and there. I'm like, "The story was already there. I just had to bring it out a little bit more." Now, the one that slipped by a lot of us was with Buffalo Soldier of all things. It isn't a major critique or anything, it was just one review that said, "Loved Buffalo Soldier. Loved the world building. Loved all these aspects of it. It's just that the child that the main character's protecting has no agency, and is little more than a damsel in distress." That's one of those things that just kind of haunted me. Well, it's just like… Hum, that one slipped by me. I get where… Because the whole story started with the whole image of… My nephew's on the autism spectrum, and is like the worst hide-and-seek player ever. Because like we'll play in teams, and like me and him will go hide. Like, as soon as someone goes, "Hey! Where's Orion?" He doesn't want you to be worried about him, so he'll jump out of the bushes. "Here I am!" You are awful at this game.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the whole premise of this story revolved around the idea of like trying to play… It was basically a chase novel with a child whose like, "Hey. You know what, why are we hiding?" But it was one of those things where it was like, Mm... He doesn't… While he drives the story, I missed the fact that he doesn't really have a lot of agency in the story. So it's one of those things where it's like lesson learned. I will keep that in mind for… If I come back to write more of this, that problem will be fixed.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to stop us here. This has been really good. I'm glad that we did this, this kind of one-two punch on this topic. I have some homework for you guys. It actually relates to some things Maurice and Amal were talking about. I'm… I find that often the way to fix a character problem is to add or subtract a character. So I want you to take one of your characters from a story you've written, and I want you to split them into two people. See what happens with those two people interact. Then, in another story, I want you to try combining, for a scene, two characters that have been the same person… Or two different people for a while, combine them into one and see how that scene plays out with a character combined, with two characters combined. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/01/13-26-character-relationships/

Key points: Beyond the character arc, with characters changing and developing, other characters get involved. That's where character relationships come in. Some people plan them in advance, while other people discover them in the writing. Leave yourself wiggle room, and when you find two characters that work well together, let them show you great scenes and better stories. Try the Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Mind: intelligence. Money: what is money for, and what are your goals? Morals: what's right and wrong? Manners: what's polite? Monogamy: hot, burning kisses? What is our relationship? The Marx Brothers: what's funny, and what's not! Alignment makes compatibility, differences create friction points, tension points. Another tool is position power versus personal power. How can you introduce backstory in a relationship quickly? A shared in-joke. Free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, reflecting on the relationship. Final question: the relationship after HEA! How do you write that? The classic romantic arc is a character arc, from I am dissatisfied with being alone to they hook up. After that, don't break the relationship, use an event arc, with something disrupting the status quo. External conflicts plus friction in the Kowal relationship axes equals story! Don't just strut like a hawk, scratch for your own worms.

( Putting words on the outline... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Relationships.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] All right. So, we know what our characters… They have a big arc, and they're changing, and they're developing. Now other people are going to start interfering with that. Helping or hindering it. We're going to talk about character relationships. This is something that I do a lot ahead of time. But I know that Dan, for instance, just kind of… Often they…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Mess each other up and you see what happens.

[Dan] Sometimes. I do a mix of both. I like to plan out in advance when I know, for example, that I'm going to have a group of friends. I want to know how they all interact with each other. But very frequently, and in fact the book that came out earlier this year, Active Memory, turned into a father-daughter book. Not because I planned it that way, but because as I was writing the other two in the series, that relationship became more and more interesting every time the father came on screen. So by midway through the third book, I'm like, "Okay, you know what?"

[Laughter]

[Dan] "We're just going to focus on this, and we're going to do it right."

[Brandon] I would say… I mean, I joke about being a heavy outliner, but this is one of the places, no matter how much you outline, you have to have wiggle room for. When your characters are quote unquote on screen together and you find that you write them with great chemistry, that they are working… When those two characters are on screen, you have a better scene than when either of them are apart, you know that something is going on there, and you need to be willing to run with that and explore it. You want to write the scenes that are best. You want the characters to give you the opportunity to write better stories.

[Mary] This is one of those things that we're always talking about, that writing is a spectrum from outlining to discovery writing. This is one of the areas that I also tend to discovery write a lot. But I also have a tool that I use when I need to… Like, when I know that I'm going to need these two characters to fight, but I don't want it to be a stupid fight. Because… Oh, I see this all the time, where the characters are fighting and I'm like, "Why are you fighting? You're fighting… There's no…" Or conversely, the characters who really do not get along at all, and then suddenly wind up in bed together. I'm like, "What? You've got nothing in common." So allow me to introduce you to something that I call the Kowal relationship axes.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] It's actually named after my mother-in-law, who used it as dating advice to my husband… Or to her son. I realized that it actually works incredibly well for describing the ways we interact with not just a romantic partner but kind of for everybody. So the idea is that there are six axes along which relationships exist. The more closely you are aligned on any one of these, the more compatible you are. The farther apart, the less compatible. It… The sliders don't have to be very far off. So those are mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers.

[Laughter]

[Mary] I will grant that my husband added the Marx Brothers after he realized… After we were married, that I had never seen…

[Laughter]

[Mary] We'll start backwards and work our way up. Marx Brothers basically represents that you have the same sense of humor.

[Brandon] Right. You laugh at the same thing.

[Mary] It's a very simple one. Monogamy is not that you're both monogamous, but that you have the same idea of what the relationship is. I mean, you've experienced the thing where someone thinks that you are BFFs, and you're like, "I kind of vaguely know you from work…" It's really super uncomfortable. So it's just you have to have… She labeled that one as hot burning kisses, which is better for the romantic stuff.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So they weren't all iterative?

[Mary] No.

[Brandon] When she… You being a writer have…

[Mary] Well, it was actually… The first four were alliterative, and then…

[Brandon] Then, hot burning kisses.

[Mary] Then hot burning kisses.

[Dan] Then hot burning kisses. Which, to be fair, can stand alone.

[Mary] It's true. So, manners mean that you have the same idea of what is polite… What is… And what is not. Morals are different from manners. Morals is your sense of what is right and wrong in the world. So you can have morals that are in close alignment and manners that are wildly off, or the other way around. I mean, that's often why you know someone on the Internet who's a terrible person on the Internet, and you meet them in real life and they're so nice. It's because your manners are really closely aligned, while your morals are wildly off. Money is that you have the same sense of what money is for, and the same goals towards money. It doesn't actually necessarily mean that you have the same amount of money, but that…

[Brandon] For swimming through in your giant money vault, obviously.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's what you do with it.

[Mary] Yes. Obviously. Mind is that you have comparable degrees of intelligence. What's interesting about this is that they really do not have to be very far off. So you can have people that are compatible. Like, the upper ends of all of these sliders in terms of their compatibility, but even just a little bit off… Those are the points where the friction is going to happen. What that does for you if you know that, if you know the places that they're a little bit farther… A little bit off, it tells you what the fight is going to be about.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] The… Why would you even say that?

[Mary] Yes.

[Howard] That surprise… We are so like each other, and yet you just… That thing.

[Dan] Yeah. The… Using those, some of them being close together can also be a good reason why the characters stick together, even though the others are far apart. I mean, the Lethal Weapon franchise is almost entirely founded on the idea that their morals are completely aligned and their manners are wildly 100% off.

[Mary] They have very similar… They're also lined up on mind and they're also… At the beginning… What's, I think is interesting is that they are in agreement on what their relationship is. Which is that we don't like each other.

[Brandon] I work alone.

[Mary] Yes. For both of them. Their understanding of what the relationship is evolves together. So those sliders move in the same…

[Howard] I have a much simpler tool that I deploy much differently, which is the two scales of power. Position power and personal power. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer has position power over the employee. But a very, very charismatic, intelligent, effusive employee has gobs of personal power, and without even trying, can undermine an employer who doesn't have any personal power. In fact, you see this a lot in workplaces, in all kinds of relationships. Where someone assumes that their personal power grants them position, or assumes that their position power grants them… For instance, friendship with everyone under them. I pay close attention to this in Schlock Mercenary, because the military organizations that make up so many… Or that encompass so many of the relationships in the books are inherently about position power, and there's a wide array of differing personal powers in there. I need to make sure… We talked about manners. Something that you would say to a fellow grunt is not something that you would say to an officer. That… That dichotomy, I have to keep track of that, because if I get it wrong, it knocks people out of the story.

[Dan] I had… I worked in an office, and was there for the moment when the guy with all the position power realized that he didn't have any personal power.

[Mary] Oh, hohoho.

[Dan] The office became unlivable. It was fascinating to watch that. That has just given me the dialogue to describe what happened.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have a book coming out!

[Mary] Yes. I have two books coming out, actually. I have a duology, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Book one is called The Calculating Stars. That's coming out this month. Actually, has just come out last week. The sequel, The Fated Sky, is coming out in August, at the end of the month. The set up for the first book is basically, it begins about two minutes before an asteroid slams into Washington, DC, in 1952, wiping out… It's actually the Chesapeake Bay, because it turns out that a water strike is way worse than a land strike. But it kicks off the space program hard and fast and internationally, with 1952 technology. So the first book is push to the moon, and second book is push to Mars. It's a woman-centered cast, because I've got a lot of… Because it's 1952, all of the women who are in Hidden Figures, all of those computers? Not only are they computers at that point, but historically speaking, a lot of them were also left over WASPs, Women Auxiliary Service Pilots from World War II. So you have a lot of people who are lighter than men, better able to handle gravitational blood pressure shifts, and who are walking computers.

[Brandon] It's out, it's awesome, I've read it, it's great. You guys should all go read it.

[Mary] So one of the exciting things for me about this book also is that I had astronauts reading it, and we are actually going to be at NASA and do a project-in-depth about The Calculating Stars, which is the first book in the series, in two weeks. Although we will have done it already… It's time travel, don't worry about it. So this gives you two weeks to read the book before we get to NASA. Go ahead. Three… Two… One… Lift off!

[Rumbling]

[laughter]

[Howard] Was I supposed to make a rocket noise?

[Mary] No.

[Howard] Oh.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] That was a terrible joke.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was waiting to see. Is she going to say lift off? Or are we not going to do that? Nope, she did it.

[Brandon] Either way, there will be massive spoilers for Mary's book in two weeks, so you should read it now.

[Brandon] Let's… Let me ask you guys another question about relationships. One of my favorite things in books and in film and whatever is when you get two characters who minutes after interacting, you can read in their interactions an extensive history that they don't have to tell you point by point by point, which is boring. Characters who just… You can read their relationship in moments. How do you write this? Any tips, any tricks?

[Mary] An in-joke. Just one. You don't have to do a lot. But an in-joke, like if two characters are talking and one of them is like, "Oh, yeah, like the time with the pumpkin."

[Chuckles]

[Mary] You don't have to do anything more than that.

[Dan] You said you wouldn't bring that up, Mary.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Sorry.

[Brandon] They did that in the Dirk Pitt movie, and it worked really well, to kick off the fact that these two characters have been in lots of crazy hijinks together.

[Dan] A story that does this really, really well is Sneakers. Because there's that whole little group of misfits and people, and one of the great things they do is the character Mother, who is always bringing up weird conspiracy theories. The first time he does that, Sidney Poitier, who's the ex-CIA guy, he reacts before he starts the story. I mean, he starts the story, and before he has a chance to get to the weird stuff, he's already rolling his eyes. You immediately know, "Oh, they do this all the time."

[Laughter]

[Dan] They have this very specific relationship to conspiracies in government, and it tells so much in the timing of his reaction.

[Brandon] That's awesome. Yeah.

[Howard] The Rocket and Groot scene where we are introduced to them in Guardians of the Galaxy… Groot's only dialogue is "I am Groot," where Groot is drinking out of the fountain, and we establish very, very quickly that the relationship between these two is kind of father-son and kind of boss-employer and kind of brains and brawn, and yet there is something woven in there that we just don't know, but it's there.

[Mary] I think that the thing with that is not just the in-jokes, but also, tying into what Dan was talking about, that... the characters' reaction to each other. So this is a place that you can use one of the tools we talked about when we were talking about character voice, which is that indirect… That free indirect speech, where the character's internal monologue can be a little bit about their relationship. "Oh, no, no, no, not this story again."

[Brandon] You see this in relationship… Romantic relationships a lot. Someone walks on screen, in a movie or television show, and you know instantly that those two characters have a history, a relationship. Often times it's that they're extremely cold to one another, which we read as, "Oh, something happened in the past between those two." I would say, less is more, in a lot of these instances.

[Brandon] Now, different topic. I wanted to make sure we asked you, Mary. You had an entire series where two characters went through a classic romance relationship, and then multiple books afterward where many people would have just stopped the series. In most movies and things, they just stop at the point where the first book ended. You wrote wonderful, awesome books about a different kind of relationship in some ways.

[Mary] So… Why, thank you. So, anyone who's married knows that you can actually be in a committed, happy relationship… Anyone who's in a committed, happy relationship, whether or not you're… You can be in this wonderful relationship, and there's still conflict. But the conflict is external. So the way I actually structured that… Okay. It took me a while to figure out. So I tend to think about the MICE quotient a lot. What I realized was that a romantic arc is structured as a character arc. The character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and then… That is, "I am alone." Then they hook up. That what happens when you… For the most part is that when people attempt to write relationships later, what they do is they're still writing a character arc, but once you're in a relationship, that couple is now a single unit, and you have to treat them as a single unit. So when you have the "I am dissatisfied with an aspect of self," that means that it's all about an internal conflict between the couple. So what I did was I treated it like an event arc instead, where they were totally happy with each other, but any event arc is when something disrupts their status quo. So I made sure that all of the conflicts that were hitting them were external conflicts, and then used the Kowal relationship axes to talk about how that friction expressed itself between them.

[Brandon] I would say that one of the reasons I like this is, it's a pet peeve of mine… Maybe that's the wrong term… That when the two characters hook up, the story is done. Which it's totally not.

[Howard] Or we have to make them break up so we can put them back together.

[Mary] That drives me crazy.

[Brandon] It's the sort of thing that I feel like, as storytellers, sometimes we internalize this thing which is a complete lie. Sometimes the best stories, in fact often the best stories, are when the reader's personally invested in both characters and personally invested in this relationship, which only happens once they are together. It's the same sort of thing in a different way that happens with Mistborn, this trilogy. If you haven't read it, the story that I originally wanted to tell was how do you keep an empire together after you've conquered it? When you're the Rebels and you've blown up the Death Star and taken over, and none of you have any experience in leading an empire or whatever, a republic, how do you make that happen? It's gotta be way harder than blowing something up, keeping it together. That's what made me initially start working on the series. With relationships, keeping together a relationship, I wouldn't say maybe it's harder, but in some ways it is, right? Because you have to work on it every day. The initial euphoria is gone, and something deeper is growing and building, but that's way more interesting.

[Dan] There's a beautiful quote from the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, in the fourth one, where the kid just wants to go off and be a hero. One of the witches says to him, "It's easy for the chicken to strut like a hawk. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." I always think that… That is such a more interesting story to tell, is how do you actually live rather than do this one cool thing and then be done.

[Mary] I think that it's also important to note that this is… This thing you're talking about of working on a relationship is not just a romantic relationship. Like, if you've met someone at a con or just school or… And they've moved away, it's difficult. You have to work constantly to maintain that level of friendship. It doesn't just take care of itself. I think that that's one of the things that you can do when… As a conflict point, as a tension point, is not the we want to break up, but we want to hang out and there are things getting between us. That's the other secret that I used in the Glamorous Histories is that I gave them, both characters, the same basic objective in addition to the same basic relationship objective, which was they wanted to get offscreen to a fade to black scene.

[Laughter]

[Mary] All they wanted… It's like, we really want to do a fade to black scene right now, but we're being attacked by pirates.

[Brandon] I would say… You mentioned friends kind of growing apart just because you're no longer in the same social circles. If that's happening to you, start a podcast with your friends…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Then you get to see them and hang out with them.

[Brandon] We're actually out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary] Yes. So take the elements of the Kowal relationship axes. Look at your characters. Decide where their friction points are. I want you to just pick two of them. Don't pick all of them, if you want them to be friends. Decide why they're that way. It's not enough to say they're… They have different manners. Like one of them is from the south, one is from Hawaii, which is…

[Laughter]

[Mary] [garbled] and I. But pick two, decide why, and then give them an external conflict and let the friction express itself.

[Howard] Can you rattle off the axes again?

[Mary] Yes. They are also in the liner notes. Mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, Marx Brothers.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/06/25/12-26-qa-on-outlining-and-discovery-writing/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you outline a scene? Not an entire book. Do you outline scenes?
A: Yes. Index cards: what's happening, what's the joke, what am I moving forward, who are the characters. One line: Awesome hanky-panky hwere while car explodes. If the way it happens is important during outlining, yes. How does it work, what are the beats. My outline is a list of bullet points to accomplish a goal. When I sit down to write a scene, I will write down a sequence of events.
Q: When outlining, how do you know when to stop adding to the outline?
A: When I start adding dialogue, it's time to write the story. When I have the emotional beats to earn a climactic moment.
Q: How much do you have to know about your characters/world before you begin writing?
A: Nothing. Nada. (Implied: you discover that through the writing!)
Q: What do you do to diagnose and fix a structural problem when you have a finished, mostly discovery written draft?
A: Reverse outline. Talk to alpha, beta readers, and analyze the problems they had. Sit down with the scripts and index cards, and push it around. One problem is bad, but two problems may solve each other, if you look at it right.
Q: I taught myself to outline like Dan did, but sometimes I can't always get into an outline like I should be able to. How did you address this, Dan?
A: Change formulas (outlining systems) and see if that helps.
Q: So far I've written five novels. The preparation/outlining process for each has been different by virtue of the story's needs. As pros, do you still deal with this frustration or have you worked out a system that consistently works for you?
A: It's different every time. We aren't chainsaw sculptors making grizzly bears, sometimes we make cabinets and coffee tables. Every book is like a first kiss with a different person. My process has stabilized over the years, but different genres have different processes. Find out what constraints your process has, where the borders are, and then adjust within those borders and constraints.
Q: What are some major indicators that a piece needs more structure?
A: If you find yourself going off track every time you start a new scene or chapter, you may need more structure. Learn the difference between a story and a bunch of stuff that happens. If you've just got a bunch of stuff, your characters aren't growing, you probably need more structure. Stuck, bored, don't want to sit down and write? You may have a broken structure that needs fixing.
( Questions, answers, and MORE! )

[Brandon] All right. So we're going to go to our homework. I have written on my guide for this episode…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Simply the words "Dan does something wacky weird." Because he promised us.
[Dan] Okay. So here we go. We're playing around with outlines. This is what you're going to do. We're going to force you to think outside the box. You're going to find another writer, or someone who wants to do this with you. Each of you are going to come up with just a quick outline for a story. Point by point, however many points you want. Six or seven. Then, you're going to cut… Print them out, cut them into strips, and then hand the other person the pile of strips. They know the beats of the story, but they don't know what order they go in. Then you have to reorder them, turn that into a cohesive story, and write it.
[Brandon] That's awesome. I love that.
[Piper] That sounds super fun.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's our I Ching episode.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Ooo, don't remind me of that one.
[Howard] Okay.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.9: Micro-Casting

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/02/26/writing-excuses-7-9-microcasting/

Key points:

-- What do you do if you don't like any of your characters? Write a different book OR change the character so you do like them.
-- How do you keep your plot on track? Outline. Decide what you are going to accomplish.
-- Real names of places or pseudonyms? How well do you know the setting?
-- How do you fix plot holes? A big Band-Aid, trowel, and spackle. Figure out what's missing, and fill in the hole.
-- How do you know when to abandon a story? Finish it first. Are you retreading old ground? Is the book not up to your standard? Is it something you wouldn't want to read?
-- How do you make sure answers to mysteries are satisfying? Write backwards. Make sure the answer fulfills the promises you made. Make your red herrings interesting too.
-- What are amateurish language-level mistakes? Repeating the same adverb frequently. Overusing adverbs. Interrobang. Repetitive sentence structure. Excessive passive voice. Avoiding said.
-- What should a scene consist of? Setting, character, plot. A problem and resolution. One or more objectives. Something that cannot be accomplished in another scene. Watch for the can of scenic worms to be opened on a scene construction podcast someday!
-- What kind of bacon is best? Streaky bacon, fakin' bacon, samgyeopsal, smoked bacon underneath real maple syrup, rouladen, and tempeh.
-- Why is Schlock, a pile of poo, likable? Most of the time, he's expressing himself. That turns him into a person.
( And for more details, press here! )
[Brandon] All right. We're going to use one of these as our writing prompt. How about this one? Do blog post and D & D play-by-post game posts count for nanowrimo? So in other words, do blog posts count for nanowrimo? So, you are going to do a narrative blog post. We'll just use this guy's thing. As your writing prompt, I want you to write a blog post in character for one of your characters, if they had a blog. Okay?
[Dan] Okay.
[Brandon] All right. This is been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: detailed

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.5: Sensory Writing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/29/writing-excuses-7-5-sensory-writing/

Key points: sensory writing, evocative writing pulls the reader into the scene and engages them. Sensory information and description is interesting. Challenge their senses! Keep the reader engaged. But don't overstimulate. Avoid literary diabetes. Err on the side of excess, you can always trim later (Luxury!). Look for details that are important to your character's emotional state or the plot. Details that get the reader into the character's skin. Try "not looking directly at it." Don't show the monster, let the reader fill it in. Hammer it home with a glancing blow to reality?
( A glancing blow at reality? )
[Dan] All right. Well, that's all the time that we have, so we're going to wrap up. I actually have a writing prompt...
[Mary] I am so proud of you.
[Dan] So I am not going to throw this at you, again, Mary. What I would like you to do for your writing prompt is, you have a character whose vision is obscured... They're blindfolded, they're in a closet or a trunk or whatever, and they're trying to figure out where they are using all their other senses. So. There you go. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: glancing

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

April 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.48: Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.9: Micro-Casting
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.5: Sensory Writing

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with scene

Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season

Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO

Writing Excuses 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines

Writing Excuses 16.48: Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture

Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

Writing Excuses 15.29: Barbie Pre-Writing, with Janci Patterson and Megan Walker

Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing

Writing Excuses 7.9: Micro-Casting

Writing Excuses 7.5: Sensory Writing

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