Writing Excuses 19.32: An Interview on Character with CL Clark

Aug. 15th, 2024 07:09 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.32: An Interview on Character with CL Clark
 
 
Key points: What do you do when you think "It's time for me to write a short story and it should have a character?" Triage your characters, who would be there. Then pick a few you are interested in, and ask what they want, and drill down into the stakes. Big stakes or internal stakes? Both! Relationships. Do you approach character differently when you write novel length versus short length? Yes. If they are loadbearing, you need to flesh them out. How do you pick what to include in a short story? Not so much picking out what to put in, but what to take out. Pay attention to what you want to play with. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 32]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 32]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] An Interview on Character with CL Clark.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Mary Robinette] And we have a special guest with us today, CL Clark. You've been reading their work for a couple of weeks, now we are extremely happy to have them with us.
[CL] Hi, everyone. I'm CL Clark. I am the author of The Unbroken and The Faithless and several short stories. I'm really excited to be here. Yay.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, the reason that we picked your stories was we wanted to have this conversation about character. There were a couple of things that short stories offered the opportunity to do, which was to look at how you built three different characters, three different POV characters, in a very compressed space. We looked at The Cook, Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an account of several misadventures and how I found my way home, and You Perfect, Broken Thing. All three of these characters are really distinct. They have different backgrounds, they have different personalities, different wants. What… Like, what are you doing when you're sitting down and thinking, "Well, it's time for me to write a short story and I guess it should have a character?"
[CL] Okay. So, I should also say that I have been a really big fan of Writing Excuses from a very, very long time ago.
[Chuckles]
[CL] So, one of the things that I do, not with every story, but for many stories, I actually stole from you, Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] Oh. How convenient.
[Chuckles]
[CL] Very convenient. But I used to be a patreon on your Patreon, and you shared at some point this sort of plot process thing that you did. There's… At the beginning of that plot processing, you do this sort of… Or you did, I don't know if you still do it, but I found it really helpful. That you would do this kind of triaging of the characters, and, like, starting with who would be there at this whatever place or situation you'd be in. Pick a few that you'd be interested in in focusing on or that you're just mostly interested in. Then asking what they want, and drilling down into the stakes. I found that the more you figured out a character's world and situation, the better… The more distinct they became. The more distinct they became, the more interesting their story was and the more they… I was able to kind of hone in on what made this story different from other stories that I was writing.
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's… So, first of all, I'm super glad that that worksheet is useful. It is on the podcast website, so folks can grab it. But I also find that, like, knowing what is important to a character is one of the things that really drives this. Part of the reason this is coming to, like, oh, yeah, it's a really good reminder, is that I just wrote a short story with a character who is a secondary character in the Lady Astronaut novels, and wrote her as a main character, and realized I did not know her at all. It is that, like, what is she afraid of? What does she want? What does happiness look like for her?
[CL] Definitely.
 
[Erin] I was going to say, I wonder, because I was thinking about, like, what characters want. I think one of the really interesting things in all of these stories is that all of the characters have, like, big wants on the surface, like, big things that they're dealing with, like, I need to get through this competition, I need to… I'm in the middle of this war. I need to figure out what's going on with this lighthouse. But I feel like when I think about the characters and what they want, I keep thinking back to their relationships with the other characters. So I'm wondering, like, when you're coming up with this, are you thinking about those big stakes, are you thinking about, like, their internal, like, what they're dealing with on the inside, both?
[CL] Both.
[Chuckles]
[CL] Because I like… I really like writing stories about relationships and not always romantic, but often romantic. Just because I think stories are the most interesting for me personally when the thing that is getting in the way is another person. That other person can also be yourself. It's very often, like, I want this and I also want that, and somehow they're mutually exclusive. But how somebody navigates around another person, not necessarily just in like a physical, like… Now I'm going to beat this person and kill them and now I have whatever, but, like, negotiating or developing a relationship to get what you want is very interesting to me. So they're not necessarily distinct when I think of whatever the stakes are. But since that other person is usually one of the three characters that I kind of brainstormed at the beginning, they just sort of come looped together already. If that makes sense. Like, they're a web that I can start pulling on and tying together.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, that does make sense. Because there's that saying, everybody's the hero of their own story. So if you start thinking about what the stakes are, what the other person's wants are. One of the things that I particularly love in The Cook is how much that story is really just about the relationship. Like, there's this massive war that happens offstage that we spent a lot of time talking about how delicious it is to watch both characters change in each scene that they're in. The relationship to each other inflected by this experience that we don't participate in. We only participate in their relationship. That's, I think, one of the things that is really, like, really lovely and beautiful about having given them both something that they want, something that's driving them.
[Erin] Yeah. I also think it's interesting because, like, even though, like, the war is such a small part in some ways of the story, it casts such a big shadow. Like, it's not like you could take that story and be like, it's not a war anymore, it's a parade…
[Laughter]
[Erin] And it would be the same story. You know what I mean. It would be a very, very different story. I love that you're able to…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled thematic story]
[Erin] [garbled] planning or something instruments…
[Garlic yeah]
[Erin] But the amazing thing about the parade version of the Cook is such a different story, because we feel the impact of things that you didn't even show us. I love that you're saying that they come to you intertwined, because they feel intertwined. It feels like if you took out a thread from one, it would unravel the thread of the other, even if it isn't a thread that we see that, like, hugely on the page, like explicitly. So I just love that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Also, please write The Cook at the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
[Mary Robinette] Please. Yeah.
[Laughter]
[CL] Hey, a fanfiction. I do do a fanfiction of my own works.
[Erin] Do you really? Wait, wait, wait. Say more?
[Mary Robinette] We're going to do…
[CL] I'm sorry. Some of it is not as wholesome, so…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] I know what I'm doing after this. Okay!
 
[Mary Robinette] Yep. Have the same thoughts. [Garbled] novels, that's interesting to me. Do you find that you have to approach character differently when you write at novel length than you do when you're writing at short length?
[CL] Absolutely. 100 percent. But, like, just on the very barest level. Kind of what you said, Mary Robinette, about your side character that you didn't know at all when you actually started trying to write her story. Some stuff that I can get away with in a short story just doesn't fly in a novel. Because, for me, I can just feel it when I have to be with a character longer, even if there a side character. If they have any loadbearing at all, and they're not fleshed out enough, I can just feel it, and every scene with them feels a little flat. Or they… I don't know, they just don't feel… I've actually been dealing with this recently with characters in a couple of different books. There's just something about even scenes that they're not in or other character storylines, like main character storylines, that feel off if someone is supposed to be important but they're not fleshed out enough to them. So, like… Well, I'll just say so. In the novel series, in the Unbroken and The Faithless, there is a friend of the princes's named Sabeen who I love to pieces, but I had to work a lot on her, because she has not ever gotten a point of view chapter or anything like that, but she supposed to be really important to Luca. Enough that Luca make some questionable decisions about her. Or around her. If she's not, if Sabeen is not a strong enough character to deserve those decisions…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[CL] Then the whole book kind of falls apart. So… Yes. It's very different that way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I wonder if… As we're thinking about it, because I do tend to think of them as being in the same general toolbox, I wonder how much of it is audience expectation that in a short story, we know that the author can't include everything, and so we're used to filling in the gaps for them, but in the novel, we hunger for that, for those details that are not necessarily there, and we're with them longer too.
[Erin] I think it's also that idea of loadbearing. Like, I love that is a concept. Like, you're not holding up as much stuff. Like, as short story is, like, you're just holding up an umbrella.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And not a house. So the amount that you need to know in order to bear that load, seems like it would be a lot less.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean…
[Erin] I don't know if that is true for you, or even how you figure out what it is that you need to know to make the story work, either in short or in novel length.
[CL] I think, like… Definitely one of the things that seems easier in a short story is… Not easier, just for the characters that… Part of the reason, I think, that you can sort of sketch out just is partly reader expectation, but partly it's easier to work with negative space when, like, so much of a short story and the world building and the plot, all of it, is negative space.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[CL] Whereas with a novel, all of it is… Not all of it, but a much higher percentage of it is fully filled out. Like, main characters in short stories are not the fullest, most fleshed out things always compared to a novel protagonist.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I like the way you're thinking about it with negative space. That probably appeals to me because I was an art major. For people who haven't heard this term before, it refers to a concept when you're looking at a picture. There's the object that… The subject of the picture. There's a vase, or a person. Then the negative space is all of the stuff that is around them. That negative space is as much a part of the composition is the figure itself I think it's a very useful concept in short fiction. The one where you see it the most clearly is The Cook, where so much of the war happens in the negative space. But I think it's also… It's also there very much in You Perfect, Broken Thing as well. Just lines like one of my favorite lines in the… I mean, I have a lot of favorite lines. But at the end of the very first thing, you say, "This is not my first race." That is such a good example of like telling you so much. You're not describing all of the other races, you're not doing any of that. But you're giving us this negative space, and we can pour the rest of ourselves into it. I think it does a really good job of creating space for the reader in this story.
[Erin] I was just thinking about this negative space idea, and, like, what readers expect. Because I was thinking, like, if you leave… It's basically what you already said, but if you leave negative space in a story, it feels intentional. If you leave negative space in a novel, it often feels like you just forgot. Like you just forgot that part of a page. Like, I just stopped coloring and left. I'm wondering, though, in a short story, how do you know what you do need to fill in? Like, you've ordered a cast that's shadowlike… How do you know that you need to like make a reference even to a first race, which you didn't have to do at all. I could have been, like, no, I'm just telling you about the current thing. Like, how do you pick those pieces that give you enough of, like, an outline that the negative space comes through in a really clear, cool way?
[CL] That is something that I struggled very hard with when I first started writing short stories. But I do want to just drop in re negative space in novels, I do think that it can work. I just think it's harder to navigate with a slight… The current sort of expectation in the fantasy genre of a quicker pace kind of reads where things are a little bit more spelled out, but sometimes… I think I have a fair amount of negative space in my novels as well. Just, I don't necessarily rely on it in the same way as I do in short fiction. For, like, understanding and plot. But, back to how I was working on what to pick to put in a short story. I struggled for a really long time actually before I ever got short stories published with writing really, really epic short stories. Because I really liked epic fantasy. It's really hard to write an epic novel, or an epic sized world in 5000 words. So the first story I ever got published was called Burning Season. It got published at Podcastle. But I remember one of the critiques that I had when I was trying to get it ready was, "This isn't a short story. This is a novel." I was like, "Well, I don't want to write this novel right now. So I'm going to figure out how to make it a short story." It was basically not figuring out what to put in, but figuring out what to take out. So I just took out as much as I could without losing the meaning. So there was a lot of, all right, well, if I take out this, does this paragraph still makes sense? If I take out this entire scene, and I still get the spirit of what this scene was trying to get across? Basically, I just kept whittling it down and cut until I could condense it into its smallest form while still having the sense of the world and the magic that was required. And the history. So…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Fantastic. I think, let's make a little bit of negative space for our thing of the week.
 
[CL] Okay. So the thing of the week that I would like to talk about is a book. It's called Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times by Brigid Delaney. I did not know that I was going to be sharing a sort of pop philosophy book today, but it has been really helpful in reframing not just, like, the world at large, but my writing career or being in the writing industry. Because the idea of stoicism is primarily about letting go of the things you cannot control. By golly, the writing industry is a thing that not a single one of us can control.
[Mary Robinette] What?
[Chuckles]
[CL] So if you are looking into this as a career, whether you're in it or aspiring to it, you're going to have to let go of a lot. This could help you do that.
 
[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. So, as we returned from our negative space, I wanted to kind of switch gears just a little bit and talk about Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an account of several misadventures and how I found my way home. Even the title of it has a different character.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, The Cook. But one of the things that's also very interesting about this one from a character point of view is literally the point of view. You're balancing two character POVs, one of which you give us in first person, and the other you give us in third. Do you remember why you made that choice?
[CL] I think I wanted to make it distinct from… I wanted to make the lighthouse keeper distinct from the sailor, not the pirate. But I think it was because the lighthouse keeper felt more distant, a little more cranky. To me, it was the better way to get across some of that anger. But also, because I often find that two first-person point of use are harder to distinguish. So that was the easier way, for me, as well as I knew I didn't want to spend a lot of time in the lighthouse keepers point of view. So having these little tiny barks was actually more… It seemed more fitting as a… Like, a section break as opposed to a point of view, so it helped distinguish it structurally as well.
[Mary Robinette] When you said you didn't want to spend a lot of time in the lighthouse keepers point of view, was that… I mean, I could try to structure this in a different way, but… Why?
[Laughter]
[CL] Because I still think that the story that I wanted to tell was primarily the sailor's. Yes, it is about their relationship, and yes, the lighthouse keeper also has some changing and growing to do. But, ultimately, it was about the change that the sailor had to make in terms of selfishness and… I don't know, like… What she was going to give up to be with someone or not give up. That was just more her story. I didn't… Also, like, there are secrets in the story, and so having too much of the lighthouse keepers point of view would have been harder to obfuscate that without resorting to tricks I don't know how to do. So…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] that when you're looking at something where you are needing to withhold information from the reader, that it is much easier to play fair with them if you stay in third person, because of that distance that you were talking about.
[Erin] I'm thinking about what you just said about relationships and, like, whose perspective we're in in the relationship, and I'm wondering, like, does that… Do you just tend to find yourself drawn to, like… All of these stories have relationships at their core. Like, one character over the other, and like, that's always the person you are going in with? Does it ever shift in any way as you learn more about the characters in the story? And, like, whose perspective you want to use?
[CL] I don't think so. I think I… I think… I have a sense fairly early on of whose story I want to be telling and who has… Again, back to that idea of stakes, who has the most stakes in the relationship or has the most to learn or change from in their convergence. Yeah, so I think I go in pretty well. But it is a little different from my novels when I have more space to have multiple points of view. So, like in The Unbroken and The Faithless, Luca and Terran are both… Like, they have romantic tension but we get both of their perspectives in the novel. That is… It's very different when I have to show both sides, but it does just offer more nuance. Like, I get to play with the idea, like, with the sailor and the lighthouse keeper. The sailor has all sorts of thoughts about the lighthouse keeper. But we don't even get to see if all of them are correct. Like, she thinks that she's snotty or stock up. We don't get to see her rea… Like, the lighthouse keeper's reasoning for her snotty and stuck up behavior. Which may or may not actually be her being snotty or stock up. Whereas when you have both points of view, you can almost immediately cut that tension by giving their reasoning. But it creates a different kind of tension. Which is, well, now that we know they both have different opinions of this action, how will they resolve that? So, I think it really just depends on what kind of tension you're more interested in playing with. Honestly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that that's a really important thing to remind readers, what are you more interested in playing with. Remind our listeners. The… So often we get hung up on oh, this is… What's going to be the best thing for the market, what's going to be the best thing for this or that. But, really, it's about what do you want? As the writer, where do you want to spend your time and energy?
[CL] And, I mean, unless someone has developed this without my knowledge, last time I checked, we cannot read other people's minds. So sometimes it is more interesting to explore that without… With having a character who only has the same capacities that we do. So…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] We should develop that. No. We shouldn't.
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Laughter]
[No, no, no, no, no. Nooo.]
[Erin] Mary Robinette mentioned, like, markets, and it reminded me of something I was thinking about before we started recording, which is that, like, all these stories are in Uncanny. We don't mean to do it on purpose, but it happened. I'm curious, and also, you worked… You were an editor at Podcastle for many seasons. So I'm wondering now, like, what you think the intersection is between, like, what you're writing and where it ends up? Like, does knowing… Do you ever write for a specific market? Do you just think it turns out to be a good fit accidentally? I'm curious where that plays into your writing process?
[CL] It's actually shifted a little bit. Especially now that I do write a fair bit of my short fiction now on commission or invitation. Just because of timing. But I think the reason, for example, that I do have so many short stories in Uncanny has a lot to do with the kind of stories I like to write. I think if I were, like, by percentage, I think most of my short stories are either at Uncanny or Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It's no… Like, it's no surprise because those are the ones that I read very often. And, obviously, Podcastle, but I can't count that because I kind of helped build that taste. So… As an editor. So I know it. But, like with the other two, I think that I'm… I have so many stories in there because that is where I naturally gravitate. It's… They… Both venues make space for the second world stuff that I like to do. With Uncanny, though, there's a bit more flexibility for little more of the realistic. I don't tend to do hard or spacey sci-fi very often. So it's very often near future, and that tends to go best at Uncanny compared to other science-fiction venues. High character focus, at both venues as well. Oh, we're on the character podcast, so, yeah. That makes sense.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It's weird. It's like you write character focused fiction. Interesting. Strange. The first thing that I read of yours was You Perfect, Broken Thing. It's a story that I keep going back to when people are saying, "Oh, short fiction, you can't really do much with it." I'm like, "Excuse me." Because it's really, actually… It's only… It's less than 4000 words.
[Really?]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 3930, according to Uncanny, which has the thing up at the top. But it feels bigger in scope. I think that some of that is how specific you get in this story, in particular with the sensory details that the character notices. Like, we are… It is such a grounded story. We don't actually go that many places. We go to the gym, we go home, and then we go to the race. How do you think about sensory detail when you're thinking about character?
[CL] With that story in particular, it's especially sharp for me because she's a very embodied character. Most of my characters are, they're very physical, whether they're fighters or dancers or athletes. Because that's just something that I'm very interested in. But it was… That story, I wrote it while I was in some creative writing classes. So I was really, really paying attention to a lot of different things. But one thing that I had rattling around in my head was something from a teacher who said, "Pick something from your job." At the time, I was a personal trainer. So, pick something from your job, and then just write every single detail about your job. So, that was everything from what do I see at my gym, what do I here at my gym, what are people doing, what are we… Like, what are we drinking, like, what are we eating, like… So that was everything from the sweat to the pre-workout, like, the locker rooms, locker room smells, like there was so much of that. Then, the other thing that I did and I really enjoyed was I did a couple exercises from Ursula K Le Guin's Steering the Craft. One of my favorite things, so everybody gets like a two-for-one of recommended books for me.
[Mary Robinette] It's so good.
[CL] There is like one is the write a really long sentence one and one is the write a really choppy kind of crush type paragraph. So if you read the story…
[Oh!]
[CL] You can pick out which ones are… Came from two of her exercises. But they also have high emphasis on sensory detail as well. So…
[Mary Robinette] Those are great, great examples. I know exactly where… What you're talking about in each. Because we… As our listeners know, we talk about that during the podcasts. I think that that's actually probably a really good place for us to segue to our formal homework, since were giving you some accidental ones. Like, go read Steering the Craft and do that exercise.
[CL] Do every exercise.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I think you have some homework for us.
 
[CL] I do. So I… As you guys can probably tell, I pay a lot of attention to the other instructors and writers who have, like, stuff to share. So this exercise, this next exercise, comes from another writing teacher that I love whose name is Matt Bell. One of his exercises is about… It's called four scenes about power. The exercise is as follows. You will write for scenes. Whether they're in a short story, a novel draft, or just like just sort of like triptych quartet thing. One is a scene in which your protagonist does something to someone else, so they act upon them. A scene in which your protagonist does something for someone else. So acting on their behalf. A scene in which your protagonist has something done to them. So they're acted upon and react to that. Then, finally, a scene in which your protagonist does something with someone or something else. They are acting in collaboration with another character or a group of other characters.
[Mary Robinette] That is a great exercise. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
[CL] Of course.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.27: Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark's ...

Jul. 11th, 2024 04:04 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.27: Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark's ...
 
 
Key Points: Short stories are like tapas, a bite-size treat. Relationships. Backstory. Choices. Ability, what the character can and cannot do, role, tasks and responsibilities, relationship or loyalties, and status, where they are in a power structure. Sequence and anticipation. Momentum or velocity. You are who you choose to be. Dragon's tears, and nebulous expectations.
 
[Season 19, Episode 27]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their  craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles about the Navigator of the Seas from September 14th through the 27th of 2024. With stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions. An ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 27]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark's Short Stories. 
[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.
 
[Erin] I am very excited that we're doing a trio of stories for this section of our close reading. Because I love to write short stories, but also, I think that there's a lot that you can learn from looking at one author doing a few different short stories. So, as a reminder, we're going to be doing C. L. Clark's stories, You Perfect, Broken Thing, The Cook, and Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home. Which were all actually published in Uncanny Magazine. I think, Mary Robinette, you were the one who brought these stories first to our attention. What made you think of them?
[Mary Robinette] So, I have known C. L. Clark for a couple of years, and one of the things that I love about their writing is that they can be extremely emotional, get deep into a character, within a very compressed space. One of the first things that I read of theirs was You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, even today, I had to reread just to prep for this, it still makes me cry when I get to the end. That's a really beautiful gift, from a short story, is to have this kind of in-depth emotional response. The other thing that I love about it is that there's a very clear character arc that happens, and the character is encountering several different emotional spaces. Not only is the character inhabiting those different emotional spaces, the style of writing that C. L. Clark deploys to convey that is so specific to each moment, that it's… I thought that it was a really good example of "Look at this! Look at how much freedom you have when you are attempting to convey character."
[DongWon] We hear the word character-driven a lot when talking about different kinds of fiction, different kinds of stories. C. L. Clark's work really drives that home. It definitely feels like the character has taken the wheel of the car of this story and has just taken us wherever they're going to go. Right? There's so many unexpected choices for surprising or nuanced things that the characters say or do that in each… All three of these stories will catch me off guard in a way that was so delightful and so fun. In a couple of them, really, making choices that were almost borderline [garbled] choices in ways that I think are so relatable and understandable and… I can't even be mad at them when they've done something that I so heartily disagree with.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. The other thing that I really like with this is the second story that we mentioned, The Cook, is supershort. It's like 800 and… It's less than 900 words. There is major action that happens offstage and all we're looking at in this story is the difference in the way to people are relating to each other, based on this major action that happens offstage, but the major action is not the interesting part. So it just gets quickly referred to in just a couple of lines, and then we go on. I find that very compelling, that… There are a lot of these character portraits that I find in their work.
 
[Howard] I want to tie a couple of things together here and clarify something. Erin, you said you love to write short stories, and, Mary Robinette, you mentioned The Cook. I love to read short stories. I was trying to figure out why, and I realized I think I like to read them for the same reason I like to eat tapas. I love being able to get in one bite a million flavors all at once. You think of a novel as… It could be a three-course dinner, it could be a pepperoni pizza with everything, it could be… If you think of it as a pepperoni pizza, or a pizza with everything, thinking of short stories as deconstructions of the pizza, as tapas, little bits of those things that would be in the full meal, and which, in and of themselves, are complete. That, coming back to the idea of just being a cook, that is the mastery that I found in reading these. That… They're small, but there is so much in there.
[Erin] One of the things I like is that… To just build on this pizza analogy, which I love, and is making me hungry, is that these are three different lengths of stories. There short stories, but one is this very tiny pizza bite type of like…
[DongWon] It's a bagel bite.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] trying to think of a name for them. It's a little… Thank you. Bagel bites. You have one that's basically, like, maybe a cross section…
[DongWon] A hot pocket.
[Erin] The hot pocket. You're…
[DongWon] I'm on it.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, I just want to be clear that the story is way better a story than a hot pocket is a food.
[DongWon] Hey, some people like hot pockets [garbled] hot pockets.
[Erin] The third is maybe a slice. So, each one of them… Because it's the same author writing them, there's a certain… There's certain things that are done in all of the stories that makes us… Like, there's cheese in all three of those things. Theoretically. But the way that that cheese would be expressed is different.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Similarly, like, things like a description of another person, all of these have relationships also at their core. But the way that people are described is slightly different when you have three words to do it versus a sentence versus maybe a paragraph.
[DongWon] One of the reasons we chose Time War is because there's like 3 to 4 different voices in that book. So it's really useful to break it down and compare. Short fiction, similarly, because they're bite sizes, the metaphor we've landed on, it's very easy to figure out how to talk about different aspects and highlight different aspects. Being able to cover a collection of short stories, a handful of them here, let's us really compare and contrast how the author is highlighting different aspects of character, drawing out different elements of character, across all three stories. So I think it'll make for a really dynamic and fun conversation.
[Howard] When we do close readings, the power of these, for me, is being able to reference the text, being able to read to you, fair listener, the words that did the thing. With the short stories, it's so much easier to find the words. Because, you know what, in this one, there's only six sentences to choose from that did this bit of lifting on that character.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find, having gone from short stories to novels, is that the skills that I learned in short fiction, I deploy in novel form so that I have more space for… Like, I establish a character very, very quickly because I've learned these skills in short form. Which gives me more space to have character development, to have other things that are happening and interesting. Whereas I see a lot of people who are early career spending chapters and chapters trying to establish this character and all of this painful back story of the character. Frequently, when you look at short fiction, you're able to establish painful back story in just one or two sentences, maybe a paragraph. Especially when we get into You Perfect, Broken Thing, there is so much worldbuilding in that that's just conveyed superfast in super economical terms.
[DongWon] Well, that's kind of the thing that I want to talk about is there something Clark does so masterfully here, which is have this laser focus on character and be so late with worldbuilding. So much of the worldbuilding is defined in negative space. Right? The Cook is a great example of this, but all three stories do this in different ways, where there is very little that they are telling us about explicitly here's why this contest is happening, here's why the world is like this, is why these people have been persecuted out of existence. All that is left in the margins of the story, and not addressed. Because they don't matter, unless they matter to the character interaction. So we understand the world enough to understand why characters are making the choices that they make and that's it. It's a stop at that point. I think that is so cool, and is such a great demonstration of how much you can do if you really hone one of the tools in your kit. Then, when you carry that into novel writing, I think when you have that more expansive space to do the stuff that is offscreen in these stories, you still have that strong foundation in knowing how to write character, how to write that element.
[Erin] Yeah. I love when you said the worldbuilding sort of just comes in when it's needed. I remember in Your Eyes, My Beacon, that there's this the high court, which is…
[DongWon] Yeah. But barely mentioned.
[Erin] Like, all of a sudden, they were mentioned and I'm like, "Oh. Actually, I think this is the first time I hearing about high court. But it's very cool that both of the characters are very familiar with it." But didn't… It didn't need to be mentioned to me until this moment. I really thought this was like sort of an audacious but amazing choice. Because the time that you spend explaining the high court takes you out of the moment between these two characters is there trying to figure out what to do within this lighthouse.
[DongWon] It barely comes up again, but is this constant threat throughout the story. I never forget about the high court for the rest of the story, but it's mentioned maybe twice, off the top of my head.
[Erin] Yeah.
[Howard] On the subject of taking you into and out of the moment, we're going to take a quick break, and be back in a moment.
 
[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is called… A role-playing game called Monster of the Week, which, as that name implies, is based around this kind of TV show Supernatural or Buffy or X-Files. The kind of show where each week there is another monster and you have to figure out what it is and deal with it. The reason I am recommending it is because it gets so creative with the powers that you have in the way that these powers help you to tell a particular kind of story. So, for example, one of the character classes has the power of getting captured by the monster. That is literally their superpower. The reason that that is useful is because getting captured helps reveal all kinds of things, where does the monster hang out, what kinds of powers does the monster have, and it fits into that genre of storytelling that you see on shows like Supernatural, where someone will get captured and then gets to talk to the monster or see how they work. So the sh… Game, once again, is called Monster of the Week and it's awesome. Check it out.
 
[Mary Robinette] Right. As we come back from the break, I want to give you a couple of very specific tools to be thinking about with character. Then, what we're going to do is, we're going to read to you the opening of… Just the first paragraph of each of the three stories, so you can hear how these tools are being manipulated even in this… In these tiny, tiny spaces. So these tools are about a character's identity. Ability, role, relationship, and status. We're going to dig more into these in the next episode, but right now what I want you to think about is ability, the things a character can and cannot do. This is all about how a character self defines. So the things they can and cannot do. Role are the tasks, responsibilities, that move them through the world. Relationship is about their loyalties. Then, status is about where they are in a power structure. So, as you are listening to us read these, think about ability, role, relationship, and status, and how they are manifesting even in these compressed spaces. Just these first paragraphs.
[Erin] I'll start with the opening of You Perfect, Broken Thing.
 
When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women’s locker room. I can’t stand anymore, but I know if I sit, I’ll never get back up. At least, not for another hour.
 
[Mary Robinette] The Cook.
 
The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. I’m standing in the inn’s common room and the other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. While some reach for a serving wench or boy, cheeks to pinch, a life to grasp—my stomach growls a monster’s growl. I should be slain; the growl is that fierce. I smell the roasting lamb, the unmistakable sneeze of freshly ground peppercorns, and garlic, but it’s all hidden behind the kitchen door.
 
[DongWon] Your Eyes, My Beacon.
 
She is light. Until she is not, and the lighthouse goes dark as the waves crash against the cliffside, the rocks at its foot jutting and jagged, a peril to even the most skilled navigators’ ships.
 
[Mary Robinette] So you can see how they are manipulating those things, even in these tiny spaces. That first one, we're seeing ability, the ability of the character completely manipulated. In the second one, we're looking at the tasks, I'm hungry and need to eat, and in the moment, that's everything that's defining this character. Then, in this last one, she is light, again, we're back to tasks, but also this role…
[DongWon] The status really comes in here.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] As she's failing to complete this task, as her ability fails her, suddenly her power and her status becomes very much in question.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think to do that with something that was really interesting I noticed between The Cook and Your Eyes, My Beacon, is, I think The Cook is very much relationship. The first time I see her, it's just a glimpse. It's about a specific other person, is being centered, really early on. Whereas in Your Eyes, My Beacon, when it talks about the lighthouse goes dark, a peril even to the most skilled navigators' ships, you can tell it's a role or status, I guess, because it's affecting all the ships. It's no longer about a single… It's not that ship. It's all the ships out there. That's where you can tell, like, it's a specific person's status or place in the world versus their place with regards to another individual.
 
[Mary Robinette] So this is just kind of a little bit of a preview of some of the things that we're going to be talking about over the next couple of weeks. And why we're so excited to be exploring the work of C. L. Clark.
[Howard] I want to look at The Cook again, because this, the shortest of the three, that first paragraph gives us so much information, and some of it is inherently mimetic, in that we are being given information by being asked to recall things that are not in the story. The sentence I'm talking about, I'm standing in the inn's common room and other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. Inn, common, warriors, ale. Pathfinder or D&D. You are there. Those are words that get used all the time. If you tell yourself, oh, I'm in a D&D setting, or I'm in a Pathfinder setting, or I'm in some sort of Western fantasy-esque role-playing game setting, except I'm telling a story, you know what, that's good enough. The story will play with that backdrop you've painted. We were told to paint it by being given those four words in quick succession.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly. It leaves so much more space to then explore character. So you don't have to do a ton of worldbuilding. That allows you to then… The negative space that DongWon was talking about before, that allows you then to just focus on the character. Again, in that… In The Cook, the first time I see her, it's just a glimpse. One of the other tools you're going to hear me talking about is recency or primacy effect. By starting with this is the most important thing in this story. The first time I see her.
[DongWon] It's funny, we almost get the inverse of that with Your Eyes, My Beacon, because we are starting with her, we are starting with the she is light, and by the time we get to the reveal of what's going on with the lighthouse keeper, I… Me at least, completely forgot about this opening. Right? Completely forgot about the connection between the character and being light. Then, when that comes back, it's such a thrilling moment.
 
[Erin] I also wanted to note that the first time I see her, it's just a glimpse… The first time. Because you know there will be a next time. I love words like that, that help to create anticipation naturally in us by telling us there is a sequence of events, and if you wait, we'll get to the next one in the sequence.
[DongWon] All three of these imply future action. Right? We have her leaving the kill floor, this sort of athlete pushed to her limits. We're going to get more about this. Right? You get the first time I see her, you get the lighthouse going out, and the consequence of that. All three are such a great way of rooting yourself in character, but with momentum. Right? I think sometimes when people talk about characters, it can feel very static, because it's a portrait of here's a person who existed at a point in time. But the thing is people aren't static, they are in motion. C. L. Clark is a master at giving us that velocity. Each one of these, I feel like I'm coming off the starting block, and just sprinting away into the distance.
 
[Howard] There's a line from… I think it's… I think Hogarth speaks it in Iron Giant where he tells the Iron Giant, "You are who you choose to be." I love that line. You are who you choose to be. Just show us a choice. Show us the character making a choice. Now we know who they are in that moment. We don't know what their next choice… What they'll choose next time, but we now know enough. It's motion.
[DongWon] Yeah. But I love how that also feels in tension with this idea of character as destiny. Right? They are going to make choices and they have choice… They have agency, which, we're going to talk a lot more about in a future episode, but also, there almost trapped by who they are and what they need to be, and watching them struggle against that is so much the dynamism of these stories. Of how do you make a choice when you have to go fight a war? How do you make a choice when you can't leave the kitchen? How do you make a choice when you need to save your family? That is so fun.
[Howard] I want to come back to the kitchen. One last comment about tapas and…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] About the length of short stories. I was served something called a dragon's tear at a sushi restaurant. Which was basically a slice of habanero, teardrop shaped, wrapped around a little nugget of wasabi.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, no!
[Howard] Okay. That is one bite of heat and tears and sneezing and regret…
[Heehee]
[Howard] And joy.
[DongWon] What did you do to piss those folks off?
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's… But, see, here's the thing. I don't want a plate of dragon's tears.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I just want one. I want to go on that ride one time. Okay. I'll go back to that restaurant and get another one. Because it was fun. That, for me, is what short fiction can do. I don't know what this is going to taste like when I start reading it. It doesn't have a book cover. It's not shelved somewhere in the fantasy or science fiction section. My expectations are nebulous.
 
[Erin] I think that is a perfect time to go to the homework, which I have for this week. Which is to write a series of sentences. Each one… Pick a character that you have and write that character's name is someone who… And then something about them. Then write it again, and again, and again and again and again. Until you run out of things and you have to continue to keep writing, because that will help you find levels to your character that maybe not even you anticipated.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format

Dec. 22nd, 2023 05:17 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format
 
 
Key Points: Playing with format? Short fiction often is more experimental. Epistolary, a story told in letters. For verisimilitude, the feeling of reality. 2nd person POV -- You are there! Stories in nonstory formats. Research papers, etc. Helpdesk responses. Chapter bumps, aka epigraphs. Footnotes! 
 
[Season 18, Episode 51]
 
[Mary Robinette] This year, my family will be having our 67th annual Christmas Eve dinner. It's a menu passed down from my grandmother through my mom to me. The entire family shows up. I'm talking 4th cousins once removed. This is not an exaggeration. Which means that during the lead up, I don't have time to menu plan or cook anything else. That's when I turn to prepared meals like Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. Factor can help you eat well for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. It allows me to save time and not eat garbage, while tackling all my holiday to-do's. So if you want to cross meal prepping off your list this holiday season, consider Factor. You can skip the meal planning, grocery shopping, chopping, prepping, and cleaning up, and get Factor's fresh, never-frozen meals delivered to your door. They're ready in just 2 minutes, which my dad says is the appropriate amount of time to cook a meal. He has no idea. The point is, all you have to do is heat and enjoy. If you're trying to squeeze writing into the holiday press, it might be useful to know that Factor is not just for dinner. Count on extra convenience anytime of the day with an assortment of 55 plus add-ons to suit various preferences and tastes, so you can carve out some writing time in the morning by choosing quick breakfast items, lunch to go, grab and go snacks, or ready to eat coldpressed juices, shakes, and smoothies. So, head to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code wx50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.
 
[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.
 
[Seaons 18, Episode 51]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, So, You Wanna Play With Format.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] 'Cause 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.
 
[Erin] This is a fun topic to talk about, because I didn't do it, really, in any of the stories that I had y'all read. Do anything really spectacularly different with format. But I think that short fiction is a place where you see people play around with format and put stories into different forms that you don't see necessarily as much at the novel length. So I thought since we were talking about short fiction, it's a perfect time to talk about format. So, what do y'all feel about it?
[DongWon] It's one of the things I love about short fiction as well, is you can be more experimental. You can push the boundaries. It's almost an expectation of playing around a little bit when it comes to short fiction. Not that every author has to do it with every story. But it's a thing that when we see it can be really exciting. One limitation, just from the publishing perspective, is that when you're publishing novels, it is pretty difficult to be experimental with format. Readers have certain expectations, booksellers have certain expectations, and publishers are trying to meet that, and so, often default to being very conservative about it. Trying to get a book published that has lots of different formatting or style or is in a different mode or a different length even can be difficult. That said, I've really had great success with certain books that have an unusual trim size, for example. Seanan McGuire's Feed, we did an unusual trim size, that helped it stand out. Right? I've had great success with epistolary books. Some… But it is an uphill climb. Whereas in short fiction, you're sort of given carte blanche to be a little freer with it. Publishers aren't as concerned about it, and you can definitely do a lot of fun stuff.
[Howard] Two of my favorite things are, on Netflix, Love, Death, and Robots, and on Hulu, Bite-sized Halloween. I like these because both of them are collections of short, unrelated except in the most general thematic sense, things. I don't know what I'm going to get, but I know that I'm only committing about 15 minutes of my life to getting it. Short stories are the same way. You sit down with a novel that's doing something hugely experimental… That's a big ask for a reader is to dive into this and just be completely unaware of how the format may shift, what may change. Whereas with short fiction, a lot of readers love short fiction for this exact reason. I want to see something new. Short fiction was where I first discovered 2nd person POV. I would have struggled trying to read an entire novel in 2nd person POV. But now I've read enough of it in short fiction that it feels like, oh, that's a thing. That's… Yeah, that totally works.
[DongWon] Yeah. Earlier this year, we got to have a really big viral moment for This Is How You Lose the Time War from our dear friend Bigolas Dickolas, a tri-gun community member who posted about it. The main thing about their appeal for this is you can read this in one sitting. It's a short book, you can read it in a night, you can listen to the audiobook, it's only a couple hours. So I think that…
[Mary Robinette] It's important to say this is an epistolary novel.
[DongWon] Yes. It's an epistolary novel. So the fact that it was very short made it possible for a lot of people to get very excited about this unusual format. The epistolary novel, it was cowritten, it's experimental in several different ways. Going back to voice, the voice is very elevated, very distinct. There's a lot of things that are boundary pushing about that book. I feel a large part of why we were able to get away with it… Not just get away with it, but have enormous success with it, was in part because it was a very tight experience. You're in and you're out before it over stays it's welcome.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm also going to quickly define epistolary…
[Erin] That's…
[Mary Robinette] Which…
[Erin] Yeah. Go for it.
[Mary Robinette] You do it…
[Erin] No, no. What I was going to say is we've been dropping some terms, epistolary, 2nd person POV, and I thought what a fun thing to do might be is to take like a bit of a Godiva chocolate box approach to…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Nontraditional formats, which is to talk about them, say what a couple of them are…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What are they doing, well, when might you want to use them, and when might you want to throw them away. So let's start with epistolary. What is it, Mary Robinette?
[Mary Robinette] It is a story told in the form of letters.
[Erin] Yay. What… Why tell a story in letters? Like, what… Why would I want to make that choice if I can decide to write a short story, do you think? Or a longer story.
[Mary Robinette] So, there's a couple of reasons. Many of the early novels, back in… Back in the day. People were very concerned with verisimilitude. Convincing people that these were real things that really happened. So, putting it in the form of a travelogue or an epistolary convince people… Was to convince people that this is real. This is… Someone actually had this experience.
[Howard] The book version of found footage.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. It is… That's a great way to describe it.
[DongWon] Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an early classic example.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly. So the… One of the things that that does is it allows you to bring in multiple voices, it allows you to actually be pretty telling with the story. So you can cover a lot of ground in a very compressed area. Also, if you want to do unreliable narrators, they're just baked in… Baked into that. What are some of the reasons that you think?
[Erin] I think… I was thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War, and I think part of what's really fun about that book is that part of it is the actual letters themselves, but it's also how are the letters getting from person to person.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, the actual act of sending letters is not something we do as much… I don't know, maybe you all do… As we used to. So, thinking about the way that you present yourself to others is, I think, a big thing that happens in epistolary. How is this person… Who are they sending the letter to? Why are they sending it at this time? What has happened in the interim between the last letter that they received? Or if it's back-and-forth… Or, since the last letter they sent? So there's a lot of really interesting things that you're learning about the broader world even in just the dates…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Between letters. There are a lot of ways to do a lot of little, like, tiny detailed worldbuilding.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That says a lot.
[DongWon] Going back to our conversation last week about unreliable narrators, epistolary is such a wonderful way to just reinforce and remind the reader of the subjectivity of who's telling you this story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? Also, because it's telling it to another person, you can feel them shaping their worldview to meet the other person's expectations. Right? So, In Time War in particular, the story… The letters from Red and Blue, they start opposed and end up together. Really, as that journey progresses, you can feel the change in the relationship by how they are talking to each other. So it just gives you, like, all these extra levers to play with. It's very hard to pull off in an engaging way, because, sometimes, if it feels like reading someone's letters, that's not always the most exciting thing to do. But when you do it right, it gives you such a way to embed you in a world, embed you in a voice, and a perspective that is hard to do with other tools.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Howard] I'm going to go out on a limb here and invent a term because I don't know the term. I don't know that a term exists. It is the semi-sequitur sequential art. John Rosenberg's Scenes from Multi-Verse, every installment of Scenes from Multi-Verse is a new little universe, in the name of the universe is usually part of the joke. It's 4 panels in which we explore often some sort of political issue about which John Rosenberg has strong opinions and we get a punchline and we get ridiculousness and it's comic. I think semi-sequitur because you rarely come back to these universes and get what happens next, but every so often you do. When you do, it's completely unexpected. I just picked up several collections of these, and it's a weird format. John, why didn't you just take all the ones that are from this one universe and put them together? Well, because you needed a palate cleanser. You needed to forget that was a thing, before you could come back to it. It's a weird format, but…
[DongWon] Juxtaposition can be such a powerful tool.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] To highlight… Right… It gives you that parallax of being able to see it from one perspective and then another perspective immediately.
[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that epistolary in particular…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Offers you. That juxtaposition.
[Erin] Nice.
[Howard] Can we…
 
[Erin] I was going to say, before we go to break, I want to pull one more chocolate out of the box. This one was mentioned earlier by Howard which is 2nd person. So, you know, you are listening to a podcast. Using the you directly, either directly to the reader or to an unknown kind of 3rd… Another party within the story. We don't have a ton of time before the break, but any quick thoughts on 2nd person? Love it, hate it, want to marry it?
[Mary Robinette] So, I think it's a form that is a natural way that we tell stories. You know, like… So imagine, you're standing in the grocery store line, and then, what do you see in front of you? You know, this is the thing that we do all the time whenever we're talking [garbled] where it falls apart, when it's… Where it becomes difficult is that you… When you're telling that story, you're deciding for the reader what their emotions are, so… If it is not in sync with the emotion that the reader is actually having, then it can be jarring for them, they can be like, "No, that's not how I feel right now." So, walking the line between creating this world where you're telling the reader this is the thing that happens and adjusting it so that you're not throwing them out of the story by having it be not in sync with their own experience of the story can be a real challenge.
[Howard] The reader has to let go. A line like, "And you draw your pistol," and my first thought is, "Wait, I'm carrying a pistol?" No, I need to let go of that.
[Erin] And you will experience a break right now.
 
[Howard] during 2020, 2021, I, like tens of thousands of other people, was privileged to discover Dr. Sayed Tabatabai on twitter as he was writing stories about his experiences in the hospital in tweet format. These Vital Signs by Dr. Sayed Tabatabai is these tweets in book collection. Think of it like a book of poetry, where each poem is a poignant wonderful true deep story about… I don't know… Life, death, medicine. It's amazing. I love this book. Love this book. These Vital Signs by Dr. Sayed Tabatabai.
 
[Erin] All right. We're back and we're still talking about 2nd person.
[DongWon] the one thing I really love about 2nd person, to just sort of pick up on what Mary Robinette and Howard were saying, is… There was a period a few years ago where I noticed I was reading a lot of short fiction that was using the 2nd person. There was like a mini, like, little trend of it. A lot of it was coming from marginalized authors. I had this thought that one of the beautiful things about 2nd person, and one of the things that readers sometimes respond badly to, is it, in the way that unreliable narrators are about the subjectivity of the narrator, the 2nd person forces you into a particular perspective, into someone else's subjectivity, because you are being brought into the story in that way. You are doing the thing, you are experiencing the thing. So what I saw was a lot of people who were trying to write about experiences that were not of the quote unquote mainstream audience, where using 2nd person as a way to sort of almost, like, forcibly grab people and bring them into their world. Right? So Violet Allen uses this super effectively in The Venus Effect, Elisa Wong has a few stories in this mode, N. K. Jemison's The 5th Season uses this in particular moments. Sometimes that 2nd person direct address can really loop someone into an experience in a way that would… They would struggle to relate to in another format.
[Erin] I also think if you want to be more antagonistic in some ways…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] With your 2nd person, it can be a way to mirror of feeling of marginalization.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] You are being told what you do and how you feel, and I am going to make you feel that way with this narrative. That can be a hard line, because you can lose the reader, but if they stick with you, like, it can create that sense of being off balance that I think is a really fun one that 2nd person sort of makes available. Some… A theory that I have about 2nd person as well is that games have actually made people…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] A lot more comfortable with 2nd person. Because games spend a lot of time telling you that you have a pistol, and even though your character does, there's a certain amount of having to like lose that, "But what about my id?" feeling, and my ego, that I think we've gotten used to…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Because that's now a storytelling [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's part of the change from doomed guy never gets to speak to [garbled master shave and halo?] has dialogue. Right? We saw like Destiny famously started with dialogue, they took it away, and then they put it back for your character, in part because there was this debate over what gives you subjectivity of the character, what can you tell people to do? I think we have all found that letting your character speak makes a more engaged experience, that people are sophisticated enough to be able to ride with some of these things that we sometimes assume is too much for the audience.
[Mary Robinette] You've just made me realize that in much the way that geeks are coming into the mainstream now, because all the people who consumed it as kids are now in power, all of us who thrived on choose your own adventures are now adults, writing fiction.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm like, oh, yeah.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I remember, kind of vividly, playing SkyRim and playing as a Khajiit and playing as a female. The enemies would sometimes use derogatory terms specific to me being female, or me having for. Because I was in first person camera, I would forget that that was what I looked like, and it was kind of a slap. Yet, I looked back on it and realized, no, this is a valuable experience for me. Because this is the way people other than me often experience the world.
[Erin] Love that.
 
[Mary Robinette] What's our next chocolate?
[Erin] I was going to say, time for the next chocolate. The next chocolate is stories in nonstory format…
[Oooo…]
[Erin] So, stories that are pretending to be research papers. Stories that… Anything that, like, it seems like something else, but really, it's a story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] One of my very favorite things I ever wrote, it's in the Planet Mercenary books, in the liner notes. It is a story being told in the comments section of a document. The comments section was not supposed to go into print, and in the very beginning of the book, we see the miscommunication where they decide, "Oh, okay, the document comments are going in the margins." It is a 12,000 word white room story about a group of people trying to finish the book you are holding. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and a murder and kittens. It was so much fun to write, and it's one of my favorite things I've ever done. Because I played with format in such an amusing way.
[DongWon] Yeah. Because it's not clear how much I love nontraditional formats, I'm going to continue to talk about client books or client stories. There was one from a client, Sarah Gailey, who wrote the story called Stet. Stet is… The basic format of it is it's an abstract of an academic paper, and one of the authors is leaving notes on the paper. In the marginalia, in the footnotes, is where the action of the story is happening and you begin to feel the unreliability of the character and start to understand what happened to her as related to the subject matter of the academic abstract. I'm very biased, but I think it's an incredible piece of short fiction, it's heartbreaking, it's thought-provoking. If you have any concerns about AI, I recommend reading it. There's so much that you can do with that format. I think again it's a very short story so sometimes that experimental format lends itself to being like a quick… A single bite of chocolate…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] To really continue with the metaphor.
[Mary Robinette] There's a story, and I cannot remember the title. So I'll see if I can find it to include in the liner notes. But it is told from someone who's like in a Mars rover and it's broken down and the entire story is just the auto responses from the helpdesk. So it's like, "How to use emergency oxygen."
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Then… It's just hilarious because you can see exactly what is going wrong, and "I'm sorry, we don't recognize those words."
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I also do want to sort of argue with myself for a 2nd. I've been continually saying that this really works in short formats, and I do think that's true. It also can work in long formats. It's difficult to pull off. Very famously… I'm blanking on the author's name, but House of Leaves is a very long novel that uses a variety of found format documents. It is printed in a very unusual way. It's full-color. There's a fully epistolary section, there are journals, there's descriptions of movies in there. It is a brilliant novel. It is one of the most terrifying and unsettling things I've read, even though… I'm not sure I would actually call it horror. It just… I found it to be a very dis-orienting read. It's a brilliant novel. I absolutely adore it and highly recommend it for anyone who's interested in how can you push the boundaries of what you can do in a printed book.
 
[Howard] When you've got a novel that's got chapter bumps, lots… Lots of authors find ways to tell stories through the sequence of chapter bumps.
[Mary Robinette] Will you define chapter bumps?
[DongWon] What's a chapter bump?
[Howard] Oh. Chapter bump. It's the little blurb at the beginning of a chapter that might be a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica at the head of one chapter…
[DongWon] Oh
[Howard] At the next chapter, it's another thing. Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I just call them something different.
[DongWon] What is the word that we use for them? I'm blanking on it now… Epigraphs!
[Mary Robinette] Epigraphs.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] I was like… Epithet was coming to mind…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, "It's not that."
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Howard] Telling stories in epithets is fun, though, too.
[DongWon] You can have an epithet as an epigraph. The author of the book is Mark Z. Danielewski. Sorry. [Mary Robinette] So… But speaking of that, a lot of the techniques that were talking about here are things that you can mix-and-match.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Exactly. I was going to say, like, you don't have to dive all the way into the pool, you can dip your toe in the water.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I was thinking about, like, those types of epigraphs are great way to, like, practice with a particular form of thing. You can have a recipe, for example. I was thinking of…
[Mary Robinette] The Spare Man. Yes.
[Erin] The Spare Man, like, in between the chapters. Sometimes it's just something that's fun. It can be… One thing to think about is why are you doing this format...
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Non-traditionally? You can just do it because you want to. So, you don't have to have a reason. But it can be something where you're like, the reason those Encyclopedia Galactica things exist is to tell you something about the world that there's really not a good place for within the narrative, but the author still thinks that you should know.
[Howard] The… There was an update to WordPress a few years ago where they introduced what they called the block editor. Which I absolutely hated. They took away my big free-form editor and they forced me to write in little blocks. I realized what they were doing is saying, "Look, you people have been using Twitter to tell longform blog posts. You've been thread in these twitter things. So here is a writing tool that will let you write in the same way that all of you have been thinking anyway on social media." I remember looking at it and taking a further step back and realizing, "Oh, my gosh. Twitter is… It's like a poetic form now. I am telling a thing in tweets and there is a character restriction on how much I can put, which is as rigid as any poetic forms."
 
[DongWon] I'm going to sneak one last chocolate from the box. That's because I want to talk about footnotes, which…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Is one of my all time favorite modes of doing something experimental. They can do all kinds of things. Terry Pratchett used them throughout his entire career absolutely brilliantly. It's… The way he does it is so funny, but also cutting and revealing. More recently, Babel by R. F. Kuane uses them to great effect.
[Mary Robinette] Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell uses them.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I use them?
[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Why footnotes? What do you guys like about them?
[Mary Robinette] I like them because they are an aside to the reader.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I think that that… While they break the flow of the story… They can break the flow of the story in some ways, but it's also… It also feels like you're being invited a little bit further in.
[Erin] Yeah. They're both… It's like a little Venn diagram. I feel like they're both explicitly in conversation with the story and explicitly in conversation… Implicitly in conversation with the reader.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So you're getting this really cool thing where you're getting just a little bit closer and seeing sort of how the sausage is made in the way that the writer wants you to…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] See it. Which is great.
[DongWon] You're not going full epistolary, but you're going a little 2nd person. It's like a little bit of, like, have your cake and eat it too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] The footnotes in Pratchett and Gaiman's Good Omens… The footnote about "Well, this is what might have happened to the 3rd… The extra baby. That's much nicer than what would have happened." They talk about tropical fish, whatever. Then, much later in the story, we meet this character who… This young boy of the right age who plays with tropical fish, and the footnote says, "We liked your version better."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It's so delightful, having been invited in…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] And told, "Yeah. This is a more pleasant version of the story."
[Erin] All right. We have gone in, we've explored our chocolate box of nontraditional formats, and now it's time for your homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, what I want you to do is take a scene from a story that you've written or you're working on, and put it into a new format. So if you've written it straight 3rd person, try turning it into 2nd person. Try turning it into epistolary. What did you learn in the process?
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations! Also, let us know. We'd love to hear from you about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
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Writing Excuses 18.43: Worldbuilding In Miniature

Oct. 26th, 2023 05:25 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
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Writing Excuses 18.43: Worldbuilding In Miniature
 
 
Key points: How much world can you put in a short story? How much world do you need to write a short story? Take one or two aspects of a concept, dive into those, and handwave the rest? Throw in a few small details to make the world feel bigger? Do enough worldbuilding to make sure the framework for the story exists. Keep a tracking document, with notes on each worldbuilding element, and review after drafting. Look for places that aren't loadbearing, where a specific detail can imply a larger world without opening questions. How much exposition does it take to explain the element? Too much, it is distorting. Short fiction readers expect you to leave things out on purpose. Every worldbuilding element creates stakes for someone. Everyone has their own understanding of the world. Emphasis, something that is important to the character, or decorative flourish, adding tone for the reader? Short fiction relies a lot on the reader filling in implications and patterns. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 43]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding In Miniature.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're really tiny.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] I love short fiction, as we've already discussed, so I'm going to talk about worldbuilding in a short fiction world. I'm really excited to kind of... This is one where I don't have a great theory, I just kind of want to think about it out loud, like, how much world can you put in a short story, and how much world do you need in order to write a short story? I will say that when I start writing short fiction, I often just have a one liner. I usually have, like a... Sour Milk Girls is the best example of this, even though it came out of a longer idea, it was what if memory were a commodity? Then, my second question is always who is suffering? Because I am me. Then, usually that's where I place my main character in that. But there is a lot of stuff that's not explained in any of the short stories that we read. There is a lot of things you don't know about the broader world. What I think short stories give you the opportunity to do is to take one or 2 aspects of a concept that have emotional resonance for your characters, dive into those, and then handwave the rest. If you can throw in a few small details that make the world feel big on top of that, all the more so the better. But I'm curious what y'all think about, like, when you're reading or writing, what is the difference between what you see in a world in miniature versus big?
[Howard] For my own part, the one idea… This is a cool thing, I want to tell a story about it. How much worldbuilding do I need to do? I need to do enough extrapolative worldbuilding… Where'd this come from, where is this going… That I can be certain that the framework for the story I've created actually exists. If your… What if memory was a commodity story, if there was something about the way commodification of memory went that made orphanages not exist, then suddenly I've unplugged the story and I would have to go back and rework it. So that's really the extent of it. I just make sure, hey, is this a cool idea? Yes. Does this cool idea negate the way in which I want to explore the cool idea? If the answer is no, I'm off to the races.
[Erin] I often think about… Thinking about did I break it midway through…
[Sputters]
 
[Erin] So I have a theory, like, that every writer does something subconsciously really well. You'll have writers will say like this character came and spoke to me at night and, like, told me their story. That never happens for me, but I feel like those people just do character on a subconscious level. For me, a lot of worldbuilding happens on a subconscious level. Where I'll toss a detail into a sentence, I'll be like, "And then they went to…" I don't know, whatever thing, random thing I've decided to put in their. Later I'll be like that doesn't necessarily make sense. Like, in a world where memory is a commodity, they're probably not in space. So I probably should take the space elevator reference out, for example. It didn't happen, but it could have. So one of the things I actually do is while I'm writing, I will sometimes keep a document open, a PowerPoint a lot of the time, weirdly, and actually put anything that I put in that's a worldbuilding element into a one particular slide on the PowerPoint. So that at the end of drafting, I can look can be like, do these work?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Actually seem like they belong in the same world, yes or no?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, interesting.
[Erin] If one is an odd item out, I need to go back and either figure out a way to make it make sense in my head, or excise that and it needs to go into a different story.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's really interesting. That's a really neat, measurable tool.
[DongWon] Cool trick, yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I… For me it's… I will also just drop in random details, and I find that when I'm specific about a thing, that it implies this whole larger world. So I look for places where I can be specific about something that's not necessarily loadbearing, that implies a larger world but doesn't open questions. That's where you get into the tricky thing with worldbuilding, is if you drop in something that… And then it opens a question about the story. Like, well, why didn't they just ride the Eagles? Then… That's where you're creating a problem for yourself with the worldbuilding. So one of the tricks that I use is how much exposition do I have to use to explain the thing that I've just dropped in. If it's more than 2 sentences, then it's a worldbuilding detail that is distorting the story. Because I'm like, that's too much. The other piece for me is the difference in expectations between audiences. So, novel readers I've found assume that if you don't put something in, it's because you forgot about it, because there reading for that immersion. Short story readers are so used to putting the story together from pieces of implication that they work on the idea that if it's not there, you left it out on purpose. So you can say, "Well, I used a Teraport thing." If you don't mention how that works, they're like Oh. Well, it's not important to the story, how it works."
[Erin] I also love one of the things I think you can do for short fiction audiences is use the way that pattern… That minds create patterns to create some of that broadness.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Like, if you say this is the 3rd God of death, okay, well, that's interesting. There are obviously 2 previous gods of death. What happened to them? I don't know. Maybe I don't need to say. But it makes me think about audience expectation as when I started writing tabletop, you can't do that.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] So if you put a detail into a scene, you have to expect players will want to go talk to the first 2 gods of death or know what happened to them, or if you create something that's like that came from the caves of pleasure, like someone's going to want to go there. In fact, when I first started getting feedback back from editors, it was like, "Stop putting in the details that you do not have the word count to explain." Because I was so used to that short fiction thing that you do where you kind of drop the things out there and let people create it. But it's interesting to think that in novels, people will expect you to kind of build the world out that far.
[DongWon] Yep. As a kind of a theory about why it happens this way, and this is sort of informed by my perspective from an editorial side more than a writer side. Right? That is to flip the iceberg metaphor on its head. The iceberg metaphor being that, like, does all this worldbuilding we only see the top 10%, but the rest of it's below water. You as the writer need to have some idea what that is. Instead, the way I think about worldbuilding, and one thing that's also important, is to realize that worldbuilding isn't a science fiction and fantasy thing. It's not a genre thing. It is a fiction thing. Any story you're writing, you are including worldbuilding. Whether you are describing a suburban cul-de-sac or a war zone or a high fantasy city, all of that is worldbuilding.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Because every time you introduce a world detail, it is… You're introducing a rule for that world. So people think about worldbuilding as like a particular type of technology or a particular location, but for me it's a way to tell your readers, your audience, what's important. Right? Because if you are introducing a university, then you're saying a certain type of hierarchy is important. If you are introducing a magic system, you're saying that logic is important. Right? So what matters to your characters are the rules of the world around them. So if you're saying there are police, then obeying the law is important in a certain way. Right? That creates character stakes. Right? The problem you run into in the RPG is you don't have control over the characters. So every time you introduce a worldbuilding element, you're introducing stakes for somebody. One of those stakes is I worship the God of death. This is the 3rd one, what the hell happened to the first 2? I gotta know. Right? So that becomes an impulse for that character to explore, because suddenly you've established stakes for them by putting something into the world. Right? So it is very useful, the iceberg metaphor is very, very useful, but sometimes if you're stuck about what do I actually need to include in this story, you can take a step back and say, "Okay. Who's my character, what matters to them, what rules do I need to define so that they can make the choices they need to make?" Then be hyper specific about which aspects of the world are you showing us to establish the emotional stakes for that character.
 
[Howard] See, we had James Sutter on the podcast years ago. He's one of the lead creatives at Paizo. His position, for 3rd God of death, would have been completely opposite of what your editors were telling you, Erin, in that he would encourage writers to say, "Oh, and this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs." What are we doing with the Singing Cliffs? I don't know, I'm just putting some things together so that you feel like the world is bigger than just where you are. Are the players going to want to go to the Singing Cliffs? Maybe they are. You, as a writer, is a game master, need to be prepared to design the Singing Cliffs. Within a franchise, though, I think this is where your editors come in, James Sutter was in a position where he could drop Singing Cliffs and the whatevers all day long because he knew, at some point, he's going to get to go create those. Your editors are like, "Please stop dropping new locations in our world. We don't have that budget."
[Erin] Yeah. We are going to talk more about this and about the iceberg theory when we return from the break.
 
[Erin] Often times when we think about tabletop role-playing games, you think big D&D playing with a bunch of friends. But there are a lot of smaller games that can actually help you build worlds, and think about your writing in really interesting ways. One of them is The Quiet Year from Buried without Ceremony. What it is is a game where you're mapping out a new community on a tabletop using playing cards that you probably have in your own home to answer really interesting questions about that community. Like, what are the omens? What's the largest body of water? What are people afraid of? What do they run towards? I love using this when I'm trying to think about building a new world, to make me ask interesting questions that can help to broaden my story and make it that much more interesting. So, definitely check out The Quiet Year by Buried without Ceremony.
 
[Erin] So, I was very excited when you talked about the iceberg theory…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Because I love thinking about it. One of the things that I think came up earlier was the idea about, like, a that character and worldbuilding intersect. Which I think is even more important in short fiction than it is in longer fiction, because it's so much more character focused a lot of the time. I was thinking, like, and iceberg has a very different meaning to the captain of the Titanic as it does for somebody who is a coldwater swimmer, or somebody who is an iceberg diver. That's not a thing, but let's say it is. Where…
[Howard] A climatologist.
[Erin] A climatologist. Thank you. I think that one of the things I like to think about with worldbuilding is every single person does not understand the world in the same way. I think that sometimes a mistake or something that I see that like gets me under my skin is when it seems like everyone has the same knowledge of the world within a world. You know what I mean? It's like everyone knows about the battle of X. Y'all, we barely know our own history…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Going back like a year. You know what I mean? It's like things that people said everyone would remember, like, I love looking at all the crimes of the century that have existed. Like, I remember in Ragtime The Musical, they talk about the crime of the century being, like, Evelyn Nesbitt's husband murdered her somebody… I don't remember, because no one cares. So, I think thinking about like what do your characters know of what the world is and how it works is very different… Even between the 3 of us, we would probably explain something differently about the way of the world. That gives you a lot of ways to think about worldbuilding, to think about power in worldbuilding, to think about what are the ways in which a world matters. Because if you make the world matter to the character…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then you make the world matter to the reader.
 
[Mary Robinette] So this… That idea of what matters to the character and matters to the reader gets back, for me, to how to control that in short story form. As you all have been talking, I feel like I've had a little bit of an epiphany. Let me just try this out and see how this fits for you all. So I was thinking that one of the ways that I will use worldbuilding's for emphasis. That, using the puppetry metaphor of focus, that the longer you linger on something, the more important it is to the character. That long gaze. So, I think that worldbuilding comes in, like, when we're dropping these specific details for the reader. That there's kind of 2 modes with a spectrum in between of the decorative flourish and the emphasis. That the thing that you're trying to put emphasis on, with the emphasis, these are the things the character interacts with. These are the things we're going to have to know what the ripple effects are. But then you also have the decorative flourishes which exist to create tone for the reader. So when you're looking at, like, your PowerPoint slide of the things, it's like do these fit in the world, it's not just do these fit into the system, it's like do these support the tone I'm trying to create for the reader in the short form and is my character interacting with them in a way that moves the story forward. Like, those are the pieces that I think that were looking at, and everything else we can kind of… Like, if it's not doing one of those 2 things, does it belong in the story? How does that fit?
[Erin] I love this, and I especially love it because it lets you know when your worldbuilding is not going wrong, but where you may be creating issues for yourself in making your story too big. If your decorative flourish feels like something that should have impact on the character, but it's not…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You treated as a flourish, but it actually… Like, why would they not care… Why would this not be the thing that matters to them? That's when it feels like, okay, now I want to go explore that. So part of it is figuring out what should be just a flourish.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What is just an extra that helps to create tone, and what is it that actually hits the core of your story, which means you have to understand what's the core and the heart of the story and the characters.
[DongWon] Well, some of the examples you brought up are things that you wanted to be flourishes, but end up being loadbearing in a certain way. Like, putting a space elevator in your story, your like, "Oh, wait. This was supposed to be a flourish, but if I introduce that, it complicates things too much." Right? So I think finding that balance… I do love this framework… Is such the trick of the whole thing.
[Howard] The decorative flourish of this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs, that's fine, that's decorative. But if we then, a few paragraphs later, talk about this pattern of stucco as being something that is commonly found among the tribes of the Singing Cliffs, suddenly the reader sits forward and says, "Oo. Singing Cliffs. That must be important." If you didn't want it to be important, don't use that flourish in 2 places.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Because you've now…
[DongWon] That lingering gaze.
[Howard] Now created a clue that you didn't want to create.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Erin] I also think it's good to look at your flourishes. This gets back to what you said about if you put police in, then that's a specific society. I think sometimes the flourishes that we go to are the flourishes we know from our own lives.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So, when we're trying to create like a quick obstacle, we might have like a garden, for example, show up. Because guards prevent you from getting places. But having a guard says something about the system of justice, about a system of power. So even though that may not be what your story's doing, and you may choose in the end not to care about it… One of the things that I also think is fun to do is look at what is the broader world that my flourishes are implying, and is that the world that I want my story to live in.
[DongWon] That's such an interesting one, because, as I mentioned, I like to run a lot of RPG's, I do a lot of campaigns and campaign settings. I almost always do homebrew. The challenge I have set myself multiple times and I have failed at every time is to build a city or world that doesn't have police. Right? This is a of me pushing, and then trying to advance my anti-[garbled incarcerate] thinking, how do I imagine a world that doesn't have those kinds of systems of power? Right? It is very hard. Right? It's very hard to envision that world from where we stand right now, and it is so interesting of a for me to explore this idea, and interesting to me in watching the ways in which I failed to do that. Because I do have an instinctive like, well, the characters did something chaotic, we need some police to chase them around now. Or they killed somebody, what do we do about this? Like, what systems of justice can we put into play here? It becomes very difficult. But I do like this idea that you can use worldbuilding as a critical tool in your set. Right? I think we think of it so much as a thing just for the characters to bounce off of, but it can be so generative on its own. I think that's part of why I love RPG's in general, is because the main tool I have as a GM often is those worldbuilding rules to influence my characters and guide them and direct them. So the way that works into fiction is giving your characters those stakes and those things to bounce off of.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. I will say that I… One of the things that I'm really proud of in my work on Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is that the setting I created, God's Breath, has no police.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And also has no centralized power. Which is very difficult. Because it is hard. It's like at the end of a story…
[DongWon] A fun challenge.
[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, you… Like, who is then telling you to go do things?
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Who is rewarding you when you come back with stuff? Also, like, how do you make big changes, because I think something that we often see in fiction, which doesn't work in the real world, but feels good in fiction, is the idea that, like, you change the king, you change the world.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Erin] You change the corporate, like who's running the evil corporation, the evil corporation fixes itself. So, like, there's the idea that you want to take an evil and like personify it. So figuring out how to make things a little more about the system and less about the person…
[DongWon] It highlights how much of our fantasy stories rely on restoration fantasy. Right? So if you want to tell a fantasy story in a high fantasy setting, so much of what we're looking for is, how do we depose the evil king and restore the rightful heir? Right? When we take out some elements like policing, like jails, like centralized power, then suddenly you're in a much more complicated world. That can be really fun. Also, my players were like, "We don't know what to do with this world half the time." It's interesting to watch the ways it failed in that way. Because without some of those narrative structures, your audience won't always know how to interact with the world that you've created.
[Mary Robinette] Right. When you're dealing with short fiction, because you're relying so much on the implication and the pattern seeking that the reader comes with, you have to be aware of what those societal things are because the reader is going to apply that lens. If you aren't thinking about it ahead of time, with your world building, even if it's not fully on the page, the reader will impose stuff for you.
[DongWon] Exactly. Everyone comes to the story with their own baggage and their own understanding. Being aware of that and conscious of that is part of your challenge as the creator.
[Erin] Yeah, I will talk really quickly, I know we're getting towards the end of time, but one of the things that was a challenge for me, when I wrote Snake Season, is that it's very much in one person's head…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] She was very isolated from the world. Part of the reason that the Conjureman exists as a character, and that also the women that visit, like, exist… You don't see them, but they are like a function in the story, is to give you a sense of what the world thinks it is around her. Because otherwise, she's just… You don't… You can't tell what's real and what's not real, what's going on, but by having these characters who represent like the world trying to exert itself on the character, it gives a to give some more meat to what's going on and to tell what is a flourish and what is actually like a loadbearing wall of this particular narrative.
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah. We had such a fun conversation over breakfast, Mary Robinette and I, over what actually happened in the story, like what's real.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I love that it's slippery. Right? I love the implication that there is reality somewhere here, but your world building elements make it kind of slippery in a way that's really fun and… I don't know. It makes it energetic in that way.
[Howard] Well, bear in mind that the reader experience here is… This was not a story about what kind of world is this. This is a story about what is this person going to do. What has this person done. I mean, the reader can go back and ask those larger questions, but the story wasn't created to answer them. The story was created just to… I say just to. The story was created just to mess…
[Laughter]
[Just to mess with you.]
[Laughter]
[Howard] Mess with you.
[DongWon] Because you are the antagonist, going back to a previous episode.
[Mary Robinette] But I think what it does is that… That because it's slippery, because to refer to the magic system, the magic system episode, because it is not well defined, it creates more space for the reader to bring themselves into it. I think that's one of the real powers of short fiction, is that all of that implication stuff means that the reader… Each reader's reaction is going to be different, because they are putting more of themselves into the story, I think, in a lot of ways.
[Howard] There's more room for the reader to do that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] I think we are about at the end of things. But before we go to the homework, just a heads up that we are going to be taking a quick pause in this deep dive. Because National Novel Writing Month is upon us. As much as I love short fiction, I also love Nanowrimo as a way to stretch and see what I can do in a different form. We're going to invite you all to come with us and think about the ways we can all sit down and write a novel or novel shaped object together. With that, the homework.
 
[Howard] Right here. Take a big worldbuilding concept, and when I say concept, I mean interrelated, the whole big worldbuilding thing, and pick one or 2 iconic elements that bring it to life for you. Then take one of those and make it a key piece of one short scene.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza

Oct. 12th, 2023 06:44 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza
 
 
Key points: I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story. Genre can be bookseller's version, where do we shelve it, the critic's version, what is the cultural lineage of this, and the reader/writer's version, what's useful, important, what does it feel like? Is it horror if the writer didn't intend to scare you, they just wanted the character to do a horrible thing? What drives speculative fiction in short form is the power of clear and simple metaphors. There are horror stories where the protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens. In these stories, our protagonist is the horror, doing things that we are horrified by. The antagonist is trying to prevent bad things from happening, and fails. Short fiction packs a lot in a small space. In a Myers-Briggs of writers, there are long and short writers. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 41]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza.
[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] 'Cause 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.
 
[Erin] I have managed to put off my deep dive until the very very very last, but the time is here.
[Dongwon] You were very very determined to go last.
[Erin] Right.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Very determined to go last. I have no idea why, but I'm really excited to talk about my work, I guess…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But also to just give a… To shine some light on short fiction as a whole.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I am merely a conduit for the love of short fiction. But I want to talk a little bit first about why I picked the 3 stories that I asked you all to read, and then see if you have any questions for me, otherwise I'll just ramble about them at length. So, the 3 that I picked are Wolfy Things, is the first story that I ever had published, so I felt it really represented the beginning of the extravaganza when I was really just kind of getting things off the ground. I was just saying before we started recording that I can tell it's my first published story because I just can. Something about the way that it's constructed, I'm like, "Oh, it's early on." But I still love it. I picked Sour Milk Girls because it is my buzzy-ist story, I would say. It's the story that ended up in year's best collections and like almost made the Hugo ballot. So it's the story that sort of people know me the most for and were most excited about. Then, I picked Snake Season because I think it is the closest to where I'm going as a writer. I think it's like sort of the truest to…
[Howard] Oh, no…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, "It's the truest to my voice of murder."
[Dongwon] Let's go.
[Erin] Weirdly, it's also the one that's been translated into the most languages. It's been translated into, I think, Spanish and Portuguese and… Anyway. So, people can be horrified, I guess, in many different languages.
[Mary Robinette] Ha. You said horrified. You… I was saying earlier, we were having this conversation about whether or not Erin writes horror. I was like, "I think you do." She does not think she does. But, ha ha…
[Erin] It's you all. You brainwashed me into thinking it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I think so much when I write, I think about what I'm writing as, just like one individual person's like troubled story, that I don't see like… What they're doing may not be… I would not use my protagonist as like life lessons. I wouldn't follow in their footsteps.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] If they told you to do something, I would say, "No." I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story.
[Laughter]
[Erin] That I just decided not to write.
[Howard] Oh, man.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I…
[Mary Robinette] Accurate.
[Erin] I just… Even though that's the case, for me, it's really, I think I get so much in their head and have to understand them in order to make them somewhat sympathetic on the page, that I can't think of what they're doing or what I'm doing as horror. Because I get why they did it, and I decided to make them do it, even though it may be something that is beyond the pale in the normal, like… In the normal life of things.
 
[Dongwon] I love this as a way of thinking about genre. I think one thing with conversation about genre get so muddy in a certain way, because there's almost 3 different ways in which we use the term. One is how I use it, which is very much the book selling side. Where do we put this in the store, what bisac code do we put on this, what gets… What comp titles do we use? Right? Like, how do we sell this? Then there's like the way critics use it, which is… I'm not even going to dive too deep into that, but it tends to be more about what's the cultural lineage of this. Then there's like how readers and writers use it, which is much more like what's useful to you, what's important to you, what does it feel like? So I love this idea that you separated out so much of your process from necessarily what the bookstore genre of it is because you need to access a space where you can look at it in a way that these are just people doing things. Yes, the things that they are doing are very upsetting, but they are doing things for relatable reasons. Right? So, I mean, even Sour Milk Girls where she does one of the worst things I've ever seen a character do in a story to another character. It's so upsetting the thing that she does to Princess, but it's so understandable and relatable, even if I wouldn't make that choice, I can understand why she does it in a way that I think, for you, I can see how internally, that's not horror, that's just a person. Right? That's a flawed person who lives in a deeply flawed world trying to survive in whatever ways that she can. Her experience and trauma and psychology all lead her to this place of doing this upsetting thing.
[Howard] The context in which… Ghost does things to Princess. Ghost is not doing anything to Princess that society has not already done to Ghost.
[Dongwon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] In reading that story, there is horrific revelation after horrific revelation. At first it just looks like they live in an orphanage. No, this is worse than an orphanage, this is… Something's being done to these kids. As we learn more about it, it gets… You experience horror. So in talking about genre, I always go back to our Season 11, Elemental Genres. I keep turning the page because I keep looking for the next horrific reveal. I experienced dread, but I'm sort of thrilling, reveling in it. It grows so nicely out of that symmetry between what society is doing and what the character is doing that when we get to the end, it is the perfect horrific inevitability. So, yeah, circling back around, yes, Erin, you're writing horror. Are they going to shelve it as horror? I don't care, I just want to read it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Something that I just want to circle back to, you said that your antagonist… Your protagonist is the antagonist in someone else's story.
[Dongwon] Great line.
[Mary Robinette] It's like… When I think about all of these stories, I'm like, "Oh, yes." One of reasons that these work, I think, structurally so well is that you have a character who has set out to achieve a goal. They come up with a plan, they have obstacles, they have all of the markers. It's just as a reader, I do not want them to achieve that goal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, that is… I can see why actually you would make the argument that it's not horror, because in horror, generally speaking, bad things happen to the protagonist. In this case, you're like, "Oh, no, your protagonist is absolutely…" And I can see all of the stories that are written from the other character's point of view.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It is… I'm like, "Oh. Yes." Okay, I will grant your point about how these may not be horror.
 
[Erin]'s Thank you. I think it also comes back to, like, what… Intentionality…
[Mary Robinette, Dongwon chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] So we were talking about, just before hand, in all the fascinating conversations we will reprise here, about that there's 3 different genres of the body. Humor, erotica, horror. They all try to make you feel something in a very visceral level. So, to me, to set out to write horror is to say I want to scare you. I want you to feel dread. I never intend… That's never a thought that goes through my head. I just want my characters to accomplish a horrible thing which might make you feel horror, but I'm not thinking. At the end, if you said, like, "I was totally fine with everything they did and I felt like I was like I'm cheering them on," I might have some questions about your moral compass…
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I wouldn't feel like I didn't accomplish my goal as a writer. Whereas, I feel like in a horror story, if you say like, "I wasn't scared at all," that you've missed something.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The same way that if you didn't laugh at humor…
[Dongwon] [garbled]
[Howard] Last night we joked during D&D, we joked about you being chaotic evil or what… This is more like chaotic IDGAF…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Chaotic WTF. I just… I am doing a thing and you're going to have experience, but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the thing.
 
[Dongwon] I will say… I will grant you what you're saying on Wolfy Thing and Sour Milk Girls. I will say I made the mistake of reading Snake Season…
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Right before I went to bed.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yes. Bad choice.
[Dongwon] I was upset. The image of Sarah, the image of the donor, is just so upsetting to me. It's so emotional too, though. I mean, what drives speculative fiction in short form so well is the power of the metaphor. Right? One of the things I love in short fiction is it's so clear and simple about what the metaphor is. Right? In Sour Milk Girls, it's the state is robbing them of their identity and memories, because that's kind of what the foster system is invested in doing, is erasing who you were to be this person that can be entered into new situations. Right? So, just this mother's trauma over her dead daughter, over this monstrous thing that she's afraid of in herself and in… I don't know how to unpack all the things in that because it's so rich and textured and dense, like, that's the beauty of that image. But, yeah, I'm very scared of that little girl. She's definitely haunting me.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that also happened for me as we got deeper into the story was wondering how much of Sarah's appearance was actually just Mary's view of her, like, was this just a normal little girl who just wasn't a baby anymore, and that that's something that she couldn't stand. Like, the fact that I don't know and there's just enough ambiguity in there? I mean, I feel like she's… It is… She is horrifying and also what if she's not?
[Dongwon] Yeah. Exactly. Because do you know something, maybe she's fine?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] On that disturbing note, we're going to take a slight break. When we come back, I have a question to ask you all.
 
[Dongwon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week and it's a way I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave you with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a whole meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty, time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.
 
[Dongwon] My thing of the week this week is Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap. In my personal opinion, I think Isabel Yap is one of the greatest science fiction short story writers we have in the game right now. She's an incredible talent and this is her debut collection of stories. It came out a couple of years ago in 2021 from Small Beer Press. The work that she does in here is so wide-ranging and delightful and engaging. She pulls from her Filipino ancestry in bringing in some traditional myths and monsters in the story, and the way she blends fabulism and horror and supernatural elements with grounded relatable concerns of contemporary characters is incredibly powerful and wonderful. I think this is a phenomenal collection and I would love for all of you to go check it out.
 
[Erin] We are back, and my question is ready, which is, who do you see as the antagonist of these stories? Because I've been thinking about it, and I actually think there's a slight shift in the antagonist… In who I see as the antagonist of all 3 stories that I think makes Snake Season feel the most horrific. But I'm curious…
[Howard] Wolfy, the antagonist is Erin. Sour Milk Girls, it's Erin.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Snake Season, it's Erin like 3 times.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm upset at you in particular…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah [garbled] statements.
[Dongwon] No, I mean I'm not sure who the antagonist in Wolfy Things is, actually. That's kind of an interesting one. It feels much more like portraiture than really like a strong… Like this intense metaphor about society in a certain way. Sour Milk Girls is definitely the state. Then, for Snake Season, it's almost just like the world. Like there's a… She just exists in a world that is stacked against everyone in the story in a certain way.
[Mary Robinette] Like, she's… She has decided that the conjureman is the antagonist. Like… I think from her point of view, from Marie's point of view…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The conjureman is the antagonist.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] But I don't think that he actually… He…
[Dongwon] I don't think he's a good dude, though.
[Mary Robinette] I don't think he's a good dude. But structurally speaking, like, he does serve the function of an antagonist.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] She has…
[Howard] There are horror stories in which our protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens.
[Dongwon] Yep.
[Howard] Just in general. In these stories, I think… In all 3 of them, our protagonist is the horror. The protagonist is the one who is ultimately doing the things that we are the most horrified with. So the antagonist is the one who's trying to prevent bad things from happening. I'm just… In broad structural strokes.
[Dongwon] Totally.
[Howard] There is… That is a flavor of horror in which we are sympathetic with, we are following a character who is on a path, their goals are going to lead them into the horrible place, and the antagonist is the one who is putting obstacles in front of them, and the antagonist is going to fail.
[Dongwon] There's no Freddie, there's no Candyman, there's no [garbled]
[Howard] You stop thinking of antagonist is villain, and start thinking of them as the person who's in between the protagonist and their ultimate goal.
[Dongwon] Well, this is why I think it's so useful in certain cases to really let go of genre expectations and not think of it as a genre piece in certain ways and just follow the story where it goes. Right? Tonally, and voice wise, I may look at this and say horror. I think Howard's right, and you're right, when I break it down to the core elements of the story, horrific things are happening. I think you're right, though, that is not a horror story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Aha!
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] You convinced me.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I also want to say that I don't think that every story has to have an antagonist. In, I think Wolfy Things… I've forgotten the main character's name. I remember Lee's name, but I don't remember the POV character's name.
[Erin] Nikki.
[Mary Robinette] Nikki. I think Nikki is the protagonist, and the antagonist. I think he is both.
 
[Erin] I think… What I would say is that for me, or what I think I was trying to do, and it's interesting to go back and see whether or not that work. For me, I think, society, culture, the world, as it is is the antagonist. I think that a lot… I think that all 3 of these stories, to a degree, are my kind of thinking about, ruminating on the idea that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's [garbled]
[Dongwon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] And that ultimately the reason the society is the antagonist is that the protagonist is monstrous, but they are only monstrous because they are in a world that creates monsters. Therefore, in them trying to figure out the world and where they fit into it, they start with good intentions, but they ultimately are kind of in like the classic tragedy sense, unable to escape who they are and how they've been made…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And what has created them. I think that Snake Season is the place where that is the least clear.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I love that.
[Erin] Like, the culture is like much more, like, hopefully like the culture of the town and their hatred of wolves is pretty clear, and the state's direct like manipulation of these poor girls is pretty clear. But in Snake Season, it's a lot less like it's just kind of the world in less of a directly antagonistic way and more just like how do you fit into the world as it is.
[Mary Robinette] But it's also like in Snake Season, at least to me, it was about how she only felt like she was supported after her child had died.
[Dongwon] Yeah. The only time people came out in a sympathetic way for her.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Instead, she had the conjureman who's like bossing her around, and her husband who's not there. And she's alone. She's alone with a child that she's trying to raise by herself while her husband goes off and works. The only way she gets people to come out is if a child dies. She's not conscious of that, I don't think. Not like… Or she's… That is the lie she is telling herself.
[Erin] She's not, like, waking up and journaling…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] No one has visited me for months…
[Dongwon] Time to kill a baby.
[Mary Robinette] Kill a baby.
[Erin] That would be horrible.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Erin] But you can't say that to yourself.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So you create a world in which that is what's happening for you, so you can get the emotional joy… Or not… The emotional comfort that you want.
 
[Howard] As we explore these structural interpretations... I love doing this. I could do this all day. It's important to recognize that a large part of this comes from us, within, what we bring to the table, what are reading experience was. When I read Wolfy, I at first thought the wolf was the antagonist. After reading it, I feel like Lee is the antagonist. Because there's a moment when I was reading, when I felt like, "Oh. Nikki's objective has changed." Nikki wants to talk to the wolf, meet the wolf, learn who the wolf is, and Lee prevents that from happening, by falling on his own knife. Lee, you klutz. Nikki's goals change and he follows through with the original plan. But that is an interpretation which… Okay, in critical senses, maybe it's wildly invalid, but based on what I brought into the book, that's the experience that I had. That's one of the things that I love about short fiction in general is that it's so tight that we have all of these experiences so close together within 30 to 45 minutes of starting the story. It's easier to unpack, easier to talk about, and I talk about it for way longer than I would on a 300,000 page…
[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to touch on this actually. Each of these stories implies a massive world. Right? World building, technology, magic, societal stuff… The amount that you get into 6000 words in terms of gesturing at a bigger world is truly extraordinary and breathtaking. But also, I think, especially Sour Milk Girls could sustain a novel length work, right, with what you have there. I could see something bigger possible in that space if you want it, but that's not what you wanted. You love short fiction. You like writing short fiction. You believe in it, as do I. I adore it. But I'm curious to hear more about your thought process, about why short fiction, why is that how you wanted these stories to unfold. Why do you like working in that space?
 
[Erin] So this is a great question, specifically for Sour Milk Girls, because of its origin story. So I actually wanted to, and maybe still do, want to write a novel about 5 different women whose lives have been screwed up by this memory, the memory as a commodity system. Ghost was going to be like sort of the protagonist, through which this larger thing happened much later in her life. Not much later, but like in her 20s. I was trying to get her voice. So, for me, as a writer, if I cannot hook into the voice of the character, I cannot write the story. Which is one of the reasons I'm extraordinarily slow writer. Because I will rewrite the first paragraph and the first page over and over and over until the character sounds right to me in my head and I have some sort of instinctive sense of how they see the world and then I can move forward. Then it gets much easier. But that process can take a long time. So I could not hook into the voice of Ghost. I kept trying and I kept writing these horrible things I didn't like. So I was like maybe I need to go back and do a writing exercise for myself of some pivotal moment in her life early on that turns her into the person that she was at the time that the novel that I was writing, which is kind of a compulsive kleptomaniac, a compulsive memory kleptomaniac. Why become a compulsive memory kleptomaniac?
[Howard] I forget.
[Erin] I was trying to figure out what is the thing? Like, why… Where did she start going down this path? So I wrote… Started writing this writing exercise. I was like, oh, this writing exercise feels a bit like a story actually. Let me finish it. Then I did. I was like I think I could publish this. So it's sort of an accidental story that comes out of me...
[Dongwon] I love that.
[Erin] Trying to understand the novel form. Because I don't get it. I have this theory that I've told people before that there should be a… Like a Myers-Briggs of writers…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Where, first, like introvert/extrovert, I think some people tend long…
[Dongwon] Yup.
[Erin] And some people tend short.
[Dongwon] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] As writers. I tend short. I think I tend to just… The way that my sentences are constructed, a lot of times, I try to jam a lot in there in a way that won't… Wouldn't work. It would be a lot for like a longer work. You need to kind of stretch things out and dole them out differently. So I… When I try to write longer works, I often end up coming up with ideas that I then break off into shorter things. Because I'm trying to understand and trying to get to a place where I could write a novel. I also… Yeah, I think like it is a lot of it's about natural tendencies and my own speed because I'm slow, writing a short story is a much easier…
[Dongwon] Totally.
[Erin] Kind of thing for me to set out to do. But I think even… I'm the opposite. We're going to talk later in this deep dive about what happens when all your short stories, people are like, "That should be a novel." Which happens a lot to my students. Like, they'll be like writing this short story, and I'm like, "This is not a short story, this is a prologue."
[Dongwon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I have the opposite, where even when I come up with novel ideas they sort of come out in short story form. Because I think I'm so focused on one character. Part of it is that I get so into the idea of the single character that you need a broader cast a lot of times in order to make a novel work, and I want to be so much in this one person's head that it's hard to think about taking them on such a long journey.
[Dongwon] It's funny, you and I were chatting before recording, and you… Just talking about an idea that you had. I was like, "Oh. That actually sounds like a short story…"
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Not a novel." I think you would need to do something to make it more novel size. So it was really funny to hear you say that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, I want to sidebar with you and talk to you about how to fix that, because…
[Erin] Oh, cool.
[Mary Robinette] Because I've…
[Dongwon] Would you, because she needs to write the novel [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I know, I would like it too. Yeah. It's… You're right. You are so… Because I also went from short story to novel. So I know the thing that happens. But I'm pretty sure we can talk about that at some point later in the deep dive. Right now, we should probably pause for homework.
[Erin] Yes.
 
[Mary Robinette] The homework assignment is take a line that you've written a while ago that you absolutely love and try rewriting it is the writer that you are now, because your style changes, your understanding of how language changes, your interaction with it changes, your taste changes. Take that original line, read it once, put it to the side, and then rewrite it as you are now.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple Podcast or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.29: Collaboration And Partnership

Jul. 20th, 2023 09:32 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.29: Collaboration And Partnership
 
 
Key Points: Partnerships with other people or other IP's or groups. Even sequels and short stories set in established worlds need collaboration. Working in someone else's IP or working with your past self. Fit into the existing continuity or play with it. Collaboration is not the same every time. With some IP work, the canon rules. In IP work, you don't get to pick the audience. Get to know the audience, at least a little. Learn what kind of collaborator you are, and what type of collaborations you enjoy. Know who you are working with, too. Writing for a property you love may still be harder than writing your own thing. What do you do to make a collaboration work? First, accept that writing is egotistical, and collaboration requires you to let go of part of that ego and listen to other people. An effective tool is focusing on fiting your story within this framework. You've been picked for your personal voice, use it! Match their mechanics and aesthetics, but express your personal voice. What is intrinsic to the first part, what does the audience love, and how can I tell a new version of that? Collaborators sometimes see different things. Collaboration challenges you to think about the essence of the story you want to tell because you don't have full control of all aspects. Collaboration can teach you new tools. Two writers working together works best when each one knows what they are bringing to the partnership. Each case is a little bit different. Sometimes you have to put your foot down if the collaboration is going towards something harmful, or a story that doesn't need to be told in that way. This is a delicate process! Know where your line is.
 
[Season 18, Episode 29]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Working in Partnership.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are going to talk about working in partnership with other people or with other IP's which can often be an entire group, rather than a single person. Part of this is collaboration. But this is also something that you often will find yourself doing with your own work when it's time to go back and write a sequel to something or a short story set in a world that you or someone else has established. There are rules you have to follow in order to make sure that it stays true to the original thing. So this is something that all of us have done to varying degrees. So let me start by just kind of throwing this out as a general question. Why is it important, or rather, how is it different when you have to work within an established IP versus just creating something whole cloth?
[Mary Robinette] So, there are built-in constraints that you have to work towards. I've done this in a couple of different modes. I've done this in someone else's IP for games. I collaborated with Brandon on the thing for The Original. But the thing that I'm doing right now is, that is, is basically collaborating with my past self. I'm writing the fourth book in the lady astronaut That series, and I have to fit it in between the novels that I have already written in the short stories that are farther down the timeline of this. As I was working on it, I had… Like, I worked out this whole outline, grabbed one of the short stories to reference a character name, and realized that it takes place two years after the end of this novel. So I could not have the ending that I was aiming for because it broke the rest of my canon.
[Howard] Kevin J. Anderson, who famously has written a number of Star Wars novels, was on the podcast and gave us what I considered the high water metaphor, which is Lando Calrissian and Han Solo in Return of the Jedi, when Lando Calrissian needs to take the Millennium Falcon and Han says, "Don't scratch it." Your job as a tie-in fiction writer, according to Kevin J. Anderson, is you need to take the Millennium Falcon, blow up the Death Star with it, bring it back to Han without scratching it. I love that metaphor so much.
[Mary Robinette] There's a number of different things that I think that you're thinking about with that. It's the fitting into the existing continuity. So there's a couple of different ways you can play with it. One is that you can… You could play that as Lando manages to do all of that without scratching it. The other is you can have this whole side quest of, oh, crap, I have, in fact, scratched it, now I have to clean it up before Han knows. So there's a certain amount of gleeful playfulness that you can do where you're like, "Hum. You told me that I can't do this thing, but let me see if I can…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And still be respectful to the IP.
[Howard] The back-and-forth that I got to have with Doug Seacat when I was writing tie-in fiction with Privateer Press. We were talking about coal technology and magic. I told him, "Hey, are you aware of coal tar?" He said, "What's coal tar?" I said, "Well, it's a 19th-century thing that was a byproduct of coal processing. It's a mild acid that got used in medicine all the time." He said, "I didn't even know about that. Well, it's going into the book." So… That level of the partnership for me was so much fun because I got to reach into Doug's head and find out what they'd said and then see if I could add things to the universe. He paid me a very high compliment at the end and said, "I love what you did with the technology inside this war jack. We haven't had anybody actually try to describe how one of these works, and you just went for it." I'm like, "Yeah, I stared at pictures of railroad engines for hours, but this was fun."
 
[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I want to say is that I think understanding that collaboration is not going to be the same way every time.
[Right]
[Mary Robinette] So, Brandon and I have collaborated on a thing, and Dan and Brandon have collaborated. Both of these are audio… Things that were intended for audio. Our collaboration processes were completely different. With me, Brandon handed me a script… Or, not a script, an outline and a world Bible. I sat down and we had a little bit of back-and-forth, fleshing out the outline where I turned it into scenes that made sense to me. Then I started writing it. In the process of writing it, I would hit these worldbuilding things, which is the thing that Brandon is known for, that made no sense at all…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Because what he realized in that process was that so much of his worldbuilding was figuring it out as he was going. So we had to have a lot of back-and-forth about that, and jettisoning those things that had been planned and plotted that didn't actually make sense once we actually got in there. Whereas Dan was given this very blank slate, which we talked about in the first episode in this series.
[Dan] Yeah. The Dark One novel was similar to what you got. He gave me an outline, but actually very little if any worldbuilding of how the secondary world… It's a portal fantasy… How does that actually function. The collaboration for this process was just, "Hey, this would be cool to do this podcast story. Do it. It has to explain how this character in's up in prison." That was the entire thing that I had to work with.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I think, I have a number of clients who do a lot of IP work. Right? I have clients who have written for Bioware and Blizzard and Marvel and Star Wars. Right? Some huge brands. It is always fascinating to me seeing how that process works when there is decades sometimes of canon, and canon that's incredibly important to the fan base. Right? So, if you play with the worldbuilding of Dragon Age, you're going to have a lot of conversations around that. Now, the problem is, there's an asymmetry here, because you're dealing with a big corporation who is trying to develop a videogame, make movies, make TV shows, in parallel with what you're doing, so it's also trying to hit a moving target with people who are very busy. So sometimes as the writer, when you're coming into this, you need to find a way to manage your time and sort of protect your time, so that you're not spending… You're not doing revision after revision after revision chasing a moving target of what the current canon and what the current lore is. Working… Doing that kind of work for hire work can be incredibly rewarding, financially, and it can be really fun to write in these universes, but it is a particular skill that's almost a management skill as much as it is a craft skill of finding a way to fit into that world.
[Erin] I think that's so important… Two things that you said that I love. One is that you don't get to pick the audience. That's, I think, the biggest thing in working in intellectual-property work, IP work, is that the audience for this work has been determined for you, and often times has been built up for a long time. So you may be able to play with the world and with what you're doing, but ultimately… When you write a novel, you might think, "Here's the audience that I want for it." But if you're writing for a game, it's these gamers. So you need to know a little bit… I think it's always wise to get to know the audience a bit. You don't necessarily have to pander to them, but it's good to know what the expectations are coming in, what people sort of want from this property or from this world, so that you have a sense that you're playing to the strengths of it as opposed to fighting it, which is never a good thing to do. I would say the second thing is, if you do a lot of collaborative work, is learning the type of collaborator that you are and the type of collaborations that you enjoy. Because not everything is going to be your cup of tea. Sometimes you don't like working with, like, big multinational companies because ultimately they hold a lot more control. You might consider like more of a one-on-one collaboration like Mary Robinette was talking about. I love writers' rooms, where your getting together with a group of people to create something and you're doing a lot of the generative work together. Then going off and writing and coming back to see how it went. Just because it plays to things that I think are really fun. Sometimes you don't know these things until you do it. But if you've collaborated on anything in your life, a school project…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A grocery list, like, a vacation, you know a bit about yourself when you work with other people. You can then try to use that and build on it when you collaborate in a creative space.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I think it's really important to not only know who your audience is, but who you're working with. Right? Because I've seen writers go into collaboration with some of these big IP that have a fan base that may not always be the easiest to work with. Especially if they're fem, especially if they're queer or a writer of color, they can get a lot of pushback in a way that can be very unpleasant. Coming up, I have Mark Ashiro is collaborating with Rick Riordan. One of the things that collaboration was specifically because Rick did not feel like he was in a position to write these queer characters. So he wanted to find a queer writer to take that on. It was a thing that Mark and I looked at very carefully in terms of how is Mark being positioned to the fans and in what way. I mean, we could not have a more wonderful partner than Rick on this. Then he and his team have taken absolute care to make sure that Mark is seen as a full collaborator and is front and center in the fans' eyes. So, knowing that we had that backup going in really changed the calculus for us of, like, is this a thing… Or, like, how do we approach this, what do we need to do to make sure that, like, we're going to navigate this well. Right? The book's coming out soon. Fans are really excited, we're really excited, I think it's going to be a really beautiful partnership.
 
[Dan] Yeah. This is such an important thing to consider. Especially, remembering back to my days trying to break into this, where I was like, "I will take anything." But also if you let me write for a property that I love, that's even more exciting to me. It is often so much harder than just writing your own thing. I sat down, back when Star Wars kind of ramped up its new slate of novels a few years ago, I sat down with Claudia Gray who's been writing a ton of Star Wars stuff, and said, "Tell me everything, I would love to work in this." By the end of that conversation, I was like, "Absolutely not."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "This is not for me." I love Star Wars, but this process that you go through that produces very good books and the people who do it enjoy it is definitely something that I would not have enjoyed. So you do need to pay attention to who you're going to be working with, what their process is going to be like, how much do you love the property. Given the same opportunity to write for Star Trek, I would absolutely say yes, because it's more of a personal connection for me. But there a lot of extra considerations when you get into this kind of work. Let's pause now, and when we come back, we want to talk more about how this collaboration works.
 
[Mary Robinette] I wrote a story with Brandon Sanderson called The Original. This story is about a woman who wakes up and discovers that her husband has been murdered, and, more than that, that she is a clone, and her original murdered him. She's been given a period of time in which to track down her original and bring her to justice. It is science fiction, it's immersive, but it is audio. It is specifically written for audio. It was a lot of fun to write. So, if you're interested in someone who's doing a lot of self reflection out of force, this is something you might want to pick up. It's called The Original. That is by me, Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson.
 
[Dan] All right. So, how do we do this? We've talked about a lot of the perils of collaboration, and a lot of the benefits that you can get. Specifically, how is it different? What do you need to do in a collaboration to make it work?
[Howard] I want to start by saying that there is nothing is inherently egotistical as writing a novel that you expect other people to read. That's good. It is an inherently egotistical act, and I accept that. I accept that and I embrace that. It's important to accept and embrace that, because the moment you're collaborating, you have to recognize that at least a little bit of that ego you gotta let go of it. You have to let go of that and learn to listen to other people over the voice of your inner artist who is shouting for the things that you want. This may sound like a 101 level technique, but I'm here to tell you, the world is the place that it is because it ain't a 101 level technique.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that I have found to be a very effective tool is to think about, there's your goal. You have to tell a story for someone else in this world, or in your own world. But that you want to bring… You can fit your story, the story that you want to tell, within this framework. There's a reason that they picked you to tell this is opposed to someone else. That is your personal voice. So I'm going to draw… Take a brief sidestep to draw out the distinction in voice. There's three types. There's mechanical, there's aesthetic, and there's personal. If I use puppets as a metaphor, which I'm very fond of doing. When we say mechanical, it's like what kind of puppet is it. When we say mechanics in writing, it's like third person, first person, game, YA, whatever you're doing mechanically. That can be taught, that can be mimicked. Aesthetic, what does that puppet look like, what does it sound like. Those can be taught and mimicked. Personal… If you loan the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why everyone freaked out when Kermit's original puppeteer, Jim Henson, died and Steve Whitmire took over, even though it's clearly the same puppet. So it's matching mechanic and aesthetic. So when you are coming in, you want to make sure that you're matching their mechanics and their aesthetics, but recognize that your personal voice is part of why you were hired. So your ideas, your personal experience, those things are going to express themselves in the fiction, and that has value. At the same time, you're also going to have to make decisions about which pieces of your personality you are sharing with them, and which pieces you are retaining, and which pieces you're willing to say, "You know what, we can overwrite that," because it is getting in the way of my paycheck and the things that you want me to do.
 
[Dan] Another consideration here when you… One of the things that you mentioned was the story you want to tell. I think that that's such a big part of this. One of the things we said at the beginning was even when you write a sequel, you are essentially in collaboration with yourself. It is interesting to me to look at sequels or second seasons of the show and realize, "Oh, this creator misunderstood what the audience loved about the first thing." Right? One of the examples I like to use for this is The Temple of Doom, the second Indiana Jones movie. What Spielberg and Lucas loved about the first one, and what they were trying to do, is not necessarily what the audience took away from that first one. The things that the audience loved were not… About Raiders of the Lost Ark… Kind of weren't present in the second one as much. That was a case of them identifying different things than the audience did in terms of this is what I'm going to continue, this is how I'm going to keep this story going. You can see the same thing with season two of Heroes, people developing superpowers. What the creators thought we all loved about that and therefore what they focused on in season two was people coming together and forming a super team. Whereas the audience was like, "No, we already saw that. We want to see the team do something together now." Because what the audience kind of pulled out of season one was, "Oh, I love these characters, and I want to see them continue to grow along this path." Rather than I want to see them walk the same path over again. So identifying what it is that really makes this click, and how can I give you more of that while being different, is part of not only writing a sequel, but also writing an episode of a TV show, writing a short story set in a larger world. What is intrinsic to this, what does the audience love about it, and how can I tell my own new version of that?
 
[Erin] I think one of the challenges and excitements of working in collaboration is that you may feel differently about that than a collaborator does. You may believe, like, that the audience is getting character and they may believe, no, the audience is really into the tension of it. So, sometimes you do have to set aside, especially if you're working with a collaborator that has more positional power, like, they're a big company, and ultimately you're not going to convince Marvel that they are wrong about the character. They're going to tell you, "It's this," and you're going to have to work with it. But I think that that's actually some of the most fun of it, and why I enjoy collaborating, is figuring out what are the mechanics and aesthetics that I need to fit my personal voice to, and how can I still make things that are core to me as a storyteller come through in this different format. Sort of like when we were talking about writing in a different format, when you're using someone else's mechanics and aesthetics, it is its own, like, sort of genre of writing. Figuring out how to tweak things and say things differently, but still get the core through, is so important. I remember Mary Robinette several episodes ago, you talked about, I think, essence and form.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Which I always say as essence and expression. It's, you change the expression, but the essence is there. I think what it challenges you to do is think about what is the essence of the story that you're trying to tell in a way that you might not when you have full control over all aspects of the storytelling.
[Dan] I understood this principle you're talking about in a completely different way when I took the time to look at my favorite X file episodes and realized they were all by the same writer. There was something that that writer was putting into the stories, that essence, that personality, that intimate connection to what was going on, that I responded to. It's one of my favorite shows, I like most of the episodes. But these four or five in particular spoke to me in a very unique way, because it was that singular author's voice coming through.
[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that we have to do in puppet theater a lot, that… They say it takes 5 to 10 years to establish a company, and during that time, you have to do names, like Pinocchio, Snow Queen. So the goal is to figure out how to do the story that you want to tell while still having the audience feel like they came out of the theater seeing Pinocchio. It comes down to figuring out, okay, what are the markers, what are the things that are important in these stories? Like, I know that in The Calculating Stars, and this is part of what I get from reading the five and four star reviews, when I'm in the right frame of mind, is that people like seeing women in STEM, they like seeing someone who's dealing with anxiety, they like a happily married couple, and they want to be in space. Like, I have to make sure that as much as possible, I give you at least one scene in space.
 
[Erin] I also think you can get tools from collaboration that are like random things you would never have to have known otherwise.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A good example of this is, so Zombies Run is based out of the UK, and all of the characters are British. I am… Was, when I was writing, the only non-British writer. So I would write things and they would be like, "This is very American." They'd be like, "You just used this American slang. This is not how things work. Stop saying… Whatever… The floors start at zero." It really made me, like, open my eyes in a way to sort of what are the things that I'm making assumptions about in the way that I tell stories that I wouldn't have thought about if a collaborator hadn't said we tell stories a little differently and you're going to need to adapt to that. I actually think that even though I don't write in Britishisms outside of that, it really helped me think differently about the assumptions I was making as a writer.
 
[DongWon] Mostly, up until this point, we've been talking about writing for IP or writing for an existing universe in those ways. There's another type of collaboration that is two individual writers working together. I've been fortunate enough to work on a number of co-written projects that were quite successful. Your talk about tools is what made me think of this. I think they've worked the best when I could see each writer knew what they were bringing to the table. So, in the case of James S. A. Corey, that was Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Like, Daniel was really bringing this sort of like rich worldbuilding, really thoughtful politics, very expensive sort of systems oriented thinking. Then, Ty was bringing a really strong sense of action and pacing and all of these things. It was one of these things that each of them individually… I mean, Daniel is a truly wonderful novelist in his own work, but I could see how the alchemy of the two of them working together were making something that was so dynamic and so fun, and created this really fantastic science-fiction series. Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, working on This Is How You Lose the Time War together, that is a collaboration that's really driven by their friendship, and each of the two characters, Red and Blue, are kind of reflections of both their styles and ways of being in the world, and then figuring out a little bit of how their friendship worked through these two characters interacting and talking to each other. You could just sort of see, like, Max's more mechanical thinking, Amal's more like organic thinking… I'm obviously being very reductive here. But, like, these two I think coming together in these two characters in these really symbolic ways and weaving together to make this really beautiful story. So, what I love is each of them knowing what their toolkit was and also understanding there was a way that that would we interact with someone else's toolkit to make something that works better together than individually.
[Dan] Well, let me follow up and ask you some questions about that. Was there a point in either of those processes where you, as the outsider, saw them start to click into what those roles were?
[DongWon] I think with Daniel and Ty a little bit more. Because that was a little bit more not clearly what section was written by which person. They did alternate, and then they would sort of pass and edit together. That was meant to be seamless. With Max and Amal, it really was more… Each… Red sections and Blue sections are meant to sound different. So those were written separately, and then sort of edited to work as a whole, but that was… Also that just showed… They didn't even tell me they were working on this. It just appeared on my desk one day. I was like, "What did you guys do?"
[Chuckles, laughter]
[DongWon] Which turned out to be a beautiful sort of surprise. So it depends a little bit on the project. Right? With Mark working with Rick Riordan, it has been, again, a little bit more deliberate of Mark. Like, okay, how do I fit into this voice, into this style of storytelling, while bringing their own sort of personality and their own perspective to it. Which is what, as Mary Robinette was talking about, they were hired to do. That's why Rick wanted Mark, because they had read Mark's other work and said, "This fits. This is the perspective that these characters need to have. This is Nico." Right? So I think in each of… Each case is a little bit different is one of the things that also is really useful. Not only look to who you're partnering with and what are they bringing to the table. Know what you bring to the table. It's always a little bit of a tap dance, always a little bit of give-and-take.
[Dan] Yeah. The first collaboration I did with Brandon was for a book called Apocalypse Guard, which is not published and might not ever be published. We back burnered that one. But that is a book he wrote for Delacorte and wasn't working. He basically handed it over to me and said, "Is there any way you can fix this?" Which meant that I came into it kind of more with that mindset of, well, what are my strengths here? I had the benefit of looking at an existing thing and realizing, okay, what do I… I know Brandon is better at endings than I am, he is better at worldbuilding than I am. What am I going to bring to this? Character and voice and humor. That really helped us crystallize, this is what I… My specialty, this is what your specialty, we're going to put these together and create something neither of us could have done on our own.
[Erin] This is making me think of one really specific type of collaboration, which is that I also do some cultural consulting, where I come onto projects and collaborate with them to make sure that there thinking about the world beyond the one that they just know from their own cultural background, is the way I'll put it. So, just bringing my own experience to the table. Those tend to work better when it really is a collaboration, versus, like, a we wrote this, please fix it so we don't get canceled, which is a thing that sometimes happens. But when it's truly collaborative, it's really interesting because what happens is you're bringing your understanding and, like, I'm bringing my worldview and saying, like, "how is this worldview a little different than the worldview that you would bring?" Even though you're in sort of more control of this property and what's happening with it, I'm trying to bring something different to the table that I want you to listen to, because it's going to reach a whole new group of people and also, just, I think, be a broader and more interesting story. I would say that one thing that I've really gotten out of doing this is, even in other collaborative projects, I will put my foot down if I feel that the collaboration is going towards something that I think is harmful, or just like a story that I don't think needs to be told in that particular way, because it's not… It's putting things out in the world that I don't agree with and I don't want sort of my name associated with. That can be a really delicate process, which is why I'm bringing it up right here at the end of the episode. But I think it can be very delicate to figure out when can you take power in a collaboration, and when is it important to say, "This is my Hill to die on. I do not want us to tell this type of story." And when do you have to let things go, and really understanding the difference between something you may not like aesthetically or a choice you may not have made as a storyteller, and something that you think is a deeply personal and, like, thing that you don't think should be out in the world in the form that it is in the particular collaboration.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I've seen… We mostly talked about when things go well. I've also seen collaborations not go well, and those projects not make it to publication, which I think, in each of those cases, was for the best. Right? I think that's also something to keep in mind, is that there are failure states of this that are different from the failure states of writing your own solo project. Sometimes it's knowing what's important to you, knowing where your line is and saying I'm not going past this line and holding that ground, which can be very difficult to do, but it's important to have clarity about why you're doing this and what you're bringing to the table.
 
[Dan] Okay. It is time for some homework. What we would like you to do today as an exercise… This is not going to produce salable fiction, because you are taking words from somebody else. Grab something on your TBR pile, a book that you are intending to read and haven't gotten to yet. Open it up, find a random paragraph, and use that paragraph is the opening of a short story.
 
[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we learn what all the one star reviews for I Am Not a Serial Killer have in common, and we talk about the two halves of a reader's brain. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.7: To Series, or Not to Series

Feb. 17th, 2021 10:27 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 16.7: To Series, or Not to Series
 
 
Key Points: One-offs, when an editor rejects book one, you can send them a different one. But a series can become a blitz. Make your choice deliberately. In short fiction, you may want to put the stories about a world in different publications to get a larger audience interested. You may also want to think about themed collections instead of eclectic collections. Reflections from Schlock Mercenary: Point 2, don't assume people are going to read the whole series, write each book as if it will be their entry point. And make sure there is an ending you can live with. Think about whether you want to be a series person, or a one-off person. You might use the model where there is a common universe, with different stories and some continuing characters. When you are considering a series, trilogy, or whatever, think about what else you want to do with that universe or world, and whether or not that means you need to keep the status quo or not. Consider artistic versus business decisions. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 7]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, To Series, or Not to Series.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm 20 books into a series I'm done with.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Yay, Howard.
[Dan] [garbled] Howard. Thank you for flexing on us.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about series. This is part of the ongoing business class that Brandon is running. So, we're talking about the business side of series. Brandon, what are those business considerations when you're thinking about whether something should be a standalone or a series?
[Brandon] So, there's a lot that plays into this. It is one of the early decisions are going to have to make, particularly if you're a novelist, but even in short fiction. Because… Let me share a story. I might have shared it before on the podcast. But when I was breaking in, one of the things that I learned early on, or I thought I learned, was that I shouldn't ever write a second book in a series. This is because I was submitting books, traditional publishing back in the day, and if an editor rejected the first book of a series, I couldn't very well send them the second book of the series. But I could send them a new book from a different series. What I was looking for and starting to get were these kind of nice rejections, where they're like, "You know, this isn't for me, but I kind of like some things about it. What else do you have?" I could send that person book 1 of something else. So I got very good at writing a different book with every… A different series with every book I was writing. Well, in the meantime, Naomi Novik was writing the Temeraire novels. We were breaking in right around the same time. She wrote four… Three or four books in this series unpublished and put all her eggs in this basket. The advice you should write something new with every book would have been bad advice for her because when she sold that book and the editor said, "What else do you have?" She was able to say, "Actually, I've got two more done and an outline for several more." That actually made the publisher go all in on Naomi's books. I remember the publishing blitz that they did when they released her books. It was amazing. I'd never seen anything like it before for a new author. Three books came out, one a month, in three different months. Everyone was like, "What? A new author? One book a month? This is insane." It was presaging what became one of the best ways to break in during the Indy era, which is to save up a few books and then blitz. So that your releasing very quickly, so that people can suddenly been. Naomi Novik went from nobody to one of the biggest established names in fantasy in the process of three months, because publishers just went all in on those books. So it isn't as easy a choice or a decision as I had assumed it was. There was a branching path here. The more I've published in the more I become part of the business, the more I realize that there are lots of different decisions you can make here, none of which are bad, but I do think you should be thinking about and maybe making deliberately.
[Dan] I… If I remember correctly, Naomi crushed you in the Campbell award the first year, right?
[Brandon] Yeah. Absolutely crushed me.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And deservedly so, right? Like, there was no… I would not have voted for me with her, because her books were great and there were three, and you knew she was going to be a major force in the industry. Who knew about me with my one wacky little book?
[Dan] Yeah. So, I love this question. One of the things that Erin brought up as we were preparing for this episode is that she thought at first maybe she wouldn't have much to contribute, and then she thought, well, actually I do have several stories that maybe could turn into series. Erin, what are the questions you ask yourself as you are looking at your own work and trying to decide should I continue this or try to turn it into a series?
[Erin] I think that, to be honest, it's not a completely business first decision in my case. A lot of it is about exploring the worlds that I'm really passionate about, and, because I tend toward short fiction, just as a natural tendency, there's not… There's only so much you can encompass. So you come up with all this world, and then, you're like, here is one moment in the world. Maybe I should have another moment? And a third moment! Where I do think about things, and this is more on the business side, is, okay, now I have a second thing. Do I go back to the person who published the first story in that world? Do I want to try to get a new audience interested in this world by putting it somewhere else? To try to bring in new people who might then go back and find my first thing? Unlike with novels, where you're probably going to find it at the bookstore no matter who is publishing it, stories depend a lot on who the publisher is. So one of the cool things in the short fiction world is you can try to plan out a little bit and say, like, "Okay. This particular version of this story has a more science fiction-y angle, so maybe that's a Clarkesworld. This one maybe is more of an F&SF." And get more people interested in the work that you're writing, which, part of a series is really trying to capture people's attention for the long-term.
[Brandon] I would think, though I could be wrong here, that a consideration here is also the inevitable collection that you're going to put together. Because if you have books on a… Or stories on a theme, a collection is going to work, I've found, somewhat better if you can release a themed collection rather than just a… This goes into branding. Your name should be the brand that's going to sell this collection, but I've released one collection of short fiction. It was all fantasy stories set in the same universe. Because of that, it did better than expected. Because the fans of that culture… I call it the Cosmere, that universe, were able to pick up an entire book knowing what was in there and it wasn't going to be just completely eclectic. However, there are times when I have bought a book, wanting it to be eclectic, because I want to have a different experience with every story. In that case, I go look for one that is just collections of an author's stories through a time., Knowing I'm going to get something with a lot of just diversity in story type. So I do think that this is a business consideration. It doesn't have to be the driving force behind what you write, but it certainly behind the scenes as you build your collection of stories, deciding how you're going to market them.
[Howard] I'm… Go ahead, Dan.
 
[Dan] I'm going to pause for the book of the week is what I'm going to do. Then I'm going to let Howard say the brilliant thing he was about to say. So, my very favorite book series, I have talked about this multiple times on the podcast before, is The Saxon Chronicles from Bernard Cornwell. I'm delighted to report that a few months ago, the 13th and final book in that series has come out. This is a series of historical fiction that charts kind of the creation of England as a united kingdom that covers the entire island, and how King Alfred the Great and his children and grandchildren kind of formed all the disparate little kingdoms into one single nation. It's wonderful. Bernard Cornwell is a fantastic storyteller and a great writer. This has been years coming. So it was just an absolute pleasure for me to have this final book to cap off my very favorite series. So if you never read it before, the very first one in the series is called The Last Kingdom. It's got a BBC series as well. But the one that just came out, the final book, is called The Warlord.
 
[Dan] Now, Howard, what were you going to tell us?
[Howard] Oh, I feel really bad because Dan said, "And then we'll go to the smart thing Howard was going to say."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The thing Howard was going to say is I could spend an entire 45 minute Writing Excuses super episode talking about the decision process for how to create each new book of Schlock Mercenary. I'm going to try and distill that into a couple of key points. Point number one, the first book is terrible. The art is bad, it's full of dad jokes, and I had no idea how my intrinsic biases were negatively affecting the stories that I was trying to tell. I had no clue. So fairly… I say, fairly early on… About a decade ago, I stopped telling people, "Oh, you should start at the beginning." I said, "You know what, go ahead and start at book 3." The decision… That decision meant that every time I wrote a book, I checked all of my assumptions, if you will, at the door, and asked myself, "Who are the characters that I'm going to be using in this book? How can I introduce them anew to the reader, assuming that this becomes the book that a reader picks up first?" Because I will never make a living at this if everybody has to buy my first book before they get to number 13. The third piece, the third decision piece, was the realization that the larger this series gets, the less people want… The less willing people are to commit to consume it. Because it's huge. It's 20 years of daily, every day daily comic installments. It's ginormous. Yes, it's 20 years of my life, and so it's allowed to be big. But that's a lot to ask anybody to bite off. So, we decided about five years ago it had to come to the end, and whatever end that was, it needed to be an ending where whatever I do next, even if it's in the same universe, whatever I do next needs to be something that people can pick up with zero knowledge of the existing Schlock Mercenary universe. As I said, I could talk for hours about the individual decision points. But those three pieces, the first book was not fantastic, each book needed to be its own starting point, and it has to end satisfactorily and completely without destroying the universe because I still want to write Schlock Mercenary things, I just don't need you to know what Schlock Mercenary is before you pick them up.
[Erin] I would say, this is a little bit of a side note from that brilliance, but thinking back to what Brandon was saying about sort of short fiction and collections, eclectic collections versus sort of getting everything in one world, I think that's true of novels as well. I think, getting back to what we were talking about in our last episode about branding, I think you can also kind of brand yourself as like a series person, like, when you sit down to read so-and-so, like, you're going to get a lot, you're going to get like a 20 year, you're going to get a deep dive. Or, there are other authors who are like, "Everything I do is a one-off." Every time you're going to get the same style but a completely different type of world and a completely different type of narrative experience. I think that's something to think about, what you want for yourself for your career, do you want to be a series person, a one-off person, as opposed to kind of just letting it happen.
[Brandon] I think that this… This can… They both have advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest boosts to my career is the fact that I set all of my fantasy novels in the same universe. This was during a time where that was not necessarily… I mean, people have done this all through the history of storytelling. But it was not a selling point, for the most part, through most people's careers. King… Steven King did it and different authors have done it. I happened to be doing this the same time that the MCU launched. Right? My first book came out in 2005, the MCU launched in 2007, I believe it was, and suddenly, the MCU was getting big, when I had basically the same sort of model in my epic fantasy, where I had a bunch of different stories that were all connected with some continuing characters moving between planets and worlds. What this did is it gave me the same sort of boost that the MCU got where the series that may be a little lesser-known or people are a little less likely to try out or things like that got the boost of everyone knowing, "Oh, but it's connected to the whole thing. If I like this other thing, some of the things I love are going to be in this lesser-known story." What it does is it really makes it a lot easier for me to launch a new book series by saying, "This is a Cosmere." It's going to focus on this and it's tied into this whole big thing that I'm doing. The core fan base starts… I've got like three levels of branding. There's branding on the series, there's branding on the name, and there's the branding on half of my work is this larger universe. It's been an enormous help in marketing.
 
[Dan] I want to take a slightly different direction for our final few words here. One of the choices that I make, one of the things I look at when I'm deciding if something needs to be a series or not, is deciding what else I'm going to do with that universe, with that world, and if that means I need to keep its status quo. What I mean by that is, for example, Mistborn is a great example of this. The story you were telling with that trilogy is the story of changing the world irrevocably. More so than a lot of dystopias. Dystopia does this, but Mistborn in particular. What that means is after you finished that trilogy, if you had wanted to… Well, and you did, want to continue dealing with that world, you couldn't use those same characters and you couldn't use that same kind of style and world and culture that you had established and the people fell in love with. You found other ways to do that with the follow-up series. But, for example, with the role-playing game tie-in, with the board game tie-in, those necessarily are not continuations of the story, they are kind of infixes to the story you already told.
[Brandon] So this is a good… We haven't talked a lot in this series about when you make artistic decisions versus business decisions. I've often said, Erin said in a previous episode something like this, that I think while you're writing the stories, artistic concerns should be primary. We're not talking about those in this series, but it should be in the back of your brain that it's all right to make bad business decisions for artistic reasons. Because we are storytellers who want to tell a specific story. When I came in with the pitch for the original Mistborn series which ended with an irrevocable change to the status quo, the publisher told me this was a bad idea and recommended I not do it. I did it anyway. They thought this was a terrible idea. This was Tom Doherty, this wasn't my editor. This is the head of the company, who said, "This is probably disastrous for your career. You should not do this. Because if this series takes off, you are limited to three books. You're going to have to completely rebrand the series for the next books in the series, and they are just not going to sell as well. They never do." I made artistic decisions that I wanted to do this. Then I leaned into them business-wise. I said, "One of the selling points of the Mistborn trilogy is that it is a complete trilogy, that you know you have an ending." I think artwork is stronger when there's an ending to it. I then tried to do the best with the business that I could, and I think it has certain advantages by having different eras of the series. But I made that as an artistic choice, not a business choice. Then I made the business adapt to it, rather than the other way around.
[Dan] That's, I think, a very smart way of handling that. Lots of different series… You look at my own, the Partials series, that is about the end of a status quo. Where is the Mirador series, I could write Mirador novels for the rest of time, because the status quo never changes. Extreme Makeover, which I think is my best book, will never have a sequel, because…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I made that choice early on that that's how the world is going to end.
 
[Dan] Anyway. We have come to the end of our episode. We have a bit of homework that were going to get from Howard.
[Howard] Right. This is leaning a little into the art side of it. Hopefully, you, fair listener, have a favorite series. Something that you've read or watched or otherwise consumed that you are familiar with. Here is your homework. For each installment of that series, whether it's a book or an episode of TV or a movie, write down what questions were asked and what questions were answered. Do this so that over the course of the whole series you can see the question-and-answer dialogue that takes place between the creator and the consumer. You're doing this so that when you have to ask yourself, "Oh, no, am I holding back too many of my best ideas for later in the series?" you have an answer. Because some of those question-and-answer moments in the series that you love, some of those may be your favorite things and they didn't show up until six books in. So, there's your homework. Question-and-answer, documented over the course of a series that you love.
[Dan] Fantastic. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career

Nov. 4th, 2020 11:37 am
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career
 
 
Key Points: You might be orphaned by editors. Or maybe your books stop selling, the series doesn't click? You have to stick with it, keep going. Dedication, hard work, keep pivoting. Look at your brand right now, and think about how to build on that to do the thing you want to next. Diversify! Multiple pen names, projects, brands. Your skill set can carry across a pivot or reboot. You can use short fiction to explore where your strengths are quickly. "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place." If you quit your day job and write full time, you are a freelancer. Diversify your income stream. Plan ahead. Learn how to track where your money is coming from. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 44.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Rebooting a Career.
[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm looking for something now.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Well, we have got something new for you. We teased this episode all the way back in our very first episode of the year. Which, for us, we recorded 10 minutes ago, but you…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Had to wait 11 months for it. Thank you for your patience. So, this is something, again, that came up in an audience question. I love this topic, because it has happened to me. I'm actually in the middle of it right now. I sincerely hope by the time this airs that everything's stable and wonderful. But I have been orphaned twice by editors.
[Mary Robinette] Let's define what orphaned means, in this context.
[Dan] Orphaned… Okay. In this context, what it means is the editor who acquired my book initially at a given publishing house, I am no longer with that editor. I was moved to a different one. Then that one actually left the publishing house altogether. A year later, I am currently, as of this recording, do not have an editor at that publisher. Which is sad because now the books are not being shepherded, and my own career is a little bit in flux. So this is something that I've dealt with personally, but I'm not going to answer the question, I'm going to ask the question of Dongwon. What does an author do when they've had some success, they've had some books come out, and then they either get orphaned, or their books stop selling, the new series they have come out just doesn't take off or it tanks completely? They need to change something. How do you know when you hit that point, and how do you know what changes to make? Now talk for 15 minutes.
[Dongwon] I really… I could talk for an hour here. I really love this topic, because it's a really, really important one. I think the greatest determinant in whether or not a writer is successful in their career is their ability to ride with the tough times. Right? That's sort of stick-with-it-ness, that's sort of like ability to just keep going in the face of a lot of setbacks, is the thing that I see more often than not how people get to where they want to be. Right? I've been in publishing now for 15 years, and over that time, I've seen people over and over again who I looked at them, I looked at their sales numbers, I looked at where they're at in sort of the market, and I was like, "Ah. They're such a nice person, it's too bad their career's over." Then 10 years later, they're New York Times bestsellers. Right? I can think of half a dozen people off the top of my head of been in similar situations. Right? So many people we talk about as overnight successes really spent years and years writing books until something hit it. George Martin's a famous example. But I think the guest host for this year, Victoria Schwab's another great example of somebody who was writing for a long time before she really blew up in the way she has. It takes dedication and hard work, and the ability to keep pivoting and keep working with it. It's one of my favorite things is to take a writer who is in a position where… Not necessarily a bad position, but one where you could be doing more, and help them figure out, "Okay, what's next, how do we reposition this to grow from here?" So, I think there's a lot of different strategies. I think the thing that's really important is considering what's your brand right now, and how do you build on that for the thing that you want to do next. Right? So I think Daniel Abraham is a really great example to look at. He had a series with Tor, that was The Long Price Quartet, which was an absolute brilliant fantasy series. Sales were probably not where everyone wanted them to be, because it's a very worthy series, but not necessarily like the most commercial, like, it's not a lot of like big action romps there, right? The thing about Daniel is he had multiple brands going at once. He was also writing as M. L. N. Hanover, an urban fantasy series. Then, when urban fantasy started falling off a little bit, he was looking to pivot again. So at that point, he came to me, when I was an editor at Orbit, and pitched two different projects at once. The Dragon's Path, which is an epic fantasy sort of following in the vein of what he was doing at Tor. But then he also was like, "Hey, we also have this co-written science fiction project with this guy Ty Franck." That was what is now The Expanse. Again, that was under yet another pen name. Right? So the thing that Daniel kept doing is he kept writing new things and different things. He was doing it under different names with different brands. Until one of them just really clicked in and took off. I mean, The Expanse is really one of the big successes in science fiction over the past 10 years. Has the big TV show and all these things. Again, that's somebody who didn't have the kind of commercial success and attention that I think he deserved early in his career. But, just kept going and just kept pivoting and kept trying new things until finally something really clicked in, in the way that it did, with The Expanse.
 
[Howard] In 1998, I was working in tech support at Novell. I looked at some of the things I'd been doing and realized that within the company, within the industry, my brand was talking to people about the way the software works. Kind of being an advocate for the product and being educational about it and being entertaining. I wanted a position in the company where I could keep doing that. I got one. I like the sound of my own voice, and did a lot of presentations and a lot of traveling as a result of those presentations. Until I left the company in 2004. In 2008, I started doing Writing Excuses. Writing excuses has now been running for longer than my entire career at Novell.
[Dan] Wow.
[Howard] Okay. I was just doing the math as I was looking at the spreadsheet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Sorry, this totally came out of left field. The idea that the career that nobody… I say nobody. I don't think many people are going to look at me and think, "Oh, yeah. That guy who was a software communications person back in the 90s and just vanished. Wow. Such a shame his software support career tanked."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] No. They're going to remember me for whatever's most recent. There was a huge pivot in there, from doing software to doing comics. But the skill set of I know how to stand up in front of people and advocate a thing and be educational about it and occasionally be funny, and leverage the comic drop of self-deprecating humor from time to time, that piece of my brand, that piece of my skill set has stayed with me and continues to serve me well. As we are having this conversation, it is September 2019. This is airing in November of 2020. Schlock Mercenary, the mega-arc, ended about five months ago, if everything went according to plan. From where I'm sitting right now, I do not know what my career reboot looks like from 2020. I'm coming up on that, and I'm terrified. But I know that the guy who is terrified is also the guy who has rebooted his career before and made good on it.
[Dongwon] There's always more opportunities, any time you find yourself in that spot.
 
[Dan] Okay. So. Our book of the week is one you've already talked about, Dongwon. This is Leviathan Wakes, the first one from The Expanse. What can you tell us about that book?
[Dongwon] Leviathan Wakes is a really wonderful space opera, that is examining, not necessarily galactic exploration, but the exploration and colonization of our own solar system. So the whole set up is, they don't have interstellar travel yet, but they can travel between the planets somewhat easily. So, the political situation is there's the Earth and then there is Mars, and they're in conflict and in tension over resources. Those resources are specifically being the asteroid belt, which is being mined by both of those great powers. Into the middle of this, a new artifact, biological weapon, has been discovered which kind of sets the whole system to the brink of war. This is a nine book series that is on the cusp of wrapping up right now. It's really, to my mind… And I am biased because I was the editor on the first couple books…
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] But, to my mind, it's really one of the most exciting, wonderful, rich character work in a space opera series that I've really ever seen. I could not love this more. The show was also great, but read the books first…
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Because they're even better.
[Dan] We did have Daniel and Ty on the show at some point a year or two ago. So if you want to hear them talk about it, you can find that in our archives.
[Mary Robinette] We'll include that in our liner notes.
[Dan] Yes, we totally will.
 
[Dan] Okay. So, I like what Dongwon was saying about trying new things while still staying true to what you've already been successful with. This is something that I have done. So, just very quickly, I hit the New York Times bestseller list with the Partials series, which is science fiction. Then, my next science fiction series, Mirador, really tanked. Like, I cannot overstate how little it sold.
[Mary Robinette] Which is a shame, because I love that series.
[Dan] Well, thank you. So do I. It did not click with the audience in the way everyone expected it to. It didn't click for the publisher the way we had hoped it would, to the point that they didn't even bother doing the third book in audio. I had to buy the rights back from them. So, as I set out what am I going to do next, I said, "Well, I'm going to continue with science fiction, but I'm going to twist it in a new direction." So I started doing middle grade science fiction. That's where Zero G and Dragon Planet and things like that came from. At the same time, because a far bigger success for me has been my thrillers, like I Am Not a Serial Killer, I didn't want to neglect that audience either. So I'm trying… This is a much more risky experiment. But I wrote a new… I started a new thriller career, essentially, by doing historical thrillers. That's where Ghost Station came from. So I'm trying these two different paths at the same time and just waiting to see, like you were saying, which one clicks in which one takes off. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of faith, and you just kind of gotta hope that… And maybe neither of those does, and I'll… I don't know, come crawling to you at some point and say, "Dongwon, help me figure out what to do?"
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is that… I also got the whole orphaned thing, right after Ghost Talkers. When I was working on Calculating Stars, my editor left, and I got transferred to another editor, who's been wonderful, but it was… The process of learning to work with her. But the reason that we decided to switch me from doing fantasy to doing science fiction was that we looked at what I had been doing in short fiction, and I write all over the map in short fiction. My science fiction that's short fiction kind of consistently gets noticed for awards. The general thing was maybe you should be writing to your strengths, which appear to be science fiction.
[Howard] Kind of consistently, that was… Oops, two Hugos?
[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, anyway…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] So, friends, we have to brag about Mary Robinette, because she's too modest to do it herself.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I only have four Hugos. One of them I got with you guys, so it really doesn't count.
[Dan] Barely anything.
[Howard] Thanks.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That's actually the only one I've got.
[Dongwon] The one that doesn't count.
[Mary Robinette] No. I'm kidding. I am… I… Obviously kidding, or I would not…
[Dongwon] Of course.
[Mary Robinette] Have made that joke. But my point being that when people wonder when they're novelists, natural novelists, and they wonder why to do short fiction, one of the things that it does allow is a faster, easier way to see which of your stories are hitting with audience. Like, just, if you are getting more acceptances from your science fiction, that's a thing that's worth noting. So I didn't actually have to go through as many iterations as Dan did to figure out, oh, maybe I should be writing some science fiction novels. And, Calculating Stars have done significantly better than my fantasy.
[Dan] Or, phrased another way, you did do arguably more iterations than I did, but they were in short fiction, so you were able to do them more quickly and see results more easily.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. That is arguably accurate.
[Laughter]
 
[Dongwon] The thing that I just want to point out is, following again on what Dan was saying, is the key to so much of this is diversification, right? Not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Sometimes that is a genre thing, sometimes it's a category thing in terms of adult or YA, and sometimes… That's even an industry thing, like writing for games and writing for comics and writing for film and TV if you can get that work. But often times it's also just not writing for one publisher, right? Having multiple publishers in place, so if you get orphaned at one, even if that's the thing that goes very badly, which it sometimes does, you still have other things in your pocket that you can turn to and emphasize. If that's not working there. Then, sometimes it takes a couple of years to cycle out, and then you can pick up with a new contract or with a different publisher or with a different editor at that publisher. But having lots of different things moving out once is often the way to sort of stabilize your career overall.
[Howard] In 2006, at Emerald City Comic Con, Robert Khoo, K-H-O-O, talked about the business of web comics. This is the guy who went to the penny arcade guys before they were big and said, "You're leaving a whole bunch of money on the table." They said, "We don't know what money is." He said, "I tell you what. I will work for you for free on the understanding that if at the end of the year, I haven't earned for you a marketing guy's salary of $80,000 a year, which you can very comfortably pay me, then I will quit and you don't owe me anything." They were like, "This sounds too good to be true, but it's probably not a trap. So, join us." Robert Khoo totally reinvented them. Out of his work grew the penny arcade Expo, which was the thing that replaced E3 as the big consumer thing of displaying… It was huge. Robert Khoo… So I've established his bona fides. He said, "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place."
[Mary Robinette] This is a…
[Howard] That stuck with me. I'm not very good at it yet. But we go over our books, Sandra and I go over our books every year and ask ourselves, "What is the thing that will hurt the most if we lose it? How do we build something that will cushion that, in case it goes away?"
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is absolutely a thing that they teach you in puppet theater, as well. I mean, just in general as a freelancer, this is a really important thing to understand. If you quit your day job and decide to be a writer full-time, you are a freelancer. Your publisher is your only client, unless you're at multiple publishing houses, unless you're doing hybrid stuff which, in this day and age, is a sensible thing. It's a good thing that you can do if you get your backlist back is bring it out yourself. So, remembering that you are a freelancer and trying to diversify. Like, I diversify my income stream also by teaching. That's one of the ways that I diversify. It doesn't have to be writing. The other thing that I kind of wanted to say about what happens when this moment… Like, I was orphaned by an editor, and that handoff was actually very, very smooth. But it was also because the previous two books had done so poorly, and not through fault of my own. I think. Obviously, other people have different opinions. But I had… The first of those last two books had been Of Noble Family, which was the last book in a five book series. We… There is a thing that happens in a series, where you have a slow decline in numbers. Then, the next book, Ghost Talkers, which is actually one of my favorite things that I've written, came out, and they sent me on tour. My first day of tour was election day of 2016. Everybody's sales tanked. Actually. But mine… Just like, there was… When I was on tour, the audiences were half the size that they normally were. Everyone looked shellshocked. It didn't matter, actually, which side of the political spectrum you were on, that period of time was really fraught. So, yes, obviously, my numbers were lower. But what that meant was, when we were doing… With my new editor, who was working with me on the two new books, when she was looking at acquiring another book after that, there was no incentive to do it until Calculating Stars and Fated Sky came out and did very well. At that point, I realized that my agent was part of my problem because my agent was not advocating for me and was not explaining… Like, the narrative of what was going on. So sometimes when you're midcareer and things are not going well, if you're starting to think, "Well, I wonder if I should go with a new agent?" The advice that I got from a very good friend who is sitting on the couch with me…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Was that when you begin asking yourself that question, you should probably change agents.
[Dan] I had my book, Extreme Makeover, came out the same day. Mary Robinette and I did a signing together…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] In Chicago. Actually, the two of us and Wes Chu. So there were three authors, and I think maybe five people there…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] If you count the bookseller. I actually, like, I love Calculating Stars, but I still consider Ghost Talkers my favorite of your books. I think Extreme Makeover is the best written thing I've ever done. No one's ever heard of either of those books. Because they got completely lost. Anyway, I assume that there are a few people who are listening to this episode who are in this situation who need to reboot their career. But I… And I hope that they do. But I suspect that most of our listeners are still looking at this from the upcoming side. Right? That's why I really want to tell you what I did not know is that you need to be planning for this already. You need to have all these income streams in place before one of them fails. Which is the lesson that I have very painfully learned. And five years later have managed to build myself back up to the point where I more or less okay.
[Howard] Or back even further up from that, we've said… I quoted Robert Khoo. 40%. Don't let any more than 40% come from any one place. Do you know how to do the math to know where your money is coming from? If you don't know how to do that yet, learn to do that. Because if you can get ahead of that, for you start receiving royalties, before you start getting advances, then you are in a position to career plan and to build your bugout bag for…
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to do a plug for something called you need a budget dot com. Which, if you are like me, and not terribly good with numbers, is a very useful way as a freelancer… It's a bud… It's a financial planning kind of tracking thing. But it's very, very useful to get a handle on exactly how much you need to make, and to figure out how to have enough of a nest egg so that if you have a. Where you have to reboot, that you have some money set aside.
[Dan] Which is a great resource. Go for it.
[Dongwon] One thing I just want to point out is as were talking about 40% of your income coming from different places and all that, remember, your day job can be one of your sources of income. Right? So the people, the clients that I work with who have widely diversified careers in terms of doing adult, middle grade, and graphic novels, and tie-in work and film and TV, those generally are the full-time writers. Right? Those are the ones who are only writing as their day-to-day job. If people… If you have a day job, it's much more feasible to focus on one thing at a time and really focus on just having your one main series because you have the financial security of that day job. Which is why my general advice is hang onto that job as long as you can stand it. Or until your… The authoring that you have to do in terms of emails and touring and things like that make having it no longer feasible to do so, right? But then you need to be planning and preparing for that transition by starting that diversification work as early as you can.
[Dan] Absolutely. Now, we are out of time. Though obviously we could talk about this for a long time.
 
[Dan] But we do have some homework for you, which is coming from Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will happen to you when this happens, or in the early part of your career, is that the imposter syndrome is going to kick up. It's like you feel… You can feel a sense of despair, you can feel like blah. So here's a weird bit of advice, which is that I want you to write a letter to a role model. This role model does not have to be a living person. Explain to them all of the things that you're afraid of, and all of the problems that you're struggling with. Then, I want you to write a letter from them back to you with the advice that you think that they might give you. The reason I'm suggesting this is that a lot of times you, in fact, know the answer to the problem. But we are often kinder to someone else then we are to ourselves. So, by putting yourself in the shoes of someone else who has been through this, I think that it might be a way for you to access the part of your brain that knows how to handle this. You do. It's just terrifying.
[Dan] Sounds awesome. So. That's been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.32: Short Story Markets

Aug. 12th, 2020 03:12 pm
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Writing Excuses 15.32: Short Story Markets
 
 
Key Points: Do you need to be prolific to make it in the short story markets? No. How do you find short story markets? Look for the lists, such as The Submission Grinder, or collections of award-winning short fiction, and see where they were published. Pay attention to what you like. Look at the audience size, the pay rates, and is it shiny for you? Do you need to be famous as a short story writer to break in as an author? No. Be your own kind of writer. How do you stand out from the crowd? Write the story that grabs you. Learn to write a competent story. Then learn to trust yourself. 
 
[Transcriptionist note: I may have confused Erin and Lari at some points in the transcript. My apologies for any mislabeling.]
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 32.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Short Story Markets, with Erin Roberts.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.
[Erin] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Lari] I'm Lari.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] Thank you. We are very excited to have Aaron Roberts with us for this episode. Erin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[Erin] Sure. I am a writer, primarily of short stories. I've had short fiction published in Asimov's, and in Clarkesworld, The Dark, and PodCastle. I also was, which is great for this particular episode, a slush reader for EscapePod for about two years.
[Dan] That is fantastic. Thank you for joining us.
 
[Dan] This is, as most of our episodes are this year, a topic that was requested by listeners. So we've got several questions, and most of these rather than about fiction writing are about fiction selling and fiction markets. So I'm just going to start. The first one here, the question is, with so many short fiction markets, does a good short story author need prolific-isy to gain notice and readership?
[Erin] No.
[Dan] Maybe the first question is what are… He says with so many short fiction markets. The short fiction market is so different today than it was when I was breaking in like 15 years ago. What are the short story markets? What are… I mean, without an exhaustive list, obviously. Where are the places people can look today to sell short fiction?
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about this is that… I'd like to try to give this advice in a way that's as evergreen as possible. So… Because markets are constantly appearing and disappearing. That's been true through the entirety of publishing. So, what you're looking for are markets that you kind of want to be in. The best places to find those are places that collect lists. So you can go to some place like The Submission Grinder or Duotrope or Ralan's, or you can go to an anthology of books… Of fiction that is award-winning and look to see where those pieces were published. These are all places that you can find markets, but the process of figuring out which market you want to be in… Like, giving you a list of "Ah, this market is…" Like, we can do that, but it's not…
[Dan] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] The chances of it being outdated a month after we record this is pretty strong.
[Erin] I also think that a lot of it's about you. The kind of stories that you like. The markets are different, they all have different styles, they all have different sort of editorial focuses. So, I would always say, read a lot of current short fiction, and see, are you gravitating to a certain market? Are you like, "Ah, the stories in X are the stories that I would love to be alongside." Because one of the best things about being published in a short fiction magazine is saying, like, "Well, my story's great," but also, "Oh, my gosh, these other stories, I'm so excited to be a part of this."
 
[Dan] So, back to the question, then. In order to really get out there, to gain a readership, to gain notice as a short fiction writer, do you need to be prolific? Do you need to be constantly publishing in tons of different markets?
[Mary Robinette] I don't think that you do. I mean, when you look at someone like Ted Chang, he does not constantly publish. Like, it is a thing you can do. But the question I would ask is why do you want to be noticed? Like, what are you trying to gain from that? So, here is my advice when you're thinking about like, what market to go into, and this is taking on to what Erin says about like what is important to you. That there are, I think, three things that help you decide what market to look at. One is the size of the audience the next is the pay rate. The third is the shininess. So, audience is literally how many people are going to see this thing. Pay rate is exactly what it sounds like, are you being paid adequately for your effort? Then, the shininess is how much do you want to be in this particular market? Like, there's… I grew up reading The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So, getting into that magazine was… That was shiny for me. Even though they didn't have the best pay rate when I got in. Shimmer Magazine is beautiful, and I wanted to be in Shimmer, even though the market size is very small. So, that varies. But at other points in my career, where… Like, there was a point when we were in New York and I was supporting my husband and myself on our… On my theater and writing income, which is exactly as large as you'd imagine that to be. So, at that point, pay rate was the most important thing. So, like the number of markets that you go into, the only thing that that affects is… The two pieces of that that you are affecting there are the number of eyes that are seeing your words, and how much money you're getting paid. So, for a career, it's like which piece of that are you trying to manipulate?
[Erin] I'll also say that both as an editor and an agent, I was very scared of the word prolific. I didn't know prolific-isy was a word, but I'd be… I'm even more scared of that one. It's possible to be prolific and be really good, but I think when there's… The stress is on the quantity, it always makes me fear for the quality. So if someone's trying to just write and write and write, it immediately makes me suspicious that there isn't that much attention to editing and just letting the material rest so you can take a new look at it. So, I would say, for me, it's always best to just pay attention to what you're putting out there, first and foremost.
 
[Dan] So, I suspect part of the thought process behind this question is someone who wants to break into the market, someone who wants to gain notoriety, either because they want to move on to getting a big publishing contract or something like that. So, Lari, you as an editor may be the one to answer this. To what extent does that matter? Does somebody need to become famous quote unquote as a short story writer in order to break in as an author?
[Lari] Absolutely not. I also think editors use a little bit too much the idea of falling in love. I think we kind of lean on it a little bit too much. But it is true that a lot of the publishing process involves a couple people just falling in love with your writing. So an agent falling in love with your writing, and an editor falling in love with your writing. Often, that doesn't really have anything to do with your previous platform.
[Erin] I just want to build on that to say that I think this question may also be coming from the idea that there is a way to sort of game the system of publishing. Like, if you do this thing correctly and follow this path, it will lead you to glory. So to speak. But I just don't think that's a good way necessarily to go. Because you have to love the writer you are, instead of dream about the writer you wish you were. And figure out, if you're a prolific writer, and that's your style, then go be prolific. But if you're not, don't stress about the fact that I will never succeed, because I am not this other person. Live in your own career and your own writing style and process.
 
[Dan] Excellent advice. I want to break right now for our book of the week, which is, actually, appropriately, the Nebulous Showcase. Mary Robinette, can you tell us about that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, one of the things that we've been talking about is how to find good markets. Looking at a collection of award-winning fiction is a way to figure out which markets people are publishing in that are… That other people are also reading. So the most… We've got the Nebula Award Showcase 2019, which was edited by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. That has a collection of the winners and nominees for the 2019 Nebula awards. So it's got people in there like Rebecca Roanhorse and K. M. Szpara and Sarah Pinsker. It's got just a ton of really good fiction. So, if you're wanting to get a better idea of the sort of landscape, grabbing the most current Nebula Award Showcase at whatever point you're listening to this. It may be that you're listening to this and are grabbing the 2020. But grab that, and enjoy some really… The fiction of people who are at the top of their game right now.
 
[Dan] Excellent. All right. There's another question here that I think is similar to the first one we had, but takes a different approach. What the question says is by submitting to one of the most famous sci-fi/fantasy magazines, I learned that they receive about 40 stories a day, but publish about 12 stories every two months, including those from established authors. I imagine many submissions are good, but how do you stand out from the crowd? So, rather than using short fiction to stand out in some other way, how do you stand out just enough to get published? How do you get noticed? How do you grab the attention of a short story publisher or editor?
[Erin] When I was… I'll say when I was a slusher, we just read stories. A slush reader for a magazine reads all the stories that come through the door, and decides which ones to pass up to the editors. At EscapePod, actually, the process is blind. So we don't know who's sending it, and if it's like my favorite author ever or someone I've never heard of. What I learned from that is just write a story that grabs a reader. A slush reader is just a reader that has been given a particular title in a particular role. They're not any different then you as a reader, except maybe that they do it more. So when you're reading stories, what grabs you? That's the same thing that's going to grab someone at a magazine. So if you write a great story, then it should grab someone's perspective and make them want to read more and publish it.
[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to add on that. That is absolutely true. And also, there is a thing that happens… That I've seen… It happened to me… Happens to a lot of writers. Which is that your publishing… Or submitting, and then you start getting the personalized rejections. Then you make a sale, and you don't know why that story sold and none of the others have sold. Like, what did I do, and you try to replicate it. You can't. Then you go through a dry spell for you don't sell anything. Then suddenly you sell something, and you have no idea why. Here is what I think is happening this is based on having done the slush reading that Erin did, but in a slightly different form. I slushred for Asimov's, but I was… They divided their slush into three piles. The first was complete unknowns. The second, the B pile, was people who had some credits. Then the A list was people who had already sold to Asimov's. All that that was really doing was triaging the sort of process. Some people in the B pile were people who'd been in A… Or been in the C pile and gotten moved in for a slightly closer read. But what it meant was that I was reading stories and all of them were competent. Like, every single story in that pile was competent. The thing that was frustrating was that for a long time, I was like, "Ah yes. I understand why editors so frequently say write a story that rises above. And that they can't describe what this rises above means." But, comparing what is happening with that pile with the authors that I know, and myself who can't… Who are like, "Why did this one work?" Here's what I think is happening. I think what happens is that you learn to write a competent story. Then you learn to trust yourself. That there is a period of time in which you are writing competent stories, and there's nothing structurally wrong with that sucker. But you are so focused on the technique of it, but you aren't actually thinking about all of the things… You aren't interrogating any of the things that you are actually interested in. You're trying to mimic things that other people are doing. So they're a little bit stiff. They're a little bit predictable. But there's nothing wrong with it. Like, no one can point at it and go, "This is wrong here." Then there's a point at which you write a story that is coming very much from your own self. Those are the stories that are unique and stand out. Because they are stories that no one else could write. The stories that don't stand out are the stories that anyone could have written. They're just… There's… Again, there's nothing wrong with them, they're just not doing that extra step of letting your own voice out. In this case, what I mean by voice is your own personal taste out. So I think that one of the things that you can do is… As a writer, is to remember that you have honed your reading experience over your entire reading career, which is much longer than your writing career, and to trust your reader instincts over your writer instinct.
 
[Dan] That sounds like awesome advice. We, unfortunately, are out of time. We've got some homework coming from Lari.
[Lari] Yeah. So, I want you to pick a couple of contemporary published short story writers, and just trace their publication history. So you can see where they've been published, at which points in their career, and hopefully that will help you start sketching a roadmap for your own.
[Dan] Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

Feb. 19th, 2020 11:25 am
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

Aug. 30th, 2017 10:01 am
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Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/27/12-35-short-fiction-markets-with-spencer-ellsworth-and-guest-host-beth-meacham/

Key Points: The short fiction market has grown enormously. Where should you submit? Consider size of the audience, how much you get paid, and how shiny it is to you (attractiveness!). What's most important to you? Express yourself first, don't try to impress the editor or write like someone else. Short fiction teaches you to get the important stuff on the page, and shave off the unimportant stuff. Plus, it's fun! You need to read short fiction to know what's already been done, and then tell a new story. Finally, slap your muse. (aka don't write the easy story, look for a unique new story!)

( The Big 3/4/5/ became 10 or 20? )

[Howard] Who's got our writing prompt?
[Beth] Spencer does.
[Spencer] Okay. So. Since I assume a lot of you came here because you're Brandon Sanderson fans, anyway, and you like long stories, I want you all to think about a long story you really… The type of long story you really enjoy, the type of storytelling you like to see a big book, an epic, an epic of Gilgamesh type thing. Then I want you to sit down and write it in under 4000 words. See if you can communicate the same thing… The kind of thing that you think needs 500 pages, in 4000 words.
[Howard] Outstanding. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write short.

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Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful

Aug. 17th, 2017 02:54 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 12.33: How to be Brief, Yet Powerful

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/13/12-33-how-to-be-brief-yet-powerful/

Key Points: Brevity, it's not just for short stories! How to get an idea across in a brief number of words. Start by honing in on what you want to tell, during the conception phase. Start with your character, what do they want, what are they doing to try to get it, and what obstacles do they have to overcome? Instead of punch-by-punch action scenes, try an emotional buildup, one headbutt, and the effects of that. Make sure that readers know what is at stake. Specifically. The consequences of failure. Look for powerful moments. Use the cold open! Short story titles frame the story, and often are longer. Look for resonant phrases, or borrow from quotes. To evoke a whole world, be specific about one thing. Food is often good for this. Knowing that a reader will probably read a short fiction piece in one sitting, and only read it once, may affect pacing, paragraphing, and emphasis. Many stories are competent, but forgettable. Make your characters specific, give the reader an emotional connection to the story, make it particular. "The more specific you are, the more universal it becomes."
( Emotional buildup, punch, and consequences? )

[Brandon] This has been a really good discussion. I'm actually going to have to call it here. But Mary has some homework for us.
[Mary] Yes. What I want you to do is we're going to start from a concept. This is a thing that I wind up doing… Weirdly, I have typewriters and I will set up at a convention and I will sit down and I will write a short fiction… Piece of short fiction on demand. So what I want you to do is basically this. You're going to pick a character. An object. And a genre. Then you're going to write 250 words. That 250…
[Brandon] Only 250?
[Mary] Only 250 words. One page. That needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which means, just in case you're thinking about this already, that means that it is one try-fail cycle. So one character, one object, one location. Now if you want to bring in another character, that's fine. But be aware that every time you add another character, those are more words that you need to handle that person.
[Brandon] Awesome. That sounds really hard.
[Laughter]
[Mary Anne] Sounds like a good homework exercise for Brandon.
[Brandon] Yes. This has been Writing Excuses. I'm out of excuses, now I'll go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

Aug. 8th, 2017 04:54 pm
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Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/06/12-32-structuring-a-short-piece/

Key Points: Flash fiction and short stories. Short fiction is usually just two MACE elements. Flash fiction is usually a single MACE element, often one problem to solve. Introduce the problem, a couple try-fail cycles, and solution. Often MACE elements get nested, or form frames. Also, changing POV often changes MACE elements, because they are all about affecting the primary character. MACE is often useful for pruning -- focus on what you really want to tell, and remove extra threads. Sometimes flash fiction, short fiction, implies questions or endings for the reader, instead of explicitly describing them. This is good for issue stories (elemental genre).

MACE: Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character, Event.
Milieu: starts when a character enters a place and ends when they exit (often returning home); main conflict is getting out, returning, stopping the main character from getting out of the milieu; journey, quest, man against nature.
Ask/Answer: the character asks a question, ends when they find an answer; main conflict is stopping the character from getting the answer: mystery, puzzle, trying to solve or find an answer. Sometimes getting the answer introduces a bigger question.
Character: internal conflict, starting with dissatisfaction with self, end with new self-definition or acceptance of self; conflicts block the character from finding satisfying self-definition; love, romance, coming-of-age.
Event: external conflict, status quo has been disrupted, ends with new status quo or resolution of some kind; conflicts block character from achieving new status quo.; action, adventures. Often event story introduces character story, as the disrupted status quo causes the character to question their self-definition.
(For more details, see the liner notes!)

( Swing that MACE, hit them in the gut... )

[Brandon] We're out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework to help us practice the MACE quotient?
[Mary] Yes. Now, ironically, this is probably the longest description…
[Laughter]
[Mary] For a homework assignment. What I want you to do is, I want you to take either a new idea or something that you're working on that you'd like to be a short story. I want you to write… Pick one of the MACE elements. Whichever one you want to pick. Whichever one you feel like is your major driver. I want you to describe that in three sentences. So the first sentence is where the story opens. The second sentences what your major conflicts are. What your major conflict is, or the type of conflict. Your third sentence is where that winds up. All three of those things should match. Then, I want you to pick a second MACE element and do the same thing. So you've got two things. Say you've got one that's character and one that is ask/answer. So that's part one and part two of your homework. Part three of your homework is to nest them. So that you start with the ask, then you introduce the character, then you close out your character tag, and then you close out your ask tag, so it's nested. Part four of your homework is to flip it, so that the character is on the outside… It doesn't have to be character, whichever of these you picked. Character is on the outside, ask/answer is on the inside. I have this written out in full detail, you'll be happy to know. It is in the liner notes. So that you don't have to remember all of the things that I've just told you. And all of the description of the MACE elements is also in this.
[Brandon] You get a worksheet this time!
[Mary] You get a worksheet.
[Whoohoo!]
[Mary] This is the benefit of the fact that I teach classes sometimes.
[Brandon] Excellent. That actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys should all totally do that. But for right now… This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.8: Short Stories As Exploration, with Tananarive Due

Feb. 21st, 2017 03:20 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.8: Short Stories As Exploration, with Tananarive Due

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/19/12-8-short-stories-as-exploration-with-tananarive-due/

Key points: Try using short fiction to explore something you want to practice. Point of view, characterization, balancing dialogue and exposition -- quick, no big investment if it fails. Use short fiction to "discover who you are as a writer without getting lost wandering in the woods." Think of short fiction as your sketchbook, a place to experiment and push the limits. Don't worry about writing salable short fiction. Use short fiction to practice technique in isolation. Like doing sprints for a football player. Use monologues to meet your characters, short stories to describe a setting or try out a style. Pick an aspect of craft and focus on that single aspect. Start by reading short stories, anthologies, collections, and see what the possibilities are. Short fiction tends to be tightly focused, with a small cast and fewer plot threads. Use short fiction to get extra ideas out of your system, as a quick refresher. Find the turning point in your novel, and write a short story about it.

( Wind sprints and footballs... )

[Brandon] That's… That's going to be our homework for this episode. I want you to do that. Take a story you've written and find a short story in it. Or the story you're planning and find a short story in it. Because we are, actually, out of time. I really want to thank Tananarive for being on… I said it right, though.
[Howard] It's Tananarive.
[Brandon] It's Tahnahnah, not Tanana. You told me don't say Tanana.
[Tananarive] I said it would be okay.
[Brandon] Okay. You were very gracious. But we want to thank Tananarive very much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much.
[Tananarive] My pleasure. Thank you all.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.52: Elemental Ensemble Q&A, with Claudia Gray

Dec. 26th, 2016 09:05 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.52: Elemental Ensemble Q&A, with Claudia Gray

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/12/24/11-52-elemental-ensemble-qa-with-claudia-gray/

Q&A Summary:
Q: Can you fit an ensemble into a short story?
A: Every character adds 500 to 1000 words. Make it concise. Use character types more than individuals. Squeeze!
Q: Is there a minimum length? Is there a perfect number?
A: Seven. Three is possible, with specific roles.
Q: How do you include a traitor in an ensemble story without knocking your reader out of it?
A: Set it up carefully. Telegraph that this story has intrigue in it. Make it part of the dynamic, that this person can't be trusted.
Q: How do I give my ensemble characters equal emotional weight if I only stay in the viewpoint of one of those characters?
A: Secret of life: you are living a first person narrative. Make the POV character aware of people around them. Don't fret too much about equal emotional weight, make sure they are represented well and get equal plot weight.
Q: How do you introduce an ensemble cast early without it coming across like an info/character dump?
A: Assembly of the team scenes and disguises (put a moustache on that infodump!)
Q: If an ensemble is about falling in love with a group of friends, how can killing a character serve an ensemble, except for the obvious example of a horror genre?
A: Funerals change dynamics, often makeing them deeper and more important. Also, someone has to fill that hole. Who will step up to it?
Q: How do you give every character a role in the climax without the scenario feeling tailored to the cast?
A: Start with a list, and match things up. Get creative when it doesn't match. Start with the ending, then tailor the cast to fit. Don't forget one archetype is here's the plan, and how it goes all wrong. Break people out of their specialties, let them adapt!
( Christmas presents behind the wrapping... )
[Mary] But the thing I'm going to talk to you about is next year's cruise and workshop.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Mary] So we have been, for the past two years, spending our time in the Caribbean, which has been lovely. Next year, we will be cruising to Europe.
[Whoo!]
[Mary] Which apparently the people here are kind of excited about. We have decided to time this with WorldCon. So for those of you who are hard-core science fiction and fantasy fans and professionals, this will be the week before WorldCon, and we will be cruising so that you can explore Europe and the Balkans and then go to Helsinki for WorldCon. We'll have a couple of add-ons if you want to have someone else arrange all of your travel. We have people who will do that. It's kind of magic. So that is the plan. The details, which I'm not going to go into right now because we're still nailing down some of the special things that we have. The details are all going to be on the website. Registration will open January 1st. I can tell you that we have three guests already lined up. That is Wesley Chu, Kim Liu, and Aliette de Bodard. We're also going to have agents, editors, and some more writers, as well. And of course, our fabulous, fabulous participants.
[WHOO!]
[Brandon] Well, this has been the elemental genres and the Writing Excuses cruise. You are all out of excuses. Now go write.
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