wetranscripts | Entries tagged with side characters

Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-09-lens-4-reaction

Key Points: Reaction is everything. Reactions sell the impact. Slow down, let us see and feel the reaction. Give audiences reactions they are familiar with. When we write too quickly, we often leave out reactions. Watch out for reactions that don't match the character's goals, motivations, fears, or seem completely opposed to what they want. Sometimes reactions line up with something else, but tell us what that is. No plan survives. Make a list of possible reactions. Don't forget the other characters! Use your own experiences. At the end of a scene or chapter, what do you want the characters, and your readers, to be feeling? Tell us how they're going to feel, tell us how they are feeling, and tell us how they felt.

[Season 20, Episode 09]

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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

[Season 20, Episode 09]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The reaction of who.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm sure many of you writers out there are saying, Howard, it's supposed to be the reaction of whom. But if you've been following along with us, you know that right now we're in our fourth episode where we're talking about the lens of who, the lens of the character. How we are approaching our writing through a specific lens. In this episode, we're finishing that up by talking about the fact that really, reaction is everything.

[Mary Robinette] There's a saying in theater, acting is reacting. Where there is something that happens on stage, and then you react to it. The actions that you take during that reaction let the audience know what your character is thinking and feeling. Because on stage, you don't get to go inside their heads. As writers, we do get to let the reader inside their head, but often there's a mismatch between what's going on inside their head and the actions that they are taking.

[DongWon] Or, if you're not showing enough reaction, things will feel really, really flat. Right? There's a video essay I really love by Tony Zhou who does Every Frame a Painting about martial arts movies. One of the things that he shows is that in a lot of great martial arts movies, what you'll see is… You see the actual blow land three different times. You see the first strike, you see a… Usually, like, a slow-mo zoom in of the strike, and then you see the reaction of the person who got hit. It's that reaction that sells the impact. Right? Because these are [stunt] performers. They're not actually hitting each other, their hitting each other very lightly. So when I see an emotional beat not land, when I see an action scene not land, it's because we don't see and feel the reaction. So I'm always telling people, it's okay to slow down. People think that to get through an action scene, it's got to stay fast to keep things moving really, really well, and we're missing the reaction and that's why things start to fall flat or not have the impact you want.

[Dan] Yeah. In… Since we're on the subject of martial arts, one of the things that I love about martial arts fight scenes, and I saw this as well in a YouTube video, but I can't remember which one it was. I can't give my sources as well as DongWon can. Someone was talking about the importance of familiarity and resonance in a fight scene. The idea that I, as a person, have never been through a pane of glass. I've never broken through one. Whereas I have bumped my head on something. I have knocked against a wall. That sort of thing. So you watch Jackie Chan, for example, and you'll see him crashed through a bunch of panes of glass, like in the beg… The one I'm thinking of is the big fight scene in the Lego store. He goes through several panes of glass, and then crashes off of a wall. What that does is it gives us a reaction, it gives the audience a reaction they're familiar with. So that right at the end, that last bit of it, we go oooh, because we know what that feels like. That lets the audience react with the character. [Silence] That was so weird that now nobody has any follow-up.

[Mary Robinette] No, no.

[Howard] No, this is the reaction of…

[Ha, ha]

[Howard] The reaction of me looking to Mary Robinette and thinking, oh, you have a response, and Mary Robinette looking to me and saying, oh, that look on your face suggests that you're about to say something.

[DongWon] Reaction and reaction.

[Howard] Both of us were wrong.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I was just trying not to make this whole episode about martial arts movies, because Dan and I could talk for an hour on this topic.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I'm there with that. So, here's the thing that I was thinking earlier about the… Showing the reaction multiple times. That when you're dealing with that reaction on the page, you're dealing with where does the character feel it in their body? What are the thoughts that go through their head? And then, what is the action that they take as a result of those things. And how does it link to the things we've already been talking about, which is, like, motivation and their goals? How do these things tied together? I will see characters who receive terrible shocking news, and all you get is a line of dialogue from them. Like, how does that sit with them, where is that… Where do they feel that? That's part of that, that's slowing down and letting us feel it. It's not that your character needs to have a reaction every single time. But it is a way of disambiguating what their response is. Sometimes it's very clear what's going on, you don't need to put all of those things in. But sometimes you really need to slow it down so that we can… That we can link to it. Like, when you let us know how we feel it in our bodies, a lot of readers will also map that to their own body. They tighten their shoulders, unconsciously, you can tighten your own shoulders.

[Dan] Reaction is such an important one to focus on, because, like you're saying, it is one of the first things that we leave out when we start to write too quickly. When we think to ourselves, well, I know how this person feels about what just happened, the audience is going to pick it up as well. I don't have to make… State it explicitly. It's one of the first things that disappears.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will go through, when I'm doing my revision, and I will look for places where I need to layer that back in. Where I've gone too fast, and I've left it out. So, if you're thinking, oh, my goodness, there's so many things to think about when I'm writing, remember that you can layer that in later. But it's absolutely true. It's the other thing that I see people do is that they… The character will have a very cinematic reaction that is completely at odds with their goals, with their motivation, with the things that they're afraid of. The classic one is two people… Like, someone wants to get back together with someone else, and they go into a room, and they yell at them. I'm like, how does… How do you think that's actually going to work? Like, that's not how that… Or all of the stalkers, like, out there. Like, yeah, I want to convince this person that I'm loving and safe. I'm going to stand under their window with a… In the rain with a radio. I'm like, that's not… Like, that's not going to get the reaction you think it's going to get.

[Howard] One of my very favorite examples of reaction to things not going as planned… It's cinematic… Is in the, as of this recording, most recent Mission Impossible movie. There's a car chase in the middle, where Ethan Hunt… No, wait, I mean Tom Cruise… No, wait, I mean Ethan Hunt, is handcuffed to… I forgotten the actress's name and I forgotten the character's name.

[Dan] Hayley Atwell.

[Howard] Hayley Atwell. They're handcuffed together and they're handcuffed so that Tom Cruise would not be in the driver's seat. They switch vehicles, I think three times, and the reactions of, wait, I'm not driving. Wait, you don't actually know how to do this thing with the car. Wait, you don't have a free hand to use your weapon. Over and over again. Things don't go as planned. Sandra and I and my youngest son watched this… I say youngest son. 21. Watched this in a hotel room at Gen Con. This was his first time seeing it, and he, about three quarters of the way through, said, this is the most interesting car chase I've ever watched.

[DongWon] That's a great one.

[Howard] It is so… It's because it's all about reactions. It's all about watching how the characters who have their motivations, who have their skills, are continuously dealing with something going wrong.

[DongWon] Exactly. The reaction sells the emotion in that moment, and, Mary Robinette, you bring up a great point, the reaction and the action don't match when a character… That's when they feel really wrong. However, I will also point out that sometimes you could use that to paper over other flaws in your story. Right?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So I watched Twisters last night. Which is one of the most fun blockbusters I've seen in a while. Truly, Hollywood remembered how…

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[DongWon] How to make movies again. There's a whole thing where the first half of the movie, there's a rivalry between these two groups, and I stopped at one point and was like, it makes no sense. It doesn't matter if they're both at the tornado at the same time. It's a tornado. They can both be there. It's big enough. Right? But there papering over that by the characters reacting to each other constantly as they're creating this rivalry. It was so fun watching them make faces at each other, make fun of each other, and outrace each other that I didn't care whether it made sense or not. Right? Because they were selling me the reaction, they were selling me the emotional stakes and reality of these characters that it stopped me from doing the step back and think about it for a long time, and 90 percent of the readers would never have done that… Or viewers would never have done that. I just think about story too much.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing to think about when we talk about reactions that don't line up with your goals is that they might line up with something else. When you mentioned stalkers, that's now the thing that I'm talking about. I apologize. Because that's a real thing that happens. People really do take actions that are not plausibly ever going to get them what they want. But it's because they are not reacting in that moment to their goals. They are reacting to something else. If you are able to present that properly in your story, that may be they are reacting to a previous experience, maybe they are reacting to a past trauma, maybe they are reacting to a desire rather than a goal which can be different things. If you don't put it into your story, the reaction will seem wrong. If you do put it into your story, then that dissonance creates a really nice moment.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of contrasts, I think this is probably a good time for us to take a little bit of a break.

[Howard] It's been said, and I wish I could quote who said it first, that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. This is not only an excellent foundation for military doctrine, it's also a very solid principle for writing. Your characters have a plan. If their plan survives from formulation all the way to the end of the book, assuming it's something they formulated in the first act, there probably wasn't enough reaction going on. We want to know what happens when the plan suffers and you have to come up with a new plan.

[DongWon] So much of it is listening to your characters. Right? I mean, and this goes back to the mismatch, when you have that mismatch, it often feels like it's because you needed something to happen for the plot. Not because the characters were organically responding to the thing. The thing I've learned from gaming as a GM, when I introduce a villain, when I introduce a scenario or an NPC, I cannot predict how my players are going to react. I might accidentally describe the bartender as being like two percent too hot, and now our session is derailed and now we're just…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] In this tavern for the rest… For the next two hours.

[Howard] Installing air-conditioning?

[DongWon] Installing air-conditioning. Of course.

[Howard] Okay.

[DongWon] Yes. Because anyways…

[Mary Robinette] It's compelling.

[DongWon] Sometimes your villain just isn't going to have the impact that you want and you need to find another angle. Right? You can't predict sometimes how your character will react and you need to listen to what their response is in the moment rather than what you need their response to be to move the plot forward. Sometimes that means either you need to change the dial on what the inciting incident is or you need to let your plot shift to follow the character's response.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I will make a list of possible responses that my character will have. I think about what is the goal, what are they trying to achieve, what do I need them to achieve, and I list out things that could possibly get us there. The other piece to that, to both of your points, is that often when we're thinking about our main character, we are forgetting how the people around them are reacting to the actions that they are taking.

[DongWon] This is the solution to the passive character. So many times, there's a passive protagonist. Right? The reluctant hero. You need people reacting to the situation that aren't that character, because if they're not reacting and taking action, it's absolutely maddening for the audience and your story's not going to move forward. So you need to surround them with people who are having the big reaction to move things forward in that way.

[Howard] When we began with this lens on character, I talked about… Or I invited us to use our own experiences as tools. I want to lean into that again, now, because I find in my own life, there are lots of times when something painful or unexpected or surprising happens, and I act quote out of character unquote. I discover something about myself that usually I don't like. Boy, I'm not the sort of person who says unkind things to someone else just because I've lost my temper. But what's wrong, what happened here? So the tool is, look at your own reactions. Are there times when you've reacted to something and you've learned something about yourself, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant? I'm putting that forward to our panelists as perhaps… Our hosts, perhaps as a question.

[Mary Robinette] So, I think that that's… This is a… A great example, and it ties back into things that Dan and DongWon were talking about before is the… Is that thing where your character does do something that is out of character, and you… But when they do that, they still have to have a reaction to it. So if they snap at someone, and then… That's the external reaction that they've done, but the internal reaction is, ooh, I just said that. Is there a way I can fix it? That's a… That is a thing that can allow you to have both. There's this great… One of my favorite celebrity interviews, Nathan Fillion is talking about being on soaps, and how they're… He was a young actor on soaps, and one of the veterans said, at the end of the scene, they're going to push the camera in on your face. And you've got no script, you can't go anywhere. You can't… So you have three…

[Howard] For heaven sake, don't move.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So you have three possible reactions. Did I leave the gas on?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, I did leave the gas on. I turned the gas off.

[Howard] I can now see…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] Nathan Fillion making each of those three faces.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Once you start seeing that, it's… Like, you see a lot of actors who have those reactions. But the thing about it is, what he's talking about is letting the reader know how they are supposed to react…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] To what has happened. So I find that sometimes at the end of the scene, at the end of a chapter, that I will look at it and go okay, did they leave the gas on or did they turn it off? And think about how my character is feeling, but specifically, how I want my reader to be feeling. What reaction I want them to be having as well.

[DongWon] A lot of times what you want to do is… kind of going back to my initial example of the martial arts punch landing, is show it… Tell us how they're going to feel, show us how they're feeling, tell us how they felt. You know what I mean? Sometimes you need that structure to a scene. That can be as… That can happen all in one sentence sometimes. Right? You can do it real quick, you can do it real slow. All those things are really useful, but letting us understand the reaction, and giving us time to process what the reaction is, is hugely important.

[Howard] Yeah. As we've talked about throughout this season, we talk about tools, we describe them as lenses. We describe them as lenses because the things that you are putting on the page are the things that are informing the reader about what they are supposed to be thinking, what they're supposed to be experiencing, what they're supposed to be feeling. Reaction is a critical, critical lens. Are we ready for homework?

[Mary Robinette] I think we are.

[Howard] I feel like we're ready for homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, what I want you to do is, I want you to look at one of your character's reactions, and flip it. So if they take an action that escalates a situation, how would that scene play if they de-escalate it? Can you still get to the endpoint that you want? So take a look at those reactions and play around with them.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. Surprise! You're out of excuses. Now do something completely unexpected. Go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/06/17-10-structuring-with-multiple-povs/

Key points: Multiple points of view. How does going from a single POV to multiple POVs affect worldbuilding, pacing, and character? Start by asking yourself you want a single POV or multiple POVs. Police procedurals often use an A plot for the main mystery, and a smaller B plot. Multiple POVs can also help control pacing. It also provides a way to flesh out side characters, and even main characters, by looking at them from other sides. It can also help examine motivations. Remember, you choose to use multiple POVs to let you dig into the complexities if you want to.

[Season 17, Episode 10]

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I've got the B plot.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now, POV, that's points of view. We want to make sure that that is clear. When we have multiple points of view in a story, how does that change the structure? How can you build the structure to take best advantage of your multiple POVs? So, Peng, what are your thoughts on this? Where do we start when we've got a story with multiple points of view?

[Peng] Weel, I mean, I think the first thing you start with is do you want to have multiple points of view to begin with? Because some stories may not be served by that, and then others, it would really have a... So, when you have... When you think you have a story that you want to tell with multiple POVs, it has really important implications for, I think, a lot of different aspects of craft. We can kind of go one by one. But I would say worldbuilding, pacing, and character are some of the aspects of stories that can be changed the most by taking your story from single point of view to multiple points of view.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to…

[Peng] Mary Robinette, you…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm going to jump in real fast, because that thing you said about you want your story to be single POV or multi-POV. So, full disclosure, I'm about to do a spoiler.

[Peng] Oooh!

[Mary Robinette] For the Glamorous History series. But it's book 5. So in book 3, we had a discussion about… Excuse me, in book 4, which was Valor and Vanity, we had a discussion about whether or not I should do multiple POVs. Because I was doing a heist, and doing multiple POVs would have made it significantly easier to hide information from the reader by controlling which character… The character that was in the know would be the one that… Whose POV I was not in. So it was going to be significantly easier. However, I said no, I have to keep this single POV, because I know… In part, there was the thing that the whole series had been single POV up to that point, but also, in book 5, I had anything planned that needed the shock of suddenly switching POVs. Which is that… This is the spoiler part. You have been warned. This is your last opportunity. Okay. I make the reader think that I have potentially killed Jane, who is my POV character, by having her lose consciousness and switching to her husband's POV. We get his POV for two chapters. So it is… It was something that I did with the intention of using that POV shift for shock.

[Howard] Mary Robinette, that sounds like it might have affected some people.

[Mary Robinette] I have been told, and it is one of the things that I'm most proud of, is multiple people threw the book across the room…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When they got to Vincent's POV because they were shocked and appalled that I was doing that thing.

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That's wonderful.

[Howard] Well played.

[Dan] That would not have worked as well if you had done the multiple POVs in book 4, like you were saying. It wouldn't have been the shock that you needed it to be.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] When I introduced myself at the beginning of this episode, and said, "I have the B plot," I was telegraphing the entire structural format of lots of police procedurals, the whole CSI franchise. Where a portion of the POVs are devoted to the B plot of the episode. You have an A plot that is the main mystery, and then you've got some side characters who are doing the smaller B plot. Sometimes they tie together, and sometimes they don't. The point of all this is that when you have an ensemble cast, or at the very least, multiple POVs, now you have the ability to manage A plot, B plot, CDE plot, whatever, and thread things together.

[Peng] Yeah. It also, when you've got multiple POVs like this, it's a good way to control your pacing, too. Especially for something… I mean, if we're going to talk about the police procedurals, if you just had on A plot, the mystery would almost seem… I mean, it would seem a little too fast and kind of surface and flat, because that's the only thing you're focusing on. But if you've got another POV to switch to, it can… It helps you control pacing because you can have one going slower or faster than the other. So your readers or your viewers will get a little bit of a break if you've got a really tense moment in the A plot, for example, and then you switch to something a little bit slower in the B plot. It can release a little bit of that fast pacing and give the readers a chance to breathe. It also indicates that both of them are related. It just makes the whole thing… It can make the whole thing feel a lot deeper. If you've got more than…

[Howard] I've seen B plots used to turn super obvious clues from the A plot into "Oh, wait. That must be a red herring." Because of the way it… It's the pacing of a mystery. Using a POV shift to convince the reader that the clue you just given them isn't as important or is way more important than they thought it was. It's cool. It's super difficult to do without multiple POVs.

[Dan] So, while we're talking about this, let's do our book of the week. Peng, you have that this week.

[Peng] I do. Our book of the week is Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey. It is a book with two alternating perspectives. It's this really fascinating clever mystery about these two people, a man and a woman, who keep meeting over and over again in different lives. Like, sometimes they're lovers, sometimes they're friends, sometimes they're colleagues, or sometimes one of them's very old and one is very young. But the weird thing is that they're always in Cologne, Germany, and they're always in the same time. Because everyone else in their lives is also the same. Like, it's the same bartender at the bar that they always go to, it's the same train conductor on the train. So at first, they don't know it, the way that the readers do, but they slowly start to recognize each other and realize that something really strange is going on. They set out to try to figure out what's happening to them together. It's such a great story. I won't spoil anything, but every time you think you have figured out what's going on, you're wrong. Just like the characters are. The ending is just so surprising and different that you think that there is no way that the author's going to be able to pull it off. Then she does. So it's such a great escape. I read it during lockdown in… During the early part of the pandemic. I think it was the first book that I was able to actually read. It was one of those one's where you sit down, and a few hours later, you look up and you're like, "What? Huh. What time is it?"

[Laughter]

[Peng] So it's really… It's great. It's fantastic.

[Dan] Wonderful. That is Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey. So, everyone go read that.

[Dan] We have recently been given a really wonderful example of how multiple POVs can alter the structure of a story. Who is it that put The Killing Floor…

[Howard] Oh, that was me.

[Dan] Into the outline? Howard, talk about that, because I find this fascinating.

[Howard] That was me. In Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel, Jack Reacher is the POV character and the story is told first person from Reacher's perspective, beginning to end. There are couple of side characters that he interacts with, who help… I say help with the investigation. It's really supposed to be their investigation. Reacher isn't a police officer. He has no authority here. But they're off doing police stuff. We get their clues, their information, when they touch back with him. In the Amazon's Prime series that just aired a couple of… Three weeks ago as of the time we're recording this called Reacher, those characters get their own points of view. It changes the way the story unfolds. It makes those characters… It makes those characters feel more important, more real to us, and it gives us tension that we didn't have before. We like them more, we don't want bad things to happen to them. If they die off camera… In the book, in Reacher's POV, lots of people die off camera. We don't see what happens. Reacher learns about another body. But actually having the camera on them changes the pacing, changes the tension. I enjoyed it a lot.

[Dan] Yeah. It was really interesting to watch that unfold. I'm glad that you pointed it out because adding in the extra POVs change the story and the characters obviously, but also required and demanded a different structure. In a lot of ways, the fact that they were turning this into a TV show, the structure demanded multiple POVs. They couldn't have done 10 episodes were however many it was solely with the one person. Now, on the other hand, Lee Child himself has come out and said that because there are multiple POVs, because we got to know Roscoe so well, for example, he is very sad that the structure of the series overall is that of a drifter, and we never come back to Margrave, we will never come back to Roscoe again. So in some ways, it kind of works counter to the book series because now we want to see Roscoe, we want to follow her just as much as we want to follow Reacher. Honestly, probably a little more.

[Howard] One of the thoughts that I had in that regard is that the emotional arc of Reacher being so disconnected that he can just drift. In the books, we don't really get a feel for the cost of that. But as audience members watching the TV show, there is a cost. I'm not going to get to see Roscoe again, and that makes me sad. Why do I have to be a drifter? Well, okay, I'm having an emotional experience because of the kind of story that's being told.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things for me about this conversation is that I think when we're talking about the characterization that it's easy to think about it as giving that multiple POV makes these additional side characters more fleshed out and more interesting. But the other thing that it does for me is that it gives you an opportunity to learn more about whoever tips us in a book where you have a main character, or even on ensemble, it gives you an opportunity to learn more about those other characters because you get to see them from the outside. That's something that a novel or a short story, that prose can do that is harder in film, is that having that second POV and the interiority of the character who is observing someone that you've already met can give you, I think, a greater sense of… Someone can feel like, "Hello, I am a hot mess." Then you see them from the outside, and they're cold and controlled. That's an exciting thing that multiple POVs can give you. One example that I'd love to bring up is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Peng] That was such a good book.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, so good. It's got so many different POVs. It's actually not so many. It's got…

[Peng] I think it's three, right?

[Mary Robinette] Multiple… Three? Is it?

[Peng] Yeah, I think it's three.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The thing that's wonderful about it is that it does this thing, that each of those characters at a certain point intersects with one of the other characters and you can see them from the outside and how they are perceived by the rest of the world, and it is at odds with how they perceive themselves. Which is, I think, true for a lot… Inherently true for a lot of us.

[Peng] Yeah.

[Dan] Definitely.

[Peng] I think the other thing that the multiple POVs in Black Sun does really well is not only does it allow Rebecca Roanhorse to illuminate the characters in that way, but it also helps you, or it can help you explain their motivations too. So it's not just the way that they see themselves versus the way that others see them, but also whatever their goals are. You… When you get to see the other side of it, it really helps you understand that… What each of them wants can be really complicated, it's not just black-and-white or… Like, for example, if you've got somebody that seems like the villain the whole time, if you're only viewing them from one perspective, like the hero's perspective, you're only going to see or get the hero's read on that. But then if you are able to jump to either the villain's perspective or someone else's perspective who can see the villain, you're able to flesh out the quote unquote villain's motivations in a way that you wouldn't be able to if you just had hero, because the hero can only see one way. I think that happens a lot in Black Sun where from the outside it might look like somebody just wants war, they want to conquer something or they want to preserve a way of life that seems very bad to the other characters. But then when you get to hear it from that character, it's so much more complicated than that.

[Dan] This is something that can work both ways, right? If you want to draw out those kinds of complexities, then structuring your book such that it has multiple POVs is a good choice you can make. It's not just an outcome that happens, but one that you can choose. Which I think is really wonderful.

[Dan] All right. It's time for our homework, and, Mary Robinette, you have that this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. So what I want you to do is take a scene in your current work in progress and rewrite from another character's point of view. I want you to look to see what changes, how the tone of the scene might shift, what new information or information might be revealed. If you want to really dive into this, try to make sure that the beats, the physical beats, don't shift. So, if a character enters at the top of a scene and pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, they still have to do that, but now you have to try to write it so that it makes sense about why they're doing that. I can't imagine what reason that would be. But maybe they're saving them from a fire, maybe that old lady in a wheelchair is actually a demon and you didn't know it. Whatever it is, see if you can make all of their motivations make sense without changing the beats. You can include things that the other character didn't notice, absolutely. You can have the scene start a little earlier or end a little later. But what you really want to do is dig into the why of the character.

[Dan] That sounds awesome. I actually think I'm going to do that with the work in progress that I currently have. So…

[Howard] You're going to push an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs?

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Is that not what everyone else got from the…

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the homework, yes.

[Howard] That's what I got, yeah.

[Dan] Excellent. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/08/13-27-characters-as-foils/

Key points: A foil is a character in a story who acts as a contrast to the main character, externalizing a point of conflict or contrast. May be a sidekick, two side characters, or even two protagonists. Sometimes the foil fills in weaknesses. Beware of flanderizing a foil, reducing them to a flat character. The best foils make both characters more rounded as they change in interesting ways. Foils can be good for exploring knotty topics, showing more than one opinion or view. Often, the foil can hang a lantern on the discussion. Heist novels can be an example of a group of foils! Specialists, weaknesses, and plenty of interaction playing on those weaknesses and the cracks in the process. Foils are a natural with teams who are just meeting, but they also can be good for introducing the long-term relationship of a couple. What keeps foils together? Family! Also, try using the Kowal relationship axes -- mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Keeping the morals aligned can help keep a couple together. Manners are a good place for friction.

( Just between you and me... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Characters As Foils.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We've talked a lot about building really interesting characters, giving them arcs, having them changes they go along. Now let's talk about them messing with one another.

[Oo… Yes. Laughter]

[Brandon] What do I mean by a foil?

[Amal] I thought you were going to say what do you mean by messing with each other.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Okay. So, a foil is a character who serves within a story to act as a contrast to the main character. This is not a character who exists to stop their forward progress, which is what the word foil sounds like it is going to be, because of "Curses! Foiled again." But this is more like… Often a role that you'll see occupied by a sidekick character. They're someone who allows the character to express themselves, so that they are getting some of their internal thoughts outside, and also to provide usually a point of contrast or conflict surrounding an internal conflict that the character has within themselves.

[Brandon] It doesn't have to even be main character/side character. I've done it frequently with two side characters that in order to make them both more distinct in the reader's mind, I make them have some point of friction or contrast, which then as they discuss, they argue about, or… Just offer examples of one another in that way.

[Mary] Like one of the examples we were talking about earlier was Abbott and Costello. In which they are actually kind of foils of each other.

[Amal] Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite things to read or see, is when you have a rivalry, for instance, and you do have two protagonists. But you can… In order to establish what they each are like, you use the other character… You use that contrast as opposed to another element of the environment or other characters. Instead, it's almost like you're making the differences between them a character as well. That kind of grows from the fact that they are… They don't even necessarily have to be opposites. They can just be complementary, they can be contrasts.

[Maurice] I spoke a while back about one protagonist, whose sole object through the course of the story was to just be left alone and get high. That character's name was Sleepy. Now his foil is one of my favorite characters I've ever created. Just to put that out there. His name is 120 Degrees of Knowledge Allah.

[Laughter]

[Amal] That's amazing.

[Maurice] The reason why they work so well together, and why Knowledge Allah is his foil, is because in a lot of ways they were like polar opposites. Knowledge Allah was an activist, Knowledge Allah knows what he believed, why he believed, and in a lot of ways, Knowledge Allah also played straightman to some of Sleepy's antics. So, Knowledge Allah actually became the motivating force to help drive Sleepy's story and drive his arc in a lot of ways.

[Mary] I think that goes to the thing that people talk about a lot, which is opposites attract. That frequently what the foil is also doing is they're filling in the weaknesses of the main character. Which is why a lot of times you will see husband-and-wife couples in a foil relationship. In The Thin Man, which is one of my favorite series of films, Nick and Nora, they… Well, and actually Asta sometimes acts as a foil, too… But they act as a foil for each other. Although given the way the films are structured, Nora is much more in the foil role then Nick is, because he, as the detective, is often driving the action more than she is.

[Brandon] So let me ask you this. Do you design this specifically, or do you let this grow naturally or some combination of the two?

[Amal] The best example from my own work is this novella that I cowrote with Max Gladstone. The working title of which is This Is How You Lose the Time War. It was totally baked into our concept. It was that… We recognized that Max and I had super different writing styles and writing paces and methods. We wanted to make a virtue of that necessity and have these two characters that were going to be very opposite. One called Red and one called Blue, and have them be agents of opposite sides of the Time War. Everything about those… Like, everything about these differences became part of the plot, part of the texture of the book, and the development of it. But ultimately, the point of those contrasts was… Ended up being more about how they're each not great representatives of their respective sides. The more that they engaged with each other, which they do because it's an epistolary story. The more they engage with each other, the more they realized how alike they were in spite of coming from these places that are literally opposites.

[Brandon] It's really easy to, I feel like, flanderize one of your foils. Which is this concept that we use where a character, over time, becomes more and more focused on their quirks, rather than more and more rounded. More and more flat, hitting one note. But when a foil is done correctly, I feel like it, in the best films and books where I've seen it, both characters become more rounded over time because of the friction between them changing them both in interesting ways.

[Amal] Exactly.

[Mary] I think that I often, because of that, because of the way it allows you to flesh out a character… The times that I plan ahead to insert a foil… Most of the time, they develop naturally. But the times that I plan ahead are when I'm planning on tackling a topic that is particularly knotty or weighty, because it gives me a way to explore multiple aspects of that topic by having two characters whose contrasting opinions and views on it show that there's… It's not just a single side. So if I were telling a story about the merits of hamsters, I might have a character who is very, very pro-hamster and her best friend would be anti-hamster. Their conversations illuminate a lot… Not just about the topic, but also about how much of this is just the nature of the character versus the nature of hamsters.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the reason I do a lot of foils is actually because a lot of my stories tend to deal with some of the weightier topics. So by having that foil who's like the opposite of whatever character I'm working with, helps me from sliding into a screed at any point. Because then… Now I have to look at the other side. I have to embody another school of thought, and let that play out more naturally.

[Brandon] You have to… You have a natural motivation as a writer to hang a lantern on what's going on, the… You're speaking… You start into kind of a lecture, that other character's going to be like, "Oh, you're lecturing us now?" It's very natural. It works really well.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and break for our book of the week, which is Breaking the Chains of Gravity.

[Mary] Yes. So, Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel is a phenomenal nonfiction book, and it's one that I came across when I was working on The Calculating Stars and Fated Sky. This is about the space program before NASA. So it starts from the very early days of people just like "Let me see if I can get this rocket off the ground…" And lots of people getting blown up.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It carries you through to the very early days of NASA. One of the things that I just had no idea about was the sheer number of women who were involved in it, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And also like… It also… I don't want to minimize the fact that many of the early… And the book does not. That many of the early rocketry pioneers were Nazi war criminals. But it does highlight the fact that they began as a teenage rocketry club in Germany that got absorbed by the German army, which I didn't know. That does… It certainly changes your view of rocketry when you begin to look at its past. But there were just so many people, and it's a fascinating, incredibly well-researched book. She's got a real grasp of narrative, so it's an engaging read at the same time that it's filled with really cool factoids.

[Amal] Has… This is… Can I piggyback on that recommendation? So, there's this amazing poem by Sofia Salatar called Girl Hours. It's dedicated to Henrietta Swan Leavitt. It's a brilliant poem. It's basically as if… Written as if it's preparing to be an essay on the subject, but then broken up, so like the top part is actually notes and says, "In the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as human computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars. I didn't know about this until I read this poem, and it's absolutely gorgeous.

[Mary] So I'll put that in the liner notes as well. So you should check out this poem which is called…

[Amal] Girl Hours.

[Mary] As well as Breaking the Chains of Gravity.

[Brandon] So. Let's talk around foils. We often view them as the kind of A character-B character interaction. Have you ever designed a group where each character is meant to kind of be a foil for the same concept, or a foil for one another in a big group dynamics?

[Mary] This is what a heist novel is!

[Laughter]

[Amal] Yes! Yes. I want you to talk more about that, because I loved reading when you were writing about how you did research for a heist novel by watching heist movies.

[Mary] Yeah. I watched a lot of heist movies, but I also read as many variations on heist novel as I could. Scott Lynch's… I want to talk about something other than my own book. But Scott Lynch's Red Sea under Red Sky and lies of Locke Lamora… These characters all act as foils for each other. Each of them has a weakness, and there is another character in the group who needles them on that weakness. That weakness represents both what their skill set is as well as what their personal failing is. So having that conflict externalized allows for the book to be a lot more dynamic. One of the things about a heist, in particular, is that it's a group of characters each of whom has a specialty. The thing that a foil does in this case is remind you that they may have an area of specialty, but there's… That area of specialty means that they have a ton of other weaknesses. So it prevents the group from feeling just like a flat one-sided gro… Collection of experts. Which then is actually no fun to watch. Like, if you watch a group of experts go in and accomplish something, it's actually not very interesting. Just as an example of this, I was talking with Kjell Lindgren, who's an astronaut. He was talking about actually in space, he always felt very safe, because they had practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced everything that they were doing. They over prepare before they go up there. So, you go out, you do a thing, and it goes… And all of the acceptable variables, because of the amount of prep time that you've put in. So that, in a book, is not very interesting. But if you throw a foil in there, that suddenly offers you a lot of places to insert cracks into the process.

[Amal] That's true. I love that. At the same time, I was… While I completely agree, I find myself thinking of how I really actually really love watching people who are super good at stuff doing stuff. But…

[Mary] But then, the story is very short.

[Amal] That's true.

[Mary] It's like we go in, and we accomplish the thing, and then we leave.

[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. I mean, even the Food Network, with experts cooking delicious things, they have to generate some kind of drama somewhere. Oh, no, the pickles are sour. I don't know. Something like that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Pickles are usually sour.

[Mary] That's exactly why Gordon Ramsay is so prickly when he's dealing with adults, but if you've ever watched his kid shows, he's not. Because his role there is not to be a foil to the child.

[Amal] Exactly. It's to actually be a teacher, it's to actually embody that role.

[Brandon] Well, they do it for different cultures. If you watch the British version, he is way less of a foil than in the American version. Yeah. Anyway.

[Amal] [garbled]

[Brandon] [garbled] slightly different tactic on this. I've noticed there's kind of two general groups of foil. There is, when you're writing a book, there is the team who have… Are just meeting and you find that everybody kind of hates each other. Then there's the long-term couple who you use their foil nature at the start of a story to establish a long-term relationship. I happen to like both of these. I really like how the second group can really easily show that these two characters know each other so well, because they know how to push each other's buttons in just the right way, but they also know how not to go too far on pushing those buttons. It makes both characters usually more relatable, unless these two people just don't get along at all. Which happens sometimes. Which brings me kind of to a question. How do you make sure, when these characters are pushing each other's buttons, that the reader understands why they are together in this situation? What tactics do you use to make it so that they don't just say, "Well, we don't get along. We're not good for each other. We are not good teammates. We're going to break apart and go separate directions."

[Maurice] Well, the easy cheat for me has been, [garbled I kind of] go back to that combination of those two groups that you were talking about, and we call that family.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] I was just realizing that, in the scene I was just writing this morning, I was just like, "Why are these people to… Oh, they're brother and sister, and they're kind of stuck with each other, aren't they?" But they do. They know how to push each other's buttons, but they're still kind of stuck in this relationship, like we're not going anywhere, so how do we now accommodate one another?

[Mary] I use a tool that I talked about last week, the Kowal relationship axes, which I will recap for those of you who are listening to just this episode. Which is that basically, there are six kind of sliders, axes, upon which relationships are built. The more you have in common with a person on these, the less friction there's going to be. So, mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers, which represents sense of humor. This is a theory my mother-in-law came up with for describing dating.

[Amal] This is amazing.

[Mary] It's actually really, really phenomenal. So what I do is that I try to make sure that for the most part that my characters' morals slider is really well aligned. Unless there is a reason that I want to specifically explore that. But if they have to go on a process together, their… That is a place that they have to be in agreement, if there both committing. Their mind can be out of alignment, their sense of what money is for, their sense of manners… Their sense of manners is usually one of the ones that if I want them to… If I want there to be a lot of friction, that's one of the ones where I will slide them apart, and give them very different backgrounds, so that they have different ideas of what is polite.

[Amal] That is fascinating, actually. The idea that… This has less to do with writing and more from experience, but it's… I'm Canadian, and I went to live in the UK for six years. The culture shock that I experienced was almost entirely to do with how people treat you when they like you.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I was… I just… I have a very thin skin when it comes to sarcasm and being teased. Which made things very difficult when I suddenly found myself in a country where the more people like you, the meaner they were to you. I just couldn't… Like, I could not wrap my brain around this. I just… I like you, and you're my friend, why are you being horrible to me? They didn't see it as being horrible, they saw it as being familiar. Whereas if they were polite and distant to someone, then that would be someone who they weren't friends with.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap this up with some homework. The homework I'm going to give you is I want you to take a famous soliloquy, like from Shakespeare or something like that, a monologue, a single character saying something, and I want you to insert a foil. It doesn't have to be comedic. It probably will, from the nature of this assignment, but someone who is contrasting what they're doing, and interrupting this. Or go the other direction. Take a famous comedy bit, like Who's on First, and remove one side or the other. Take out Abbott, or take out Costello, and maybe replace them with someone who completely plays along, and see how far it goes, and see how it works when both characters are trying to one-up each other to the joke. Or just take one out and see if the… It works on its own. So, this has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.10: Handling a Large Cast

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/11/13-10-handling-a-large-cast/

Key Points: The length of the story often influences the size of the cast. When you have an ensemble cast, you may need to give them all weight. Name, distinguishing characteristics, backstory, motivation? But with short stories, you often want bit players who come in, do something, and leave. With large casts, you may need spreadsheets or even a wiki to keep track. If they have a name, they need motivation, backstory, and all that. Or write one group straight through, another group straight through, then weave and blend them. Big casts often start with one character, then expand, and grow over time. You don't really start with a huge cast on page one! Small casts, characters often wear lots of hats, and you can show they are skilled in one area, but ... the story challenges them in an area where they aren't so good. You can also use the relationships between your characters more. And delve deeper into your characters, and their interactions. Think of screen time -- how do you balance and give each character enough screen time?

( How many people can fit in here, anyway? )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Handling a Large Cast Versus a Small Cast.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We're going to talk a little bit about nuts and bolts on this episode. We want to find out specifically from Maurice and Amal how you do your writing. How you actually physically go about doing it?

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Okay.

[Amal] Do you want to go first?

[Laughter]

[Mary] They're both backing away from the question.

[Amal] I mean, the thing with me is that I have never written a novel. Like, not even as a kid, writing… The longest things that I wrote as a kid were role-playing character backgrounds, in like over 10 pages in nine point font. That's like the thing that I did. But… So I write a lot of short stories. Because short stories are so, to me, flexible, I've tended to have a different approach to most… Almost every one. Except for the butt in chair part. Like I just sit and write. But I've… There are some that I've outlined, some that I haven't. There are some where I've come up with the characters first, sometimes I've come up with the plot first and the characters kind of arose from it. The biggest cast of characters I think I ever had to manage was when I was actually writing an episode for Book Burners, which is a serial box serial, which is like TV but written. So I had a cast of characters handed to me, and keeping track of that was really interesting. It was a completely different challenge. Thinking about things like A plots and B plots, which I don't know if I've ever otherwise done in a short story, at least until that point…

[Brandon] Specifically about characters. What do you do? Do you do anything? Do you like free write characters or do you just see where it goes?

[Amal] I think a lot of the time, I have a scene in mind, and I have a feeling or a texture that I want to generate out of this conflict or out of this conversation or I really want to experience this thing and make other people experience it. Sometimes that feeling comes from a character I have in mind, sometimes it… The feeling dictates the characters. Yeah.

[Brandon] When do you add another character?

[Amal] Gosh.

[Brandon] Just when it feels right?

[Amal] Just when it feels right. Yeah.

[Brandon] Are you usually doing smaller casts or…

[Amal] Yeah. Usually the casts are not more than four. That's… It's really interesting to take stock of how the length of the story has tended to determine that. Although, that said, I did just recently finished a novella with Max Gladstone where there are two characters in this novella. It's epistolary, and they're time traveling spies. Fighting a time war. But… As one does. But so, there are two characters, and there are two background characters beyond that who are their… Like motivating them. That's sustained over novella length. But I think that's generally the exception to a rule of the shorter the story, the fewer the characters. Somewhere at novelette length, you start having the flexibility to like put different groups in play as opposed to just two different characters in play. But I've tended not to think that way, because I think most of the short stories I've written have tended to be structure-driven as opposed to character-driven.

[Mary] One of the things that I've found with both writing short fiction and writing novels, and also dealing with puppetry, is that at a certain point, you become very con… Trained to the constraints of the form that you're working in, and will begin to naturally gravitate and move down the decision tree to make choices that fit the length that you're supposed to be working with. Like, one of the constraints that I had when I was working with puppet theater was that there were two performers. Which meant that we were limited by the number of hands to the number of characters we could have on stage at a time.

[Amal] Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. That's like the most beautiful physical manifestation of this problem. How many hands do you have?

[Mary] Right. So I would naturally… I'd be like… I would naturally say, "Oh. Well, let's think about doing Snow Queen." Because this is a thing where she encounters a lot of different characters, but only one at a time. Whereas Aida, there's like a cast of thousands. That's not a good choice, because I just can't get that many people on stage. I feel that way, that when I am… The hardest thing for me when I am jumping back and forth between short fiction and novels is remembering which metric I'm using. Because I can… Like I'm working on a novel right now that has an ensemble cast, but it also has an ensemble cast of a lot of onlookers that… And because it's a murder mystery, I actually need to give them all weight, because you don't know which one is…

[Amal] Right.

[Mary] So, it's interesting because everybody that comes on stage, I actually have to give the same amount of weight to. Whereas normally, when I'm doing a shorter piece or something, anyone who's not important, I try not to give them a name, I try not to give them any distinguishing characteristics, I just want them to come in, say their bit, and get out again. Here, I have to make sure that everybody gets a name, that everybody seems to have a back story, that everybody seems to have a distinguishing characteristic. It's a very different metric.

[Brandon] By shorter story, you mean under 400,000 words, instead of over? Right?

[Laughter]

[Mary] Right. Yes. Yes.

[Brandon] Right. Okay. I get that.

[Mary] Yeah, yeah.

[Amal] What's the smallest cast you've ever dealt with, Brandon?

[Brandon] I've done two person casts before, but that was in my flash fiction.

[Amal] Okay.

[Brandon] Lar… Anything more than… I mean, The Wheel of Time had 2400 characters…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Stormlight's got something around eight or 900, or something like that. So…

[Amal] Wait. Wait, wait. Sorry, I'm having difficult… Sorry. Say those numbers again.

[Brandon] 2400 characters. Yeah.

[Amal] I hope you can hear the face I'm making.

[Brandon] The book I just finished was 540,000 words long. We cut it to like 460. But… Anyway…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's move on to Maurice.

[Amal] So amazing.

[Brandon] Maurice. What is your…

[Amal] Like, how do you do that?

[Brandon] Sorry. We're doing this podcast and I'm thinking, "Wow, they use very different methods."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because for me, if I'm going to track this cast, I need… I need spreadsheets for the small stories. Right? Because even the small stories, it's going to be… I'll generally do two or three about the same characters, and I'll have 60 characters in… Across the series of novellas.

[Mary] You really cannot see our mouths just hanging open.

[Brandon] But, Stormlight, it's a huge wiki with tons of characters.

[Mary] Wow.

[Brandon] And things like this. That's why I have two continuity editors.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And whatnot. So, yeah, it's a very different experience for me. Maurice, how do you track your characters? How do you come up with them, how do you design them, how do you…

[Maurice] So, I come from a gaming background. So basically, my rule is once I bothered to give you a name, I'm going to roll you up as a character.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Do you actually do that?

[Maurice] Well, I don't roll them up, but…

[Laughter]

[Mary] I think we'd love it if you did.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] But, yeah, once we get to the stage where I'm naming you, then I go through all the things that I would do for any character. I'm figuring out what your motivation is, I'm figuring out what your back story is, I'm doing all those things because if you have a name… Because naming… For me, naming is one of the hardest things. So if I'm going to go to the effort of giving you a name, you come with everything that comes with being a character.

[Brandon] You actually have these sheets? Like you…

[Maurice] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh, wow. Really? Oh, these are cool.

[Maurice] So. Well, I mean. They look a lot like these. So I have a sheet… It's basically divided into quadrants, where I just jot down information for each of my characters. So I can just track them that way.

[Mary] Can we put one of those templates on the website in the liner notes?

[Maurice] Sure.

[Mary] Great. That is so cool. Because that's… I want a copy of that.

[Amal] Like I've done that for my characters in retrospect. For, like, for my own fun sometimes. But… Come up with a character. This is also within the context of role-playing, but role-playing free-form online. And sometimes, just enjoying taking a character sheet from say World of Darkness or something like that, and just turning that character who is fully rounded and stuff into a character on a sheet.

[Maurice] Well… All that being said, what the… Probably the largest cast of characters I've had to deal with was for my urban fantasy trilogy, which I'm calling… I basically call my accidental trilogy, because I never intended to write a trilogy. But it was all based on the Arthurian saga. So in a lot of ways, that work has been done for me. I can just take all the characters and then just sort of… Well, here's how they've traditionally been portrayed. Now let me just do my tweaks and… How would they plug into the hood, basically. But that was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I mean, it's not the numbers you have, but it was still a couple dozen characters per book, which is larger than I had ever done before. Tracking them was tough.

[Brandon] I throw those numbers around to be awe-inspiring, but usually there will be like 30 main characters. Right? Maximum. But… That's what gets really tricky, is remembering this character's motivations and things like this. I… usually, when I'm writing these books, I'm writing one group straight through. Then I'm writing another group straight through, and another group straight through. At least to a kind of breakpoint. And then weaving it together. Then you have to do all these passes to make sure that the different stories blend together in a way that's dramatically and pacing wise works. It gets very complicated there, but I find that if you jump each scene to the new characters, it always feels like you're stopping and starting and things like this. So…

[Amal] Brandon, can I ask you a question? Do you find that with these really large casts, that that… Like thinking back to what Mary was saying about the constraints kind of dictating what kind of story you tell. Do you find that you sort of have to tell a big… Okay…

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Amal] But that because you're choosing to tell a really big story, that you have to have a commensurate number of characters? Or can you imagine a situation where you have that number of characters for a small-scale story?

[Brandon] I have no idea how you'd do it. I suppose we can imagine it. It's certainly a challenge that you could put up before people. With me, I grew up reading epic fantasy. I wanted to write epic fantasy. I was reading these stories with these huge casts, like Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. I would read these books, and when I sat down to write, I just naturally started doing this. The big problem was, and I tell this to people a lot, was I jumped in, just trying to write that large cast from page 1, and I failed spectacularly my first few tries. What I realized is a lot of these casts grew organically over time. The author didn't say I'm going to have 2400 named characters in The Wheel of Time or whatever. Robert Jordan told a story about one character who interacted with a lot of people, and did some expanding on who these people were, and then started telling their stories. I think the form is very important to this. When I write a Stormlight book, which are the really big ones we joke about. Most of my books are kind of normal length. But when I write these, the 500,000 word ones, I actually plot them as a trilogy, with a short story collection included. I write them as three books and a short story collection, which I am interweaving as I go. I put together… The idea behind it is that when you pick this up, you're not just going to get a story, you're going to get a lot of stories, all woven together toward a big goal at the end.

[Mary] But you can talk about the difference between the way you are handling the stories in the short story collection versus the way you are handling the larger casts.

[Brandon] Yes. Ethnically.

[Mary] Does it… Do you go into those differently, or do you use the same…

[Brandon] Definitely. Absolutely, differently. It's the same setting. Like, the most recent one, there is a short story in it about a lighthouse keeper. His family has kept this lighthouse forever. A disaster has just struck. He is going through the town, helping people with the problems from the disaster. It just goes to the four different people. Really, he's collecting their wood so he can keep his lighthouse burning. But you interact with a ship captain whose ship is not there anymore. And help out the sailors, but end up with their wood. You go here to the woman whose farm was just completely destroyed. But their shed was broken, so I got some more wood. Then he goes up and stokes the flame to the lighthouse. That little sort of story has no connection to the big story, except for the fact that the disaster happened in the big story. The main characters, their job is they can like stop this. They can work with this disaster. He can't. He's the lighthouse keeper. So it allows me to just tell these different types of stories, all in one package. That was a huge tangent.

[Mary] No, no…

[Amal] No, I like that.

[Mary] Actually it wasn't a huge… That was exactly on point. Because this is… The thing that I like about that example is that one of the things that I find with a lot of fiction… A lot of processes, that it's a very fractal thing. That you've got something that you do on this big scale, and it looks totally different because the scale is huge. But when you start drilling down into it, on a scene-by-scene basis, you're doing exactly the same things. In this scene, I can only have this many characters, because this is how many words I have.

[Brandon] Well, it's beyond that. There's a sort of reader, at least me, maybe writer, brain space. Right? Like I can track maybe four or five characters in a conversation. If there is more people trying to participate in this conversation, I have trouble bringing them up enough to remind you that they're there. I've got to arrange these situations so there is a smaller number in each given scene.

[Mary] Yeah. It's like I totally forgot Howard is even in the room.

[Brandon] Oh, yeah. Howard, put your pants back on.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's… We haven't even stopped for the book of the week yet, and we're [inaudible approaching the end, so…]

[Mary] Sorry, this is a very interesting conversation for us.

[Brandon] Let's talk about To Steal the Stars.

[Screech! Oh, my gosh!]

[Mary] So. We both want to talk about it?

[Amal] You can start.

[Mary] Okay.

[Amal] I learned about it from you.

[Mary] That's fair. So this is a podcast. It is an audio play called To Steal the Stars. It's coming from Tor Labs and Gideon Media. This is one of the best acted and best produced…

[Amal] And best directed.

[Mary] And best directed and best written pieces of audio drama that I have ever heard. I say this as someone who used to perform in it, review it. This is phenomenally good. It is hitting all of the right science fiction and character buttons for me.

[Amal] I was thoroughly unprepared for how hard I would fall for this. If you describe to me what the contents are… Like, even the genre of this audio drama, I'd be like okay, cool, that sounds interesting, but I wouldn't necessarily dive into it. People describe it in a lot of ways. People will talk about it as noir, as a noir thriller heist, as a near future noir thriller heist thing. All cool, all fine. But, it doesn't prepare you for how incredible the characters are, how tight the pacing is, how… And just all of those beautiful grace notes of the directing. Like, I can't get over the fact that there's a part where two people are having pillow talk, and it actually sounds like normal people. Like, it just… It's so hard to do that. It's hard to do that on the page, fiction wise, it's hard to… I mean, representing people in intimate situations is chancy at the best of times. But this was the best of times, and also the worst of times. It's just amazing.

[Mary] In context, I'll let us segue back in. One of the reasons that I think that it's really good for you to listen to is because as radio theater, each character has to have a completely distinct voice. It's not just the actor. It's the way that they are approaching the words, the way the script has been written. Each character has a distinct motivation, they have a distinct characterization. Some of the episodes have very small casts, some of them are quite large, with multiple voices all happening at the same time. It's a really interesting way to start thinking about an aspect of a cast which is the way characters actually speak.

[Amal] I think it was also all recorded in an actual hangar… Or not in a hangar, necessarily. But it was all recorded in one space, and they were… The actors were allowed to occupy that space and spread out.

[Mary] Oh, really?

[Amal] Yeah. So it wasn't in a studio the way we are. So the reason… Part of the reason the audio is so fantastic is that you get the sense of people's movements through a very large, echo-y space. They're evoking a top-secret hangar, basically, where secret objects are kept. You really get the feel of how these voices enter and leave the space, of how close people are, how far they are apart. And the performances have more room to breathe. So it's… Ach. It's just so good. It's so good. And it's going to be a book that comes out… I think November 7th? Of last year, from when this is airing?

[Mary] I know, it's time travel.

[Amal] So it's out now.

[Brandon] All right. So we are almost out of time. Even though we just did that. But I wanted to throw one more question at you guys. Which is, let's focus on the small casts. I've talked about the large casts. How do you make a small number of characters wear a lot of hats, if you've got a very limited cast, or a very limited space, to do so?

[Mary] So I'm doing a story right now, which is basically two characters on a heist. Normally, heist stories have a huge number of characters. So what I have them doing is that I have them each with a primary expertise. Then, I have given them each area of competence that is… They're okay at, but they're not great at. What that does is it allows me to… The nice thing about having a character who has multiple hats is that you can demonstrate how this person is really skilled, but by having them encounter things that they're not so good at, you can actually ramp up the drama significantly.

[Amal] I think the smaller the cast, the more it becomes important to take into consideration their contrasts to each other, to have one character's strength be the other's weaknesses, or to have them complement each other. Which is the same thing, actually. But, yeah, so, just to… The fewer characters there are in the story, I think the more loadbearing the relationship between the characters needs to be, and the more nuanced and encompassing it has to be. The more characters you have, the more variation you can have on those lines.

[Maurice] Yeah. When I'm dealing with smaller casts… Actually, it's a problem that I didn't realize was even a thing until I started doing the massive urban fantasy, which was the whole issue of screen time. When I have this large cast, it's like, how do I manufacture enough screen time for some of these characters, who… I've bothered to roll up and create these characters, they now need screen time. How do I balance that? But in a smaller cast, I have this space, and again, they get to occupy this space, so they do have sufficient screen time. So now, what are we going to do with that? Because you now have to occupy all of this space all on your own. So, for me, I'm thinking of my story, The Ache of Home, which is up on Uncanny Magazine. Cast of three. Each of the characters are so completely distinct. I could tell who's talking without any dialogue tags, basically, because each one is so distinct. Each one has a different role. Like, even my main character, she is… She's a single mom. She's struggling in the neighborhood. Yet, she also has this magical ability to tie in with the green. When her co-protagonist, is this gentleman, he's recently out of prison, but his tattoos tell the story of his life. He can peel the tattoos off, they become magical objects.

[Amal] Oh, that's so cool.

[Maurice] They're just… So they have all this screen time, and frankly, I just have more time to just delve deeper. I think ultimately that's what it is. I have more room to delve deeper into these characters and their interactions.

[Brandon] Awesome. You were going to give us some homework, Maurice, that's kind of along those lines?

[Maurice] Oh, yes. Very much along these lines. So, it's out of my dialogue class I teach. I call it, it's a talking heads exercise. Again, one of the roles of dialogue is… By the end of dialogue… Dialogue, you have characterized… You use dialogue to characterize… To develop characterization. So one of the goals is that by the end of… You should be able to write characters with such a distinct voice, I shouldn't need dialogue tags to tell them apart. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the audio plays. Very much… It makes you very conscious of that. How do my characters sound, distinct from one another, even in those brief interactions? So that what I… So the exercise is. So you have a married couple. They bump into each other at a coffee shop, when neither one was supposed to be there. One's supposed to be at work, one's supposed to be doing their other thing. They bump into each other at a coffee shop. So, obviously, they have an agenda and they have a secret they want to hide and the other one's trying to get that out of them. Write that scene.

[Brandon] Write that scene with no dialogue tags?

[Maurice] With no dialogue tags.

[Mary] Awesome.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.9: Quick Characterization

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/04/13-9-quick-characterization/

Key points: Quick tips for characterizing side characters? Give them something weird and memorable, something in conflict with the reader's expectations. Also something that conflicts with the POV character's expectations. Or use the tricks people use to remember names, e.g. alliteration. To make a character come to life, write a brief scene or piece from their viewpoint. Play two truths and a lie with your characters! Beware of turning characters into a single quirk, a.k.a. Flanderization. Figure out what makes the character do that thing, then pay attention to how that motivates other things. Use peekaboo moments, add a splash of color to a scene highlighting something unusual about this side character. A juggling guard? Just a momentary glimpse of the motivations and passions of the side characters. To quickly introduce characters, have the characters, justifiably, talk about each other. Beware of overdoing quick characterization of side characters! Finally, make sure that the side characters are doing something when the protagonist walks on stage.

( Rounding out the flat side characters... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Quick Characterization.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are talking all this month about side characters. It's a topic we've touched on before on Writing Excuses, so I want to dig into something specific about side characters this week. I want to talk about how we characterize people quickly. Because sometimes, you just don't have a lot of space to dedicate to these side characters. So let's say you only have a couple sentences to characterize someone. Dan, how do you go about doing it?

[Dan] Kind of the cheap and dirty hack that I use is just to give them something that is, in my opinion, unexpected. Based on what their role is or what their situation is in the story, I will throw something else weird on top of that so that you'll remember, "Oh, yeah, this is that kid, but also he really likes this one strange thing."

[Brandon] Right. They put them in conflict with the reader's expectations. It's a really good way to make someone memorable.

[Mary] One of the things that I try to do, actually, is that thing, except not just the reader's expectations, but the point of view character's expectations. I… Because using that allows me to kind of slide past some of the I am telling you what this character looks like. It also allows me to then convey information about my main character, which, when I'm writing short fiction, I have to be able to get every sentence to do double duty. One of the sneaky tricks that I will use sometimes is I will use some of the tools that people use to remember names in real life. Which is… If the character says their name, I will slide a detail in that is alliterative without…

[Brandon] Wow!

[Dan] Without calling attention to it?

[Brandon] That's interesting.

[Mary] Yeah. Monty with the mustache.

[Unsure] [inaudible now]

[Brandon] Oh.

[Dan] So, like an example?

[Mary] Monty with the mustache.

[Dan] Monty with a mustache. Okay. Awesome.

[Mary] I mean…

[Howard] Howard with the hairless…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Hairless Howard. I get… And there are other memory palace kinds of things that you can do with that, too. So…

[Brandon] Right. Make the guy named Jim a butcher.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Actually, that would totally work. So, I was… I'm terrible with remembering names. That's when I meeting someone in real life. So I was taking a class on how to remember names… It doesn't help me actually that much. It's a little better. But I suddenly realized that these were all very useful tools for cementing a name with a reader. So… If I have a character who is a jeweler, then I will… One of the details that all call attention to is the earrings that are hanging from her pendulous earlobes…

[Brandon] Nice.

[Mary] If I have named her Patricia, pendulous…

[Howard] Pendularia…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah. Penny. That is a very sneaky… I do not deploy that all the time, but that is a trick that works distressingly well.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think I got better with side characters once… And this is kind of coming back to the name thing. Once I realized that I wasn't good with names, and I wanted to be, so I started practicing any time I was in public. I learned the names of all the people working the line at the place where I got salads. In the course of doing that, they always gave me the best strawberries. Because I was the guy who came in and knew everybody's names. But in the course of learning their names… They were all wearing identical clothing. They're all working this salad line. But in the course of learning their names, I forced myself to remember some of these details. I taught my brain that this is important. So I started retaining that information. It's fascinating that the two seem to be related. If… I will often see in movies, when I can't tell two side characters apart, I know they've done it wrong. Because I'm pretty good at tracking those things, and if I can't tell, then it's just… It's not been done right.

[Brandon] So…

[Dan] Well…

[Brandon] Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] The… One counterexample being something like Crabbe and Goyle from Harry Potter, who are supposed to be interchangeably faceless.

[Brandon] How do you characterize people without viewpoints? Let me explain this. I find it, as a writer, really easy if I give myself a brief viewpoint through someone's eyes to dig into their back story, to kind of discovery write…

[Mary] Luxury!

[Brandon] Who they are, right? And just suddenly they come to life. If I don't have a viewpoint, then I have a lot of trouble with that. It's like…

[Mary] I will go ahead, sometimes, even when I'm doing short fiction, I will go ahead and do a little bit of an exploratory scenelette thing from the other character's point of view. Usually the same scene that I'm writing. Especially if I've got a character that is being very flat, which still happens sometimes. It's just you're not getting traction on them. So I'll do exactly that. I'll write that scene from their point of view, which helped me figure out what their motivations are, and some of the physical… The body language that they're going to be using. Then I'll flip back to my main character, do the scene again, incorporating the information that I've learned. Which will often… I don't do that every time, but it's a very useful exercise to engage in sometimes.

[Brandon] I've seen you do something similar.

[Dan] Yeah. So the thing that I do, all the time… And this is… This is such a dumb little thing. I will play two truths and a lie with my characters. Because then I get to know things about them, and I get to know what kinds of things they would lie about. It's fascinating. I've done it with… I think at this point, all of my young adult series. The one I'm writing right now, I actually put a scene into the book because I find it so interesting. But just to watch them tell truths and tell lies. Inevitably, I'll have one character that tries to cheat. It just tells me a lot about who they are, very quickly.

[Mary] I want to point something out that you said about what are the things that they would lie about and why would they lie about them? I think that when we have characters who wind up dropping into being just a single quirk, then I think one of the reasons that that happens is because we've thought, "Oh, I'm going to do that quirk. I'm going to give him this quirky thing." That the flanderization…

[Brandon] Right. We'll talk about flanderization in a minute. We can just dig into it right now. Why don't you tell us what flanderization is?

[Mary] So, flanderization is referring to the slow evolution of a character into just being a quirk. It relates to what happened to the character Flanders on The Simpsons. That he started out as being this very rounded character, and then eventually became a single joke.

[Brandon] Because when people saw him come on the screen, they all wanted him to do his thing. So he did his thing, and the writers all just had him do his thing. Then he stopped being a person, and started being a quirk.

[Mary] So, I think one of the things that you can do to keep that from happening is figure out why your character does that thing. Then, only deploy it when the triggers happen. If you want them to do it, then you have to give them the trigger, and the trigger then has to be coherent to the rest of the story. It also makes the character more rounded, because you… Whatever reason they have to do that thing, that same reason is going to motivate a lot of other different choices.

[Brandon] Month, we're going to dig into this kind of idea really deeply. We'll do an entire podcast on the idea of characters who are self-contradictory, or characters who wear different hats in different social situations and act differently in those social situations.

[Mary] Spoiler alert!

[Brandon] We will dig…

[Mary] Everyone does.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Into this a lot.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You are actually going to tell us about Brimstone.

[Mary] Yes. Brimstone by Cherie Priest is fantastic. It is a story set right after the 1st World War. There are two main characters. The… One of them is a young woman who is a medium. She has traveled to this new small town to learn how to use her powers. It's a real town that really had a spiritualist movement in it, and still does. The other character is a man who survived the war and has come back with a ghost. But he doesn't realize he has a ghost. Things just keep catching on fire. It's their interaction and figuring out what it is that is haunting him and has come back with him from the war. The characterization in this is so rich. It's a huge cast, because she's in this small town, filled with spiritualists that she's meeting. There's… It's this very huge community. Each character feels distinct and individual. Even ones that are on stage just for a few moments. It's… Even the ones who actually never come on stage, because they're dead already.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It's wonderful storytelling. It's…

[Brandon] Brimstone.

[Mary] Brimstone.

[Brandon] By Cherie Priest.

[Mary] By Cherie Priest.

[Dan] And if you've never read Cherie Priest, she's one of the few writers who can hook me from the very first sentence of a book. The just… The writing itself, the language is incredible.

[Mary] It's written in an epistolary form so that each character is… That what you're reading are there journals.

[Yeah!]

[Brandon] So one of the things I've learned over the years for characterizing side characters in specific, doing things quickly, is what I call peekaboo moments. It's a measure of great gratification to me as a writer when occasionally someone will come up and say, "Oh, this little side character just came to life for me." Almost always it somebody I've done one of these peekaboo moments, where you are writing a story. In general, you'll describe the scene and then focus in on the main characters and have the conversation or the conflict and things like this. Everything else fades to background, even some of the side characters who are coming in and interacting with them. What I like to do is occasionally say, "No, we're going to add a splash of color to this specific scene, to this specific person. We're going to fade them from the black-and-white background into the characters paying attention to them, saying, 'Oh. This person wasn't what I thought they were.'" This guard, who's standing guard at the door, isn't the person I thought they were. They are, between… While they're waiting, they're standing there juggling or something like this. What I tried to do in these peekaboo moments is show a moment of humanity and back story and passion from somebody who's not related to the main story at all, just so that you get a glimpse that hey, all these people populating this world have their own motivations and their own passions. I find that the occasional use of one of these can really add a lot of vividness to your story. Or using them with a character who's often in the scene, but is never the main character. The reader will take that character and take that image of them and bring it to the next scenes where they're going to be like, "Oh, yeah. This is the person who has twin daughters and is always on the lookout for two copies of things, because they like to give it to their twin daughters." I don't know. Something like that, that human… Gives humanity to the background characters.

[Dan] There's a… One of my favorite movies is Brick by Ryan Johnson. Which is a… Basically a film noir, but set in a modern high school. As much as I love it, I could not tell you who any of the side characters are, except for one drug dealer, who pauses somewhere around the second act break and gives a little monologue about how much he likes the Lord of the Rings books. He's such a beautiful character, because of that moment. It's amazing how much richness that adds.

[Howard] One of the tricks that I use is having the characters, justifiably, talk about each other. The 18th… 18th, good Lord!… Schlock Mercenary book, one of the opening scenes, the company's about to take a job, and our protagonist is talking to her sister. Her sister's saying, "You know, I need medical help." She's like, "I'm not a doctor. Why are you calling me?" "You work for a mercenary company. You got battlefield medics, don't you?" "Well, yeah, our doctor. I guess she's okay. But our battlefield medic is like a walking cutlery station." Then we have the battlefield medic show up behind her and say, "Saved your life." Schlock says, "She also hears really well."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now we have, in two panels, insight into five characters. Okay, it helps that I'm able to illustrate them, so some of this context is…

[Luxury! Chuckles]

[Howard] But the… I did it specifically. I've got a spreadsheet for this. I did it because I knew these characters are all going to be critical to this story, and I need to introduce the reader to them early in a way that is memorable.

[Brandon] But doesn't take a lot of panel space.

[Howard] But doesn't take a lot of panels. Yeah. It took two panels. And while this is happening, we are moving the story forward by establishing why this job is going to make sense for the company to take.

[Brandon] There are some books out there, and I was going to give the kind of warning, that you can't do this too much in most books. If every scene, you're spending a paragraph on five different side characters, then suddenly the point of quickly characterizing…

[Mary] A paragraph!

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But there are some books that this is kind of the way the book is. We've recommended the Gollum and the Jinn.. the Genie... The Gollum and the…

[Mary] Jinni.

[Brandon] The Gollum and the Djinni on the podcast before. I read that because you guys recommended it.

[Mary] [inaudible]

[Brandon] It is a story mostly about the side characters. On this page, you will spend three pages on this side character. On this one, you'll… They just kind of are there, populating the story and constantly interacting with the main characters. But the main characters are almost there as an excuse to explore entire community… [cough] Excuse me.

[Mary] I think one of the reasons it works in that book is because everything is new to the main characters. So that's one of the reasons that it works, is because of the POV focus on who is this interesting person that I've encountered that is unlike anything that I've ever seen, living in a glass bottle for a thousand years. So this is… There are many other books that do that where I think it does not work, it's not compelling and engaging.

[Brandon] I would agree.

[Mary] Can I offer one other trick? Think about… One of the things that I will do sometimes is think about where the character was or what they were doing before the protagonist walked on stage. Because I think one of the things that will make a character seem flat is when they have just been waiting for the main character to appear. So, it's… You don't even have to give the character a name or anything like that, but if my main character walks in and the clerk behind the counter wiped mustard off her mouth and then smiled brightly. "Can I help you?" That character already feels more real and compelling than just…

[Brandon] That's a really good tip.

[Brandon] I think we're out of time. Howard, though, you've got a cool thing that cartoonists use.

[Howard] Oh, yeah. The silhouette test. It's not… Cartoonists, comic book writers, anybody who's working in sequential art where there are characters.

[Mary] And puppeteers.

[Howard] Yes. Puppeteers. If you're going to keep these characters straight, they have to be able to pass the silhouette test. Which is where all of the details of the characters are removed, all you can see is the outline, or all you can see is the filled outline, just the silhouette. If you can't tell them apart, something has to change. I… I have… I ask myself this all the time. What is the prose equivalent for the silhouette test? What I've kind of boiled it down to is the adverbs and adjectives that I will so rarely let myself use when I'm describing characters. Which are the ones that I would only use on character A and would never use on character B? Just make a quick list of those adjectives and adverbs. Once I have those, when I am writing the characters, those adjectives and adverbs need to disappear. Because you expand them out into other things.

[Brandon] So your homework…

[Howard] Come up with those.

[Brandon] Is to come up with those. Yeah, you don't necessarily want to always describe somebody who comes on scene as greasy. But if on one scene, they're the person who's always eating a big hamburger and dropping bits of it to they… To their jeans, then that image you can use repeatedly.

[Howard] So, the homework. Take your cast of characters, and make their adjective/adverb list, so that, in terms of those words, they are passing the silhouette test for you.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/09/10/12-37-subplots/

Key points: Subplots usually carry less emotional weight. The subplot's inciting incident starts after the main plot inciting incident. Subplots often are related to the main plot in some way. Sometimes the real emotional resonance is in the subplots. But beware of subplots that lead the reader too far from the main plot. The main plot needs to move forward. Subplots should be in service to the larger story. Sometimes you can spin a subplot that isn't needed off into a separate short story. Subplots don't necessarily have to be related to the main plot, but they should intersect. So look for the intersections that are interesting, that complicate or change the story. How can a subplot change the character's plans? How can the subplot support the main plot? Using MACE, try to look for a subplot that is in a different category from your main plot, to get interesting intersections. If you can remove the entire subplot and it doesn't affect the story, then the subplot doesn't belong there. Although it may illuminate the character or world... Subplots let you pull solutions for problems from them. Beware of having it be too convenient! Do side characters need a subplot fo their own? Not necessarily, although it is one way to flesh out a character. But sometimes, you just let them achieve goals offstage.

( A plot, B plot... Save the cat! )

[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and get some homework.
[Wesley] Okay. So, your homework for the week is, let's say that four major things will drive a story. They are environment, characters, disruption of the status quo, and questions. Take a piece, look at your main plot, and decide which of these main four things it is. Then ask which of the remaining three things can go wrong. Make one of them your subplot.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go right.

[Brandon] So, listeners. I used the word gypped in this podcast. It's a word I've been trying to eliminate from my vocabulary. We thought rather than just cutting it out, I would put this little thing on here. This is one of those words that wiggles its way into your dialogue which you don't realize it is deeply offensive to people. So I want to apologize to the Roma people who might be listening. I'm trying to get rid of it. If those who don't know, it actually means Gypsy ripping off, because Gypsies were seen as people who would rip you off. It is an offensive racial stereotype. So, I apologize for using that. I thank you guys for continuing to listen even through the mistakes that we occasionally make.

mbarker.livejournal.com

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/09/29/writing-excuses-episode-34-what-the-dark-knight-did-right/

I'm Brandon, I'm Dan, I'm Howard . . . and I'm Batman

( here there be spoilers? )
Writing prompt

Brandon: take an old piece of writing, one that you've been working on in the last year, and take a dialogue scene. Then take each line of dialogue up by half a notch -- make it a little more unexpected, evoke a little more of the character -- but it should mean the same thing.
Howard: crank it all up, but have the dialogue end up in the same place as before.

Current Mood: gothic
Current Music: What Was I Thinkin', Dierks Bentley

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Episode 33: Side Characters

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/09/22/writing-excuses-episode-33-side-characters/

Key points: Give your side characters their own voice, sensible motivation, and unique aspects. Give them a good motivation and make them the center of their own story. If they are too interesting, promote them to a main character or cut them out.

( The Meatloaf )
Writing Prompt [confusion over how to take a side character without having written a main character results in Brandon suggesting]:

Brandon: take a side character from the future, bring them back into the past, and write a story about them.

Howard: thank you, and goodnight kids.

Current Mood: sidelined
Current Music: Independence Day, Martina McBride

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Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction

Writing Excuses 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs

Writing Excuses 13.27: Characters As Foils

Writing Excuses 13.10: Handling a Large Cast

Writing Excuses 13.9: Quick Characterization

Writing Excuses 12.37: Subplots

Writing Excuses Episode 34: What the Dark Knight Did Right

Writing Excuses Episode 33: Side Characters

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