Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.

Dec. 18th, 2019 10:06 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.
 
 
Key points: An old writing adage, Write What You Know. But what does it mean? Tap into what you know from your own experience! Extrapolate from what you know. Write what you know is true. Know your genre... or not? Write what you love. Mix the familiar and the strange. Write what you know, but add what you don't know, too. Write what you know may be boring to you, but your experience is individual. As a writer, you filter everything through your own experience. What you are passionate about may be a better story. Use your own emotional touchstones to make a richer story. Expand your knowledge, know more. When you tackle something difficult, put the other parts on an easy setting.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 50.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You… No.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] This is an age-old adage in writing circles. Write what you know. You may have been taught…
[Howard] Can I just say write what you nope?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Yes. You may have been taught it before. It's kind of confusing. The first time I heard it, I'm like, "Wait. So I can't write fantasy or…" What do you guys think of this adage?
[Mary Robinette] So, I agree that this is one of the things that is often wildly misunderstood. The idea behind the original is that there are things that you know, that you can tap into. You know what it's like to be afraid. You've had these different experiences in your life. If you tap into those and write from your own personal experience, you're going to have a story that's rich in texture. The thing that I often say for fantasy people is extrapolate from what you know.
[Brandon] Yeah, that's a good suggestion.
[Margaret] A phrasing I heard of it once from Alice Chadwick at a conference on narrative and nonfiction. He said, "Write what you know is true." There's some unpacking around that, but I think that really it speaks that same grain of truth, of you don't have to write your own literal experience… I'm not necessarily giving advice to journalists with this, but as a fiction writer, you can write from your own experience. If that is grounded, then that will ground your story, no matter how fantastical you get from there.
[Howard] For journalists, it's write what you've verified with an additional source.
[Laughter]
[Howard] The… Early in Schlock Mercenary, I hadn't done a whole lot of research with military folk yet. But I was fresh out of a very unhealthy corporate environment where… I've talked about this principle before… Position power was being substituted for personal power. I am your boss, therefore you must like me. All the time, all over. It was very top-down. I was familiar with how that worked and how it was broken. I just sort of built the personalities of my mercenaries in that manner. I got email from people saying, "Were you and I in the same unit? Because I swear you've described my lieutenant or my captain." I found that very flattering, because what it said to me is I know enough about broken people to have correctly described one that I've never met.
[Brandon] One of the things that… When I think about write what you know, I get actually really conflicted. Because I like some of the sentiment that this phrase is telling you. But then I go the rounds. If I kind of look at fantasy novels, there is a big part of me that thinks, if you're going to write in a genre, you should familiarize yourself with this genre. You should know the conventions of the genre and you should become part of the discussion. There's another smaller part of me that says, "Yeah, but people who have none of that baggage sometimes create things that are just wildly new and completely off the beaten path and doing something very interesting with the genre." So you can see, I kind of… The two different sides of me fight about this pretty often.
[Mary Robinette] I think one of the questions there is, like, where is the line between what you know and what you love? So I think that when people are writing something that… And they're coming to science fiction and fantasy from outside the genre, there still chasing the thing that they love and they're still writing the thing that they know. They're just adding this unfamiliar to it. Which is the same thing that we do in genre. We're writing something that we love. We're always trying… We talk about this all the time on the podcast, the familiar and the strange. It's just that for us, the genre is the familiar. That is us writing what we know. Then we add other things that we don't know onto it. So I feel like it's two sides of the same coin.
[Margaret] Yeah.
 
[Brandon] How do you guys incorporate who you are into the settings that you're building?
[Uh…]
[Howard] You know what, that's a question that…
[Margaret] I try not to, honestly.
[Howard] That is a question that will be very specifically answered in great detail when I'm no longer around to defend myself.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because I remain unaware of an unknown number of my biases that creep into my work in ways that I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, whatever. I like to think that I'm aware of how I'm influencing these things, but there is a voice up in the nosebleed seats that says, "Expect to be wrong. But don't worry, because you'll be dead before anybody really points it out in detail."
[Margaret] When… At a slightly more literal level, I know my first published short story, Jane, was in Shimmer magazine. This is a story about a paramedic who winds up at the center of a zombie apocalypse. Really, it's about her relationship with her foster mother. I have her walking in the streets of Los Angeles. She absolutely lived in the first apartment that I lived in in LA. Even… It's like… It was boring to me, but I'm like, "Only one other person has ever lived in that apartment with me." So, it's like… Walking up the street, if you were familiar with the street when I lived there, the empty lot that's there was absolutely there. She is fictional, the dog is fictional. Like, I don't know much about zombies, but I can root it in a Los Angeles that I've walked the streets of, and I've heard the traffic, and I understand it.
[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said in there that I really want to underline for the readers about why write what you know actually works. It's boring to me. But the experience that you have as a person is individual. It's not an experience that other people have. It's why you all get so excited every time I break out the puppetry stuff. When I'm in puppetry communities, it's like… They're like, "Oh, that thing went wrong? Let me one up you with this." It's like this is… It's all old hat to us. But when I come over to writing, to prose, it's a novel and fresh way to look at things. So, one of the things that… To get back to your question about how to put yourself in there, is that you act as a filter for everything that you're writing. We get asked all the time where do the ideas come from. We also always say they're all around you. But what you're doing as a writer is that you're filtering it through your own experience. So I think, for me, one of the things with the… Parts of the way write what you know that is true is to trust your taste, and to trust your own experience, and to trust that it is interesting to other people.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So this is Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. I was the audiobook narrator for this. It's the sequel to Amberlough, which I raved about previously. This is such a strong book. It follows on the heels of Amberlough, which it basically feels like it's the Weimer Republic. Here we have three of the… Or two of the viewpoint characters that we had in the previous book plus a new one. So we've got to people that we are familiar with and they've moved… They are refugees now in another country. So what you're getting there is a lot of the outsider "OMG, what's going on?" But you can still see Lara's voice coming through, even though this is in a totally new place. Also, the characters and their interactions are all informed by where they have been… By their past. I think that honestly you could read this book without having read the first one, but the emotional resonance between the two books is so powerful if you read them sequentially that I… I'm recommending Armistice, but if you have not read Amberlough, pick up Amberlough, then read Armistice.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, kind of, I want to push on this theme a little bit further, because I think this is really interesting. A lot of times, when I'm talking to my students and working with them at the university course, this is something that they completely miss. This idea that something that they are really passionate about can make a much better story than trying to in some ways write something patterned after what you've seen before.
[Howard] Certainly, write something bigger than they could ever be is…
[Brandon] Or just more bland. Really.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's the thing. People don't trust themselves that what they're passionate about is going to translate into stories. I really do think if you are really excited and passionate about something, that's going to help you make a better story.
[Absolutely]
 
[Brandon] Now there is a danger there in the kind of waxing too long about a topic or going too deep into jargon or things like this. Kind of losing track of a story because you're too busy writing about the ins and outs of breeding rabbits which is really interesting to you. How can you balance this?
[Howard] For me, it's emotional touchstones.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] I'm going to share a very personal example. In 2006, I separated my shoulder and was prescribed Lortab and ended up addicted to it. The addiction was not one where I was stealing in order to illegally obtain pills. It was one in which I now had a dependency that was controlling me, instead of me controlling it. We went off of Lortab, and when I say we, it was Sandra removing it from the house and shepherding me through the process of living without this stuff. For two years after that, if you said the word Lortab, I wanted to cry. Because I knew that this was a thing that would relax me, that would make me kind of happy, and I absolutely could not have it. That experience was incredibly alien to everything else about me. You could say a word and it would hurt me. That knowledge… I can use that as a writer. In 2018, I injured my arm in a different way. The doctor said, "Well, we don't know what's wrong yet, but maybe ibuprofen, or we can get you some hydrocodone." I know what hydrocodone means. That 12-year-old addiction came back all at once. I almost broke down in the doctor's office. Now I have this understanding of how when an addict says, "I'm not no longer an addict, I'm just not using. No, I'm always an addict." I have an understanding of that. I don't need to write a story about someone who separates his shoulder and then has a blood pressure problem. I can write a story about somebody who has lost a loved one and thinks they're over it, and 15 years later stumbles across a photograph and discovers that they're not. When I think write what you know, that's a thing that I know.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Yeah. The… Less personal example, but all puppets, all the time, which is what I do, is… We talk about voice and things like this. I've talked about this when we were talking about the voice podcast, that there's three things when we're talking about puppetry, style of puppet. It's mechanical style, the aesthetic style, or the personal style. The mechanical style is what kind of puppet is it? The aesthetic style is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like it's handcarved? The personal style is you can hand the same puppet to two puppeteers and it will look like a different character. It's because of the individual taste of the performer. Jim Henson, if you look at anything else that he did that is not Muppets, like, was much more in a Dada, surreal, experimental land of filmmaking. Steve Whitmire, who initially took over Kermit, was much more of a linear storyteller. So they're going to just make different choices. This is the kind of thing that were talking about with write what you know. It's like when we're saying trust yourself, trust your own instincts, it's… These things will allow you to create something that is special and unique. When you're taking something that's deeply personal, like what Howard experienced, you're going to explore that in ways that are different from someone else who has that. It's going to allow you to bring an honesty to your work when you're reaching for things that you know. This is why also when we, in the larger picture, when we're talking about the hashtag #ownvoices, which is the importance of reading fiction and supporting fiction written by people from a lived experience writing about their lived experience, the reason is because that lived experience is going to inform that fiction. When you sit there and say, "Oh, but my world is boring. My world is normal." What you're also doing is you're setting yourself… First of all, you're devaluing yourself.
[Margaret] Right.
[Mary Robinette] But you're also kind of setting yourself up as the default, as the dominant, and exoticizing everybody else. That's… That is also a problem. This is not to say that you're not allowed to write other people. That's not… It's not that you're never… It's like I am totally allowed to write people who are not a… Let's see when this podcast airs… Not a 50-year-old white woman. But… Oh…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Sorry.
[Howard] I'm already a 50-year-old white man as of this recording, so… Have fun with it.
[Mary Robinette] Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. To be honest. But the point being that I am allowed to write other characters. I'm allowed to do these other things. But when we talk about write what you know, there's two aspects of that. One is that my work should be influenced by what I know. The other thing is that my work will be influenced by what I know, whether I want it to or not, and I have to be aware of that when I go into stuff.
[Margaret] I think the other thing that strikes me about… I think probably the first time I heard write what you know, I was maybe a second grader, it was like one of those came across in elementary school…
[Howard] I have bad news for you, kid.
[Margaret] Well, that's the thing, because it sort of… You get told that as a child, and it's like, "What do I know?" What you know is not set in stone. One of, I think the charge inherent in write what you know is expand your knowledge. Know more.
[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I'm going to say is, especially if you are tackling something that is very difficult, it is totally okay to put everything else to the easy setting. If you are… Especially if you are an early career writer, and you're like, "I am trying to get a handle on plot." Don't try to get a handle on writing the other at the same time that you're trying to get a handle on writing plot. With Calculating Stars, I knew that I was going to have to be handling mathematics and orbital mechanics and all of these other things. Judaism! Which, I don't know if you noticed, been raised Southern Baptist and Methodist. Really, this is not… I was handling all of these things. So I set Elma to a Southern woman, I gave her a mother that's very much like my mother, that relationship, I gave her a marriage that's very much like my marriage. I sent everything I could to what I really know, to give myself room to work on and concentrate on the things that I don't know. Even there, I was extrapolating from what I know.
[Howard] And you decided to tackle this project when you are already pretty comfortable with what goes into writing a novel.
[Mary Robinette] That's true. That's the other aspect.
 
[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to wrap us up here. It's kind of a sad moment, because this is us saying goodbye to Margaret. Not forever. But this is our last podcast with Margaret, so we're going to let her give the homework this week.
[Margaret] All right. So, the homework assignment this week. We want you to take an area that you are super familiar with and turn that into a superpower. The same way Mary talked about how we all think her puppet stuff is completely cool, the way that my background as a screenwriter has made me a structural god among novelists…
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] This is…
[Mary Robinette] Quite true. Accurate. Accurate.
[Margaret] Find something in your life that you maybe don't think is all that interesting and make it the coolest thing on the planet.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you, Margaret.
[Margaret] Thank you.
[Brandon] For hosting with us this year. You all are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?

Feb. 20th, 2019 10:45 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?
 
 
Key Points: How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling? Typically, you get one bye, you can ask the audience to believe on big thing. Everything else has to follow from that. Beware of "Oh, it's magic" so anything goes. This depends on the expectations of the audience, and the genre you are writing. But even serial urban fantasy has one major shift, not anything and everything. Make sure the audience knows where they are and what they are doing. Sometimes the worldbuilding is too weird the first time, but re-reading is okay, because now you know something about what is going on. Sometimes you can do more weird things by connecting them to the first bye. Think of a budget -- weirdness, boring, anything that challenges the reader, they all draw on your budget. Too much, and you lose the reader.  Learning curve... add weirdness slowly, building off other weirdness. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Seven.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How Weird Is Too Weird?
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] My friends used to call me How Weird.
[Ooh! Garbled… Starting this podcast]
[Howard] Yeah. How Weird is too weird. Just…
[Brandon] Oh, no. Sorry. No.
[Howard] That was like fourth grade.
[Margaret] [garbled]
[Howard] And junior high.
 
[Brandon] Well, let's… We're going to theme this again. This is our year of worldbuilding. So we're talking about how weird is too weird, specifically in our worldbuilding. Let me just ask, how do you, and I kind of want to bounce this off Margaret first, because she's the one we've heard the least from regarding these topics. How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling?
[Margaret] Well, it depends to a certain extent on the media that I'm working on for that particular project. But in television, one of the rules of thumb that I sort of inherited from my training in my experience is the idea that you get one bye. Like early on, you're setting up, the beginning of your film or the pilot episode of your show, and you get to ask the audience to believe one big thing. Everything else has to sort of follow on from that. A show that… I mean, an exciting example of a show that no one has seen because it never actually turned into a TV show, but I was working on a show called Day One for NBC. The bye for that was these giant alien monoliths suddenly erupt out of population centers all over the Earth. This is the vanguard of an alien invasion. It would have been a really cool show. But that's the one thing we get. We don't get that and armies of flying elephants and dolphins can now talk. Like, you get the one thing. Past that, everything either has to come from those monoliths and the alien invasion, or it's got to be rooted in the familiar world that the audience is already going to be familiar with.
[Brandon] That's very interesting.
[Howard] There's a flipside to that coin that gets cited a lot by apologists and whiners of all flavors. That's, "Oh, you can believe in a universe that has dragons, but you can't believe in a sword that cuts through a horseshoe?" Well, you didn't say it was a magic sword. A sword can't cut through a horseshoe. I will totally believe in dragons, because they gave me… That was their one bye. If they want to tell me that dragons cut through horseshoes, that's fine, I can probably absorb that, and say that their one bye is magic exists and that includes creatures. But you have to pay attention to this. You don't just get… You don't just get to throw these things down because, oh, hey, it's magic.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask you, Margaret, do you take that same perspective on fiction? The one bye? Or would you kind of say that's a short form, television thing?
[Margaret] I think it depends a lot on the expectations of your audience, and the genre that you're writing in. When I'm working on Bookburners, this is very much designed to be in the vein of something like X-Files or Warehouse 13. It's that urban fantasy sort of set up. So the assumption is that the world works basically the way that we assume that it does, but also there is this encroaching magical force that is coming into the world that causes this. We don't get that and the major power… And the Vatican doesn't exist. You can only shift around so many things before it starts to feel arbitrary. What you want to do is make sure that you're setting your audience up in a way that they know where they're standing and what they're doing.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. As you were talking, I was thinking about China Mieville. Like, with the new weird movement, the basic bye is stuff is going to be weird. We're going to have women whose heads are bugs. Not the head of a bug, but their head is a bug. But gravity works the way gravity works. Electricity works the way electricity works. So if China were attempting to do stuff is going to be weird, I'm not going to explain the physiognomy of any of these creatures. But and also gravity doesn't work the way you think it does. That would be two byes. So I think that you can do kind of a blanket bye in terms of this is sort of a genre expectation thing.
[Brandon] Right. Say, I'm thinking of like Hitchhiker's, right? Where the… There is not one bye. The bye is nothing will make sense, but it will be funny. But I do think genre expectations are a big deal here, right? When you write… You pick up an epic fantasy that's a 1000 pages long, it's secondary world, you are going on board for I'm going to get a lot of worldbuilding. When you sit down to watch a new show that's been pitched to you as a science-fiction thriller with a singular hook premise, you want that premise to be the focus of the show, not and then this other thing.
[Howard] You brought up Hitchhiker's… I assume you're talking about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes. So much weird. The reason they get away with it is that the narrative voice would take some of the weirdest… Hey, boy, this came at you from left field. I'm going to now use this… Use the opportunity to explain it, as an opportunity to be funny and to satirize something you didn't see coming. So as that extreme weirdness happens, the voice sells it in service of something else. I think that's where I draw the line.
[Brandon] The voice is the familiar.
[Howard] You want to make it weird…
[Brandon] In the Hitchhiker's Guide.
[Howard] The voice is the familiar.
[Margaret] You, as the reader, have a literal guidebook to all of the strange stuff that is going on in those books.
[Mary Robinette] Plus, the point of Hitchhiker's is that you are Arthur Dent. So the expectation that has been thrown down is everything is just going to seem strange.
[Brandon] Everybody else gets this but you. That's kind of the joke.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask this, then. Have you guys experienced media or read books or stuff where the worldbuilding was too outlandish for you? That it was hard for you to get into?
[Howard] Yes. I'm going to apologize for it, because I loved it anyway. Iain Banks, Look to Windward. The opening sequence is a war, battle thing, in which we are just immersed in the POV of an alien who is essentially a six-legged giant ferret. He never says, "These are six-legged giant ferrets." I never get all at once a description to tell me where I am. I read the first chapter and was lost as to who I was until I got to the end and thought… Oh, I was actually kind of disappointed. Oh, these aren't people. This had felt very human. Then I read it again. Reading it again, I was fine. I felt like I was the target audience for this. I was absolutely the target audience for any Iain Banks' novel. But that first chapter was too weird on first reading. Iain Banks… His one bye for me is if you have to read it again, read it again, this is going to be fine. You're going to love this. It's going to be okay.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Which, Mary, you're going to give to us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, this is The Nine by Tracy Townsend. Which is, for me, right on the edge of too weird, but in ways that are… I, like, finished the book and have been recommending it quite a bit. It's… It feels like London, and it feels like a steam punk London, but there are these other creatures that are going through. It's a… It's taking advantage of the many worlds theory, so it's a version of our London, but definitely on a different world, and there are these creatures that have their eyes in their feet.
[Brandon] That's different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And, so there's all of this very solid worldbuilding that goes from that single premise. But my brain is like, "Why would that evolve?" Like, and then trying to picture it, and trying to understand how it all works. So they tend to be arboreal, they do a lot of moving through trees. They have ferocious teeth, but they have no eyes in their head. Their eyes are in their feet. It is… It's… For me, like, I think one of the lines for me on the weird factor is how much time I spend trying to picture it in my head and if that's going to throw me out of the story. Now I pitch this is a book of the week because I think it's a gre… Terrific heist novel. It's got great character building. The steam punk makes sense. Frequently, when I read steam punk, it's like, this does not… Why… None of this makes sense. There's so much to love about this book. But if you are looking for something that is like, "All right, things are going to get weird," the nonhuman races in this world are weird. There's also tree people who are… Will shave their bodies, plane their bodies to take on specific shapes in order to cater to humans. It's like… There's so much stuff in this book. It's just filled with "Whaaat?" There's a ton of that. But mostly the reason you read it is because great characterization. And just a thrilling heist novel.
[Brandon] Awesome. That was The Nine.
[Mary Robinette] By Tracy Townsend.
 
[Brandon] So tell me this. Mary, when you're working on short fiction, how do you budget your weirdness?
[Mary Robinette] So. The… It's actually surprisingly like television in that you do pretty much get the one bye, you get the one thing that is this is weird. Mostly because everything that you put on the page, you have to spend words on to explain to the reader. So when I'm trying to get the reader to understand something, I know that it's going to throw them out of the story. Proportionally, that's going to take more of the narrative than it would in a novel. Even the same number of words. So I tend to also do one bye for short fiction. Usually, the short story is something that is exploring that one idea.
[Brandon] Something Margaret said earlier really kind of hit with me. We will have a podcast later in the year about how to make a story have worldbuilding depth rather than just breadth, which is the idea of taking a concept and digging deep into it. You said earlier this monolith story that you were working on. The idea being that you get your one bye as the monolith, but that doesn't mean that has to be the only weird thing. You are just going to connect any other interesting science fiction/fantasy elements through the monoliths.
[Margaret] Right, right. The idea in this series, and I think I can safely talk about what we might have done had this been a thing. My apologies, Jesse Alexander, if I'm spilling anything here. But in the pilot episode, there are these giant monoliths. Everybody is dealing with the fact that these things have erupted out of the ground. After that, other strange things start to happen. But it kind of comes at you one at a time. I think that speaks to what Mary was talking about on the short story. The idea of that subjective line of how weird is too weird… When you lose your audience, it's too weird. Anything up to that point, not too weird. When I started in film school, one of the things they told us was that the only firm rule of screenwriting is that you can't be too boring for too long.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Try to cut the boring stuff.
[Howard] That's a really good rule for everything.
[Margaret] Yeah.
[Brandon] I thought about this a lot when I've been teaching my class. I've said to my students, worldbuilding is the place where you generally are given more leeway. If you can keep your characters relatable, it doesn't matter how weird it gets as long as that character remains familiar. Now, sometimes, that character you want to be part of the weird, and then you're going to do other things to ground us. I really like what we've come up with with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing, where the guy is the normal, and everything else can be a little weird, or a lot weird.
[Chuckles]
 
[Howard] I… I'm thinking about this in terms of budget. Let me give you an analog… Or analogy. The concept of social capital. People will often ask me, "Oh, will you plug my Kickstarter?" Well, I have a limited amount of social capital. If I plug your Kickstarter, then I'm digging myself into a hole when the time comes to plug mine. As you are writing, as you are introducing weird things, as you are spending time on exposition, but it really needs to be exposed. As you are spending time on navelgazing, but you really want to dig into this emotion. All of these things are coming out of a budget. I don't know how exactly readers quantify the budget as they are reading, or television viewers quantify that budget, but if you think about it as a budget, you are doing a thing that is challenging the reader, and if you go too far, you lose them. Boring is challenging. Because a slog is challenging. How weird is too weird? When you've gone over budget, it's too weird.
[Brandon] Yeah. I would rely a lot on your beta readers, on early looks at things. Also, I think learning curve… We haven't even touched on in this, but I do think if you add your weirdness on slowly, building off of other weirdness, then you have things that feel perfectly normal by the end, that if you would have thrown it at the reader in the first chapter, you would have been in trouble.
 
[Brandon] We're going to do our homework. Margaret, you've got our homework this time.
[Margaret] Yes. The homework today is to… Well, your homework today, if you choose to accept it. Take a project that you are working on. Figure out what your one bye is. Can you narrow it down to one science fictional or fantastical element that is the core to the story you are telling, and have everything flow from that?
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

Jun. 15th, 2017 01:44 pm
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Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/06/11/12-24-creating-great-outlines/

Key points: This episode is about outlines to help you write, not sales tools. People like structure, it is comforting. Mix a familiar structure with a bit of strange, and you can relish the oddity. First, the Kevin J. Anderson: pitch, expand to 5 pages, 20 pages, and keep blowing. Thumbnail sketch, synopsis (internal beats), scenes. This approach keeps you focused on what this novel is about. It also gives you room to be creative and get the discovery writing out as you expand. Beware, too much interesting stuff in the outline can make writing the novel boring. Don't try to include everything, just the key details. The Wesley Chu: outline 30%, write a bit, outline more, write more. The structuralist: seven point, three act, Hero's Journey, etc. Create your beats and build the outline. Also good for diagnostics -- what's wrong with this story? The George R. R. Martin: use historical incidents. Often used in science fiction and fantasy, based on a historical record taken fantastical. The Sanderson: build your outline backward. Start with a great ending, then look at what promises lead to that. How do you justify awesome things? Prequels, interstitial tales. The strength of an outline is that restrictions breed creativity. Structural requirements can push you in directions you might not have gone otherwise.

( Details, details, who has the details... )

[Brandon] All right. Well, we are out of time. We are going to go ahead and have Mary give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. Okay. So we've talked about a bunch of different outline structures. What I want you to do is I want you to take the list of events in whatever it is that you're thinking about writing. I want you to take a list of structures. So, seven point plot structure, The Hero's Journey, all of these different things. Heist! List out the scene types. Then slot the scenes from your event list into the scene type list for each of these different structures. See which of these kind of fits organically with your story, and which one kind of makes you excited, and what opportunities they allow.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.8: Wonder As a Subgenre

Feb. 24th, 2016 12:48 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.8: Wonder As a Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/21/11-08-wonder-as-a-subgenre/

Key points: Wonder as subplot. Often the first half is exploring amazing, wonderful new things, while the main plot is building for the second half. Mash up waiting for the next wonder with something else. Put awesome things in! Make a list, order them, and write. Beware taking them out of order, kung fu on a train goes before the nuclear explosion, not afterwards. Use set pieces, major scenes. Make your buildup fit. Foreshadowing is important. Sense of wonder, strangeness, newness, and reactions. Make sure the character can be awed -- sometimes a naive viewpoint character can help (eh, Watson?). But when Sherlock is surprised, you know it is amazing. Don't just do set pieces, fill in the corners with amazing candy wrappers, too. Even small moments of wonder can be very useful. Build the progression -- something new, something strange and unexpected, and then amazement. Booger-flavored candy? Consider timebombs, plot tokens that foreshadow you've got this many coming. Apprentice plot, travelogue, whenever you set up promises of wonders to come and then pay them off, it can be good. Be careful that your subgenre doesn't take over the story, though. Use little pockets, layers, flourishes of wonder, not a distraction but an accent, just an Easter egg for the reader to enjoy now and then.

( A drop of sunshine, a sparkle of dew, a firework display, bright and shiny! )
[Brandon] We actually are out of time on this. This has been a fantastic podcast. But we're actually going to give you some homework.
[Dan] All right. Your homework this week is that we want you to do this. We want you to actually take a story that you're working on, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a sense of wonder, and apply a sense of wonder to some aspect of it. Somebody walks into a room and sees something amazing. Or walks out into the city street and sees something amazing. Write a paragraph or two where your character experiences a sense of wonder.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.6: The Element of Wonder

Feb. 9th, 2016 01:10 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.6: The Element of Wonder

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/07/11-06-the-element-of-wonder/

Key Points: Sensawonda? Oh, sense of wonder! A 15 story tall ship! A giant promenade in the middle of the ocean? An aft balcony, with a new sunrise and location every morning! New, strange, and amazing. That's so cool. How do you get there? A spaceship the size of a moon. "That's no moon." Context, the POV reaction, the reader reaction. Direct the reader's attention with the character's attention. Basking in the moment of awe. Give the character, and the reader, time. Foreshadow (aka context) and then reveal. Pacing. Don't rush, let the character's attention linger on it, walk through the fine details, enjoy it. The sense of wonder isn't always big, sometimes it's something tiny. Also, there's a sense of engagement, of wish fulfillment, with the sense of wonder. It's not just wonderful, we get to do something with it!

( Fireworks, sunsets, glory! )

[Brandon] We are out of time with this one. So we want to give you some homework.
[Dan] All right. Your homework today is that you are going to apply a sense of wonder to something for us. But we want you to do it with something that is relatively small and ordinary. Something maybe just by your desk, something in your house as you look around. Spot an object, and then describe it in such a way that the reader will get a sense of wonder.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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