Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-19-cooking-as-a-writing-metaphor

 

Key Points: Swapping ingredients is creative! Chefs learn from recipes, you can too! Mac & cheese and fanfic. Cooking at home does not mean you are a failed professional chef. Sustenance writing? Meal prepping and writing prep. Creme Brulé. Understand the technique behind the recipe. Things will go wrong. Joyful mistakes! Know what biscuits should be before you make one. Good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.

 

[Season 20, Episode 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[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 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Cooking as a Writing Metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Howard] Hey, you know what I love? I really love to make food for other people. Almost as much as I love eating. But I think all of us kind of love eating. I remember years and years and years ago, we were talking about creativity and how occasionally you'll talk to somone and they're like, "Oh, I'm not creative. I'm just... I can't create to save my life." "Do you cook?" "Well, yeah, of course I cook." "So, if you're cooking a thing and you don't have one of the ingredients you need, what do you do?" "Um, well, I go to the cupboard and I look at what's in the cupboard and I try and find something that'll substitute." "Aha! So what you're saying is you are creative, you just didn't know it yet." And this is one of the ways for me that cooking functions as a metaphor. At a very high level, it's an acid test for whether or not you really can be creative. At a much lower level, boy, there's a lot going on. There is so much going on. There is… I'm sure we are all familiar with the phrase necessity is the mother of invention. Recently, Sandra has had some dietary needs, some dietary requirements, and I've discovered that mayonnaise works instead of butter. How did I discover that? By doing all kinds of reading and research, and it's the same sort of thing that you do when you're writing. And so, in this episode, we're going to talk about cooking as a metaphor for us as writers for writing, and I think this is going to make all of us hungry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's true. One of the things that I want to say is that… You were saying everybody cooks. I'm like, actually, that's not true. There are a lot of people who don't cook. Or who think that they don't cook. But when we're talking about cooking, when we're talking about creativity, there's this whole range, like, if you have selected a frozen dinner and you stick it in the microwave, that is actually cooking. It doesn't mean always that you have to start from scratch. Like, sometimes you're cooking and you are cooking using somebody else's kitchen, sometimes you're cooking using somebody else's ingredients, sometimes you are like, I'm just not in the mood. And there's still ways to be creative within that. Anytime you're having to make a choice, the choice is the creativity.

[DongWon] Well, and… Like, in writing and in reading, there's so many valences we put on certain kinds of things. Like, we look at French cooking. Right? Michelin star French tradition cooking as like so worthy and valuable compared to other traditions. But, I've had as much enjoyment eating at a very fine dining restaurant as I have standing at a counter in a gas station eating a taco. And the way you enjoy things… And a box mac & cheese at the exact right moment is one of the finest pleasures in life. Right? So they're different kinds of writing and different kinds of creativity and art that fit different situations. That doesn't mean that the box mac & cheese is inherently worse or less valuable than the 300 dollar tasting menu. I am nourished at the end of both of those. I… Both in body and in spirit. Right? And, I think, think about what you're getting out of the things that you're making, rather than how the world would put a price tag on the thing that you're making.

 

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. And also know that, like, there are… That those degrees of interest and degrees of skill, and that skills are things you can acquire. That the, for me, the thing at the core of this, when we're talking about cooking, is nourishing… Although there's some really good stuff that's not particularly nourishing, like, give me a delicious s'more. Like, if that's, like, a toasted marshmallow? Oh, my God.

[Howard] Burnt sugar and air.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So good.

[DongWon] There's a lot of different kinds of nourishing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? There's body, there's emotion, this spirit, there's all these different things. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is absolutely true. But if you're looking at something and thinking, oh, I can't do that because I don't have those skills. The top chefs did not have those skills either when they started.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] They learned them.

[DongWon] And you learn from recipes. Right? You learn from starting to read recipes from a book that explains the basics. For me, that was The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. I know a lot of people sort of of my generation learn to cook from that book where it just goes through, here's the core techniques, here's how to break down a chicken, here's how to heat up a pan, here's, like, all the very basic techniques that let you learn the different components of what a dish is, what a recipe is.

 

[Howard] It… I hadn't thought about this before, but boxed mac & cheese may be kind of like fanfic. In that you start with something where you know exactly what it's be… You've seen it a thousand times, you know exactly what's in it. But you make the boxed mac & cheese and then you reach for the Panko breadcrumbs and the bacon bits and you put them in on top and now you've done slash fic.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've done your own take on Kraft mac & cheese or whatever. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because at some point, at some point in your cooking journey, you realize, hey, you know what? I… What if I actually use real cheese instead of this powdered stuff, and a mixture of milk and butter? How do I get to that point? That might be interesting. I'm going to try that. As a writer, boy, what if I build my own fantasy universe instead of using Gray Hawk, instead of using Dungeons & Dragons?

[Dan] So, one of the things to remember about this is… Nobody looks at the home chef and says, "Aw, it's too bad you're a failed professional chef."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Haha!]

[Dan] Right? Like, just because you cook at home doesn't mean that you have professional aspirations, or that you need professional aspirations. And writing can be the same thing. It's something that we do because we love. Even if your goal is to eventually make money with it, you start because you love it. And it is a thing that brings you joy. And, so making sure that you know kind of what your goals are as a writer can help you deal with those thoughts of inadequacy or criticisms coming from outside. Somebody finds out that you're a writer, they'll immediately ask, "Oh, have you published anywhere? Have you sold anything?" Shut up. That's beside the point.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That might be our goal, but that's not why we're doing it.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. And one of the distinctions I think about when thinking about what the difference is between… Not the home chef and a professional chef, but what I think of as sustenance cooking versus cooking for joy. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The… I resent sustenance cooking. When I have to make myself lunch in the middle of a work day, or it's seven o'clock on a Wednesday night and I'm starving and I need to prepare what to eat, like… I'm furious at the idea that I need to, like, stop and cook.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? That's sustenance cooking. Versus cooking a meal with… For somebody you love or for yourself or whatever it is. And the difference, to me, is intention. Right? When you approach what you're doing with intention, that changes… That changes from the emergency I need to feed somebody box mac & cheese to the I'm going to build a sauce for this mac & cheese. I'm going to add the breadcrumbs. I'm going to do more with it. So, even if it is fanfic that you're doing, when you're approaching that fanfic with the kind of intention about what you're trying to accomplish and what effect you want to have on your audience, that, I think, is transformative and brings a different level into it.

[Howard] Okay. Pop quiz. What is sustenance writing? I'm going to say email.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I was going to…

[Howard] I'm going to say email.

[DongWon] I think journaling can be sustenance writing. I think email. But I do think there… There's a lot of kinds of writing… I think a lot of writing… The kind of writing you would do for fanfic, the kind of writing you do just as tests to see if something works. Right? I think there's a lot of times people are sitting down and forcing themselves to write. They're like, I have to get a thousand words out today. Right? Otherwise I can't call myself a writer if I'm not doing that. I think writing when it comes from obligation as opposed to a pull towards craft and attention… And that's not me saying that writing… That kind of sustenance writing isn't important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's hugely important and valuable. And learning how to do that's import… In the same way that me learning to feed myself, even though I resent it, is also important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but also, like, learning to feed yourself in ways that you don't resent…

[DongWon] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] Learning to do sustenance writing in ways that you don't resent. Like, I… One of the things that I often find is that I have something that's prepackaged, that's available. So, for my emails, I have templates, often. These are things that you can do. And also, for me, when I'm writing… Like, when I need to make progress on a project, sometimes I have to do sustenance writing on that, where it's like, I just have to make forward progress. And if I break it down into small chunks that… It's like meal prepping. Where I'm like, I know that tomorrow I'm going to be able to do actual, like, prose writing, but today I can do my meal prepping, I can set all of my ingredients up, I can make a bullet list of these of the things that I need to do. And often, when you do that prep… When you walk into the kitchen, it's like, oh! As a complete accident, we have… I've got… It turns out that I don't actually love shopping for groceries, and doing the menu planning. But I really enjoy cooking. My husband is often… He's doing some volunteer work that's 20 minutes away. And so he will let me know, I'm on my way home. And it's not a predictable time. So what I've been doing is, I've been doing all of the sous chef work, all of the prep work, and then I get that 20 minute notice, and I walk back into the kitchen and I cook. And I'm finding that that is actually starting to influence the way I'm writing, too. That I will do some prep work, and I'll take a little bit of a break, and then I'll come back and it's like, oh, look at this gift that I've given to my future self.

[DongWon] This is me spending a day and making stock…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Kimchee for the month. Whatever it is.

[Dan] Yeah. There's this… I love this idea, and it's reminding me of the cooking thing that I'm going to horribly mispronounce, because it's French. Maison plase? [Maison plais?] The idea there is that you prep all your ingredients in advance. That you pre-chopped everything, that you premeasured everything. So that when it's time to cook, you just have them close at hand. And I'm realizing as I listened to everyone talk, that that's how I use outlining. That if I have my outline, and I am an extensive outliner… I outline scene by scene. And so when it is time to write the next thing, I can open that outline and look at it and I know who's in this scene and what it is supposed to accomplish and what is supposed to happen and blah blah blah. Which is just like having everything pre-chopped and I can just pick it up and throw it in a pan.

[Mary Robinette] And it doesn't have to be outlining. You can also, if you're a discovery writer, you can also bank sensory details. So that you've got those ready at hand. So what does this room look like? I will often use C. L. Polk's five four three two one technique. Where I just write down, okay, what are the five things that are visible in this room? What are four things that I can hear? And I'll just go through those… All five senses so that they're banked, so when I sit down, I've already thought about that. Even if I'm doing some discovery writing.

[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. And after the break, I'm going to argue with someone who's been dead for 150 years.

 

[Howard] All right. In the nineteenth century, French chef Antonin Careme famously declared that there are five mother sauces. Espagnole, veloute, bechamel, tomate, and hollandaise. And I looked at those when I learned this and realized four of those are thickened with a roux, which is butter and flour. And one of them is a water and oil emulsion. Dude, there are only two mother sauces.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are only two, because four of them are exactly the same thing, all you're changing is the flavor. I bring this up because this only ever happens in cooking. I've never had writers argue about what kinds of forms there are for writing, or anything.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, you are not hanging out with the right writers. That's all I have to say. There are only three stories.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] It's only Man meets man, man… It's like…

[DongWon] There's only The Heroes Journey, there's only Save the Cat, there's only…

[Howard] Yes. The one I heard was there's only two stories. Somebody… Stranger comes to town and somebody goes on a trip. And I'm like, those of the same story, it's just the point of view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's only one story!

[Howard] The point here is that I love structure, I love formula. And the first thing that happens when I look at a formula or a structure is I begin asking it… I begin trying to break it. I wrap it around things it shouldn't be wrapped around, I play with taxonomy. I love this. Does it result in good cooking? Eh… Maybe. Sometimes. Does it result in good writing? It can. What are the things where you've done this? Where you've taken a form and you've said, well, this form is interesting, but it really doesn't mean what I think… What everybody says it means. I'm going to do something else with it.

[Mary Robinette] Um... [Kaily.]

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… I think that is the heart of this, is that we'll hear a writer say, "Oh, I don't want to do anything formulaic." And the difference between formula and formulaic is very interesting. So I tend to think of writing as recipes. And when I am doing recipes, I always wind up swapping something, because, you know what, I just want a little bit more of this, or a little bit more of that. And when I'm writing, also, it's like, the number of times that I have secretly done a retelling of something and I just haven't told anyone that it's a retelling… And I haven't asked… I've like filed the serial numbers off really hard. No one's noticed. No one's noticed, but I'm using somebody else's recipe. This is… Like… There are… You go to a restaurant and you order the cream Brulé, and there's a whole bunch of… Like, boy, that is a very simple dessert that you can really mess up. But that's something… That's a recipe that someone invented, and it has become a genre.

[Howard] Someone whose first question was, can I use this blowtorch in the kitchen?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] The answer is yes.

[Howard] Yes, you can.

[DongWon] [garbled] fire.

[Mary Robinette] I had a Parmesan cream Brulé with a spicy red pepper jelly on top of the Brulé part is an appetizer that was transcendent. And that was someone going what if… What if I take this well-known thing and swap some stuff out?

 

[DongWon] Because, I think, getting to sort of the core of what you're talking about, and the core of what Howard's talking about in terms of, like, yes, there are the mother sauces, yes, it's important… Blah blah blah blah blah. But what matters more is that there's technique behind each of the mother sauces. Right? And I've read so many cookbooks that have been completely transformative to my practice, that have been so useful. The one that I think made more of an impact than any other is a book called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. And Ratio, it's a very slim book, and it's just teaching you not to think in terms of recipe, but giving you the logic of why recipes are structured the way that they are. The ratios that go into thinking about food, into thinking about drink, and to thinking about… I mean, Samin Nograt's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is getting out this in a different way. Right? Those are the four elements of any dish. Salt, fat, acid, and heat. How are you applying them, that's going to make things delicious. Right? And so, think about ratio, think about elemental ingredients, and you'll see the logic behind the recipe. And then, any recipe you run into, you could figure it out. Right? Any book you want to write, if you understand the ratios, if you understand the core elements, you can write a mystery, you can write a space opera, you can write a romance, you can do whatever story you're trying to accomplish.

[Dan] I am trying to imagine… We're recording several episodes today. This one is coming before lunch.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And I am trying to imagine what this episode would be like if we recorded it after lunch. When we were full, and we didn't want to think about food anymore. We wouldn't get this enticing description of cream Brulé.

[DongWon] Dan, you're underestimating our ability to get hungry thinking about food.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And writing is a lot like that. And I think a lot of it, a lot of the time… Writer's block, for example, comes down to that same idea of I am full right now. There are words in my brain, I have already written some of them, and I'm just not feeling it anymore. And that's okay. Sometimes it is time to get up and take a walk and digest a little bit.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and…

[Dan] Because that is going to help you feel excited about writing again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and sometimes the reason that you are not interested in cooking or food is because you're ill. And you need to take time to rest. And it's okay. And we don't… We so often have that write every day. And it's like if you don't cook every day… No. You absolutely don't have to cook every day.

[DongWon] If you're feeling uninspired, go out to eat. Go to a nice restaurant. Go to a place you've never been before. Try a new cuisine. Try a new dish that you've never tried before. And that'll help inspire you. You've got to put in the tank to get stuff out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things I just want to quickly hop back to when we were talking about the salt, fat, acid, heat, is that this is something that I have been thinking about more and more over the last year is thinking about the why. So, like, I tend to sit down and talk to you about what a mystery structure is. But why does it work? When we talk about the long night of the soul, or in a heist structure, the false… The all is lost moment. But that's the plot twist where, oh, this was the secret plan all along. And I think it's because there's a contrast. And so when I see people who are playing with the recipe, and they swap an ingredient out, but they don't understand what that ingredient does. That's, I think, when you get the fiction that feels lifeless or formulaic. Because they aren't swapping it with intention, they're just swapping it to swap. They're just swapping it to do something different.

[Howard] That's… Gary Larson of The Far Side perfectly described that contrast element in cooking when the polar bears are sitting outside the igloo and one of them says, "Man, I love these things. Cold and crunchy on the outside, and soft and warm in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Anyway. But, yeah, that… If you don't know why these things are there, then when you make the substitution, it's a roll of the dice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] You're going to make the wrong sub.

[Dan] Okay. So this is bringing your metaphor back around to a place where the puppetry metaphor also got two. Which is the idea that execution is a vital part of this. That any recipe that you follow is going to be uniquely yours because you are the one who made it. Just like when we were talking about the mother sauces, and the idea that we joked that there's only one story. Something happens to a person. You could reduce all recipes down to somebody eat something. Like, when we get that granular with it, it's not helpful anymore. Whereas, you think about a hamburger, for example. That is a formula. That is a recipe. Although every hamburger that you've had is different from every other hamburger that you've had. You can get very creative with it, you can deconstruct it, you can add different elements to it. But ultimately, it is going to be uniquely yours if you are the one who made that hamburger. And I would rather eat your hamburger than a generic one somewhere else.

[Howard] I would rather eat your hamburger then let you eat it.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] Well, when you talk about execution, one thing that comes to mind is I think a very important thing. I cook a lot. I feel like I'm a pretty good cook. I like to cook, I make good food, people enjoy it. The number of times something goes wrong in the kitchen while I'm making a meal… Making a meal I've made a million times before. Last time I roasted a chicken and a number of small things just went slightly off the rails. Right? I was like, oh, I don't have the soil. I was making the cocktails, I was like, oh, I don't have lines. You know what I mean? And it's just like things inevitably go wrong. In terms of it could be as dire as you burn yourself, you cut yourself. It could be as minor as this is the wrong kind of onion. Right? And how you respond to that, and how you move through that, I think, is what defines a great cook from somebody who's struggling. Right? And when I see people… I've been to people's houses and they're struggling with the food is not at the level that they wished it would be, it's because they don't know how to respond to a setback. They let the setback overwhelm them and don't understand how to improvise, how to move, how to replace, because they don't know the core elements that were talking about. They don't know the ratios, they don't know the broader elements. So the reason we're talking about all these things is when you're writing, something is going to go wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? You will get derailed in your process, a character arc is not going to work the way you want it to, an emotional beat's not going to land, an action scene won't land. How do you move past that? How do you fix that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, when I have that, I try to look for the opportunities, I try to look for… Going back to puppetry, there's a thing about the joyful mistake. Croissant… Some dude forgot to put butter in when he was making… It's like puff pastry exists because somebody was like, oh, no, I forgot to add butter at the right time, and had to fold it in later to compensate. And now we have this joyful, joyful thing. So when you… When something isn't working, you can step back to what was I aiming for, what were my goals, how do I accomplish that anyway? And then it winds up being a joyful mistake that brings… Because of your response to it, because you brought your own choices to it, you wind up with something that is different than everyone else is making.

[Howard] It was a chemist at 3M who was trying to come up with a new adhesive and came up with an adhesive that really only barely worked. And that's why we have Post-it notes. This is one of the reasons why writing is so much better than cooking. Your joyful mistake may not be right for this book. But you can put it in your trunk and it will literally keep for decades.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The puff pastry is not going to last that long.

[DongWon] It freezes pretty well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] One thing I want to tag onto this is to return to the cream Brulé for a moment. One of the best cream Brulé's I ever had was at a Japanese restaurant which did a black sesame cream Brulé. Incredibly delicious. Combining a traditional East Asian ingredient with French technique and style and riffing on this sort of thing. When you're cooking, you're going to be pulling from lots of different traditions. You're pulling a technique… I make a lot of Korean food. I frequently pull in what would be a French technique into making a Korean dish in terms of sautéing the onions a certain way before hand or whatever, whereas Korean cooks would just toss them in. Right? And it's not that one's better or worse, it's just I put a spin on it by combining these different traditions. But it's also very important to understand why a food… To understand what the dish you're trying to make tastes like for the people who originated it. Right? I lived in Portland, Oregon for a few years, and that is a town that loves to make a biscuit. I also feel like that is a town that learn to make a biscuit by calling a friend who visited the South once and they described it to them over the phone.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Some of the worst biscuits I've ever had in my life. They are…

[Mary Robinette] Listen…

[DongWon] Tough.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You and I, both Southerners… I also lived in Portland, Oregon, and every time that people would be like, you should go to this place, their biscuits, they're Southern biscuits. I'm like, these are not biscuits.

[DongWon] They are so committed to the worst biscuits I've ever had. But the thing is, what I feel in so many cases is, they haven't had enough of the original thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] They don't know what it's supposed to taste like, so they're trying to re-create it. And when it comes to tradition, and when it comes to writing, when you're pulling in elements from other cultures, when you're pulling in structure from another culture, there is an obligation, I think, you have to understand what the origin thing was. You're not trying to replicate it. But if you want to pull elements from it, you need to at least have a facility and be able to recognize what the thing was.

[Howard] What you're saying, if I can distill this all the way down to the roux, is good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I think that might be the point where we do the homework.

 

[Howard] All right. Listen, this whole episode has been about giving you a metaphor for helping you to understand the way you write. The tools that are in front of you. If we've done this correctly, every time you sit down to cook or to eat, part of your brain will also be writing. Because we are terrible people and we may have just done that to you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I'm going to double down on that. Make a list of your top three comfort foods. Top three. Then make a list of your top three comfort reads. These can be specific books, or they can be styles of books. Now, map them, one to one, on to each other. As logically, as rationally, as deliciously as possible.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-46-an-interview-on-structure-with-n-k-jemisin 

 

Key points: What was your process? I wrote an outline that laid out the three plot line structure, the opening with an overview of the world, and that there would be a cliffhanger ending. Then I write test chapters. It started to flow. But about halfway, I decided it was trash. Devi talked me down. Structure and process are intertwined. Deep and close reading. I wrote the majority of Essun first, then started working on the other two. I fixed a lot in revision. I seeded in a lot from the beginning, then took out a lot in revisions. Starting with too much is an easier edit. Epic fantasy wants certain things. What if we have a complex magic that is indistinguishable from technology? The restoration tradition in epic fantasy is  a manifestation of privilege. I wanted to explore oppression. I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 46]

 

[Howard] I have three be a better writer tips. The first, write. The second, read. The third, get together with other writers. That third one can be tricky, but we've got you covered. At the Writing Excuses retreats, we offer classes, one-on-one sessions, and assorted activities to inspire, motivate, and recharge writers just like you. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll 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 19, Episode 46]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

 

[DongWon] We are incredibly excited to have a guest with us today. As the title implies, we have interview… We are interviewing N. K. Jemisin as we are finishing our section talking about The Fifth Season. Nora is truly one of my favorite authors working in the genre today…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think an absolute powerhouse when it comes to sort of redefining what fantasy is right now. Not to overstate it right at the head into us. But, we are incredibly excited to have you here and to start diving into some of the topics we've been talking about when it comes to The Fifth Season. So, welcome.

[Nora] Thank you very much. I'm N. K. Jemisin. Welcome. Thank you for welcoming me to this podcast.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] You are also the sweetest person in the world [garbled for having?] said that. Thank you.

 

[DongWon] Very, very happy to, and I promise it's only true things. But… Let's dive right into it. So, as we've been talking about Fifth Season, we really focused on the structure of this book, with sort of the three point of views that you eventually realize is all one character, just split across time. I was always entranced by how this book is put together. It feels like an intricate puzzle box. Yet, as we were chatting before we headed into this recording, this episode, you mentioned that you don't do a lot of planning ahead of time. So, what does the process look like for you to put together this thing that, as a reader, feels quite complex? But to you, was an organic process?

[Nora] Um. There is some structure involved. I wrote an outline that sort of basically laid out the three plot line structure, the sort of opening, which would be sort of an overview of the world, just to kind of introduce people to the planet as a character. And that there would be a cliffhanger ending. That… All of that, I knew up front. My initial thought was that the story was going to be third person, very traditional telling, present tense… I mean, sorry, past tense, third person. Nothing sort of experimental or unusual there. But I always write test chapters. The test chapters, I will just simply start writing. Like, I'm spitballing and, I'm trying to see what voice feels best, what makes it flow, what makes it have the right energy. So I will try it over and over again, in some cases, from the different POVs, different tones, different voices. For some reason, I found myself drawn to this bizarre part third person, part second person, present tense-y… Almost… It increasingly felt like I was trying to write poetry. And I suck at poetry. So, I attempted multiple times to write poetry, only to realize I'm entirely too literal a person to do that. But here I am, I'm pulling the hollow man, even though I'm only E. E. Cummings, I'm like… All of a sudden, all of the poetry I've ever read in my life is starting to speak to me and wants me to acknowledge that flow, that energy. It was a truly instinctive… Like, this just feels right. So I started writing. It started to flow well. I was like, this is ins… This is bizarre. I've never really written anything this… Just experimental, I guess. For lack of a better description. I've never written anything this off the beaten trail. I don't know if it's right. But it feels right, so I'm going to keep going. Then, of course, I hit a point about like halfway through the book, where I suddenly decided that this is the worst thing I've ever written, I can't believe I've written this much, I need to stop right now. Devi Pillai, my then editor, editor at Orbit books, had already given me… Had already offered me a three book contract, and I had happily signed it and happily gotten the advance. At that point, I was like, this… I've never written anything like this, I can't keep doing this. This is going to make people think that I'm the worst writer in the world. So I called up Devi, I was like, I want to stop doing this book, I'm going to change this back to a single book contract. I think I was crying. Devi was like the editorial equivalent of hey, Nora. Have a Snickers. You always want to quit your novels when you haven't eaten. So… Basically, she told me to sit down and relax. So, around the same time, a bunch of friends of mine dragged me out for a intervention.

[Laughter]

[Nora] A very drunk intervention. Over mimosas, they were like, Nora, this may hurt. So…

[DongWon] Stop reading Modern Miss poets and get back to reading your poets. But…

[Laughter]

[Nora] Anyway. So we're segueing over from talking about structure. I'm sorry. But that was basically how I wrote it.

[Howard] Yeah, but see, that's… Structure and process are so intimately intertwined. I mean, when we talk about structure with each other, when we talk to writers about structure, it is in part of a… It is as part of a discussion on process. You have a structure that you are originally working with, and then you realize… You get to the middle of the book, as I think almost all of us do, and decide that we're wrong, we've always been wrong, we hate writing, and we're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is a structural moment. That is a moment where you go back and you look at what you're doing and you eat the Snickers and you have drinks with friends at the intervention, and then you go back, and, I assume, at some point realize…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness, the second person is actually teeing up a wonderful reveal. And… [Garbled] I don't know when that moment was…

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] But your reveal was brilliant.

[Nora] Well, the reveal… So I knew at the beginning that all three perspectives were the same person. That was a given. I knew that my primary perspective needed to be Essun. That Essun was the person whose story I was ultimately telling. They're all Essun, but that was…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] The focus that I wanted to keep. So I found myself seeding in hints into Essun's POV… I put hints into all three of them on purpose. Because I am an evil writer, and…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I cackle while I throw in little hints. I'm like Did you notice this one?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Nora] But, uh...

[DongWon] Going back in a reread, it is such a delight to pick out all those little moments of, like, oh, diabolical.

[Nora] Isn't it?

[DongWon] That she was giving us this… I remember noticing stuff in the introduction of Essun that, like, leads to that understanding later. I was just like God damn.

 

[Nora] Yeah. Yeah. Those are my favorite kinds of books to read. The books where, when you are really… Where you enjoy the first read through enough that you're willing to go back and reread it and catch all the little stuff. So that is… I don't expect anybody necessarily to pick up on it the first time around. But, deep and close reading are… Deep and close reading is something that I want readers to do with me. It is what I love to do myself with good writing. So I want to reward that with here's a blanket which she mentions in one chapter that you're not going to see again tell like six chapters later. But, little things like that. So, um… But, yeah. I knew from the very beginning that it was going to be all three people in the same perspective. I did write Essun's part first. Because I felt like I needed to know where she was going and where she was going to end up in order to write the other two. But then the other two, I kind of flipped back and forth between Damaya and… Oh, God. Wow.

[DongWon] Syonite.

[Nora] Syonite. Wow. Wow. Okay. Coffee… I don't have enough in me. Sorry.

[DongWon] Always. Yeah, I was really curious about the order in which this was written. Because part of me was like, did she write just sequentially, chapter 1, Chapter 2, chapter 3, altering the perspectives? But hearing that you wrote one of the POVs first, and that then enabled you to write the other two… Which makes sense. Because Essun is like the spine of the novel in some… So many ways. Her story's like carries us through as we start to understand the other perspectives and the history that she's had up until this point.

[Nora] Yeah, I wrote the majority of Essun first. Because I needed to have her lodged in my head. Then I started kind of working on the other two, and inserted some earlier chapters. But I reached a point where I was basically alternating between the POVs as I wrote. It just felt better that way. In fact, in some cases, I was deliberately… Like, when I was writing about Damaya, I would have just written a segment in which Essun went through some terrible hell, and I wanted to seed in a parallel to that that Damaya has to go through. Or that Syonite has to go through. I had to actually kind of stop that, because it was a little too obvious. In the revisions, I fixed it, I think. But…

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Nora] Yeah. But that is how it got written.

 

[DongWon] I mean, we spent a whole episode talking about parallelism in this book. Right? Your use of parallelism in the different character arcs, but also over time. Right? Starting with the child death and ending with a child death. Starting… You'll have one beat that then is replicated across all three stories at different points in time. Which, like, set up so many sort of like thematic resonances. It was almost like… Like the magic system, you were setting up these different resonances that were coming at us from different angles, which, like, built to something, but felt quite powerful. When you're setting up those parallels… I mean, you were saying that once you started alternating, you saw them coming in, and then you sort of shifted them around or cut back on them in edits. When you're seeding like, these clues, in as well that you kind of mentioned, was that planned at the beginning or did you find yourself layering that kind of stuff in later? Because I think… I love that we're talking about process so much, because I think these are the questions people have when they see something beautifully structured, they're like, how in hell do you do that? Because you can't think of all these things when you're outlining or when you're doing your first drafts sometimes.

[Nora] Right. Right. The majority of the parallels and the hints and things like that, I seeded in from the beginning. I took out a lot. I am not a subtle person. I am a… I am a person that throws bricks at the heads of my readers. I have to stop sometimes, because I need to be more subtle than I naturally am. So revisions are my favorite. Revisions are when I'm like, oh. Oh, that's way too… Let's turn that brushstroke into a dab. Let's turn that brick to the head into a pebble to the head. Or whatever. So I removed a lot of really obvious stuff. Honestly, it still felt too obvious to me. But then I ran it through some beta readers and that helped a lot. Because things that scream obviousness to me are far more subtle in other people's eyes, I think. So…

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like… I don't know if you've ever performed stage magic, but it's a little bit like being the magician and knowing which hand you palmed the coin into. Being able to see from your angle, yes, I have a fake fingertip on this finger. It's often very difficult to step out of that point of view… Like, man, everybody's going to see this. I can see it. It's obvious.

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] No. Nobody's going to see it. You're moving your hands fast, and you've written this well. I feel like there's an instinctive element here, that sometimes we have to go back and remember. When I wrote this the first time, my instinct was to do this. I've cleaned it up in revisions, and I haven't broken it. That's the thing I think we're always afraid of, is that we'll break something in revising.

[Nora] No, I have always loved revisions. Revisions are my favorite part of writing. Writing raw is actually my least favorite part. I am good at that part. Like, the flow… Once I really kind of get into the zone, I… If I'm listening to my characters the right way, then they are speaking and the story is writing itself. At least at a certain point. But there are two huge problems. One, I have a terrible memory. So I will write the same scenes, or the same kinds of scenes, beats, over and over and over again. Because I don't… especially when I'm on deadline, I don't have time to go back and reread the entire book, and I forget that I put in some particular beat, and then I do it again, and I do it again. So that sucks. Because each writing session is about anywhere from like 1500 to 3000 words a day, and by the time I get to the point where I am doing page 100, I will have forgotten what's on page 25. So that's one problem. But the other problem is that the urge to be subtle feels coy to me. I've always preferred just being straightforward. I've always preferred just saying what I mean. The problem is that it's a good idea to be subtle sometimes. It's a good idea to kind of let the story speak for itself, the action or the setting or whatever speak for itself. I've got to get myself out of the way of that. I have sort of a… I'm told that this is a typical neuro-diverse person behavior. I don't know if that's true. I'm still adjusting to realizing that I have been ADHD my whole life, and had no idea until relatively recently. Yet, when I look back, I'm like, "How did I not know?" So… Anyway.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] But, um… So I'm…

[DongWon] We've all been there.

[Nora] Yeah. So I'm told that is sort of common for folks with ADHD to just repeat themselves over and over again trying to be more clear each time in the hopes that they can get across what they're trying to say if they're just clear enough. If they just say it slowly or carefully enough. As a writer, I'm especially prone to that. Because I'm like if I just write it exactly the right way, they'll all get it, and it'll be obvious, and then I won't need to do it again. And, no, that's not how anybody works. So…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] That's not how I work. I don't even know why I expect that of other people. So I have to kind of get myself out of the way. I have to stop my urge to explain and explain and explain. That is what revisions let me fix.

 

[DongWon] That said, if you're going to err on the side, I think erring on being straightforward over being coy is so powerful. Right? There's so many times I read a book that is just with holding so much back that I'm like there's nothing keeping me here. You've kept so much back that I am just straight up bored. Right? So I think the instinct of just telling the reader stuff up front, I think, does so much to keep us engaged. And then, I love this idea that in edits, you're like, oh, I gotta pull back a little bit. I gotta hold a few things back, I'm telling them too much. Right? I think starting with too much and pulling back is always an easier edit than starting with… Like, underwriting is harder to edit for then overwriting. Right?

[Nora] [garbled]

[DongWon] Not to say that you're overwriting.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Yeah. I'm not sure. I've never underwritten. I've always overwritten.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] But the overwriting is a problem in and of itself, though.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Because past a certain point, I find underwriting coy. Overwriting is condescending. It is patronizing to your audience. It is assuming that your audience lacks the intelligence to figure out simple stuff.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] [garbled] subtle stuff. So… That's not what's in my head, but that's how it feels when it comes across. So I have to keep that in mind too.

[DongWon] It's all trust.

[Nora] So there is a sweet spot. Yeah. There is a sweet spot.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And there is a trust factor, and you have to remember that your trust factor changes as you proceed through the book.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] You start out at the very beginning, your audience does not necessarily trust you at all, especially when you're hitting them with second person and a bunch of other weirdness. Then, past a certain point, though, you can start to be very, very delicate with your brushstrokes. I tend to still slap on the paint. But I… Revisions are where I thin it all. To beat a metaphor to death.

[DongWon] Well.

[Laughter]

[Nora] I'm sorry.

[DongWon] No, you're doing it, that's great. Speaking of overwriting, we are running a little bit long here. So, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

[Nora] Sure.

 

[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.

 

[Nora] So, yeah. My thing of the week right now is the videogame Alan Wake II. I have gotten very into the Remedy connected universe, I think is what they're calling it. Alan Wake is the sequel to the game Alan Wake. It is companion to a game called Control which one lots of awards last year. Alan Wake II one lots of awards. These are writers games, I think. Because they are games that are heavy into sort of exploring the artistic mindset, among other things. But, also, the paranoia that revisions are to writers. Are you making the story better or are you dragging the story to hell? And is the story driving you to hell? So are you actually putting in… Breadcrumbing your ideas early or is an eldritch abomination slowly dragging your story into a terrible place? So, Alan Wake II is a game about a writer who is literally trapped in his own novel. There are other characters involved. There are other plot elements to it. But, as a writer, writing this… Playing this incredibly meta-fictional game, it has been absolutely fascinating for me to realize (A) how writing looks to other people. How writers look to other people. That's been a little actually intimidating. Because you realize Alan's coming across to pretty much everyone that meets him as just being absolutely bat shit. And there's something wrong with the guy and everybody can see it. I'm like, oh, is that how… Is that how we seem?

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Oh, good to know. But then you also see things like the author's characters getting revenge on him. [Garbled lot in common] But it's been a delight to play. And I'm actually super excited because next week sometime, the latest DLC, The Red Caps, drops. So I cannot wait for a chance to play that. So…

[DongWon] We've been talking about doing a bonus episode talking about Alan Wake and…

[Nora] Oh, really.

[DongWon] I think now we have to do that, and we have to have you back to do a deep dive with us.

[Nora] Sure. I would be… Absolutely.

[DongWon] On why this game is so brilliant. So. But thank you so much.

[Nora] Yeah. Absolutely.

 

[DongWon] Welcome back. So, so far we've done a wonderful dive into your process and how you think about the structure of these books, what that looks like as you develop it. I want to take a zoom out a little bit and take a little bit of a step back, because one thing I was thinking about is… This might be my publisher perspective coming in. Right? Of this book is very much marketed and sold as epic fantasy. Right? It's very much fitting in that category. One of the things that I think is so interesting about it is it feels very fresh and contemporary. It's not surprising to me that you were like thinking about modernists as you were writing. There's so much about it like the rupture of technology is sort of modernity coming into this book in a certain way. It feels very contemporary, it feels of non-genre fiction in terms of the structure. But when you look at all the elements, it's literally wizards going to a magical school with magic crystals and things like that. Right? Like, especially the first book has so many of the trappings of classic fantasy brought into it. So, epic fantasy can have a really rigid structural drive. Right? It wants third person omniscient. It wants prophecy. It wants multi POV, like all of this stuff. Were you actually thinking about the category as you were conceiving and drafting this novel, or were you just like I'm going to do my own thing? And did you feel a tension with that tradition at all?

[Nora] I definitely felt tension with the… I always feel tension with the epic fantasy tradition. I take very much to heart your statement that epic fantasy wants certain things. I find myself hearing those calls for certain things and saying, "No. Fuck you, epic fantasy. I'm not giving you what you want."

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I have spent probably the bulk of my career fighting with epic fantasy. Because I see such potential in that subgenre. It is… Like, why are we fixated on middle European epics, on that as epic? Why aren't we looking at Gilgamesh? Why aren't we writing about [San Diego?] Why aren't we writing about all these different cultural traditions instead of just a few? Why aren't we exploring science fictional landscapes? There's no reason why you can't have magic in space? And things like that. So I do not like the rigidity of any genre. I react badly when I'm told that the way to a particular kind of genre is only X, Y, Z. I'm like, well, what about X, Y, A? So that is how my head works. So, yes, I very much was like I'm going to put a lot of science fiction in this. Then, somewhere in… I think the two… This is a little spoiler. But, somewhere in the two, I gave a name to the force that is being used, and it is not orogeny, it is magic. And I'm just… I just did that to [garbled fool with the audience]

[chuckles]

[Nora] [garbled] because I am an evil writer as I said.

[DongWon] Because at that point, the book was becoming more science fictional, was becoming more science fiction in terms of its logics and technologies, and then that you're throwing out us, like, no. This is magic. It's such a lovely little tension there, yeah.

[Nora] Well, I mean, there's a particular thing that I was doing which is that… I believe it's Clarke's Law, is any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from science fiction… No. The other way around. Any…

[Howard] Any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Nora] Thank you.

[DongWon] There we go.

[Nora] The inverse of that, I think, is the Girl Genius law, which is the same thing. Any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from technology. And I really wanted to play with that. What if we have magic so complex, so structured, still incomprehensible, still at its core something that you cannot fully grasp or at least not easily, and not necessarily reproducible, not necessarily all of the things that are science. But what if it's magic, it looks and sounds and tastes like science. At what point do you start to treat it as a science? At what point is it just science, it's just got a weird name. I really just wanted to play with that. I did not want it to become a clear answer, I wanted it to be ambiguous to the end. Because… Again, this is a bit of a spoiler for later in the series, but the initial stage of the story, where you realize how structured orogeny is, much, much later in the story you find that another civilization went even further with the structure. They got into literally the ability to do some miraculous things with it. They scienced it to death and then drag the world with them. So I really just wanted to explore that aspect of it. It's magic, but can you science it too much? Is there a point where you have dragged it so far that it has a different core?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] It's different in its nature, ultimately.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Nora] Yeah. That was the idea.

 

[DongWon] Well, like, one thing I think about a lot is… I think about Tolkein a lot. I love those books, I love the story. It's very meaningful to me. But the thing that always strikes me when I go back to Tolkien is how mournful it is. It's very sad. Everyone's always just singing songs about how the world used to be better. Right? I think so much of epic fantasy derives from that origin point of this… What is ultimately a restoration fantasy. Right? It's we need to bring the old ways back…

[Nora] Right.

[DongWon] And the world was better before and we live in this fallen time. So, so much of what we think of as classic epic fantasy… Obviously there are departures, this is not the whole genre. But much of the core of the genre, much of its most successful elements tend to be this urge to bring something back that once was. Right?

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] If I'm… Had a couple cocktails and you catch me at the right moment in an expansive mode, what I will say is that I think the dominant mood of epic fantasy is nostalgia. Right? I think nostalgia is the thing that drives a lot of it. That is not The Fifth Season. Fifth Season explicitly starts with this statement of Fuck restoration.

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] Restoration doesn't work.

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] We can't do that. It starts with the breaking of the world. I mean, I just wandered off into a whole thesis statement about where fantasy is, but I'm curious, like, was that something that resonates with how you think about this book or were… Was that not even in your mind as you're trying to distinguish yourself from that tension between the what epic fantasy wants versus what you wanted to do?

[Nora] That is always a tension in my mind. I, like I said, one of the things that I… I have been fighting against that tradition within epic fantasy and other traditions within epic fantasy in my whole career. Epic fantasy has so much farther that it can go. And it is… The adherence of so many writers to that nostalgic theme limits it. I think that that's not necessarily a thing that they can help. I think that that is a manifestation of privilege. You want to get back to the world as it was if the world as it was is good for you. If the world as it was was a shithole, you have no need to go back to what used to be. You would not want to go back to what… In fact, you're going to fight the quote unquote heroes of the story, you're going to be an antihero and try and move on to something different, instead of returning to what was. So a lot of my fiction tends to explore these themes. Because some of it… It's pretty obvious, I think, in The Fifth Season that I'm channeling slavery. And I wanted to explore a lot of different kinds of oppression within it. I was exploring closetedness among queer people, I was exploring disabled people who had been treated as useless at varying points, I was exploring a lot of different stuff. I wanted to kind of teach one sort of unified theory of all these folks for whom the old world was bad, are going to see the potential in change. They may or may not pursue that potential. But they see it. And there's no reason for me to pretend that tension isn't there. So, yeah, in the case of… For example, in the case of Essun, I deliberately contrasted her against Alibaster. Alibaster is the reformist. Essun, for the bulk of the book, is the centrist. Who is the status quo defender, survivor, etc. one of these people… Both of them see the potential for change. One of them is just simply not willing to put in the effort that is necessary to make that happen and the stuff for it that would be necessary to make that happen. And the other is further along on his particular path towards reform, basically. I deliberately contrasted them, because I wanted to show… I don't believe that there is… I mentioned earlier that I think that that nostalgic exploration tends to be associated with privilege. For people who are coming from marginalized identities, there's different ways of reacting to that same thing. I don't believe that there's any one way of doing it in a privileged way, and I don't believe there's one way of doing… Of reacting to oppression as a marginalized person. But I wanted to show different perspectives on… Excuse me. If you are seeing the world as it is and you see that it could be better, what do you do? So, yeah, I guess it's the centrist versus the progressive, if you want to look at it that way.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's really interesting. I was just having a conversation with a cis white male author about epic fantasy. I kind of said something similar to what I said here about, like, me, even as a kid, reading epic fantasy, feeling a sense of golden nostalgia, of a thing I would never have access to. His response was initially [garbled] he didn't quite have that experience when he read it. He felt more of the potential of adventure. I was like, oh, is this just the experience of reading this while marginalized? Right? Like, as a person of color, as a queer person, of, like, oh. These adventures aren't for me. I will never get to be Taron. I will never get to be whoever a major epic fantasy hero is. It's really interesting… And I think part of why Fifth Season did speak to me so much was I was like, oh. This is from the perspective of deeply marginalized people who are being subjected to active, awful oppression. Right? It's why the scene of the Guardian breaking Damaya's hand will just, like, live in my brain forever in the worst and best ways. So… But I would love to shift away from sort of looking back a little bit at the traditions and talk about how you move forward. You've written a whole nother series since then, and… What lessons did you take away from the experience of writing these books. Obviously, they came out to great acclaim. You've won Hugos for every single entry in the series. What did you… How did this shift how you approach writing fantasy going forward and what… How you think about structure going forward? To return to the original topic, like, what were the lessons that you took away from this experience?

[Nora] Um.

[DongWon] That's a very easy to answer question.

[Ha ha ha ha]

[Nora] I think I have relaxed a little. I'm not as angry at the genre, because I said my piece. I… I… Like I said, I spent a long period of time kind of railing against the traditions of epic fantasy, frustrated by the potential that I saw that just seemed to be being squandered. I would read… I'm not going to name any particular books, but I would read an epic fantasy series and see how much more interesting it could have been if they'd decided not to restore the king to power. If they decided why don't we try democracy. I know that, like Game of Thrones, kind of went and nudged about ha, ha, ha, democracy? We're not going for that silly idea. Why would we try that? I know that there have been others engagements with that idea, and, epic fantasy as a general thing has mostly kind of laughed at the concept of applying all these modernists… All these modern ways of thinking to the story. But you aren't bound by the ways that medieval people actually thought. You are writing to a modern audience, you are a modern person yourself. You cannot think like a true medieval person. So why pretend? Why let your biases about the medieval era impact how you actually write about the medieval Europe versus how people in the medieval era might have themselves actually thought. There's a lot of potential within the genre, and I spent a long time just kind of pushing at it and trying to say, look, we can do more. We can go here, we can go there. Let's try it. Why isn't anybody else trying this? There were people… There are people who are. I don't want to pretend that I am the only writer that is doing something weird.

[DongWon] No. But I do think you kicked the door in. You know what I mean? Like, I think people were doing that, but I think you opened a door in a way… Forcefully in a way that made it easier for people to follow.

[Nora] Good.

 

[Howard] Using the door metaphor, when Tolkien published Lord of the Rings, he threw open a door into something that at the time was being called romantic fantasy or fantasy romance or something. They didn't even have a word for it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] He had a goal which was to create a sort of fictional mythos for Great Britain, and we all walked through that door.

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] We all walked through that door and ended up with that POV, ended up with that point of view, ended up with that perspective. And now when I think about worldbuilding, I have to kick myself a little bit and say, no. You're worldbuilding. You're building a secondary world thing. You do not have to adhere to the rules of feudalism or medievalism or Roman or bronzed technol… Just do what speculative fiction does best and speculate!

[Nora] That's… You raise a really good point. What Tolkien did, in creating that mythos, I think bunches of readers read the Lord of the Rings, saw what he did, and were to… And their take away was we can do medieval Europe better. Their take away was not we can do a mythos in whatever thing that we want to do. We can make up our own mythos in any direction that we want to spent. I think that there's a number of reasons why that sort of lockstep thinking kicked in. I mean, obviously, you wanted to make imitations for commercial reasons. Because when you look at Lord of the Rings, and you think, what makes it worthy of all this money and all these movies and all this other stuff, you're going to go for the most obvious imitations. I grew up in the eighties, where there were Tolkien imitators every fricking where…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] And literally called the genre or the subgenre of Tolkien clones.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And…

[DongWon] I grew up on those. They were candy to me. I loved them [garbled]

[Nora] They were candy to me. I was like 10 years old. Then I hit 15 and I was like I am so sick of medieval…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Europe once again. And I would have reached a point… I did reach a point where it was just sort of like, oh, my God. How many times can they do the same shift over and over and over again? And I think that that is probably what informs my writing…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] As an artist, is my 15-year-old, no, I am tired of this. So, yeah, I think that that's really what it kind of boils down to. But what Tolkien did was take something that he cared about…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And take it in and create a riff on it. I wanted to take something I cared about and riff on it. And I don't care about the same things that a British professor who's born in South Africa and went through World War I… One? Two?

[DongWon] Two.

[Howard] One.

[DongWon] One.

[Nora] One. I don't think about the same things, I don't have the same interests, I'm not going there. Among other things, what interested me was American history, Black history. I inserted a theme from an actual thing that happened, the Margaret Garner incident at the end of the book. You people have read the book, the first book, so Syonite killing her child at the end rather than letting her child return to slavery is based on a true event for those that did not know. Based on the actual real life of a woman named Margaret Garner who escaped slavery with her children. Something went wrong, slave catchers were closing in, she began to kill her children rather than let them go to… Go back into slavery. It was one of the incidents that galvanized the abolitionist movement, because people were beginning to… People were basically like slavery is so bad that a mother would kill her own children rather than let them suffer it. Because at the time, the marketing for slavery on the part of the slaveholders was, oh, it's fine. We treat them beautifully. Because they're an investment. We would never mistreat them. It doesn't make any sense for us to mistreat them… Didididi… All of that. So that was one of the prime… Not primary, but that was one of the thematic ways that people pushed back. I wanted to insert all of that. I wanted to riff on American history. We are a country with so many sins to our name. We are a country that cannot really function without putting someone in a position of suffering. I wanted to think more about that, basically.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] So I did the same thing that an old British guy did, but I did it from the perspective of a younger black woman. Black American.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, to me, it felt like his reference point was postwar Britain, and you moved the reference point to being 21st century America. Right?

[Nora] Yeah. Yeah.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about Fifth Season was, to me, it felt… When reading it, I felt so clearly to be to be… If not entirely about it, at least in conversation with the experience of being black in America. Right? But, nothing was mapping allegorically one-to-one. It wasn't like, oh. These are the black people, these are the white people, these are blah blah blah blah blah. It wasn't, like, mapping to specific things, but it all felt so densely and richly of the experience. Right? But a part I didn't know about the individual event that you mentioned that you were referring at the end, which is very powerful and very upsetting. But, yeah…

 

[Nora] What I wanted to explore was oppression. Not specifically…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Racism, not specifically sexism, not specifically… I was not exploring a specific oppression. I was not exploring a specific manifestation of oppression. I read about suffragism in the UK and Australia. I read about the aboriginal resistance to Australian colonization. I read about Mallory resistance. I mean, I was reading as much as I could about how people in the world pushed back against colonizers and what happens to societies that are colonized, and how it warps those societies, how it warps the people in them. And I wanted to explore the themes and not dry history. So that's why it doesn't map. I didn't want it to map.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] I didn't want it to be… This was not me trying to work through the specifics of my own life or the specifics of American history. This was me working through what is it to be oppressed. Period.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Um… And I tried to do it in a way that paid respect to all of the marginalized people whose histories and stories I read. I don't know that I succeeded.

[DongWon] I… From my experience, you did succeed very well. I found a lot to personally identify with from where I come from. For someone who is afraid of being too obvious or… Worried about a kind of didactivism, I think you succeeded in creating something very specific and very subtle and very universal all at the same time.

[Howard] I am fond of saying that there are books that are factual and there are books that are true. And you wrote a true book.

[Nora] Well, thank you. Wow.

[Howard] I come from… It's middle-aged white dude. I do not come from any of the marginalized spaces, and I read a true story about what it meant to be marginalized, what it meant to be oppressed, what it meant to try to reshape the world when a marginalized person finds themselves with the power to do some reshaping. It was a true story for me and I loved every minute of it. Except for the parts where I was mad at you, and crying.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Yes. Okay. Um…  Yeah, okay, I mean I… Writers are evil.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Nora] I am an especially evil writer. I admit it. I accept it. This is a thing that I have learned to own about myself.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest. Like, I'm killing a character and I'm like people are going to hate this. Hehehehe.

[DongWon] Make them suffer.

[Nora] Yes… Your tears. I am sometimes like that. I try not to be like that, but… In real life, I am very much… I try very hard to be a nice person. I… Everybody's got their own inner bitchiness, of course, but… And sometimes outer. But I try to be a nice person. I am very much a people pleaser and so forth. But in my deepest soul, I am a sadist. [Garbled] writers are.

[DongWon] And we are deeply grateful for it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So… Nora, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was truly wonderful. It was a real delight to be able to dig into some of the thematic elements and structural elements of this book with you. Thank you for writing it.

[Nora] [garbled] I thought so too.

[DongWon] Thank you for joining us here.

[Howard] Do we have some homework?

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Nora] Yes. In keeping with me being interested in video games lately, I've also been replaying Mass Effect, the Mass Effect series.

[DongWon] For your sins.

[Nora] Sorry?

[DongWon] For your sins.

[Nora] Always. So, what I would like to ask people to do is to imagine that they are in a game like Mass Effect where they are presented with three different attitude-oriented choices. Let's call them paragon, and the renegade, and neutral. So, take your current work in progress, take your protagonist to date, assuming that you have one, and flog them through those attitudinal flavored choices. What happens if you continue the story with your character having done the diplomatic and polite and nice thing? What happens if you have your character snap and just be super done with everything and say the stuff that they probably shouldn't say, but it's effective? What happens if your character tries to punt on either of these choices, when they really needed to be giving a more strong response? Just run it in your head and see how that affects your plot structure. I don't know if that…

[DongWon] That's fantastic. Thank you so much. That sounds like a really delightful exercise.

[Nora] Okay.

[DongWon] Nora, thank you so much again for joining us. We… It was such a delight to have you here.

[Nora] Thank you very much. It was a delight to be here.

 

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

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help? There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-43-a-close-reading-on-structure-parallelism-and-inversion 

 

Key points: Parallel structures. 3 POVs. Mirroring structure with inflection point in the middle. Inversion. Fifth season of catastrophe. Narrative rhyming. Echoes, imagery, emotional states can create parallels. A knife in the hand can create parallels. Read this book twice. How do you do this? Ask a question, again and again. Revision!

 

[Season 19, Episode 43]

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 43]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and Inversion

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this week, I really wanted to talk about the parallel structures that are present in Fifth Season. We talked a lot last week about perspectives and POV and how those shift. And we got a little bit into parallels, just inherently in that, but the way Fifth Season is structured has two major structural things, in my view. One is you have the three POVs of Damaya, Syonite, and Essun that all have their own arcs. Right? They all have the arc of being pulled through the story in a beginning, middle, end way. There's also an inflection point somewhere in the book where you have this mirroring structure of beginning with a child's death and ending with a child's death. Right? We have Essun/Syonite losing both of her children, or two of her children. The inversion of her husband killing her son, and then her killing her own son at the end of Syonite's story is this absolutely devastating mirroring effect as we have the inversion across the book. That works because we have these three parallel structures. So I just kind of want to toss it to the group a little bit. Like, is that something you grokked in the moment of the sort of rhyming between the different narratives, or did they feel really distinct to you?

[Howard] I did notice that there were parallels… I've only read it once. You have the advantage of a second and perhaps a fifth read on me.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think three total now. So, yeah.

[Howard] I've only read it once, so a lot of my time was spent figuring out what's going on. But, by the end, I definitely noticed the parallelism of the three POVs. The other thing that I noticed, and it took me a while to really grasp the in-world terminology of Fifth Season. The Fifth Season is not there have been four seasons and now there is a fifth. A fifth season is a season in which a catastrophe adds a season to your year…

[DongWon] Or your 10 years.

[Howard] And it… Yeah. It adds a season to this year…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And that season may span multiple years…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Or decades. And there was a parallelism to that, because they kept coming back to previous… Or talking about previous fifth seasons. The choking season. The season of teeth. The… Oh, what was…

[DongWon] The acid season.

[Howard] The acid season. The idea that there was a season in which they learned metal just doesn't last well…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because we get acid rain and it will destroy these nice things you've made.

[DongWon] This goes back to secondary world contextual tension that we were talking about many episodes ago now. But it's such a wonderful idea of seeing that in-world understanding of the context of a thing, where Syonite will look at the metal doors of the rich… What was the term for the towns?

[Howard] Yumenes.

[DongWon] Oh, no, no, no. There's like the whole… Like the towns with…

[Erin] Comms.

[DongWon] Comms. Thank you. Where she would look at the big metal doors on one of the Comms and just be like, "These damned fools have no idea what they're doing," because of the contextual sort of history there. So, yeah.

[Howard] Coming back to the parallelism, there was this idea… And I didn't get this until, oh, 80 percent of the way through the book, the idea that Damaya, Syonite, Essun's life is itself punctuated in the same way the world's life is punctuated by fifth seasons. There are these periods of disaster, these periods of upheaval, and I love that.

[Erin] I'll say, for me, it felt more cyclical than parallel. I think I felt more like life changes, but does it change?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think the fact that it's called the Fifth Season sets me up contextually… If you think about it, the title is the most obvious piece of contextual thing that you give your reader. It's the one thing that no one in your story knows. They do not know what the story is called. You do. So I was set up for a cycle, but I'm curious to ask, what you think is required to make something parallel? Like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Erin] How many things need to work in sync for it to feel like a parallel structure for you?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think it's almost maybe more narrative rhyming than parallel, exactly. Right? Because I think you're right, that it is cycles, especially in this book. Right? So much of what N. K. Jemison is trying to get across is the way cycles of violence and abuse perpetuate themselves, the way cycles of exploitation perpetuate themselves, the way cycles of seasons… All of that. So, to me, I think it is rhyming of certain things. Right? Like, it's hard for me not to connect Schaffa and Damaya in some of those early scenes with Syonite and Alibaster going to the Node Maintainer. Right? As we see two endpoints of the same logic, as we see two aspects of the absolute horror of what the Guardians are. Right? Then I think there's also later rhymings of seeing the Guardians die when Damaya goes and finds the socket versus I think the later scenes we see of the Guardians, both the truly horrifying attack on Alibaster…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] When they're in the city where… The coastal Comm…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Then, sort of seeing them again at the end of the book. There's sort of this thing of, like, what the hell is going on with the Guardians? Is, like, such a big question. Right? So, like, I think those rhyming things really do kind of set up that parallel. I don't think you need parallel arcs, like… I don't think every beat needs to be the same. But I think having points here and there that echo each other, that have overlapping imagery, that have overlapping emotional states, I think all three of those can be ways in which you can create a parallel.

[Howard] I talked about this in the class I taught using Beethoven's fifth and some other musical pieces, just talking about parallels and how you don't need much. If you put a knife in someone's hands in two different scenes…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In the book, they are completely different people, they are completely different knives, the reader will create a parallel out of that for you. That's an extremely useful tool. Just reading that one sentence, one bit of imagery, one element of a paragraph on a page can be enough to forge a parallelism in the reader's mind. Once you've done that, you can play all kinds of games.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's drawing the connection between two dots, and once you have that connection established, then they will feel on parallel tracks or on similar cycles, too, I think play with as a writer.

[Erin] Yeah. I love the concept of narrative rhyming that you just dropped in here, which I don't know if you… Like, I know what you mean by it, but it might be good to sort of talk about what you mean when you talk about narrative rhyming?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think narrative and visual rhyming is, like, one of the most important techniques in all of storytelling. Right? It is to… I'm trying to find a way to describe it that isn't just relying on other metaphors…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like, to me, it's like a leitmotif, right, in music. It is a thing you return to over and over again, and as you do so, you can layer on more meaning to it. Right? So, like a very simple example is the way Stonelore works in the book. Right? Where Stonelore references in all these different moments in the book, and every time we get a new piece of Stonelore or someone telling us the lore of the Stonelore, so, this is Alibaster explaining the secret tablets and things like that a little bit, the apocryphal text and things like that, we're getting all those extra layers and that adds richness and texture to our understanding of it. Right? So that's like a very simple form of… That is a very simple form of that rhyming. Right? Another example is the moments in which parents understand that their child is an orogene. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] like, hey, they have that power and the ways in which they respond to…

[Howard] [garbled]

[DongWon] Whatever it is. And then, of course, we have Essun's husband literally killing one of the children and then leaving. Then we have the other parallel on the island of how they treat orogene children. Right? So we have this rhyming, and each time, we see a new one, it's a different layer, different kind of hostility, different learning about what the world is.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] I think of… When you say narrative rhyming, my mind immediately goes to The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe. Because the word Bell is used over and over and over again, and technically, it's not a rhyme, because it's the same word. Of course, it rhymes with itself. But it is a concept, and parallel to it, or sitting alongside it, is the types of metals. Iron and silver and gold and brass are all part of a narrative rhyme, because they are all a metal and they are categorizing what we are getting from the bells.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And I like distilling it down to something tiny like a poem that super effective because it extrapolates out big for me more easily.

[DongWon] Rhyming creates a pattern which creates tension, because then you can resolve the pattern in one way or another. While we are back on patterns for a moment, let's fulfill our pattern, and take a break.

 

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

 

[A] I'm so sorry I'm late. I was just talking to my sister about protecting abortion rights.

[B] Wait. Didn't we already do that in Ohio? We passed Issue One last year.

[A] I know. By a wide margin, too. But now it's up to our state Supreme Court to decide whether they enforce it or ignore it.

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[B] Um. I don't know if I can remember that. Listen, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

[A] Here's a trick. All you have to do is remember Don't Stop Fighting.

[B] Don't Stop Fighting? Oh, I get it. D, S, F. Donnelly, Stewart, Forbes. I love that.

[A] Tell everyone you know. If you supported Issue One last year, Don't Stop Fighting. Vote for Donnelly, Stewart, and Forbes.

[C] This message was paid for by Red, White, and Blue, a community of women who care about reproductive rights as much as you do.

 

[Erin] Eden Royce is one of my favorite short story writers ever. I had the pleasure of editing an issue of Strange Horizons that featured her story Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, which, like, just from the title, right, you're there. It joins another story of hers, the Shirley Jackson nominated Room and Board Included, Demonology Extra, and 17 other short stories in her new collection, Who Lost, I Found. So, Eden is an amazing black Gothic horror writer from South Carolina, and she brings Geechee-Gullah culture, which is the culture of the sea islands and the coastal areas of the Carolinas and Georgia into all of her work and all of her stories. They're written in ways that make you tense, but also make you feel filled with love. So, please check out the amazing Eden Royce's stories in Who Lost, I Found.

 

[DongWon] So we talked a bit about sort of the narrative rhyming in the parallel structures, the cycles. One thing that I think is super interesting… I kind of mentioned this at the beginning, but it starts with a truly awful moment and ends with a truly awful moment. These are paired in a certain way, and there's sort of an inflection point in the middle that we get somewhere that creates sort of this inversion by the end of the book. I'm wondering if people have thoughts about, like, how that structure works, some sort of end to end rather than layered?

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that you can do is introduce surprising elements, like, hello, everyone.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] For me, the thing that was interesting about that was that they hit that beat of a parent killing a child more than once. There's a point in the middle of the book which sets up, besides the beginning setting it up, there's a point in the middle of the book where she says that… In one of the Syonite's sections where she says that she would later understand why sometimes killing them was more… Was kinder than sending them to a Node Outpost.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That… When you hit the first arrival at the Node Outpost, you're like, oh, okay. Then when you get to the moment where she kills her own son at the very end, you also realize… For me, there were two things about that. One is that is… That predates the killing at the beginning.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it is only… What it does is it recontextualizes our understanding of why that death… The many, many layers of why that death was so horrible for her.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love a reveal or a twist that echoes back through the narrative you've experienced before and rewrites your understanding of all of those beats up until that moment.

[Howard] This, per the episode that we just had where we were talking about whose perspective is it anyway, why do you break up a timeline and tell a story in media res so that you can align emotional arcs differently. The emotional arcs aligned via this parallelism, via this inversion, are so much more powerful when you discover that the killing of a child that happens first… When you learn about it, and so it now re-informs your whole understanding of the thing that we opened the book with.

[Erin] I've been thinking about, like, earthquakes and epicenters and sort of as its own thematic element… I've been thinking about how… Thinking about this book and I was thinking about Ring Shout and how I would summarize them, like, in a word or two. To me, like, Ring Shout is about the power of community, and Fifth Season is about breaking the world.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I love that in some ways, this is like a seismologist, like, going back and finding where the actual break was. Where was the worst break? It's the one that we end with.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even though we start with the worst on paper, like, for the world break, we end with the worst emotional break. Like, we been sort of tracking back to it the whole time.

[DongWon] It's the reveal that Stonelore is wrong, you don't look to the center. It's not just the center, it's… The epicenter can be somewhere other than a perfect circle. Right? So the elliptical nature of these two points that create this… This sort of ovoid space of the novel. Right? I don't know, there's something about that that's really powerful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's a line in the book where she says, "This is what you must remember. The ending of one story is just the beginning of another."

[DongWon] Oof. Yeah. Right. Oh, I'm so mad at her sometimes.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Very much so. Very, very much so. And one of the things that I love about the way she is using the inversion and the parallelism is that she's… Sometimes people call this foreshadowing where you set something up. That's not exactly what the way N. K. Jemison is wielding this. Because it is the… It's, like, yes, something bad is going to happen later. But it is the recontextualization of that first element because of the bad thing that happens later. So it's not just foreshadowing, it's that that thing that is a foreshadowing becomes re-contextualized.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of the thing that happens later…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And that's that inversion, the parallelism, that's the power of that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, also, just FYI readers. You should read this book twice. Because when you read it a second time, there are layers upon layers of this kind of thing that are happening all the way through it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, I think what we were talking about in terms of rewriting itself by the end of it and being able to see all of those tricks up front. It's just an absolute master class and, on a craft perspective, you just learned so much about structure, about rhyming, about all these different things if you just go back through the text a second time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] That actually brings me to a question, which is, let's say I'm writing something and I'm not N. K. Jemison, which I'm not, like, how do I then figure out how to create this kind of, like, layered parallelism in a story? How do I rhyme narratively?

[Mary Robinette] Some of the techniques that I have been playing with, because I have the same question…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Much of it rising after reading this book the first time. But, one of the things I've been playing with is thinking about it when you go into the book, about a question that you want to ask. So, she's not… Like, rather than saying, I am going to tell a story about, you say, how does this affect? What are the ways… How does a parent feel when they have to kill a child? And then you ask that question…

[DongWon] What a question to ask.

[Mary Robinette] Right? Yes. Okay. So. But then you ask that question again and again, and that allows you to set it up. Or, like, what does it mean for a world to end? How do you define world? Is it a personal world, is it a larger world? And it's a question that she's asking over and over again, what does it mean to end a world. What does it mean to start again? And she doesn't do that much starting. Like, we see the aftereffects of the world ending. We see a little bit of the starting again for the Syonite version of her. But it's a lot of… There's a lot of endings that happen over and over again.

[DongWon] And we can see Essun starting again. It's just… There's a middle part of the start again that we don't see of her life in the Comm. But we do see her have to start again… With the knowledge that her husband killed her son, and how do we survive this season. Right?

[Mary Robinette] I guess that I feel like that is all part of the ending. I feel like that is still part of her [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled] beginnings.

[Mary Robinette] right? That's fair.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Mary Robinette, when you said foreshadowing but not really foreshadowing, I had a bit of an epiphany that I'm now going to go ahead and share. The etymology of foreshadowing is the idea that something is coming toward you and it's backlit and so its shadow arrives first. Then I immediately went to Plato's cave, the idea that the shadow is not the thing, and the idea that some of these parallelisms are foreshadowing because you are being told the shape of the thing, but not the thing in advance of the thing arriving, so that when it arrives, you realize, aaa… I was staring at it the whole time, but the light was coming from a different angle, and so I didn't recognize it.

[DongWon] This is the power of the rhyming, and this is the power of the perspectives, is every time you see the thing, you're seeing it from a different angle. So, from that parallax, you begin to understand more and more the true shape of the thing or the consequences or the context. So that repetition is adding more and more power to your encounters with the object.

[Erin] I also thing, like, circling around, thinking of circling around an object is really interesting because one of the things that I really like is we talked earlier about how you're like, why would someone break the world? And at the end, you're like, why wouldn't they?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And there is… There's something really interesting there, in that looking at the exact same action and being able to see it from all sides.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The thing that is both horrible and necessary is the same action. I think that there's something really powerful in that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. To get back to your question, Erin, about how you do that. One of the things that I want to also flag for readers is that as brilliant as this book is, and as brilliant as Nora is, this did not spring out of her head in this form. You have to do revision. That's the other way you can get this kind of parallelism and these inversions, is during the revision process.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So don't feel like setting yourself up with I'm going to be thinking about these things. You can do that. But a lot of that's going to come as you layer it through the revision process.

[DongWon] Yeah. I was literally last week working on this with an author actually, where we are breaking it back down to the outline, and looking at each of the character arcs, figuring out what needs to be here, what doesn't, and then also how to enhance the parallelism of those arcs. How do we line up certain beats? And really, taking things from act five, putting them in act one, taking things for Mac two and putting them at the end. Like, so much moving around and restructuring so that we can get that rhyming repetition rhythm going through the book that will build to a conclusion.

 

[DongWon] So, on that note, I have a little bit of homework for you that kind of builds on what Mary Robinette and I and Erin, we were all just talking about here in terms of how to do this. Right? So what I want you to do is to take a look at one of your main character's arcs. Then, try to rework another character's arc to match similar beats and structure to the first one. This can be a villain POV, this can be a love interest, this can be a traveling companion. But see if you can take the arc of one and then have that rhyming structure in the second arc. See what that adds to the overall emotional state of the book.

 

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

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-39-a-close-reading-on-tension-tying-it-all-together 

 

Key points: anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. How do you decide what to use when? Think about one thing and do that the best you can. Then go back and fix the others. Do little bits of lots of things. Ask yourself questions at the end of a try-fail cycle.  Use an inverted pyramid, to do the least rewriting. A mille-feuille of elements! Multiple threads of tension. Bake your structure as you go! Add tension in rewriting. Tension is not just conflict. Don't just add more explosions. Tension comes from caring, stakes too. That needs relationships. Relatable moments. Focus! Variation and change. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 39]

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 39]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I'm excited that... Well, I'm sad that we're winding up our whole piece on Ring Shout. But I'm excited to talk about all the things that we've been talking about over the last few weeks and figuring out how do you put it all together. We've been talking about anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. If you're writing, trying to write something as tense as Ring Shout, how do you decide which tools you're going to be using at which moment to make it work?

[choking sound]

[Howard] I'm laughing because there are so many disciplines… That as a web cartoonist I had to learn so many different disciplines and in every last one of them, I found that I knew more things than I could track at once when I was trying to do a thing. So, for me, the answer is think about one thing. Do it as best you can. Then come back and figure out where you made the mistakes in all of the other things and now try to do them.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is been such a fun module because we were able to cover some many different techniques, so many different types of things. I think P. Djèlí Clark is really virtuoso-ly demonstrating a lot of these techniques at once. So one of the things to kind of take away from it is what you want to be doing is doing little bits of lots of different things. Right? I think this kind of goes back to what we were talking about last episode in terms of how to keep something from feeling super trope-y is having that variation. You want to subvert a little bit here, you want to like deny someone a resolution here, and then you want to complete the pattern here so that we're in the rhythm of the story and your drawing us forward. Right? This really ties to a lot of the stuff we've said before, we're just framing it slightly differently in terms of try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, like all of these kind of things that help move someone through the story which we usually talk about in terms of plot, really are tension techniques. Because tension is the thing that makes a reader excited to continue reading. That's when you get that page turning effect. That's how you get the more like quote unquote transparent prose effect where it makes something more quote unquote commercial. Right? I'm going to just keep saying quote unquote around…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] All these publishing terms. But tension is so much of what like drives the story, because you can get to the emotional core of the characters, you can get to the core of the relationships, and you can set stakes in really efficient ways.

[Erin] I love what you said about try-fail cycles, because one thing I've been thinking about for myself is, like, how to incorporate all of this. Because it's one thing to read it in somebody else's work, like you were saying, Howard. It's another thing to try to put it all in yours. I was thinking if I broke my work down… A work I was still doing, into a try-fail cycle, maybe these are all questions I could be asking myself at the end of that cycle. So it's like, okay, I'm trying, like… What am I… What are the characters anticipating in this try-fail cycle? What have I resolved at the last try-fail cycle? Where am I moving towards? Instead of look for some of these moments of tension, because, sort of as you were saying, though the try and fail is a lot about the… Like, the action. But not necessarily the tension. So, thinking about what's the tension that moves that action forward, or that makes that action important, might be a cool thing for me to think about, like, when I'm trying to figure out an outline or if I've written something and I'm like, "That doesn't seem very tense. How can I add more to it?"

[Howard] I love the try-fail cycle aspect of it, because try-fail cycles are one of those things structurally that you kind of want to know early on. Because if you get them wrong, you have to do a whole lot of rewriting. I think about… Tying it all together, all of the techniques, I think about which do I need to do first in order to do the least amount of rewriting. It's kind of an inverted pyramid. Worldbuilding. For me, is the very first, especially with a historical alt history piece like this. You get something wrong, oh my goodness, the amount of rewriting that has to go on. But the amount of history that your readers are actually seeing on the page is very small compared to things like dialect, dialogue, all of those other tension techniques we've been talking about. So, for me, tying it all together is an inverted pyramid. Start with the structural things that will make the biggest mass if I get them wrong, and finish with the structural things that are like the fine grit sandpaper.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. One way to think about how to apply what you're talking about and sort of what we were talking about earlier in terms of all these techniques is I often think of a novel as a layer cake is the metaphor I use a lot. Right? Not like a three layer birthday cake, but like of mille-feuille with all these different elements. One thing I want people to think about in terms of how to keep tension rolling forward, how to keep that momentum up, is if you're resolving one thread of tension, if you're coming to the end of a pattern, make sure you have another one set up that's going to carry them forward. Right? So as you're resolving one, so… Say it's resolving her arc of understanding what happened in the barn, then underneath that you have the second arc of the broken sword. So that's going to carry you forward. As one ends, there's already rolling forward tension and momentum on another plot line. Ideally, like two or three others. Right? This is partially why what we were talking about in one of our earlier episodes about contextual tension can be so useful. Because the contextual tension is this ambient tension that pulls us through the whole book as were trying to understand how does this tie into the real world history, how does this tie into the actual plan, into the history of quote unquote the nation and all of those things.

[Erin] I also think I will say, like, as a very messy writer, I am not a great structural like planner. So I think it's also maybe, maybe not, a way to like bake your structure as you go. So I'm thinking about that opening scene where they're fighting… Let's say I was just like I want to write a scene where the clan are monsters and somebody is fighting them, and I'm going to figure out the rest once I get there. So it's like the scene has ended. Okay. They fought them. Then it's like what is left unresolved on the stage. Like, what is left? What's actually left is the next thing they do, which is the pieces. So I'm thinking, like, okay, now they've killed these things, they've got to, I assume, get out of wherever they are. Okay. That needs to be resolved. They need to, like, take the bits of monster somewhere and do something with them.

[Howard] Oh, and they gotta steal some whiskey.

[Erin] And they gotta steal some… There's always time to steal some whiskey. One of my life mottos. Not really. But then, like, by thinking about that, then it's like, okay, maybe that gets me to the next scene. Then I can figure out, okay, now I've figured out where they take the pieces. Oh, I thought up a new character, maybe that character provide some new tension. Will it be a lot jankier, and you're going to have to go… It's like a cake… You ever make those cakes where it didn't quite work out?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I mean, not frosting the heck out of it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You're like, no, no.

[DongWon] [garbled] Flat and round. Right?

[Erin] Exactly. That's all you need. So you may have to fix it in post. But I think sometimes, for me, like, I will often get stuck when I'm writing at transitions. I think a lot of times it's because I haven't figured out where the tension is going.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So it feels like you just ended a sentence with a really, like, heavy period. That sounds very odd. You just ended a sentence with a very definite ending.

[DongWon] You want to keep the flow going.

[Howard] You know what, let's keep that. And speaking of flow, should we take a break for things of the week?

[Erin] Sure, while I get myself together.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about a novella that I translated from Icelandic. Yeah, I know. Icelandic. It's a whole other story. The thing I want to talk to you about is this novella. The author, Hildur Knutsdottir, is an award-winning writer in her home country, and we met at Ice Con in 2021. I fell in love with her writing, but it wasn't available in English. The Night Guest is a creepy horror novella which starts out with a totally relatable situation. The main character goes to the doctor because she keeps waking up tired and with mystery bruises. That's not the relatable part. The relatable part is that her concerns are dismissed because she's being quote hysterical. But each night, the injuries get worse. Hildur has this beautiful spare language that manages to create dread in the seemingly most innocuous moment. I loved this book enough to translate it. Check out The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir.

 

[DongWon] Howard, I love what you're saying about thinking about how to write efficiently. How to figure out how to do the least rewriting. The one thing I do want to say on that, though, is I think tension is the thing that needs rewriting the most often. You know what, as an editor, the thing that I see the most, the feedback I give the most is, characters are great, worldbuilding is great, the plot is great, it just doesn't have enough momentum. It needs somebody to… The line I always say is it didn't pull me through the story in the way I need it to. Right? So that's always a tension critique when I give that. So what you're saying, Erin, makes a lot of sense to me too, in terms of like when you do it, you have these individual scenes, is getting the momentum and sliding from one scene to the next. Tension is how you create that elision, moving from one beat to the next beat. So figuring out how to layer that in sometimes will not be too obvious for you in the planning stages, and maybe something you find as you go. So if you're struggling with that, I don't want you to, like, worry too much about things in the outlining and planning stages. Obviously, have an eye on it, think about it. I think it can be really helpful. But it's okay if you feel like this needs a lot of rewriting to get the kind of tension in there that you want.

[Howard] You know what, I want to be clear here. When I say the least amount of work, I'm not talking about no work.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There is so much rewriting that needs to be done. But I don't want to have to take this magnificent set of layers and instead of doing some trimming, I turn a dobos torte into a dobos tortilla. There's... Okay, I only have one layer I can use. Now I gotta rebuild the whole thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] For a tension rewrite, what I prefer is to be able to say, "Oh, this chapter isn't working the way it needs to work. I will rewrite this chapter." Rather than, "Oh, this chapter doesn't even fit in this book. I have to restructure it and everything that comes after it." That's the work that I want to avoid.

 

[Erin] I think that one of the reasons… I agree with everything. But I think that one of the reasons that tension often happens in the rewriting is because tension is different than conflict. I think sometimes when we get stuck in writing, or maybe it's just me, like, the instinct might be to, like, Michael Bay it and…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Just be like more explosions! More things! More enemies! Like, and just like build it out bigger and bigger and bigger. But that doesn't necessarily make it any more tense.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's like if you're up against 50 people trying to kill you or 60 people trying to kill you, it's pretty bad either way. It's not more tense, you're pretty dead. So you have to think about a lot of times, it's small things…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] That create tension. It's emotional things, it's personal things. I think that's what I love about Ring Shout is that things that we talked about in tension, the girl, the sword, they're important, but they're not the big set pieces.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] They're not the huge battles in a lot of ways. They're the smaller moments that pull you from one big set piece to the next. I think they can be harder to find until the rewrite, because you don't know what small details you put in chapter 3 until you write it out. Then you go, oh, I mentioned a cloak. Maybe that's a source of tension that I can bring through…

 

[DongWon] I think the lesser version of the opening of this book is one that starts with the trap blowing up. Right? But he doesn't do that. He starts with a conversation. Starts with a long conversation between the key characters of the story. I think that leads to the kind of tension that's interesting. Because now we have a sense of who these people are, we're starting to care about them. Then, for me, the fight scene in the warehouse is fine until she draws the sword. Then it's like, oh, damn. This is interesting now. Right? Because that, for me… I… We talk about this a lot, but death isn't very interesting stakes. Right? Like, if the character dies, I'm sort of like, okay, characters dead, let's move on. It's how the other characters feel about the character's death that makes it hit hard. It's the sense of, like, oh, they had something to accomplish that they didn't accomplish. Because we, as people, care about other people. Right? We don't necessarily care about one thing in isolation, we care about communities and relationships. So when I say that this needs stakes, I almost always mean that this needs a relationship of some sort. To another person, to a group, even to like themselves in a certain way. An aspiration for themselves. That's the thing we're going to feel emotions about. So, that's why starting in an action scene is something that, like, I always recommend against. When you think about action scenes in general, as Erin was saying, it's not about the explosions, it's not about the cool fight scenes, it's about the intensity of emotion, it's about caring about the relationship, it's about what's the consequence of losing this fight. That consequence is in the regard of their community and their family, whatever it is.

 

[Howard] The community and family. There's a scene about… I want to say a third of the way into the book, where the community is coming together for shared meals, and we talk about the food and we talk about the music and what's happening. When a scene like that is done well, I want to eat. I am now connected. If you do something that like removes their ability to get crayfish anymore, I'm tense. Because I… Food. That's important.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] So these sorts of celebratory moments a third of the way into the book… Granted, my meta-reader is saying, "Oh, Howard, don't learn to love this food or these people or whatever else. P. Djèlí Clark is just setting you up to care about things that could be taken away." Yeah, set my meta-reader aside and just enjoy it. Because it's a lovely scene that connects me and allows the author to create stakes that matter.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Rather than, oh, no, somebody's gonna die. Oh, no, this community might fracture.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's so grounding. Like… You said food, it made me think, many of us may have been in life or death situations against multiples of people, but many have not. But we've all eaten. I would assume. Oh, boy…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So I think that a lot of times in… It makes me think about one of the challenges of fantasy and science fiction, which is that sometimes you're talking about things that we have no frame of reference for. Like, I have never been tense about a ship exploding, because I'm not on a spaceship. But I am tense about letting the people on my crew down. Or, like, disappointment is something that we understand. So I think a lot of times where I can sometimes get lost in fiction is when so much of the tension is focused on the thing that I can't ground myself into, and not enough, like you're talking about, in the relationships.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think when people hear "add more stakes," sometimes they think…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Add bigger things blowing up.

 

[DongWon] One other thing I want to add to my layer cake metaphor here…

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] And sort of what we're talking about in general is I think one of the problems with adding more explosions is you lose focus. Right? So I'm saying have lots of layers, but have one of those tensions be the focus of your scene. Right? Then as you resolve that, you shift the focus to something else. When you're just adding more noise, you lose sight of the tension, so the tension drops, actually. Right? So thing to remember is that, like, if you think about the juke joint fight scene, right, she's running around looking for her lover through all that, and the tension is coming from that, primarily. There's other elements there. Right? There's the relationship with Sadie, there's whatever's going on outside with the butcher, there's… Again, the stuff with the sword, her memories, those are all present in the scene, but the dominant note, going back to our music metaphor, the dominant theme in that is her relationship with this guy as she's coming to terms with how much she cares about him.

[Howard] You mentioned don't raise stakes like Michael Bay by blowing more things up. Funny story. I think it's the third Transformers film where they were shooting in 3D, and it was the most enjoyable and comprehensible for me. It turns out it's because the 3D tech people went to Michael Bay and said, "That thing you keep doing with the cameras? Stop it. We can't do 3D if you jiggle around a lot." So they, for technical reasons, they forced him to, as you were saying, focus our attention on something.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Which let me care about it. Which made things comprehensible.

[DongWon] Yeah. I saw an interview with George Miller the other day where he was talking about the most important thing that he learned to do, and he learned it from making Happy Feet 2…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Which he made immediately before Mad Max Fury Road, which is very funny to me. But once you spot it, you can see why it makes Mad Max so good, is he learned that you communicate who the protagonist is by what the camera is looking at. Right? So all throughout Fury Road, you will notice these scenes… You talk about, like, Michael Bay level action, a million things are happening at once, but you're always focused on a character, what that character's experiencing, thinking, and you can tell what that character feels about the other characters in the scene. Right? You can see the growing trust and affection between Max and Furiosa simply by watching how they move, how they respond to each other. Then when they start fighting in tandem, it's this beautiful moment of two people coming together for survival. So, I know we've wandered off of Ring Shout…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But think about that focus when you're thinking about how to create and maintain tension.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I also want to, just before we wrap up this episode, you were talking about music earlier also made me think about something that I've seen that happens a lot at karaoke. Which is that if you have somebody who has the most beautiful voice in the world and they start singing at the same volume and, no matter how beautiful it is, after about 30 seconds, people will stop. The thing they do where they start listening, they're like, "Wow, you can really sing," and then go back to their conversations. Because it is the change that actually makes…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] People pay attention. Our human brains are really good at taking things that there use to and screening them out. It's actually… Whole nother podcast on why that actually is unfortunate, because if you're happy, sometimes you could get really accustomed to it and start thinking you're not happy anymore, because that's what the human brain does. But it does the same thing when you're reading. So when you were talking about the one scene in her looking for her lover, that's the note of that scene. But it's not the note of the entire book.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] Because if you hit the same note over and over and over again, nothing wrong with explosions, I think the reason Michael Bay gets a lot of heat is because when you go to the same well over and over, it's like that singer holding the same note, same pitch, same timber, for 10 minutes. Eventually, you're just like, oh, got that. Now I need something new.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Speaking of something new, we have new homework for you.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I've got your homework for you this week. What I want you to do to tie this all together is to take a look at your own outline. Move one of the major conflict points in that outline into a different act. Move it forward. So, say you have the resolution of Act I. See if you can stretch that into what happens if you move that to the end of Act II. If you have something in Act IV, what happens if you move that to Act III? See how that changes the pacing, see how it changes the tension, see if moving things forward or back increases or decreases the speed of reading the book and the momentum of your story.

 

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

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-08-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-working-with-an-editor 

 

Key Points: Working with an editor or agent! First, your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team, trying to make your book a better book. What's an edit letter? There are stages of editing, starting with developmental or structural. This tends to be broad structural questions. E.g. this character arc doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the book. These are often phone conversations, not letters. Edit letters should be a compliment sandwich, starting with what is good about the book, and ending with more things that are working. When the editor asks you to do something, can you say no? Absolutely. That helps the editor or agent know what is important to you. When the editor or agent offers a suggestion, they are asking whether you can come up with a better idea. Sometimes they offer ideas that they know are not good ideas, to help you react and find a direction. Suggestions identify that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Ask questions! Sometimes "no, this is a terrible idea" shows that you are tired, and it's time to take a break. Editors and agents are people, too. Alignment comes with asking questions.

 

[Season 19, Episode 08]

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 08]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Working with an Editor.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Ali] And I'm Ali Fisher.

 

[Mary Robinette] Now, I am very excited about this episode. Let me tell you what we are about to do. I'm about to ask DongWon and Ali all of the questions that I wish I'd been able to ask an agent and an editor before I had published a novel.

[Ali] [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] We are so excited to answer these questions. I wish I could transmit from my brain all the information I know about how this process goes to every writer in the world. Because that's the whole point of this. We want them to feel comfortable coming into the process and see how it's not scary. Even though it is difficult at times, that we're all pulling for the same goal at the end of the day.

[Ali] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. I will say, one of the things that's straight off the bat, dear writers, that you should know is that your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team.

[Ali] Yes. It's true.

[Mary Robinette] You're all trying to make the same book a better book.

[Ali] Amen.

[DongWon] One of the reasons I wanted to have Ali on in particular is that we are working together on several projects at this point.

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Having a sense of Ali's perspective, but also so that you guys can hear a little bit of the working relationship between an agent and an editor working together. I think there is this idea that is the agent versus the publishing house sometimes, and that it's the author versus everybody sometimes. The more that, I think, if we can find ways that… To be clear, that we are all trying to accomplish the same thing. That doesn't mean that conflict doesn't happen, that doesn't mean that there aren't problems. But at least we're starting from a place of understanding and conversation and alignment in what our goals are.

[Ali] Yeah. Yeah. Which doesn't mean that your agent won't advocate for you when needed and it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be conflicts of sort of ideas or like [garbled thoughts on] campaign, etc. Like, that's just smart people working together. But when it comes to the book itself and especially… I don't know, overall, I think, there's no question that success of the book is a win win win for the whole team.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. So, writers, you've probably heard that at some point you're going to get something that's called an edit letter. What's an edit letter?

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Never heard of it. Sounds suspicious.

[DongWon] Sounds like to me…

[Ali] Well, DongWon, do you want to start with the types of, like letters or calls you do before I do?

[DongWon] Yes. So, I think, there are different stages of editing. Right? What we sort of think of as developmental or structural. Then, sort of like editing. What I tend to do is very much on the developmental stages. I love to be involved early in a project. Or when a submission comes to me, and it's a debut, then I'm doing a lot of structural edits working with the editor to make sure that the book is in a great place before we send it off to the publishing house. So I'm asking… I tend to be asking incredibly broad questions, like big structural questions, word count questions, of, like, can we add 20,000 words? Can we cut 30,000 words? Right? Like, that's scale of question tends to be what I'm doing. So, often times…

[Mary Robinette] Can you give some examples of what a structural question is?

[DongWon] Yeah. So, a structural question can be as much like, "Hey, I'm not sure this arc for this character is lining up with sort of the central themes of the book." Right? I'm being a little bit abstract. I'd say it more specifically of like, "This character's situation feels really disconnected with our protagonist's situation. Can we make that feel more connected, or should this be here?" Like, what are… What was your intention with writing this character into this book, and how are they tying into the rest of it? So that might be a structural question I'm asking that could affect an entire character arc, which is… A solution set could be rewriting that character's entire central conflict so that there arc ties more closely in. It could be cutting that character entirely, because we all realize that they're extraneous and were vestigial from a previous draft. Or it could be changing the central thematics of the book, because that character is actually really important and their arc is more important than the protagonist's arc, and we need to make those pull into alignment in a different way. Right? So, when I'm asking these structural questions, they are kind of that big and that broad about, like, "Hey, the pacing doesn't feel great here. The act two turn, the big reveal, isn't landing in an exciting way. This character isn't feeling like they're exciting and connected. This romance isn't working right, these 2 characters don't come together in the way that I kind of wish." So that's kind of what I'm doing at that stage. Because they're such big broad questions, and because I really do frame them as questions, not like, "Hey, do XYZ," I tend to do that is a conversation. So I'll get on the phone with the author. I know, everyone's dreaded phone call. I will have edit conversations that are 2, 3, 4 hours, sometimes. As we're really just talking through the book, like, what were you trying to do, what… How does this work? What are possible solutions? For me, those are some of the most exciting, most fun conversations I have. They're very difficult and stressful for me, and for the author, but in ways that I think are really energizing when they go well.

[Ali] Yes. So, not dis-similarly, by the time it comes to me, normally, it's in more polished condition or it is… It fits more firmly within the expectations of the types of things that the house that I work at publishes. Right? So, like, it tends to be in a state that is quite recognizable to me. Then I do a lot of the same things. I'm a different reader, different eye… A different sense of… Understanding about where the author's coming from or, probably a lot less understanding of where the authors coming from, and probably just a lot more sort of like generic reader experience. I'll ask a lot of the same questions, very high structural things. You mentioned worst-case scenario twice, and we never saw it. Which made me want to see it. So, something like that. Right? Then, all the way down to sometimes through sentence level style questions or suggestions, mostly for matching things up or, like smoothness, that kind of thing. Just, for anyone out there who's curious, I am an acquisitions editor and an editor, and not a copy editor. Bless them, because I am not nearly qualified enough to make sure a book could actually go to print. But, so a lot of the same things, a lot of the same questions. So brace yourselves, this is also a part where, I think, the agent turns into a little more handholding as someone's going back into…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Revisions after they felt like we just finished, and then we went out and the book sold, it's so exciting. So, sometimes that happens. Similarly, I also… I love and I offer a phone call as often as I possibly can because an edit letter, even though those are really fantastic, and I've also obviously found that authors with audio processing issues or who just need the time… They just need to read it, they need to think about it, and otherwise it's just not a free flow conversation. Happy to write it down. But if we get the chance to have that conversation, you avoid sort of the asynchronous issue of my assumptions running through the entire thing, whereas there can be a quick, like, "Oh, I actually intended this," and then that changes a lot of my responses. Right? So, I guess all I'm doing is sort of pitching the concept of if you can muster the confidence or the desire to get on the phone with an agent or an editor, I do think it's a really helpful thing. If you can't, that's totally fine too. Edit letters themselves look really different, editor to editor, and, for me, book to book. Sometimes it is… I go through… I have big chunks that's like character A, character B. I'll have worldbuilding questions. Then, sometimes, they're 2 pages long, and it's like bullet points of, like, this is where I cried, this is… My one big question is this. And can you add like a whole section where she's getting from here to here? Because I was desperate to know more.

[DongWon] Yeah. Sometimes they can be really brief, like you were saying, like, one or 2 pages. I think my longest edit letter, back when I was at Orbit, I think was 25 pages.

[Ali] Whoa!

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think sometimes…

[Ali] Oh, my God.

[DongWon] Hey, I know people who wrote longer letters. You ask [garbled] sometime what the longest letter she wrote was…

[Ali] No.

[DongWon] So, sometimes, like having… Sometimes you just need to dig into lots of detailed things. Especially if you're going chronologically through the book, of, like, chapter 1, Chapter 2, like, breaking things down. Depending on the writer and what they need and what kind of conversation and what kind of changes you're suggesting, sometimes, a lot of details was called for. But the long edit letter, I think, is very rare, don't let that scare you. That was something that was produced in conversation with the author, I didn't just spring that on them.

[Chuckles]

 

[DongWon] But one thing that I wanted to point out about edit letters that's really important is what I think of as the compliment sandwich. Right? Where you start your letter with talking about the things that are good about the book, and hopefully you end the letter also with reminding the author, here are the things that I liked about the book, here's the things that are working. Right? I think… I see sometimes younger editors, newer editors, skip that. I think that's a huge mistake to do so. Because it's not just… We're not just like blowing smoke and we're not just complimenting you for no reason. It is… Kind of going back to what we were talking about last episode, it's showing that we are in alignment about what your intentions with the book are. If I'm telling you, here are the things that I think are working, and you read that and say, "That isn't the book I wrote. That's not what I was trying to do." Then nothing in between that compliment section matters anymore. Right? Because I don't understand what you were trying to accomplish, so all of my critiques aren't going to land now. Right? So those alignment sections are… Perhaps as important if not more important than all the critical stuff in between. It's not just to make you feel good. It is to make sure that I understand as deeply as I can what it was you were trying to accomplish, so I can help you write the book that you meant to write. To make it the best version of the thing that you want it to. So don't skim those compliments, don't cut them, don't not give them, if you're an editor yourself. I think they're really, really important and really interesting, and very fruitful conversations come out of them.

[Ali] Also, that's… I think I flagged this in our last episode, so we share credit, but it's also where I say, like, please don't cut this. Like, I love this. Like, I might be telling you to make some sweeping changes, and this could get caught up in that, and I don't want to lose it. So those are genuinely… I find those very important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As a writer, I can also say, that now I recognize that those compliments are some of the most useful things, because it is telling you what I'm doing well, and, as writers, we are spectacularly bad at understanding what our strengths are, because those strengths are usually things that come easy to us, so we don't acknowledge them as being valuable. Having someone else recognize that allows us to be like, "Oh. Okay. So that's something I'm good at. I should look for more places where I can do the thing that I'm good at."

[Ali] Yeah. It… A lot of parts of the process to focus on what could be improved or, like, what opportunities are there that aren't here yet. So it's very important to focus on the things that are there and that are working and can be expanded, like you're saying.

[DongWon] Yeah. Again, flagging the things that, like, this is great. This made me cry. This made me laugh. Like, as you go through the manuscript, are just really helpful, because getting… Somebody telling you the stuff that doesn't work about your book over and over again for a long period of time can be quite demoralizing. We understand that. So I encourage any people who are trying to be editors or agents out there to really remember that. Even [garbled] just like have your little notes of like, "Yay, thumbs up," like, this part is so important just to make the whole process go more smoothly. Whenever I see an edit letter that's like too harsh and sometimes even sarcastic a little bit, it's like, "Uhh, this is not working, we can't do this. We gotta switch up how we're approaching this writer."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, when we come back, I will ask my 2nd question.

[Laughter]

 

[Ali] My things of the week are 2 incredible podcasts. One is called Rude Tales of Magic, and the other is called Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Both of these podcasts just so happen to feature me regularly on almost every episode. So if you like the sound of this, what's happening now, I simply must recommend Rude Tales of Magic and Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Rude Tales of Magic is mostly fantasy. It's a collaborative live-action role-playing…

[DongWon] I believe the phrase I said earlier is that it's a collaborative improvised storyteller podcast that is…

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Roughly using the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to lightly flavor the type of story that you're telling.

[Ali] Correct. Then, Oh These, Those Stars of Space is the science-fiction version of that. Also, we have so much great merch. Go to rudetalesofmagic.com/store, get a sweatshirt, and don't listen. It's entirely up to you. The sweatshirts are so soft. I'm wearing one right now. Thank you.

[DongWon] I can attest to the quality of the merch. As someone who owns some. I'm a huge fan of the podcasts myself. As you can tell, as I'm stepping all over Ali's pitch here. But, Rude Tales in particular is a really wonderful podcast if you like things like critical roll and Dimension 20, then absolutely you should check out Rude Tales. It is much more irreverent than those, but it is a group of truly hilarious comedians and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

[Ali] Yes. Thank you.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] I… As… I'm just going to flagged here for our listeners, even editors can be really bad pitching their own stuff.

[Laughter]

[Ali] What do you mean?

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Yeah.

[DongWon] I promise we're all better at talking about other people's stuff…

[Ali] I know.

[DongWon] Then our own stuff.

[Ali] That's… Other people's stuff…

[DongWon] That's why we do what we do.

[Ali] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] Anyway. All right. As we come back in, I'm going to ask another question. So, we talked about what the edit letter is. One of the things I just wanted to draw a line under is that a lot of the edit letters that I get and that you all have talked about is really about the editor asking questions rather than giving an answer to the author. It really is about the… A trust between the editor or the agent and the author. But when you're a new author, you don't necessarily know that that trust is there, and you don't know what the rules are. So they've asked you a question, they've asked if you can add more of this and more of that, can you really say no?

[Ali] [deep breath] I don't know. What do you think, DongWon?

[Chuckles]

[That's really tough]

[DongWon] No. Absolutely. Please say no. [Garbled] people say no all the time. You have to say no. It's your project, you know it better than us. Know what you… This goes back to what I was saying earlier about loving your darlings, know what you can change and what you're not willing to change. Right? Know what the things are that are untouchable to you. That's fine. We will work around that, because what we want to know is what do you care about and why have you written the book that you've written and how can we make that the best version it can be. Right? So we will constantly be poking at stuff, and you say, "No. Actually, I don't want to do that." My best case scenario is I make a suggestion of how to fix something and the author does something completely different. They do answer the question, but they just run off into the distance and come back with something wildly different. That's always more exciting than whatever stupid idea that I had.

[Chuckles]

 

[Ali] Yeah. Oh, 100%. I have a piece of text that I put at the beginning of all of the edit letters that I send to new authors that I'm working with. I really hope it gets through. This is what it says. It says, "I'm trusting you to safeguard what makes this story for you. When I offer you suggestions for changes and opportunities for deeper exploration, I'm hoping to initiate your creative process. I fully expect you to come up with better ideas than the examples and suggestions I come up with to illustrate my thinking." Because that is really how I think of it, which is, when I'm offering a suggestion, or like a directly actionable specific recommendation, I'm really saying, like, "can you think of something better, actually?"

[DongWon] I love that so much.

[Ali] This is kind of what I mean, is, really what I'm trying to say.

 

[DongWon] There's a thing that I'll do, and this sounds worse than it actually is. But there's a thing that I do sometimes where I will suggest something that I know is not a good idea because… And that the author will also recognize is not a good idea. Because then, they'll have a reaction to it. Right? When you have a reaction, now you have a direction. Right? I do this a lot with titles most clearly. I'll just start suggesting the worst titles in the world…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So that they'll bounce off of it, and in bouncing off of it, a direction is going to start to emerge, because, like, they keep running in this direction, like, "No, that's too comedic, it has to be more like this…" Then I'm like, "Okay. Now we have more information that we can start building around." So, the… When I make a suggestion about an edit, I mean, usually it is sincere of, like, what if we did this, what if we thought about it this way, but really what I'm looking for is a reaction to the suggestion, not an execution of the suggestion.

[Ali] Yes. 100%. Did you see Hannibal? The show?

[DongWon] Not that much of it. Only the first few episodes.

[Ali] Okay. Well, in the first season, there's an episode where Hannibal commits a murder in the style of a murderer…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] To show Will Graham, like, what it isn't. Like, what is actually special about that. I think about that all the time. How I'm committing bad murders to show…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] How their murders… This other murderer to try to figure out that's actually like this.

[DongWon] If you take nothing else away from this episode, please remember that we are the Hannibal to your Will Graham.

[Ali] Yes. That's all I'm saying.

[Mary Robinette] That's beautiful, and I'm making notes about being alone in a room with both of you.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] But it is… I will say that, as an author, the thing for me is, is that suggestion, for me, it identifies that there is a problem that I need to address, and the suggestion is usually wildly wrong. But the problem is usually one that's present. So, when I don't understand why a suggestion has been made, I will go back to the editor and I will ask clarifying questions.

[Ali] Beautiful.

[DongWon] Yes. I think if there's anything you truly do take a away, not joking this time, is that if you don't understand what the editor is asking you to do, or if you don't feel it's right, just ask questions. Just start a conversation.

[Ali] Yes. Please.

[DongWon] Whether it's your agent, whether it's your editor, if you feel that you cannot go to them and have a conversation about what is going well and what's not going well, then there's something that needs to be tweaked about that relationship. Because it's your book at the end of the day, and you should feel empowered to make sure that your writing the book that you want to be writing. That means asking questions, advocating for yourself, advocating for your ideas. If there is something you really care about that they're really pushing back against, then that should be at least a conversation, if not an adjustment that everyone's working around what your goal is.

[Ali] Yeah. I remind myself all the time, it's your name on the cover. Right? Nobody else that you're working with, their name's going to be on the cover. So, that's your… It is your vision, it is your job to safeguard things and to also, like, keep your ears open and be really honest with yourself if something causes friction within you. But that discomfort might settle into a realization of an opportunity. Right? So, sometimes our initial reaction can be really intense, and we thank you for your 3 day waiting period before telling us.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right. That too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, I'm going to give writers a quick moment of perspective from some of my experience. And then a tool that's extremely valuable. The first is that, with my first series, I would hit things that my editor would say, and I'd be like, "No. This is very wrong, and I'm doing this for a reason, I'm going to keep it." I only did that a couple of times, but without exception… Without exception, my editor was right, there was a problem, and that is a thing that got [garbled] in reviews, that people would say… It would get brought up. So, my editor's suggestion on how to fix it was the thing that I was objecting to. I didn't recognize that at the time. But now, when I get a suggestion and I don't agree with it, I will ask for more clarification, but I will see if I can dig into it and find a way to do something that makes me happy that addresses whatever the problem is. The other piece of that is that sometimes the reason that you are having the no, this is a terrible idea, is just because you're tired. You're feeling a little bit defensive, because your baby… Someone has come in and told you that your baby is ugly. So if you hit 3 editor notes in a row that you think are stupid, walk away from the edit letter. Go take a walk. Go do something else, you're just tired and angry.

[Ali] I mean, clear your vent. Tell them how stupid we are. Get mad. Be… It's…

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Ali] It's totally, absolutely appropriate and shows that you give a shit about your book if you're mad at… Like, suggestions that don't feel right immediately.

[DongWon] I would encourage you to do that in private.

[Ali] In private.

[DongWon] And not on Twitter or Blue Sky.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Ali] yes.

[DongWon] That is a thing that I don't recommend you do.

[Ali] Ideally in private. Rage in private. But then come back and then see what still feels bad. Or feels different.

 

[DongWon] One more thing I just want to point out that may be too obvious to bring up, but editors, agents, are people. Right? There individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, I know, we're…

[Questionable]

[DongWon] We're all just robots and… Yeah, very questionable. But have their own personality quirks, have their own modes of communication, have their own styles. Right? One thing that may be happening if you're feeling really frustrated is an editor might just have an abrasive style or a style that just doesn't vibe with you. Sometimes I will get an email from a client being like, "Hey, I got notes from this editor. Can you take a look at them and tell me what's happening here?" Sometimes the answer is, "Oh, they're missing XYZ," or sometimes I'm just like, "They just kind of talk like that, and that is rubbing you the wrong way." I've seen that both go in the too harsh and too nice directions. Right? I've seen both send up a flag for the writer. So much of this is matching personality, matching style, matching how we communicate, how we connect. Again, that alignment stuff I'm talking about, this is where it becomes really important. So, sometimes, if your editor has left or you didn't choose your editor or for whatever reason, you might be stuck with someone for a second that… And you need to find a way to work it out. But other times, it is a question of, like, make sure that you're working with someone you're excited to work with. Don't just be taking the first thing that's offered to you or the biggest number that was offered to you when you don't like the person. The connection with your team is so important to making sure that everyone is happy with the end result.

 

[Mary Robinette] So how do you get that alignment with… Between the writer and the editor on a project? Like, are there tools that are useful to make sure that everyone's actually on the same page?

[DongWon] I mean, I think it's asking questions. Right? We kind of keep coming back to the same things in certain ways, but it's that… The compliment section of the edit letter, not to sum up what's wrong, but talking about what's going right. Sometimes it's taste stuff, right, like sometimes even talking about other books, other movies, and things that you both like can be really useful, because then that gives you a shared language of, like, "Okay, we both love Hannibal. So our series [murder] like, we want it to feel more like Hannibal than we do like Scream." Right? So having that shorthand of vibes that you both are feeling can be really, really helpful to think about it.

[Ali] Yeah. Even on that… If you have that initial call with an editor who's interested in your book, you can ask mildly irrelevant questions. Obviously, nothing like to personal or inappropriate, right. Because that's probably not your business. But you can ask questions, because the more someone talks, the more they display their values and their interests and their thoughts, and, like, it's kind of just reaching out and touching someone else's mind for a little while and seeing if you like it.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Well, with that, let's segue to our homework as we try to touch the minds of our listeners.

[Ali] Yes, yes.

[Mary Robinette] Not creepy at all.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Not creepy at all.

[Ali] For my final style…

[DongWon] Exactly.

 

[DongWon] So, I have our homework this week. I would like you… Thinking about this alignment question, I would like you to take a work you haven't written, and come up with 3 questions you would ask the writer to help them clarify their intention in the text. Whether this is a project your beta reading for a friend, a short story, even like a movie that you've seen, take a piece, a story that you engaged with and really figure out what are the questions I would ask the creator of this to really help them understand better what it was that they were going for. Then, for bonus points, I want you to apply those questions to your own work in progress.

 

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

 

[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations. Also, let us know. We'd love hearing from you about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-27-framing-stories

 

Key Points: Frameworks in fiction. A podcast being recorded by a character. A story told by a character, like in Frankenstein. Beginning and ending frames. Value? A sense of verisimilitude. Tools for setting time and place. Adding tension, structure, or information. A perspective of larger movements. Signaling genre. What's the meta? Framing can constrain you, or be unnecessary! Frame stories, like prologues, must be good on their own.  Ending frames can twist our understanding. Frame stories aren't just beginning and ending bits, sometimes they are woven throughout the story. The frame can be resonant with the story. Ticking clocks, encyclopedia entries between chapters, epistolary. Frame stories are a 201 technique. Frame stories push the boundaries a little bit. They can add tragedy, horror, scale. Cartoon barbarians! 

 

[Season 18, Episode 27]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Framing Stories.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Today we want to talk about frameworks in fiction. Dark One: Forgotten, the kind of central conceit, the inspiration behind that story, is that you are not reading a book or listening to an audiobook, you are listening to a podcast being recorded by one of the characters. So it's telling a story within this very specific framing. That changes the way that it's written, it changes the way that you would interact with it, and the way that we are able to tell that story. We thought that this was a really good opportunity to talk about frameworks in fiction, because this is something that's been around for a very, very long time. There's a lot of different frameworks that you can do. For example, if you've heard the term frame story, you have probably heard it in the context of something like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Wherein the entire story is being told to you by one of the characters. There's a little bit at the beginning where they say, "Now I'm going to tell you the tale of what happened to me." Then a little bit at the end that says, "That was the story. Thank you for listening." But there's a lot of other kinds of frameworks that we can do. Before we get into specifics, let me ask the group here, what value do we get by adding a frame like this, by casting our story in some kind of different frame or format?

[Mary Robinette] So, some of it… There's two different, I think, value areas. One is the reason that people started doing frame stories in the beginning was it gives a sense of verisimilitude. It's like, "This is a travelogue of a real place, you can actually go to," Gulliver's Travels. Spoilers, you cannot go to any of those places.

[Dang it. What?]

[Mary Robinette] I know.

[Dan] We want to go to that fourth one.

[Mary Robinette] This true crime podcast, this is the thing that actually happened to this person. So it gives this sense there. The other thing is that it often will give you some narrative tools for setting up time and place. Like epistolary novels can do a lot of heavy lift, because you've got a date stamp at the top of every section. So those are two kinds of areas that they can give you. But I think there's some others.

[DongWon] I have often suggested to clients, when we're doing especially early stage structural edits, if a book feels like it needs a little bit more tension or a little bit more structure or you need a way to give readers a certain piece of information that your protagonist may not have access to, the frame story can be an incredibly useful way to do that. Right? Whether it is a piece of… Neon Yang's The Genesis of Misery has this frame story, these two unknown narrators having a conversation. That comes up two or three times in the story that A) gives us the shape of what's about to happen, so once we meet the protagonist, we get a little bit of like the arc of what's coming and also a little bit of that perspective of greater pieces moving outside of the character perspectives. So big political things sometimes. The movement of history. Technology or magic systems that are operating in the background. A frame story can let you get that information in, which lets you punch up the tension in act one and lets you really signal heavily what genre you're in, what kind of story you're telling in a way that can be hard to do when your character is just… When you're showing what your character is doing. It's a way for you to like cheat and like tell your audience a bunch of stuff in a fun, cool way. I absolutely love a frame story. I think it can be so useful at the beginning, the middle, and the end, to just punch up certain moments where the story's getting a little confusing or a little flabby.

 

[Howard] I think it's… For terminal… Terminological semantic purposes, it's important to recognize that there's a lot of ways you can talk about this. Often, the way I talk about it is just by saying what's the meta? What's the meta for Dark One: Forgotten? Well, it's a podcast. It's a podcast. That creates a framework. What's the meta for Name of the Wind? Well, it's a framed story, someone is telling a story within the context of another thing that's happening.

[DongWon] Blair Witch Project's one of the best ones of all time.

[Howard] The Blair Witch…

[DongWon] Because they went very meta and convinced a certain set of the audience that this really was a documentary. Right?

[Howard] Yes.

[DongWon] I think it… There were people I know who watch that movie, there were 12 or 13, who were genuinely confused. That just amped up the absolute terror that they felt watching the movie because they were like, "This is a real thing. This happened."

 

[Howard] I just say this to clarify, because there is a story to be told in the meta itself, that this is a podcast. When we say framing story, sometimes we just mean, "Oh, it's like Scheherazade, the Arabian Nights," but sometimes we mean, "No. There is this framework we are working within that is in media res or whatever."

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned Blair Witch, because that's one of the things I wanted to mention about horror, specifically, is that a frame like this can heighten that sense of danger, because if you are listening… Dark One: Forgotten's a good example. It is not exactly a found footage movie, but it's playing with that same idea. Right? If it had been done as an audiobook, there would always be that sense of this is a story being told to me that creates, even if it's only subconsciously, a little bit of safety. You know that if… When something bad happens, that it's only happening two characters in a story. But if even just for a second, I can trick you into forgetting this is an audiobook and make you think you're actually listening to Christine Walsh's podcast, that she's recording on her phone while being chased by a serial killer, then when something bad happens, it's happening to a real person. Because we've tricked you.

 

[Mary Robinette] There is a danger, though, that you can feel like, "Oh, I'm going to add this frame story." It can constrain you, or it's just completely unnecessary. I went back and did a reread of Where the Red Fern Grows, which for a certain population of… A certain… Like, your sixth grade teacher read it aloud to you or you had to read it. It's devastating. I went back and read it. There's a frame story on that sucker.

[DongWon] There is?

[Mary Robinette] That I have no memory of at all.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] No memory. It does nothing. There's no… It just makes the beginning and end flabby, because it's this old man talking about I saw this dog in the street and it reminds me of this dog I used to have. Then he tells where the red fern grows. Then he finishes the story and he's like, "I wonder what happened to the dog I saw in the street?" It's like, "Wha?"

[Howard] Thanks for the story, grandpa.

[Chuckles]

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, because frame stories are often used as prologues and epilogues, they get a lot of the same challenges that prologues do. Which is, they have to be good in and of themselves. It's your first interaction with this world, it your first interaction with the story. So if you're putting a frame around it, that is not just like a little thing that you dash off that's like, "Ooo, wasn't that fun?" It's like, no, that's got to do some heavy lifting. Right? So, pulling off a frame story, I think, requires real chops and real confidence in what you're doing. So, it's not… I often say that it's like added N edits, but it is… Which is often true. It's still, however, takes a lot of attention and focus to get that right. It's a thing that you should really dedicate as much time on as you're dedicating to any story opening, to any other major structural component of your story.

[Howard] One of my favorite frames… It's a half frame… Is in Larry Niven's… I think the novel is called Protector. The novel is about this guy who discovers that humans are descended from a race that had three lifetime cycles, and old age is actually immortality. There's a virus that can cause this to happen, and blah blah, and whatever. We get to the end of the story, and he says… It twists right at the end, it says, "So if you're reading this, I've infected you with the Protector virus, and you're going to become immortal. When you wake up, be fast. Because they are coming and they are angry and you need to be ready." Then it ends. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness. I want to be the sequel for that story." It was so much fun.

[Erin] I think ending frames, like where you find out, like, it was a frame all along…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Are such an interesting tool. Handmaid's Tale has like the sort of part I think everyone forgets, where it… There's like this was a research project sort of at the very end. One of my favorites is actually from Planet of the Apes, the book. Where at the very end of the novel, they're like, "This would never happen." And it's an ape family. They're like, "Humans? Talking?"

[Laughter]

[Erin] "No. Impossible." It's like so… It was kind of fun, because you're like, "Wow, it does kind of turn things on its head."

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Erin] I think that is always a [garbled]

[Howard] Well, I love how in the adapt… The movie or TV, I can't remember which one it was. Movie adaptation of that, they realized we need to do the twist… This needs to have a twist. That that twist… I don't think that twist will work. What will work? A Statue of Liberty sticking out of the beach? Sold! That's the one we all remember.

[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that those kind of closing frames can, by retextualizing part of the story, or recontextualizing, rather, they change your understanding of it. One of my favorite books of all time is The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is… It has two narrators. Some chapters are first person from the main character guy. Other chapters are third person. You find out at the very end, and I apologize for spoiling this like 40-year-old…

[What!]

[Dan] Book, that the third person chapters are all written by his granddaughter, as she is filling in the corners of his life story. It changes everything. It is so cool to have that experience that I've now ruined for you.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. One of my very favorite movies of the last few years is a film by Pedro Almodovar called Pain and Glory. There are these very artificial looking sort of… And you think it's just like memory that he's having, and again, I'm going to spoil this, I'm sorry. These very beautiful scenes of his childhood, that then turn out to be the movie that he struggling to make over the course of the film. So it's all the aging director and it's him reflecting on his childhood. Then, the final shot is really… You see the boom mic's coming in to the scene of the beautifully shot memory that he has. It just recontextualizes the whole movie. It snaps everything into focus in this way, and provides the catharsis for the character of like, yes, he managed to do the thing. We see him suffering for this whole movie, but he does make the thing that he's trying to make, and you don't realize you've been watching it all along until you get to the end. I cannot recommend that movie highly enough.

[Dan] All right. Let's pause for a moment, and when we come back, we're going to talk about different kinds of frames.

 

[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is a book that I just read that I am completely in love with. It's Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel. Katie Siegel does Tik-Tok's, and she did this Tik-Tok of a character who used to be a child detective, like an Encyclopedia Brown, a Nancy Drew, and is now a 28-year-old who doesn't do detecting anymore, but carries this baggage of everyone remembering her as a child detective. So she's adapted this into a really good murder mystery novel. It's her debut novel. It's a good murder mystery. But it's also this really compelling story about depression and friends and family and figuring out who you are. It's lovely. The character voicing is really good. I am just… I just really liked this a lot. I felt like I wanted all of these people to be my friends. It's very cozy. It's a very cozy story. So this is Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel.

 

[DongWon] We've talked about this a little bit before the break, but one of the things I want to get into sort of in this back half is the way in which you can use the frame story as a really integrated tool in the rest of your text. Right? It doesn't just have to be the thing at the beginning and the end, it can be a thing that is woven throughout your story that can change how you experience the narrative. We talked a little bit about how the final frame can sort of reflect backwards and change your understanding of what you've seen so far. But there are other cases where… The other thing about a frame story is often it lets you do direct address to your audience. It lets you do second person in a way that works really well, because it's either a letter written to somebody if it's epistolary, or sometimes it's a story being told to you. N. K. Jemison's The Best Season, this is a minor spoiler, but at some point in the book you start to realize someone is telling you this story. Then the question becomes who the hell is talking to you right now? Once you start to put the pieces together of what's actually happening, she's done this beautiful formalist thing over the course of the novel that you don't even realize is happening until you're about halfway through. So, sometimes the frame story… You don't have to be so rigid and think of it in that Frankenstein way or Lolita, where it's like here's a document that we found at the beginning, and then we'll return to it at the end. It can be a thing that's really woven throughout that changes your relationship to your reader and forces them to think about what's happening in the text in a way that like situates them as a subject in… That the story is happening to in a certain way.

[Howard] I think the first season of ABC's How to Get Away with Murder, the headliner there is Viola Davis, and she's brilliant in everything that she does. The in media res… I thought at first that, oh, this is just in media res. They begin by showing me the immediate aftermath of a murder. Looks like some college kids may have done something bad, and they're trying to cover something up. And now we go three months earlier, and they're in class. Okay. I think I know where this series is going to take me. Each episode bounces you into a different portion of the current, the just after the murder, it might be a little bit forward, it might be a little bit back. As we advance the clock of the story, three months earlier, two and a half months earlier, six weeks earlier. I watched this and every episode gave me chills, not just because it was well written and I love watching Viola Davis chew scenery, but because the form they were using was new to me. I had never seen in media res done this way. I can't yet figure out how I would do it in just prose or in comics. But I love it, and I love learning things.

[Erin] One of the things I love about that example is I think it also shows how the frame itself can be resonant with the type of story that you're trying to tell. So this is a story about getting away with something, it is about a ticking clock, it's about things compressing. Similarly, the frame itself plays with time, and plays with the clock ticking down. Another… Sometimes this works in a completely different way. I keep thinking about the sort of Encyclopedia Galactica…

[Yeah]

[Erin] Like the idea that you're like encyclopedia entries happen in between chapters, which is a form of like… A very…

[Howard] Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[Erin] A very formal frame. But it also tells you a lot about the world. This is a world with a centralized understanding of things, where people are documenting what's going on. This story that we're telling is a thing that may be documented one day. It's either very important, or, sometimes, like in Hitchhiker's Guide, very silly. You're playing off the fact that it's not the kind of story that would end up in this big encyclopedia. But it's doing something that is resonating with the story.

[DongWon] It allows you to introduce contrast in that way.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Dan] Yeah. A great example of what you're talking about, Erin, is the book, the Prestige. Where the movie is basically a cool movie with a twist, the book is an epistolary, which DongWon mentioned earlier. That's a story that is told primarily in letters or correspondence. Two people are writing letters back and forth to each other. One of the really brilliant things The Prestige does is one of the people writing the letters… Those letters are weird. There's clearly something going on, because some of the letters act one way, some of the letters don't, or they seem to have forgotten things that happened. This leads toward the same twist which I am hesitant to reveal because it's a massive spoiler. But it… Just like Erin was saying, the specific frame they have chosen allows them to tell the story in a certain way, to create a very specific feeling, lead towards a very specific moment of revelation, that wouldn't work in any other format.

[Mary Robinette] There's a wonderful book Code Name Verity which I listened to in audio. In audio, it loses one of the things that happens in the print book. Which is that the entire print book is a code. She's sending a coded message. She's a spy. So it's wonderful. It's one of the best audiobooks that I've ever heard. But that's a piece that doesn't translate over. It's an inherent part of that frame story.

[Howard] [chuckles] Yeah. We had a similar problem with the audiobook for Xtreme Dungeon Mastery second edition. Because in the physical book, there is, if you flip the pages, there's a little cartoon barbarian running and smashing things. We just could not figure out… That's not in the audiobook at all.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm so sorry.

 

[DongWon] One thing I think that is coming across in how we're talking about this is this is not really a 101 technique. This is a 201 thing. Like, doing a frame story is truly pushing the boundaries a little bit, in terms of the formal constraints of what you're doing in your text. That's not me discouraging you from trying. You absolutely should try it. But I think when you're thinking about do I want to add a frame to it, there's a lot of questions you will be thinking about of like, how is this adding tension? What am I adding in this moment? How am I using juxtaposition to create more tension, as we discussed several episodes ago? These are really opportunities for you to be very playful with time, with POV, with a sense of inevitability and dread. It's a way to introduce tragedy, it's a way to introduce horror into your story. I think that can just make things feel bigger. Right? The reason so many epic fantasies have that frame scope frame to them is it gives the sense of grandiosity, of scale, in a way that's hard to do when you're just staying in the characters perspectives. So it really works with certain genres really, really well. Crime, murder, tragedy, horror… Any of those things that are like trying to get across very specific ways of playing with expectations and dread and tension. So, something to think about as you're approaching it. I just want to encourage everyone when you start figuring out do I want to add a framework to this, really think hard about how you're going to apply it, and what techniques you're bringing to bear to make it happen.

[Mary Robinette] Also, what constraints it's going to place on you.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Because once you put that frame on, you have limited the paths that you can take. Sometimes that is like super exciting and a really good learning experience. Like, oh, can I convey this information if I do this entirely as a series of emails back and forth?

[DongWon] That's one of the reasons I generally don't like epistolary, because it locks you into such a very specific framework of back and forth. It's ironic that one of my most successful titles is entirely an epistolary novel. But I think sometimes the constraints that the frame can introduce will really bother a certain subset of your readers who are trying to logically make it work. So there are ways in which you can be playful, but do be careful about what it does to your world building.

 

[Howard] Talking about Xtreme Dungeon Mastery again, and the light came on. In the first edition, Tracy tells this story towards the end of the book about how in the room with the pillars of runes that couldn't be read, and he decided to role-play his barbarian and just smash down the nearest door, and drag the adventurers through the dungeon at high speed. It was when he learned how collaborative role-playing works. Early in his career. In the second edition, as we were preparing it and laying out the materials, I had a conversation with Tracy and I said, "What if we put that story first? Because it's early in your career, and we use it as an introduction. Then we take that barbarian and we have them smash down doors at the beginning of each chapter, and use the barbarian as a thread for the content of the whole book." That's why we put the little cartoon barbarian in the corner. Tracy loved the idea. You triggered this, DongWon, by saying, this is an expert level technique. When the first edition came out in 2009, I wasn't even able to have the idea, much less execute on it. When we did the second bit edition in 2021, 2022, Sandra and I and Tracy were able to look at things and begin editing and re-ordering material and make what might otherwise be a very dry gaming supplement about how to do stuff into a story, where the careening path of this barbarian drags you through the drier material.

[Dan] I'm really glad, DongWon, that you brought up this idea of constraints, or maybe it was Mary Robinette. The idea that once you have chosen to tell your stories in a framework, that locks you in. That can be difficult, but it also… The constraints themselves become another tool you can use. What I'm thinking of is the kind of Alias-style 72 hours earlier. Which is a framework. Right? The… If the beginning of your story is horrible thing happening or bizarre situation, how did we get into this, what's going on, and then you get 72 hours earlier, that… First of all, it allows you to start off your story with a bang, but really what's going on narratively, when this is used well, is we know this horrible thing is going to happen. We know that the character is going to get caught, or that this awful thing will happen. Then, that creates a ticking clock, it creates a sense of foreboding that you can use as a tool to play with your audience.

[Erin] Similarly, I think epistolary, one of the challenges of epistolary is that when you're writing a letter, you are presenting yourself in a specific way to the person who's reading the letter. You're not going to be getting the thoughts underneath. You're going to be trying to… Like, when you're writing an email at work, you're not going to necessarily put everything you think about your boss in that email. So if that's the conceit of the story, how do you get your seething resentment at your job…

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? Per my last email…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, but there are tools to do that. Then you can put things are… That things in your work that suggests that and suggest the tension in how do I want to present myself and what am I truly feeling. So then that becomes a tool that you can use in epistolary. So, similarly, it's both a constraint, but also something really cool that you can play with.

[DongWon] Yeah. One other thing I want to add to that is you don't have to let the framework overstay its welcome sometimes. Right? So I have a project coming up. It's still in development, but act two and three of the book are about a plague that hits the city and changes everything. Once you get to act two, everything really changes. So we had this problem in act one of how do we signal that this is coming. So what we ended up doing was introducing an epistolary component where every now and then, you would see a letter from this character who is one of the villains, a truly unpleasant person, talking about this things starting to happen and how no one was talking about it, whatever. Then, again, slight spoiler for a thing that no one has read yet, but, like, she just dies in a very comically horrible way towards the end as she gets infected with the plague after being like so scornful of everyone around her. In a way, that was like, yeah, she'd accomplished what we needed which was to signal this was coming. Her role was done. She's out. Then we can move on with the rest of the story. So you can really use a frame in very tactical ways. It doesn't have to be, again, at the beginning of the story, end of the story. It can be a thing that sort of gets you to a certain point, builds to a certain thing that you need to signal. It really solved a solution for us, or solved a problem for us, in a really just fun and elegant way.

[Dan] All right. This is been such a wonderful conversation. Let's get some homework.

 

[DongWon] So, what I would like you to do is take a thing that you have already written, either a short story, your work in progress, whatever it is. Try and add a frame story to it. Do this as a very traditional beginning and end. Add a frame, like a little prologue and a little epilogue. Then take a step back and think has adding that changed anything that happens in the middle of your story? Just experiment a little bit, play with it a little bit, and I think you will find that this is an interesting technique that you might be able to apply to this or future work.

 

[Mary Robinette] On the next episode of writing excuses That, we tackle how to make interruptions in your dialogue more believable, how to vocally furrow your eyebrows, and mumble core. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/02/17-40-questions-answers-about-structure-with-special-guest-peng-shepherd/

 

Q&A Summary:

Q: How can I avoid putting too few or too many plot threads into my story? How do I know when I have the right number of them?

A: Put them in priority order. Big overarching storyline, big B story, then... Every MICE Quotient major thread makes a story roughly half again as long. Practice. If you lose track of the plot threads while writing, there are too many threads.

Q: How do you spread the structure of a plot line over several books? How do you know when to split it structurally in order to get the right payoffs?

A: Beware publishers splitting books. Each book, and each section, needs a satisfying ending. 

Q: How do you ensure that smaller plots or smaller POVs don't make the reader lose sight of the main plot or feel like the subplot is an unwanted diversion?

A: Character attention can direct reader attention. Watch out for repetition. Make your A plot your shopping trip, and any subplots are impulse purchases that need to be attached to the shopping.

Q: What are some strategies or lines of questioning we can use to better align the character goals, the villain goals, and the overall problem of the story?

A: The character and villain goals should come into conflict. Think about why the character and villain want these things, and how those come into conflict. Often the character needs to give up the want for the need, and you need to tie that to the greater need. 

Q: Besides studying successful story structures for guidance, are there clear do's and don'ts when it comes to story structure? What are they?

A: No. Whatever works for you and keeps you writing. Watch out for characters that do what's in the outline, but it hasn't been motivated or signposted for the reader. 

Q: What methods of assembling structure do you use? 

A: 3x5 cards laid out based on plot thread elements. Cat plotting. Scrivener notecards. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 40]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Questions & Answers About Structure, with Special Guest Peng Shepherd.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We have our special guest with us, Peng Shepherd.

[Peng] Hi, everybody. I'm Peng. I'm very glad to be here.

[Mary Robinette] Remind our listeners a little bit about who you are. You did a wonderful master class with us about structure, and we wanted to bring you back to do a questions and answers. So can you just remind folks a little bit about who you are?

[Peng] Sure. I am a novelist. I am the author of The Book of M, and most recently, The Cartographers. I'm very excited to be back, because I just love… So we did the whole master class about structure, and I had said many times in many of the episodes, "I am such a structure nerd." I went away and I thought about it and I wondered, why am I such a structure nerd? I think that because I'm also a discovery writer, structure is kind of my outline in a way that an outline is an outline for an outliner. So I think I might… I depend on it the way that a plotter might depend on an outline.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] I loved the structure master class. My only regret is that I came away from it a day later with all kinds of epiphanies about microstructures, and ended up deploying brand-new techniques that I didn't even have names for through the current project, my current work in progress, as a result of having a podcast conversation where we're all supposedly knowledgeable and stuff. I just learned things and didn't say any of them into the microphone.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that listeners who listen to that podcast might remember is me having a moment where I said, "Oo, I think you just solved the next novel that I'm working on." I am pleased to report that the… That is true.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And that I did use the calendar structure. I am using the calendar structure that we talked about for The Martian Contingency. Now you might be wondering where these questions are coming from and how you can ask questions on a podcast. The answer is that we are doing this podcast live in front of the attendees of the Writing Excuses workshop and cruise.

[Cheers]

[Mary Robinette] So, these are their questions. Dan, what's our first question?

 

[Dan] Our first question is very basic, but it's something that a lot of people have. This is a common one. This comes from Corinne Flynn. How can I avoid putting too few or too many plot threads into my story? How do I know when I have the right number of them?

[Peng] That's a good question. I would advise putting them, I think, in priority order first. Because you've got to have one overarching storyline that's going to carry you through. Then there is usually a pretty big B story. Then, after that, there's not necessarily a lot of room. I mean, how many plot lines have you had in a…

[Mary Robinette] Well, it depends on the story. The thing that I… Because you all know that I talk about the MICE Quotient incessantly. But the thing that I say is that every MICE Quotient ele… Like, major thread can make a story roughly half again as long. But not every plot thread is a major plot thread. So. How do you handle it, Brandon?

[Brandon] My last Stormlight book first draft was 400… 520,000 words long. I have a lot of plot threads going on…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In one of these books. But I would say, early on, practice is just what got me there. Unfortunately, that's the answer to so many things. My first book that I tried writing when I was a brand-new baby writer, I got like 200,000 words in, and I'm like, "That feels like an ending," and then just had a fight.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Didn't resolve very much at all. I'm like, "And it's book one!" I didn't know I was writing book one, but there it is. Over time, the more I wrote, the more I came to understand what a plot thread requires from me to do it in a way that I find a satisfying narrative. That's why I can now, decades later, right 400+ thousand word books with a lot of different plot threads, because I know how much they each take.

[Mary Robinette] I just want to double check. Was that 400,000 words in addition to the five secret novels?

[Brandon] So this is the Stormlight book I released before I launched into those.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Great.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] So…

[Mary Robinette] I just wanted to know where to…

[Brandon] Sounds cooler. Each of the secret novels were between 90 and 110,000. I'm sure it's kind of the same with you folks, that as you write, you get a feel for how long a story takes you. So you're like, "I know that this one's going to be around 100,000 words," and you just launch towards that, whether you have an outline or not, and you are consistently in that same range. This is an experience thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] If I'm losing track of the plot threads while I'm writing it, then structure notwithstanding, that's too many plot threads. Maybe I'll get better at it and be able to do more, but for my own part, it's what fits in my head and works for me.

 

[Dan] All right. I want to have a follow-up question, because something Brandon just said is right in line with another one of our audience questions here. This one comes from Roy Radien. How do you spread the structure of a plot line over several books? How do you know when to split it structurally in order to get the right payoffs? Now, Brandon, you said when you first started, you just kind of stopped when you were done. But how do you know when is the best place? How do you do that now?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, I can tell when an author has done this. These days, I don't know if you've had this experience, but it happens more often when the publisher's like, "Yeah. Split this book." Then it's just… It's always unsatisfying. Okay. I say always…

[Mary Robinette] No, Brandon…

[Brandon] Mary Robinette's like, "Wait. I may have done it once."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But for me, I'm always looking at each book needs a satisfying ending, and each section of a book needs something satisfying. So when I'm building a novel, I'm asking… When I'm building a series, I'm asking what is the satisfying part of every installment. We've seen a lot of people try to launch, in movies recently, big long series where the first one wasn't satisfying. This is, I think, a huge misstep, a huge mistake, and a huge mistake I made in that first book that I tried writing, where I just kind of ended it. So, if we're talking structure, knowing what your book is trying to do, knowing what's going to make a satisfying ending, and knowing that's your primary job. Then you can start saying, "All right, these sub threads I can raise, hang a lantern on the fact that I'm not going to answer them yet, the characters are too inexperienced." Then that will be sort of the passes, the balls I'm throwing to myself to catch in a future novel.

[Mary Robinette] So the… The reason I raised my hand, like wait, was that I… Calculating Stars was originally supposed to be one book that we split into two. The reason that I knew I needed to split it into two was because I was having to jump important emotional beats…

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In order to save them for the second book, or the second part of the story, in ways that were going to be unsatisfying and frustrating.

[Brandon] Yeah. I should define that better. When it's poorly is when you turn in the book and the publisher splits it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Brandon] I've split books before, as I've been working on them. I've been like, "No, no. This is a trilogy," and expanded them. That works just fine. It's when you turn them in and the publisher's like, "No. Too long. Here's the halfway point. Now you've got two books."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because when I split mine, as you say, I had to unpack and expand.

[Dan] The most egregious example I can think of of the publisher quote unquote splitting a story partway through is the end of the second hobbit movie, which is named after Smaug, the entire thing is about Smaug, and the movie ends five minutes before they kill him, which happens in the third movie. It's shockingly incompetent.

 

[Dan] Here is another question. Once again talking about subplots and how many plots you have. This is from Sarah Hippel. How do you ensure that smaller plots or smaller POVs don't make the reader lose sight of the main plot or feel like the subplot is an unwanted diversion?

[Brandon] That is an excellent question. I would say one quick tip is character attention is something that often directs reader attention. When the characters care about it, particularly in books we can show from their viewpoint how invested they are, if you can take that character and have them spin it into the larger story in some way, this helps a ton.

[Peng] Yeah. They also have to be… I love writing multiple perspectives and I often end up with far too many. So I do have this problem where I've got like 15 people and I need about four, and I think it really is as you go back, you can see when you've got too many people, some of them are repeating each other in some way. Like they're both looking at the same thing with the same mindset. So you want… You only want that one mindset or from that one perspective or only that one person has that knowledge. So that has helped me clean it out, to make sure there's no repetition and that everyone has a reason for being there.

[Howard] I layer it and I think about it in terms of the impulse purchase on a shopping trip. The shopping trip is the A plot. The impulse purchase is the C, D, E, whatever plot. But because it is attached to the shopping trip, we haven't lost sight of things.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's take another question.

[Dan] All right. So this one comes from Daydream. What are some strategies or lines of questioning we can use to better align the character goals, the villain goals, and the overall problem of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Well, you know my favorite thing about the MICE Quotient…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Is that it helps you define kind of the process, the types of conflict that they're doing. So one of the things about a character goal and a villain goal, is that they… That these goals come into conflict. The character has the simplest possible goal, the villain has the simplest possible goal, and then their actions mess each other up.

[Peng] One of the ways I really like to think about character goals is what makes it unique, and it's usually the why. So, a character and a villain, they both want something, and they both get a cost to not achieving what they want. But it's always the reasoning behind it. Like, the mis-belief they've got about the world or about themselves that is preventing them from easily getting the want, and coming into conflict with their opposing party.

[Brandon] Yeah. On those lines, a lot of times, what the character is doing is revising their own goals as they go through the plot, mature, see what's going on. In this case, showing the character giving up the want for the need, which is kind of a classic story archetype, you are very easily able to spiral that into the need is the greater need, the narrative's need, the world's need. The character then giving up the want becomes a great tie-in to that when you do it right. That one isn't that hard, if you're looking at the scope and expanding the scope of your story through the middle.

 

[Dan] So, I want to talk a little bit more about what Howard said, of making sure that the different plots A, B, C… The impulse buys are connected to that central thread. Because of the pop cultural medium we exist in right now, superhero movies are the examples that are leaping to mind. So, for example, Amazing Spider-Man 2 brought in so many villains. None of them had anything to do with each other. They were people who were causing problems. They each had their own plans. But they were not related to each other in any meaningful way. The story of Electro did not really connect to the story of Green Goblin, etc., etc. Compare that to the Dark Knight. The Christopher Nolan one. Where we have multiple villains, the two main ones being Two Face and Joker. In that case, the writers used Two Face specifically as a linking element between the other stories. So the goal of Batman was to get Harvey Dent on his side. The goal of Joker was to ruin Harvey Dent and turn him into a monster. So they did the same thing, they had multiple villains in the story, but they were very deeply connected because the goals were so close.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are going to pause for the book of the week. We are running long for this episode because we've got so many great questions. The book of the week this week is actually my book. Whee hee! It's called The Spare Man. It's basically The Thin Man in space. So if you have not seen The Thin Man movies, they're amazing. But this is a happily married couple, their small dog, solving murder mystery on an interplanetary cruise ship, which is definitely not at all inspired by the boat that I am on right now. There's a small dog which lives because I know the rules. Banter, cocktail recipes, including [Vera approved] cocktail recipes, and did I mention murder?

[Brandon] Not of a dog.

[Mary Robinette] But not of a dog.

[Dan] Not of the dog.

[Mary Robinette] Not of a dog.

[Howard] And a conference room with really uncomfortable chairs.

[Mary Robinette] Really uncomfortable chairs.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that's The Spare Man, available from fine bookstores everywhere.

 

[Dan] All right. This question is from Dorinda. This is much more of kind of a wide-angle question. Besides studying successful story structures for guidance, are there clear do's and don'ts when it comes to story structure? I guess the follow-up, what are they?

[Howard] Two answers. Answer number one, no. Answer number two, what works for you and keeps you writing is the right answer.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, that's the very… It's the truth, right? Every… You can find an exception to every rule, except that rule.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I… Now, I can give some pitfalls for me, personally, right? Like, I can say, "Hey, here's things I've run into that my writing style… When I find that I've done something wrong." With me, that is usually comes down to me knowing what needs to happen in the outline, so the characters know what needs to happen in the outline, so the characters do what's in the outline, and that's not properly motivated and/or signposted for the reader, and a lot of times what I'm fixing after beta reads is things like this. I've kind of noticed that that's a thing that sometimes I do. It's very common for outline writers. Right? You've got… There's the joke a lot of… You see this in criticism of movies, where characters do things and the joke is, "Oh, they have the scripts, so they know what they're supposed to do." The characters know what they're supposed to do, they have the outline. That I want to avoid, and I watch out for it.

[Peng] Can I ask you a question, Brandon?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Peng] These days, how often do you ever get surprised and then deviate from the outline that you've written? Does that ever happen anymore?

[Brandon] So, surprised never happened to me. The way that my just psychology works, I'm always searching for the better answer. The outline is a guide to try to get there, that's what past Brandon, the best that past Brandon could do. Without the experience of having written the book. As I'm writing the book, I'm always saying, "What can be better?" I'm working on the next Stormlight book right now. I hit a thing where I'm like, "This just isn't good enough." Right? It just isn't good enough. So I dig back into it, and I dig deeper, and I'm like, "Let's try something else." That happens a ton. It's not that I get surprised, it's more that I get disappointed. I'm like, "No. This is… I need more." Then I dig. Once in a while, I'm like, "Oh. This is a better connection." But I don't even see it as a surprise. I see it as current Brandon can take what past Brandon did, but has more experience now, is older and wiser.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] By a few weeks. I can now change that up and go forward with something new that is going to work better.

[Dan] I do have an example. This was a question for Brandon. I'm going to answer it. I do have an example of something that surprised me. This was a book, a horror novel that I wrote a couple of years ago, which none of you have read because of this thing I'm about to tell you. I realized at some point in chapter 4, five, six, whatever it was, that it would be a much stronger story if abruptly the monster ate the love interest.

[Hah-hah-hah-hah]

[Dan] On the one hand, I was right. It was way better, it was much more interesting to turn that obvious love interest into a red herring, then he gets eaten, and then we move on. The problem that I had not properly dealt with at the time was, well, what do I do about my ending now? Because the love interest was part of the thread that was going to lead their. I didn't take the time to properly recalibrate the trajectory of the story to account for his absence which left a very unsatisfying ending. Even though he wasn't in 80% of the book.

[Brandon] I've got an answer for you after the podcast. It might be too spoilery.

[Dan] Oh, I'm excited.

[Brandon] I've seen this happen really well. [Garbled] to say, "Oo, have you thought about this?"

 

[Dan] All right. I have one more question. Okay? This one was written to me about a role-playing game that I ran earlier on the cruise. But I think we can apply it more widely. It says, "Dan Wells, after playing in one of your homebrew games, I was intrigued on how you prep or colorcode the different pieces of the game." This is something that I do when I run games in person, is, in order to streamline certain things, I take a lot of the rules of the game and a lot of the elements of character and I put them onto cards so I can just pass them out. Then that makes decision-making much easier and we get into the story much more quickly. But if we can put that into a broader question, what methods of assembling structure do you use? I've seen people on this cruise arranging Post-it notes in different orders. Mary Robinette, I know you do 3 x 5 cards that you can shuffle physically.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Different people use different methods of organizing the tools that they have so that they can see the story.

[Mary Robinette] So I am going to mention, because I can't remember if I have mentioned this on the podcast before. With the 3 x 5 cards and The Spare Man, I laid them out based on plot thread elements that I needed to include. I was re-jiggering because I had made a change about who the villain was going to be. Then my cats ran across the notecards. I looked at it and was like, "That's actually a better sequence."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, technically, part of this book is plotted by cat. Which I highly recommend is a plotting method.

[Peng] See, I would even say the opposite, because I start… I'm very visual and I like to be able to see the plot visually. I started with notecards and I also have a cat, but it didn't go that way.

[Laughter]

[Peng] It did not. So now I use Scrivener. I think, it feels to me like the same thing, because you can drag notecards around on the screen, and my cat can't type.

[Chuckles]

[Peng] So it really works for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Can't type well.

[Brandon] I want to… Yeah. My cat walked across my laptop when I was working on the Wheel of Time, and I kept the letter E. So my cat typed one letter in The Wheel of Time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When you're reading those books, you can know that it was partially cat-produced.

[Mary Robinette] So what you're learning here, dear listeners, is that if you want to be successful, you need a cat.

[Brandon] Yeah. Preferably multiples, who are trained as well as your cats, Mary Robinette. I use a Word document.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Even still. Just a single document that is my outline that I have built using my tools for outlining. No notecards, no fancy Scriveners, even though I've had a lot of people tell me that I should move to Scrivener. I believe them. I'm just old and stubborn.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Everybody's looking at me like I have a solution here. I love the cat thing because that's how natural selection and evolution works is the random introduction of mutations. If it's a mutation that is successful, then we keep it. So go team random cat.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, as Elsie would say, we are all done. So, if I can get a homework assignment?

[Peng] Yes. Your homework for today is to try writing a piece of fiction outside your usual length. So if you're a novelist, try to write a micro fiction story. If you are a short story writer, try to write a chapter or two of a novel. Something that doesn't end is long. See how the size of the idea and the length of the story influences how you end up structuring that exercise.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much for joining us.

[Peng] Thank you for having me.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Thank you to our lovely live audience for your questions.

[Cheers]

[Mary Robinette] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/03/17-14-structuring-for-disordered-or-order-less-reading-order/

 

Key Points: Stories or structures that can be read out of order? That ignore or bypass a specific order to events? Being able to read books in a series, or sections in a book, out of order, and it still works. Television episodes often do this. Although books usually still have to build. Fixup novels do this. Often there is a frame that explains why the story is told this way. Webcomics demand that each installment is understandable and rewarding enough that people want to find more. Series often require that readers be able to start with any of the books. Different characters and big time jumps can help readers with this. Make sure that at the beginning of the story or episode, the character has earned the reader's/viewer's trust, belief, admiration.

 

[Season 17, Episode 14]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes or so long.

[Peng] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Howard] And I'm not allowed to write episode titles anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I suppose I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I could be Peng.

[Howard] I'm Howard. I'm out of zoomer.

[Dan] I demand that you may or may not be Howard.

[Howard] Is that in order?

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Disordered or orderless reading order.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are books that can be read out of order. There are stories, structures that demand a specific order to events, and structures that ignore that or just bypass it. Peng, what do we mean by this? What are we talking about with orderless reading order?

[Peng] Well, there are a couple of different ways that I think we can take this. I would say that it's one of the… It's a rarer structure for sure. Because we, as readers, especially Western readers, have been conditioned to expect that you start at the beginning of the book you finish at the end of the book, or the series. So, when we say flexible orders of reading, we could mean something like reading the books in a series out of order, or, if you got books that are… Have multiple sections, you might be able to read the sections out of order. But it's basically a story in which you can read all of the pieces either in the order that's suggested by the book or in whatever order you choose and it still has to work.

[Dan] Yeah. I think it is funny that we talk about this as a rare style of storytelling. Because within books it definitely is, but that's how television was for decades. Right? Modern detective stories, something like The Killing, you have to watch those in order because there's a very large serialized story being told. But go back to the 80s. You can watch any Magnum, PI, episode out of order with no context whatsoever, and still understand what's going on. So I… It's definitely a style of storytelling that we are culturally familiar with, just not really in our prose, in our books.

[Peng] Well, I think the main difference between TV shows like that, where every episode is its own thing and you can just watch any out of order, and books that are trying to do this is that with those TV shows, they're not necessarily building towards any kind of greater narrative. It's just every self-contained episode is a half-hour of entertainment, and that's that. Whereas books that can be read out of order, or they have some kind of a flexible order of reading to them, it doesn't matter what order you do choose to read it in, it still has to build in a way that these TV shows don't necessarily. So I think that is the greatest difficulty of this form, but also a really rewarding aspect of it. Because it is very hard to pull off.

[Mary Robinette] It's a… I think it's a structure that we did… We have seen perhaps a little bit more in a type called the fixup novel. Which is where an author takes… The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, is a prime example of this. It was a collection of short stories. He put them together, then added some interstitial material to kind of stitch it together. But you can really pick up The Martian Chronicles and read a chapter without reading the rest of the book, and it's fine. There are other examples of those. Most of the ones that I'm coming up with are in the fixup novel category, which is really a collection of short stories that are masquerading as a novel. But there's one that I… I haven't tried reading it non-sequentially, but The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Ward, I think you could read it non-sequentially and still get the overwhelming sense of loss that she builds towards.

[Peng] Does that book… Does it give you instructions to read it in any order you want, or is it just something…

[Mary Robinette] No, no. It's just something that I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it. It's not a fixup novel. It's just… It is… When I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is not a three act structure or any of the other structures." Yeah, but there's no instructions that you should read it out of sequence. There are books that tell you you can read it out of sequence?

[Peng] Yeah, so there's… Oh, go ahead.

[Dan] I was just going to say I'm familiar with one called Second Paradigm by Peter Wacks that's a time travel novel that every chapter can be read out of order and the story still makes sense.

[Wow]

[Dan] You could just open it up to a random chapter, read to the end, start at the beginning and wraparound. You could read the chapters in random order, and it all still works. It's really a brilliantly constructed story.

[Peng] That's really, I think, that's another really good point to call out about this structure is that because it is not so standard, a lot of times you… The story that you're working on, it might require some kind of a frame to give your story a reason for being told that way. So, out of order or in any way and order you want to read. It sounds like the book that you just named does that, because it is a book about time travel. So the jumping, like the book itself is conscious that it can be read in that way because it is about time travel. So it provides, like, a really good reason or frame for it to exist that way.

 

[Howard] When we think about this in terms of a physical novel where you're paging through in order to read, it's often difficult to imagine, well, why would I not just go to the next page? Why would I just open it up and start in the middle? My… And I'm going to use these words completely non-ironically… Magnum opus, Schlock Mercenary, the webcomic which ran for 20 years and you can still read at schlockmercenary.com. On any given day, if you went to schlockmercenary.com, the strip that is up in front of you is the very latest event in the story. I had to make sure as I was telling the story that every installment was comprehensible enough and rewarding enough that someone would click a button that says take me to the beginning of this chapter. Take me to the beginning of this book. Just throw me to a random location in the archives and let me see if I like it. We had all of those buttons. In fact, when we put the random archive button up, I got all kinds of feedback from people who said, "You're a monster. I click that button and then I look up and I've been reading for two hours. How did you do that?" Well, I guess I didn't build the story to be read in any order, I read the story… I built the story to make sure that the first element you see, no matter where you see it, is an invitation to go find more in whatever order you care to.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have a thought on that, but I'm going to wait until after we talk about the book of the week.

 

[Peng] Ah, okay. I've got the book of the week. It's Crossings by Alex Landragin. This is one of the… This is a pretty intense example, I think, of a book with a flexible order of reading. So I'm going to try to describe it. It's… The frame of the book is… It starts in Paris, during the Nazi occupation. It's introduced by a German Jewish bookbinder who stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings, which is the title of the book itself that you're about to read. Crossings is made up of three stories. One is a ghost story written by the poet, Charles Baudelaire, I think. The second one is a second noir romance about a man who falls in love with a woman who… She draws him into this dangerous hunt for a real manuscript that might have supernatural powers. Then the third is this memoir of a woman who claims that she has been alive for seven generations or something like that. But the really innovative thing about this book, Crossings, is that after you read that introduction by the German Jewish bookbinder who says, "I found this book, Crossings, and it contains three stories," is that he gives you the option to either read it straight through, so you just read one story after the other and then get to the end, or you can alternate back and forth between the stories according to directions he gives you in the book until you end up uncovering the reason that all of these stories are together. So if you choose to follow his direction, you end up bouncing back and forth like, I don't know, 12, 15 times between all these stories, working your way through all three at once until you get to the end. It's… I mean, it's just so innovative, so creative, so unique. It's really… It's worth reading because it is amazing how each story can build on its own if you read them one at a time or when you read all three of them together, they build up to something larger, even though you were going in a really different order.

[Dan] That's so cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's like…

[Dan] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] That is really cool. I'm like, that's like a grown-up literary choose your own adventure.

[Peng] Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's…

 

[Howard] When we put together the 70 Maxims collection, there's an annotated version of it that's an in-world artifact where the book has been in the possession of four different people. They've all made their own notes in the margins. I had a spreadsheet that tracked the chronological order in which the people had the book, and the chronological order of the events that they are making notes about. But none of my spreadsheet is actually in that book. So you are holding in artifact that has a very nonlinear, very read it in any order sorts of stories written in, no lie, the handwriting of my children and a neighbor kid and Sandra in order to capture that effect. It is structurally super weird. No, it's not how I would want to tell a mystery story, but I love what we ended up making.

 

[Dan] Cool. So that was Crossings by Alex Landragin.

[Howard] Oh, sorry, I interrupted the book of the week, didn't I?

[Dan] No, everyone interrupted the book of the week. But it was super innovative and fascinating. That's okay. But. Mary Robinette, you had something you wanted to say?

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So what Howard was talking about, about how he had to make sure that when a reader lands on a new strip, that it was comprehensible and also part of a build. That is something that… For those of you who are like, "Uh-oh, nonlinear. I can't even… Uh-uh." Which is, honestly, where my brain lands when I'm thinking about this. But it is something that I think about when I'm thinking about plotting novels in a series. Because I really genuinely want anyone to be able to pick up one of my novel as their starting point. But that means that I have to think about all of the previous books as prequels. Even though I didn't write them as a prequel, I have to think about having them function as a prequel in case someone comes into the series at a different point. So I think that even if you decide that you don't want to structure an individual story or novel in this kind of read it in any sequence way, learning some of the tools can help you with your… With the overall thing. Like, The Lady Astronauts universe started with a story… The way a lot of people come into it is The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is set years after The Calculating Stars, but it was the first thing I wrote. So people will ask me, "What order should I read this in?" I'm like, "It honestly doesn't matter." You can read… You can go Lady Astronaut of Mars, Calculating Stars, Relentless Moon, Fated Sky or you can go Calculating Stars, Fated Sky, Relentless Moon, Lady Astronaut of Mars. It doesn't matter. But it took a lot of… It's basically me making decisions about what things I want to hold as an emotional… A piece of emotional oomph. And what things I don't mind being backstory. As soon as I decide that they are backstory, that means that I no longer think of them as something that I want to avoid being spoiled.

[Peng] That's a really good point about that the most important thing if you're going to approach a book or a series with… By giving it a flexible reading order, would be to hold like the emotional resonances or the theme as the most important thing, whereas the plot might not be. So I was wondering, I was going to ask you, because you said one of your books takes place 60 years after the one that comes before it, even though you wrote it first. Would you say that if you're going to attempt something like this, that having a different character for every story or having bigger time jumps between them might be a way to allow for greater flexibility, because readers might be more forgiving if the character's going to change or if there is a big time jump versus feeling like they need to go in order if it's the same character the whole time or the time jump isn't very big in between?

[Mary Robinette] That sounds right to me.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Dan] It sounds…

[Mary Robinette] I mean…

[Dan] Yeah, it sounds good, although I… In my cyberpunk series, the Cherry Dog books, the Mirador books, I specifically intended them all to be episodes and you could read them in any order. But they all take place relatively at the same time. The… I was kind of specifically aping the TV model. Right? Where the characters are all the same age, they kind of exist in a timeless space. That seemed to work fairly well.

 

[Howard] One of the things that I keep in mind is the principle of whether or not a character has earned the reader's or the viewer's love and belief at a given point in the beginning of the story. As an example, the very first episode, for me, the very first episode of The Mandelorian, the Mandelorian earns the right to be awesome without a training montage or anything. He just… He earns the right to be awesome. The first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett, Bobba Fett does not earn the right to be awesome. All he has is the name Bobba Fett and the legacy of a bazillion Star Wars things. If the first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett is your introduction to Bobba Fett, I had to ask myself, "Why am I interested in who this character is?" So that dichotomy, for me, if there's the possibility that books are going to be picked up out of order and one of my characters needs to do something that requires the earned trust, the earned belief, the earned admiration of the reader, I have to put something in there for them to earn it. It can be another character saying, "Hey, Bobba, would you mind terribly being awesome for a moment? We need you..." And then Bobba does it, and now the reader's onboard because the other character was on board. So those kinds of tricks… Every time I started a new Schlock Mercenary book… Eh, from about book 10 to about book 20, I kept that in mind. Who are my characters going to be, how do I make them earn this early on?

[Dan] I think that's probably the reason that every James Bond movie starts with the last scene of a previous one we have never seen before. Because right off the bat, they're establishing, okay, this is who the character is. This is why you like him. He is awesome. Now we're going to tell a story.

 

[Dan] Mary Robinette, you have our homework this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I actually have two homeworks for you. Because I recognize that one of them may break your brain. So, depending on how your brain works. So I'm going to give you a choice. You can do both if you want. So. Look at your current work in progress. Are there pieces of backstory that you could unpack into a sequel? For instance, as I mentioned, Calculating Stars is a prequel to Lady Astronaut of Mars. It's basically me unpacking her backstory. So is there a story that's in there for you? The second one, and this is the one that may break some of you. Take your current work in progress. Make a copy of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So that you can do this safely. If you're using Scrivener, this is going to be easy. Otherwise, however you want to do it, shuffle it. Shuffle it, and then see what bridging pieces you need to put in, what elements you need to add in to make it still make sense in that new order.

[Peng] My brain broke because that was so exciting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Peng] I'll go do that one now.

[Dan] Okay. I am excited to hear, dear listener, from those of you who attempt this shuffling thing. Because I think it could be really fascinating. So. This…

[Mary Robinette] I'm…

[Dan] Yes?

[Mary Robinette] I am going to say that this came as an exercise because of a real-life incident that I had in which my cats played across the notecards… Played a game of tag across the notecards that I was using to plot my book. When I picked them back up, I was like, "Huh. That's actually a more interesting order."

[Chuckles]

[Peng] Cats are geniuses.

[Dan] Let your cats plot your books, I guess, is…

[Howard] That's the next [garbled]

[Dan] A take away you should not have from this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 17, Episode 11]

 

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

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

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] I'm getting carried away.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Howard.

[Dan] That was Howard, by the way.

 

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

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

[Dan] I have not.

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Okay. Let's get back to our…

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

[Peng] Well, thank you.

[Dan] Absolutely.

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

 

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Wow. Because now… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Wheel of Time…

[Dan] There's a specificity to it.

[Mary Robinette] Wheel of Time is based on…

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/27/17-9-lets-talk-about-structure/

 

Key points: Beyond Freitag's Triangle, Save the Cat, Truby's 22 steps, and other overarching story frameworks, what are the specific techniques that fit into these narrative shapes? What is the writer's version of copying the masters? Sometimes you have a story, character, setting first, and then try to find a structure to fit. Other times, you have a structure or element of structure, and need to develop the other parts. Think about what is the important aspect of the story, and how can the structure enhance that. Look at what you are trying to do, and think about what structure can help bring that out.

 

[Season 17, Episode 9]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, our structured deep dive class, Episode One, Let's Talk About Structure.

[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'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We have a brand-new class starting, eight episodes, we're going to talk about structure. You've heard us talk about structure a lot, so we wanted to bring in Peng Shepherd to get her take on all of this incredible stuff. Peng, tell us about yourself.

[Peng] Well, first of all, thanks for having me. My name is Peng. I am a speculative fiction writer and the author of The Book of M, which came out in 2018, and The Cartographers, which is coming out in March.

[Dan] Well, excellent. Thank you very much. Now, we are starting today to talk about structure. This is your class and your outline. Where do you want to start in this structural discussion?

[Peng] Well, I think we should just talk about… We should just talk about structure in a kind of general way just to open this deep dive series. I also just want to say how important it is, I think. So what I really want to do with this series is go beyond the Freitag's Triangle, Save the Cat, Truby's 22 steps, these really big overarching story frameworks and look at structure much more closely as really specific techniques that can fit into these really big general narrative shapes that often get talked about. Because I think that structure at this level of detail gets overlooked a lot. We spend a lot of time as writers talking about plot and character and world building, but we don't often give structure the same level of attention. It's just something that sort of happens naturally to a lot of our stories. But I'd like to talk about ways that we can be a lot more intentional with structure as we write.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I was excited about when we were talking to you and bringing you in for this was exactly that, we tend to go back to the same things. So, two things that I wanted to say. One is that I asked Peng to come because I've been working with her for the past couple of years doing programming for the Nebula conference. When I was president, she was in charge of that with Erin Roberts and [K. M. Szpara]. So, it's really nice to have someone with this kind of breadth of knowledge of the industry. The other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is one of the reasons I was so excited about this topic, is the idea of structure in general. When we're talking about things like Freitag's triangles, Save the Cat, all of that, what we're really talking about is something in art that we call copying the masters, where you take an existing structure like what you used to do as an artist and sometimes still do is that you would take a painting and you would make an exact copy of that painting as a way to learn the techniques. Another related thing that you would do… Can do is you would take a painting and draw circles around the major elements. Then remove the original painting and put your own elements into the structures, into those circles, to kind of copy their compositional structure. I think that a lot of times what happens to us as writers is that we are constantly copying someone else's structure as a kind of reflex. It's like, "Oh. I've found Save the Cat." That works. It works every time. Except that it… The problem with that is that it gives you… The problem is something that can give you repeatable results is that you are always going to be repeating the same kind of story. So what I'm excited about with this is that we're going to be talking about a lot of different structures, which is going to really broaden the kind of story that you're going to be able to tell.

[Dan] Yeah. I… On my other podcasts that I do called Intentionally Blank, we did an episode about Encanto, the movie, which follows… Which ignores a lot of what we think of as kind of structural norms, because it is based on Latin American magic realism. Which does not follow a lot of the structures that we think of. It's been fascinating to have that conversation with a lot of people in the audience who, some people thought, "Oh, this didn't work. The ending didn't land. It's because they were expecting one thing and got another. Other people in the audience were very thrilled by seeing something that was so new and different that they hadn't seen before. A lot of that just comes from using different structural techniques. There is not one way. I do think, and I'm guilty of this myself, we often teach that the existing structure that we use is there because that's just how brains work. It isn't really. It's a cultural artifact. There are lots of different ways of doing it.

[Howard] Yeah. We talked about this at great length in the setting expectations class we did at the beginning of this year, end of last year. We talked about how when people recognize the beginning of a structure in a work that they're consuming, whether it's a movie or a book or whatever, you've set their expectations for that structure unfolding per formula through the rest of the work. If you're not seeing that structure, they will often be disappointed. It's which is what some people who saw Encanto experienced. That doesn't mean that it's wrong. It means that we haven't yet educated the audience to set expectations for a structure they've never seen before.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. A lot of structures exist for reasons that aren't… That are just kind of encoded. Like, the three act structure that we are all very familiar with, one of the things about that is when you listen to… When you really unpack what's happening with the three act structure, it's like, well, there's a beginning, and then there's a middle, and then there's an end. That's not actually all that useful when you really dig into it.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm wondering if we should actually pause for a book of the week, since I think we are about at the middle right now.

[Dan] Yeah. I think that's a good idea.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of structure.

[Dan] Let me take that one. I've got our book of the week this week, which is actually another magic realism novel called The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina by Zoraida Cordova. She's been on the show before, and she's a really wonderful author. This is the story of a magical family with Ecuadorian roots, but living in a place called Four Rivers in Oregon. The grandmother, the matriarch of the family, calls everyone together right at the beginning of the book to tell them that she is dying and they need to come and collect their inheritance. This being a magic realism novel, the inheritance is not money, it's several other things both good and bad that spin out over the course of the novel. It's told in multiple timelines, we get the modern stuff interspersed with the life of the grandmother as she grows up. The woman, Orquidea. It's a really wonderful book. I'm absolutely loving it and I recommend it very highly. It does have a very unique structure. It's not following a lot of the rules that we expect. It's very surprising and delightful to not see so many things coming. So, anyway, great book, check it out.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm particularly interested in this whole topic, and I'm about to ask Peng a question. Because I am in the process right now of working on the outline for the Martian Contingency, which is book 4 in the Lady Astronaut series. The structure which I used for Relentless Moon was the seven act structure that… Seven point plot structure that Dan teaches. It will profoundly not work for what I want to do with the Martian Contingency. I've been like trying all of these different structural ideas to try to figure out exactly what the framework is that I'm hanging the thing I want to talk about, the thing I want to explore in the story. So, Peng, what are some… When we're thinking about structure, what are some of the implications that are there for us when we start looking at how to pick one of these, a different structure than maybe one that we're used to working with?

[Peng] Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think there's two ways to come at it. Because there are some writers who probably come up with a story or a character first, and then you have to figure out what kind of structure to use, which is what it sounds like is happening for you. The story and the characters are already really, really set. Then, on the other side, you could come up with… Or just have a structure or an element of structure that you really want your work to center around, but you don't have anything else yet. It's sort of like you come up with the character first or the premise first or the setting first? So, I think… I don't know which is harder. They're both hard. If you come up with the structure first or you come up with the characters first. But I think that if you've got the seed of a story, you've got the seed of the character, and you're trying to figure out what type of structure would be best for that, you first have to ask yourself, what is the most important aspect of your story that you're trying to explore? Is it the character or the relationships between characters, for example? Because then you might want to consider structures that focus on that, like multiple timelines or multiple perspectives. Or is the thing that you're trying to emphasize most the world or your world building or the setting? In which case, you might want to focus on a structure that is built around… And we're going to talk about all these in depth in future episodes. But you can focus on a story that's built around a specific thing in your world, or stories that have footnotes. Or, if the thing that you want to focus on the most is maybe like a twist, if your whole story is built around a twist, there are different structures that lend themselves really well to that kind of reveal, more than others.

[Dan] In a lot of ways, I feel like what we're saying is similar to the episode we did last year with Amal about poetic forms. That there's lots of different forms of poetry, whether it's a Shakespearean sonnet or a sestina or something like that, and the form you choose will help guide the poem itself and the impact that it has on the reader. We often think that there's only one structure and we have to use it. That's not the case. There's lots of different ones. Like Peng was just saying, the one you choose can help draw out elements of your world building or your characters or the twist you want to focus on or things like that. They can change the pacing and the tension. I think that's a really great point to make.

[Howard] One of the things that I… And I do it instinctively at first, and then I fall back on craft when I realize I'm doing it. If I've come up with a fascinating setting or a fascinating… A location or a thing or a technology or a plot twist or a character, I will begin structuring the story I want to tell around how our understanding of that thing unfolds. If it's a character who's undergoing transformation, then… Are there beats in that transformation? Well, those beats become structural landmarks around which the story paces itself. Are we exploring a location? Well, the geography becomes kind of a map to the structure. Once I realize that I've started doing that in my head, I take a couple of steps way back and say, "All right. Does this map onto an existing structure that I know how to use? Does this map onto seven points? Does this map onto kishotenketsu? Does this map onto… What does this map onto and how can I use it?" Usually I don't catch myself soon enough, so there's lots of slop.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… I was actually just thinking about kishotenketsu, which is the first time that I really… When we… I had talked about, oh, there are other things, like the rule of three is very Western, but other places it's the rule of five, the rule of nine. But until we did the episode with Dong Won Song, where we looked… Did a deep dive into Parasite, the film, and they were talking about kishotenketsu, I hadn't really thought about what… How that worked and why that film was so satisfying. So in that structure, you have… It's a four act structure. You have interaction, ki, development, sho, twist, ten, and conclusion, tetsu. It's… It is… It's really satisfying, and one that I'm… It's the one that I've been thinking about, contemplating, for Martian Contingency. But it is this thing where there are so many options out there that it's just exciting to be talking about this.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, I… Before we end, I want to point out that this doesn't have to be a massive sweeping thing. It could be something much simpler than we're making it sound. For example, Avatar The Last Airbender, the cartoon. It is split into three seasons, each of which follows one of the major nations that's involved. We get Water, and then Earth, and then Fire in season three. That, like Howard was saying, that's just the geography of the world and the world building influencing how the story is told. So, just thinking in those terms, you can come up with, well, why did they use three seasons? How did that fit their story? Well, it allowed them to explore each of the three extant nations. The Air doesn't get one because it doesn't exist anymore. So that's… At some level, that's what we're saying. Look at what you're trying to do and see what structure is going to help bring that out.

 

[Dan] Anyway, we've gone slightly over time. So let's throw this to Peng. What is our homework for this week?

[Peng] Your homework for this week is to pick a favorite book with an interesting or unusual structure and see if you can identify how the author's chosen structure enhances some aspect of the story, whether it's the tension or the plot or character development.

[Dan] That's wonderful. Thank you very much. We will be back next week with more talk and some specifics about structure. Between now and then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.