Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-10-anticipation-is-more-than-just-making-us-wait/

 

Key Points: Forms of anticipation? Surprise, introducing an unexpected element. Suspense, delaying the action or answer. Humor, the joke is coming. Unfulfilled promises, waiting for the promised action. For anticipation, you need to know or think you know what is coming. Be careful about trying to build tension with unearned interruptions, withholding information. Inevitability, and genre tropes, can build anticipation. Subverted tropes, using the reader's expectations against them. Mix up the kinds and places of anticipation, and play them against each other. Horror and humor use the same anticipatory expectation, but horror fulfills it, while humor subverts it. Use your beta readers to check your anticipation. The twist in mystery depends on the reader anticipating something, and then you take them someplace else.

 

[Season 18, Episode 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait.

[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.

 

[Mary Robinette] So now that you've been anticipating something, let's talk about actually how this works. There's a number of different forms of anticipation that we can think about playing with. I'm going to mention four of them, but there are more. This can be anything from surprise, where you're introducing an unexpected element, suspense, where you're delaying an action or an answer, humor is often a form of anticipation where you know that a joke is coming, and then unfulfilled promises, where you… The reader is waiting for the thing that you've promised is going to happen. Like, in a previous episode, we mentioned going down the dark stairs, and you know that someone is going to jump out. You've just made that promise.

[Howard] Yeah. The title of this episode comes from the 1976 Heinz ketchup commercial where they're singing anticipation while the very slow ketchup comes out of the bottle. The whole idea being I really want to just eat the sandwich, but I have to wait for the ketchup first. Anticipation is inherently… There is an inherent tension there, and you can be anticipating something wonderful. Even the ordinary kind of wonderful like ketchup.

[Mary Robinette] That actually…

[Dan] I just want to say, an important part of anticipation is that you have to know or think you know what's coming. A very, very short version of a story I know I've told before. I was trying to teach this to a group of teen writers several years ago. I showed them the beach scene, the first beach scene in Jaws, where there's a bunch of kids out playing in the water. It is full of jump scares and all these things. It is just delicious mounting tension of which one of these kids is going to get eaten by a shark. But I, in my foolishness, forgot to tell this group of 12-year-olds that there was a shark. They didn't… They had no context for this movie whatsoever. So instead of a very tense scene, it was a really boring scene in which nobody got eaten by a shark. Without knowing that something bad was going to happen, there's no anticipation at all.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about that example is the… Is that you have to have that conversation with the reader. One of the things that I will see people do badly with anticipation is that they will hold onto a key piece of information trying to build tension by creating a mystery around it that is unnecessary. Where the reasons for interruptions are unearned. This is a… Like, this is, again, a thing that I played with a lot with Spare Man was that I would attempt to have… To create tension by having someone say, "Oh, well, the answer to your question…" Then I would use Gimlet, who is an adorable small dog, to interrupt the process. So, "The answer to your question… Is this dog allowed to have fries?" The reason that that worked was… Usually… Was that it was an earned interruption. It was an interruption that wasn't under anyone's direct control. There was also a different payoff, like that interruption was serving another function. Often, the interruption is just like someone comes by to drop a check, and they decide not to answer the question after all. That dropping the check? That is not serving any other purpose in the scene. It's not… It's an unearned, in my mind, interruption.

[DongWon] In a different way, you also used anticipation in one of the most clever ways that I've seen. Which is with the intimacy between your two leads. Right? There's this recurring sort of very funny thing where they're just trying to get a moment alone to sort of have an intimate moment, because it's their honeymoon. You're using those scenes to give us an enormous amount of exposition and information. You're having them talk through the mystery, and you're using them is what could, in other circumstances, be a very dry and boring dump, but by including this anticipatory element of like are they finally going to get to do the thing, it creates this very funny loop where you using the anticipation in this very like subtle background way that draws us into the scene and gives us a reason to care about what they're saying, while we're just like, "Can they please just make out now?" It's great.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you for noticing that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Or not. Maybe I don't want you to notice it. But, yes. But it is that thing which I think gets back to something that Dan said earlier, that anticipation, that there is an element of hope… That there is a thing that you're hoping is going to happen. I think that was Dan. It may have been Erin.

[Howard] It was Dan, and it was two episodes ago.

[Mary Robinette] Two episodes ago. Previously.

[Howard] Or, no. One episode ago. But, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Before. Someone said. I thought it was clever. But that element of hope, whether it's that there is an outcome that you're wishing for with anticipation…

 

[Dan] Now, one form of anticipation that I don't see on your list, though it arguably can be a part of suspense, is the idea of inevitability. If we have seen a character do a certain thing in a certain situation every previous time that that situation has arrived, then, all of a sudden, you can present us with that situation again, and we know what's going to happen. We know they're going to make the wrong choice or we know that they're going to kill the person. You can see this a lot in No Country for Old Men, for example. Where we suddenly find ourselves in this situation and we know what's going to happen because we've seen it happen before. That inevitability just adds so much tension into it.

[Howard] Genre also programs a measure of that inevitability into us. If you're watching a… Watching or reading a thing, and you realize, "Oh, this is sort of following Hero's Journey, and this character is the mentor… Oh, crap. I like this character and they're the mentor. Something is going to happen to them to prevent them from being useful. Oh, no." That's real. That's a thing that your readers bring to your book, even if you're not writing Hero's Journey. If you've dropped enough things that might telegraphed to the reader that it's Hero's Journey, the character they think is the mentor is the character they're expecting you to kill off. It's something that we need to be aware of any time we're writing in a genre.

[DongWon] Sometimes you can be really explicit about it. Star Wars has spent 20 years now milking anticipation as a narrative engine in all these prequel series. Right? I'm a huge fan of the cartoon Clone Wars, also known as the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. Right? We know what happens to Anakin. We spent five seasons with all these characters that we know aren't surviving this series. They are not in the movies. We know what is going to happen when Anakin becomes Darth Vader. So the tension of that series is so much in wait, there are all these characters we care about. Are they going to make it out of this? How do they make it out of this? And those questions. Andor recently was such a fascinating series because we know where Cassian Andor ends up. We know… And the entire question of the series that we're watching is, how does he become the character that we meet in Rogue One? So they're sort of using this as a loop, over and over again, to answer interesting questions that the audience has, using our anticipation, using our sense of inevitability, to give us like these little Greek tragedy structured stories. Because we have certainty about where this ends up.

 

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of inevitability and anticipation, why don't we take a pause for our thing of the week?

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Max Gladstone's Dead Country. This book is out March 7th, which should be a couple days from when you're hearing this, if you're listening to it when the episode drops. Max is returning to his most well-known and original series, the Craft sequence, with a new series of books that is telling the story of a war that is coming to the world of the Crafts. The first book starts with Dead Country. We meet Tara Abernethy, who's the hero of the first book, Three Parts Dead, returning to her home for the first time since she was chased out because she's heard the news that her father has died. So, we get to see this character that we've seen before returning home. It's this really wonderful examination of what we give up when we go out into the world, what ambition costs us, and how do we pass on the learning that we've had over the course of our lives. Dead Country kicks off a new arc in the Craft that is a much closer, tighter knit arc then we've seen Max do before. I cannot tell you how excited I am for everyone to see where he takes this universe over the next four books.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, as we're continuing this conversation about anticipation, there's… One of the other things that I particularly enjoy are subverted tropes. Where you are using the reader's expectations against them. Sometimes this is a… I will spoil a little bit… This is a thing that I used in Spare Man, when… You'll see this used a lot… Where you're like, "Aha. I think that it is this person." Then they become the act two corpse or something else happens that causes you to decide, "Oh, I guess I was wrong." Then, either they have fake their own death or they have… There's something where you subvert the reader's expectations. You use their anticipation of the ways they think it's going to go to toy with them.

[Howard] One of the best examples I can think of, just off the top of my head, is Samuel L. Jackson's St. Crispin's Day speech in 1999's Deep Blue Sea, where he is riling everybody up and saying, "Yeah, these sharks might be smart, but we're human beings, and we're…" He is ramping up to awesome, full-blown Samuel L. Jackson. Then a shark comes out of the water from behind him and eats him. Now that… I mean, it's 20 years later, we kind of expect that kind of thing. Now that it's been done a few times. But at the time, it was both hilarious and horrifying and was brilliant. So, I look for ways in which I can do something that looks like it's delivering what people are anticipating, and then twists and delivers something else that makes them laugh and makes them scream at the same time.

 

[Erin] One of the things that I love about that is that it plays with the different types of anticipation. Not in the way that Mary Robinette has set this up, but just the different strands. You can have physical… Like, the anticipation of physical pain, the anticipation of emotional change. Like, I'm going to have a breakthrough, or a relational change, we're finally going to make out. What I think is cool about that example is it's an emotional… The anticipation is of this emotional release, and then a physical thing comes in and interrupts it. So one thing that's really fun is to play around with the different types of anticipation or the different kinds of places in which anticipation can happen, then layer those in among each other.

[DongWon] Mary Robinette kind of mentioned this earlier, but I think horror and humor really rely on the same overlapping anticipatory impulse. Right? This kind of goes to what Erin was saying as well, in… There's one type of anticipation that sort of drives that flip. There's a moment in the recent reboot of Candyman. It's a tiny little moment, where one of the characters opens a cellar door and looks down a dark stairwell. We have this horror anticipation of she's going to go down there, something bad's down there, it's not going to go great. She just says, "Nope." and closes the door.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It becomes this comedy beat. It's a delightful beat. I was in a theater. We all just lost our minds at this. But it is the thing of humor can be that subverting the expectation, and horror can be about fulfilling of the expectation. The horror version is she goes down there and something bad happens to her. The humor version is she's like, "I ain't doing this. I'm out." and closes the door and walks away. So, I think how you resolve the anticipation can sort of determine what genre space you're in. But the same impulse is there in terms of the feeling we have going into that.

[Mary Robinette] The… One of the examples of how you can really use anticipation along these lines is in the Expanse, in the first episode, we meet… I think it's the first episode… But we meet a ship's captain and he has this wall of collectible cat figurines.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The main character is like, "So what's with the cat figures?" He's like, "What?" He clearly refuses to answer, there's something there. What you're anticipating is that later he's going to be… There's going to be a telling moment, a compelling moment where they… He shares why he collects the cat figures, or you're anticipating that one of them is going to be broken, and he's going to feel… The main characters going to feel really bad about having broken it. Instead… Full on spoiler… What happens is we just blow the entire ship up, and we will never get the answer to what is going on with all of those cats. But it creates this little bit of tension there that it's like here's… We're anticipating something… That these are going to be important for some reason. We're anticipating that they're Chekhov's gun, and then they are not.

[Noise]

[Mary Robinette] The other… Go on.

[Dan] If I can interrupt really quick, that's also an example of that combination of anticipation and hope. Just giving those little cat figurines humanizes that character in such a tiny but vital way that suddenly we care about this person. We care about getting the answer to that question. We find them to be more interesting than just standard captain on a doomed ship. So, when the ship blows up, we care in a way we wouldn't have without that little element.

 

[Howard] I want to call out one of my favorite go to tools for anticipation. That is the beta reader. I will ask my beta readers at the end of each chapter to tell me what is it that you are anticipating? What is it that you are dreading? What is… Tell me what you think is going on. Not so I can second-guess you and write the story so that you're wrong. I want to know if the anticipation is working. Because it's very difficult to know if it's working when the only person who's reading it is you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's very true. Which actually brings me to how you can use anticipation with a mystery. We mentioned that one of the main beats in a mystery is the twist. The twist does not work unless you have the reader anticipate something else. That's one of the things that you have to do when you're setting up the mystery is you have to build in anticipation. Then, at the twist point, you take them somewhere else. Speaking of taking us someplace else, think let's take us to our homework assignment.

 

[Howard] I can do that. Have a look at your current work in progress, and ask yourself, are there genre tropes that you can subvert? Can you payoff reader anticipation by delivering something other than what the genre you're writing in has led the reader to expect?

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/23/17-4-the-gun-on-the-mantel-is-actually-a-fish/

 

Key Points: Red herrings help make the inevitable surprising. Aim for inevitable first, build surprise second. Deconstruct shows and books that have deliberate twists to them. Drop fish into your foreshadowing to keep us distracted. Use the tricks of a stage magician, give us other things to watch. Make the red herring story significant, while the actual foreshadowing is just a small thing on the side. Include clues to support multiple endings. Beware the sudden change, and unintentional storytelling without knowing where you are going. Ambiguity can be useful! Use your context to highlight the wrong thing. Use the character that everyone likes to point the reader in the wrong direction. Synonyms, homonyms, and other misdirection. Make sure you deliver in an enticing, wonderful way.

 

[Season 17, Episode 4]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[pause]

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[chuckles]

 

[Howard] I was late with my line about who I am. Okay, last episode, we talked about foreshadowing. I described it as creating a thread which makes a surprise inevitable. This episode, we're talking about red herrings. This is where we create the thread which makes the inevitable surprising. As we said last week, aim for inevitable first, and then build the surprise second. Because if you fail at inevitable, you've got a deus ex machina and we're disappointed and bewildered and we feel llike we've been lied to. If you fail at surprise, we're like, "Oh, I saw that coming."

[Which, depending on...]

[Howard] I would much rather have the reader feel like they're smarter than me than feel like they're better than me.

[Laughter. Very true. Very, very true.]

[Howard] So. Red herrings. Let's talk… Some good examples of 'em? Where have you seen them done really well?

[Fish market. [Whisper] I'm kidding.]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mmm. So tasty.

[Kaela] You just really went for that one, Meg.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Straight in.

[I was going to give a serious answer.]

 

[Sandra] I think it's useful to look at shows or books that have a deliberate twist to them. Where… A frequently used example of this is the Sixth Sense. Where you have this twist that I can see… The kid sees dead people. Oh, our protagonist is dead is the big twist at the end, and the surprise. And yet it is the surprise that makes you want to go back and rewatch the whole movie and see how absolutely clearly inevitable it was. It was absolutely there. So much there that there are many people who saw it coming from scene one. Some people were not surprised. So you go into the movie and you deconstruct and say where… How did they mislead the majority of the audience into believing that Bruce Willis was alive and interacting with the world? They put him in scene after scene after scene where there's another human in the scene who our brains fill in the blanks, because they are sitting opposite each other in chairs. We assume that there was a part where Bruce Willis knocked on the door and came in and was welcomed and invited to sit down. We don't see any of that. So the show uses the medium and the automatic back and fill that the medium asks of the audience to get us to back and fill something that absolutely wasn't there. So the show actually is getting the audience to create their own red herrings. Which is kind of a cool and interesting thing that that particular show does. So that's one of my examples and it's fascinating to go through and figure out where was I misled.

 

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think that's a really good example, particularly leaning into the strengths of your medium to accomplish that. I think one for books was Harry Potter, the first one. I think that was one of the best, like, at least… I mean, admittedly, I was young when I read it, but I still think it holds up really well. The way that they make you think that Snape is the one who's trying to steal the Sorcerer's Stone. Because, by all means, it seems completely reasonable. Snape was the one that was muttering a curse when Harry's broom bucks around and he nearly falls off. Snape seems to hate Harry for absolutely no reason. So you're like, "Yup, I believe he's a bad guy." And, like… There's the cut on his leg after everybody runs through the troll in the dungeon. So we have pieces of evidence that imply that it is him. But when we find out that it's Quirrell, we also suddenly remember that Quirrell was in all of the scenes, that Snape was muttering the counter curse, Quirrell got knocked over by Hermoine's fire stuff, and that broke his concentration for the curse. That Quirrell had run through the dungeon, Snape headed him off, and, like, they were there with Fluffy. Like, they… We forgot Quirrell was there because we were wrapped up with a very good and reasonable explanation of Snape.

[Yeah. And…]

[Howard] The… Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, what you've described here is a pattern that has a tool built right into it. Which is, any time you are laying a piece of foreshadowing, grab a fish and drop a fish next to it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay? You want to have a red herring in there with your foreshadowing, so that the audience can be misled.

 

[Sandra] Right. We can also take a… Learn things from stage magicians. Where there's the patter and the hands that are waving because he is moving something from the table in front of him into his pocket. He does this big gesture with his opposite hand and tells a joke because he knows that the audience can only pay attention to a limited number of things at a time. Then there's also that video with the passing the basketballs and the gorilla that dances through the middle of it. Nobody sees the gorilla because we're so busy paying attention to the balls. You can do the same things in what you are creating. You can teach them, and teacher audience, okay, pay attention to the ball. Your job is to count how many times the ball is passed. When, truthfully, you're hiding the gorilla in plain sight. Meg?

[Megan] Yeah. So the idea is to give your red herring story significance while making the actual foreshadowing something that's just happening to the side or… Like, a small joke in the conversation, where we're talking about the big important thing. A show that I think does this very well is The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin. It has some of my favorite examples of long set up and payoffs for a joke in an episode. I'm going to tell you one that just happened now. The payoff won't be as good because I'm telling you the beginning and the ending right after.

[Howard] Go ahead.

[Megan] You need to imagine there's 40 minutes in between. But there's a news anchor, and he's complaining to his wardrobe assistant that, "Is there something wrong with the pants you give me? Because I keep trying to put them on, and both my legs end up in one side." The assistant's like, "You can't put your pants on, and you think there's something wrong with the pants?"

[Giggles]

[Megan] The A story of this episode is someone is here to do a hatchet job news article about the news agency. He used to date the main producer of the show before she dated the main character, the news anchor. So the reporter and the producer are having a huge argument. She is standing up for the news anchor. She's like, "You don't understand. He is a great man. I mean, he struggles with things, but he's a great man." As she says struggles with things, we see him hop into the scene, trying to put on his pants.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Then he falls over in the background. It's been a half hour since we mentioned the pants, but it just comes back at like the best moment. So… Check out The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin.

[Howard] Yeah. That's the… As a professional humorist, that sort of thing is something that I use a lot. Sandra mentioned stage magic. In the second edition of X-treme Dungeon Mastery, we call attention to the way in which surprise, for a magician… The deception with a magician there should never be a reveal. They have red herrings, but they are never going to tell you how they perform the trick. Whereas as storytellers, the deception needs to be gentler. It can't be, as we mentioned last week, can't be animating Hans having a loving, kind, totally genuine expression of love while the music cues and the lighting all say this is a good boy for her to be interested in, when in fact, he's just making a play for the kingdom. That's deceptive. We want our reveal, for storytellers, the big payoff is in the reveal. For audiences of magicians, the big payoff is I was deceived and I don't know how. I use the example… We illustrated the example in the book of the trick knife. If the magician says, "Aha, see, this is where I switched out the actual knife for a knife with a collapsing blade. You didn't see it, though, did you? But, yeah, the knife just has collapsing blades. Stab, stab, stab." Big deal. In the movie Knives Out, we are told that there is a knife that has a collapsing blade, and in the very last scene, someone attempts to commit a murder with it, and we find out that they've grabbed the wrong knife, and it is delightful. Because we get to see the trick knife.

[Kaela] Knives Out is a master.

[Howard] I just realized… Oh. Go ahead.

[Kaela] I say, Knives Out is a master class in red herrings and guns on the walls and like, seriously, like, pick it apart.

 

[Howard] So, very, very many. On the subject of red herrings, I have the book of the week. It is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. I picked this one because it is arguably the place in which red herring cemented itself in the colloquial… The jargon for a distraction. The character Vera scolds everybody for being distracted, because in the verse that applies to one of the previous character's deaths, a red herring swallowed one, and then there were three. She's saying, "A red herring's swallowed one, that clearly means Armstrong was not dead. There was a distraction here." And Then There Were None is a fine book to read. It's short and it's very tightly woven.

[Megan] In my eighth grade English class, I disagreed with the ending. I remember meeting with my teacher afterwards, because she was talking about, like, it was inevitable. This is the only way it could end. I'm like, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Megan] I wrote a different ending as to who the murderer was and what they were doing. I pointed out it could have happened this way. She's like, "Okay, Megan. It's not that deep. But good job."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Here's the thing. This is… I can't remember where I got this. I could be speaking out of class. But I have heard said that Agatha Christie often wrote these things three quarters of the way through without knowing who the murderer was herself, and then went back and made sure that the foreshadows in the red herrings all aligned and she had a proper ending in place. Which means if you… Depending on how much of the book you let yourself rewrite, yeah.

 

[Sandra] Yeah. Well, it's fascinating, the movie Clue, I don't know what year it was, but it's the Tim Curry movie Clue, which did an experiment that they actually filmed three different endings with three different murderers. Then they sent different endings to different theaters.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, theoretically, you could go see the movie in multiple different theaters and get to see the three endings. Now, in the age of streaming, they just play all three endings one after each other.

[Howard] Yeah, they've concatenated the endings and they've given the third one, they're saying, "But this is what really happened."

[Sandra] Right. But the whole thing is written so that there are clues to support every single ending. Which is valuable as a writer to deconstruct, because the vital clue for one ending is a red herring for a different ending, and so you can pull that apart.

 

[Megan] So, the writers' strike of 2002 hit a lot of shows very hard. One of the shows it hit quite hard was the procedural Bones…

[Yes]

[Megan] Which is one of my favorite shows of all time. There is a recurring murderer in the third season. Which is rare for this show. Normally, we get our guy every time they show up. But there is a recurring murderer that is a cannibalistic cultist that eats people's faces. Like the Sith, there's always a master and an apprentice. At the very end of the season, it is revealed that someone on our team is the apprentice of the murder. Even though throughout about 90% of the season, this person has been making discovery after discovery, helping us track down the murderer. So you try and rewatch that season, and there is no clear moment when this character betrays us until you can see in the writers' room that… Well, or lack of a writers' room, I'm not entirely sure how the writers' strike wrapped up the season. But…

[Chuckles]

[Megan] They had to cut the season early, and about two episodes from the end, this character starts actively working against us. But it's clear to see that that was a decision made much later on in the season, and it doesn't logically follow. So what we have earlier aren't red herring, it's just unintentional storytelling before we knew where we were going. Because you can't go back… [Garbled]

[Howard] It was the writers' phone booth, not room, because…

[Yeah]

[Howard] Phoning it in. Because… That joke would have played better if I told it sooner. What other tools do we have for creating satisfying red herrings in order to make the inevitable surprising?

 

[Kaela] I think one of the things that… You have to use this carefully, but ambiguity is a very helpful tool when depicting things. Because ambiguity is the… Or almost an objectivity. Like, this is what happened. These are the facts of what happened. But a lot of storytelling is contextualizing what has happened. So, if you can show what happened and either just leave it there as if it's not important or touch on the… Like, use your context to put only one part of it in focus, without obscuring the view of the rest of what happened, you can use that ambiguity to your advantage to get people to look at the wrong thing or to pay attention to the wrong thing. That still makes sense, but you haven't hidden anything from them. You're just leaving it ambiguous or uncommented on.

[Howard] One of the things that I try to do is take the character who is the most charismatic, the character that everybody likes the most, and have that person look at the wrong thing. The right thing is someplace else, but the person we like is looking at the wrong thing. Now, obviously, you can't do this all the time, or you're just like, "Okay. Check everything in the room that he didn't look at. That's a possible clue. That list of things will thread to the answer." But, yeah, the audience is going to follow… They're going to follow the funny, they're going to follow the cool turns of phrase, the… When I write, I try and put the funny around the wrong thing enough of the time that people mislead themselves.

[Kaela] The power of misdirection. Like you were talking about with the magician's stuff, where you're shoving the context over here. That doesn't mean that you turn out the lights on everything else and you are deceiving them, but you're like, "Hey, look at this cool thing." I love using a trusted, likable character to do that. Where you're like, "Oh, I love this character. I appreciate this character." Or even "I trust this character, they're really smart." Then, you're like, "Oh, but they didn't have all of the picture either. They didn't tell me that this thing was the answer, but I thought it was."

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] Sandra. Sorry.

[Sandra] A quick set of tools depending on what medium you're working in. If you're in a prose medium, you can use synonyms and homonyms carefully. That's a potential tool depending on what you're writing. Auditory, then you want things that sound the same but mean different things. Then visual mediums, you can do visual misdirection again. So it's all… Just another set of tools to think about. Meg?

 

[Megan] I want to kind of wrap this up by saying it's okay if the audience guesses what's coming, if you can deliver on it in a very enticing way. That's Chekhov's cauldron of hot lead is coming back. Because I had just assumed they were going to put on some red and orange lights when it's time to spill it, because we're in a small theater, we're inside. They set off fireworks inside the building.

[Gasp]

[Megan] There was just a fountain of real live sparks and fire on the stage. So I knew the scene was coming, and just didn't care. Then they delivered with an actual explosion. I was like, "Oh. I was wrong. Oh, my gosh." So, that was great. That was wonderful.

[Howard] The 1812 overture…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Done by the high school, in which the sheriff is backstage firing his shotgun into a bucket.

[Laughter. Yeah.]

 

[Howard] Sandra, I think you got this week's homework. We could keep talking and talking and talking about this. We need to get people homework.

[Sandra] Yeah. The homework is, this is a paired episode with last week's episode. So, do the reverse of last week's homework. Instead of finding a thing in the beginning and writing a scene at the end, find something that is important at the end and find a place early where you can rewrite the scene to put that on the mantle in some way. Then, maybe, take some of the tricks and tools to magician misdirect so that it's there, but it is not the focus of attention. So…

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 40.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Vs. Wide.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] I've shared this story before on Writing Excuses, but it is one of my favorite stories. I once read a review of a videogame that was an RPG game that was known for having an expansive world. The review was critical because they said, "Yes, it's really, really expansive, but it's like an ocean that's an inch deep. Every town you go to has the exact same copy-and-pasted rooms and things. There's nothing to explore. All the dungeons are exactly the same. Yeah, there's 4000 of them, but if you just copy-and-paste the same three dungeons 4000 times, then you're not exploring 4000 locations, you're going into three places 4000 times." This has stuck with me, because the more I worldbuild, the more I realize that I prefer as a writer to have depth to my worldbuilding. I ran into this policy early in my career, where I had started to get popular. I had three magic systems in the Mistborn series, and fans are starting to hear that I was working on something new, the Stormlight Archive, which was going to be big. They started asking me, "How many magic systems do you have in this one? You had three and your previous one, how many are in this one?" I would be like, "There's 30. There's 30 different magic systems." I kind of fell into this more is better sort of philosophy. When I actually started working on the book, I realized one of the things that had made the Way of Kings fail in 2002 when I tried to write it the first time was this attempt to do everything a little bit, to have 5% worldbuilding and characterization across a huge, diverse cast and a huge setting, where the book had failed because nothing had been interesting, everything had just been slightly interesting. So I want to ask the podcasters, with that lengthy introduction, what constitutes a deep story to you, specifically when you're talking about worldbuilding? What draws you to those stories, and how do you create it in your own fiction?

[Mary Robinette] For me, it's looking at causal chains, the ways things link together. A lot of times when I see something that is shallow, there is an item, but it doesn't appear to have any ripple effects, it doesn't have any effects on the rest of the world. Whereas with deep things, you can see that there's a history, and you can also see that there are consequences to having this thing in the world. When I'm teaching my students, I talked to them about, and when I'm doing it myself, I think about why. Why did this thing arise? What was the need that caused this piece of technology or magic to occur? How does it affect everyone, and what is the effect, with what effect does using it? It's not like necessarily the personal toll, but what is the effect on the society? That's the piece, for me, like looking at how it affects the society, that I feel like a lot of worldbuilders fall apart, because they think about the effect on the individual magic user, but not the connections between those things.

[Dan] So, during the time that I was writing the Mirador series, there was a cyberpunk TV show called Almost Human with Karl Urban, if you remember that one. They did that, they had this very shallow worldbuilding. I remember in one of the episodes, a guy walked by an electronic billboard in a mall, and it like read his retina or did facial recognition and knew who he was and called up his shopping history and offer him a product. I'm like, "Oh, that's a cool detail." But if they have that technology, it would be in so many other places in the city. It would enable so many other things. They didn't explore any of that. It really frustrated me. So when I started building my cyberpunk, I'm like, "Well, I can't do that with everything. I'm going to do that with… Here are three or four branches of technology's, and just drill really deep into them and try to figure out how is this going to change society?" How will the entire city feel different if all cars drive themselves, for example? Just really dig into those and try to figure out what the ramifications are.

[Howard] For me, the decision point on deep versus wide occurs after I've only gone deep on as many things as I go deep on, because I will find the one which in conjunction with the others, gives me surprising yet inevitable. Gives me all of the pieces I need for the story to unfold in a way that it's going to do the things that I want it to do. At that point, I feel like… Whatever that thing was, and whatever pieces it touched in order to function in that way, that is where the depth has to be. Everything else, I'll go wide, and, if I have more budget, all sink an extra couple of holes over here as red herrings. But for now, that's the research that needs to be done.

 

[Brandon] You bring up an important point, which is that you can't go deep on every topic. We've been talking about this concept all through the year. But this idea that sometimes you do need to touch lightly on things, basically to pitch yourself ideas that you can catch in later books or later scenes.

[Howard] I wanted to tell a joke about the history of our solar system 75 million years ago. I was wondering how old Saturn's rings were. So I started doing research. What I determined is that in 2006, Saturn's rings were as old as the solar system. In 2018, when we dove Cassini through the rings, Saturn's rings are about 100 million years old, and will probably be gone in the next 200 million. The more I looked into this, the more interesting it got. The reasoning behind, the math of all this, which I'll spare all you. At the end of that session, I had four hours of information in my head, and zero jokes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Now that's familiar.

[Howard] So, I left all of that out, because I realized, "Yeah, I totally write things about that. But it's not going to move my story forward, it's going to make people argue because it's not every… Some people know the 2006 science." I just have to give it a wide miss. The point here is that portions of my week are absolutely lost in that way. I'll research something and come away with nothing useful. But I don't get to have useful things if I don't do at least some of that research.

[Brandon] For me, where I went wrong on Stormlight Archive, looking back at it, when I first tried to write it, was I was a big fan of the Wheel of Time, which was, at that point, on its 10th book, 11th book soon to come out, I believe. I was trying to compare my series with one that had been going for 12 years.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] I wanted to jump in at the 12 year mark and say, well, this is what I love about the Wheel of Time. So I'm going to write a book that evokes those same feelings without doing the groundwork and characterization that the Wheel of Time had been doing for over a decade in order to create a really spectacular experience later in the series. What I ended up doing is, I ended up just touching lightly on all these things that I had spent my worldbuilding time on preparing. I ended up with a story that just wasn't satisfying because of that. Have you guys ever been working on a book and realized I need to do a deep dive on this one topic? What made you decide to do that, and what was it?

[Mary Robinette] I'm actually in the process of doing that right now on the Relentless Moon. One of the things that I went a little shallow on in the Fated Sky was the political situation on Earth. Because most of the book takes place on the way to Mars. Well, the Relentless Moon is a parallel novel that takes place on Earth and the moon, while Fated Sky is going on. Which means that I actually have to dig deep. In order to dig deep into the political situation on Earth, I have to do some… A deeper dive on the climatology of the planet after the asteroid strike. Because I'm like… Like, I have actually no idea as we are recording this whether or not the jetstream is still functional. Because where that asteroid strike was, it's like it may not be. I… So, I have to sit down… I've got an appointment with a… Someone who specifically does computer modeling of this kind of thing to figure out what the climate looks like. Because I didn't need to know. Now I do. It's… Yeah, it's…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Irradiation…

[Mary Robinette] Totally stalled on the novel right now.

[Howard] The secondary radiation of the regolith, the soil, the dirt, the whatever on a world where there is no magnetic field shielding you from radiation, and deep dove on this and came up with a quote from a Russian scientist who was asked, "Which one's worse on the moon, the solar radiation or secondary radiation from the regolith?" The Russian scientist said, "They are both worst."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Which means if you don't shield against one of them, you die. You have to shield against both. But again, this is a case where I was reading for four hours before I found that moment, where… For me, this is a moment where I laughed. Out loud. I'm like, "Okay. I even say that with a Russian accent." I'm not even going to put it in the book. But the idea that the dirt can be as dangerous as sunlight on a planet where there's no magnetic field… I tell jokes on that until the radioactive cows come home.

[Dan] In Partials, I am… That whole series deals with a lot of different kinds of science, but there was only one of them that was in the outline. It said, part of my thinking was, "And then Kira figures out how to cure the disease that's killing everybody."

[Laughter]

[Dan] Which meant that I had to figure out how to cure disease. Right? I could totally gloss over all the ecology, all the genetics, all the everything else, but, and I've said this before, I never want to write the sentence, "Then she did some science." So if I have my character actually using a science or a technology or a magic or whatever to solve a problem, I need to know how that works. So I did actually enough study into virology that I was later able to convince a doctor that I knew what I was talking about when my father was in the hospital. So finding out which one is key to the plot, which one hinges a whole story, that's the one I focus on.

[Howard] As a side note, writers tend to be dangerous that way.

[Dan] Yes.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and talk about Squid Empire.

[Howard] Oh, yes. Danna Staaff. Nonfiction book called Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods. Which is a discussion of… It's a… Well, it's a whole book about cephalopod evolution on Earth. The cephalopods were the first creatures to rise from the seafloor. They invented swimming. Then, at some point, fish invented jaws, and the kings of the ocean became the ocean's tastiest snack. This book walks you through all of that. If you are interested in worldbuilding, the discussion of this, just the way these things interoperate and interlock and unfold is useful. But it is also fun and beautiful.

[Brandon] Awesome. That was Squid Empire.

[Howard] Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaff.

[Brandon] Awesome.

 

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. How can you take a single culture in a say science fiction or fantasy book and build a bunch of characters who all maybe come from the same background, but all express something very different? The reason I ask this is often times I think our go-to in a fantasy or science fiction book is we're going to have this alien, and that's going to represent this, and we're going to have this fantasy race, and they're going to represent this. Or, this kingdom is the kingdom of merchants, and we're going to bring in a character from the kingdom of merchants. Where, sometimes what you end up doing is then creating a bunch of caricatures or things like this in your world. Digging deep, I found that sometimes, the best thing to force me, as a writer, to stretch and make sure I'm not making each of my races or my worlds or my settings or my kingdoms stereotypes of themselves is to say I need three characters who come from a very similar background with a very similar job who are cousins and who are all distinctive individuals, who offer something very different to the story. This has been a really good exercise for me in forcing my worldbuilding to stretch further, where I'm not just pigeonholing certain people from certain countries into certain roles in the story.

[Howard] I audition characters. I mean, I have a cast of thousands in Schlock Mercenary. I will often tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to be doing a scene. There's a side character here who is this particular race, and I haven't represented that race before. So, here are four different faces, and here are some different backgrounds, and here are some different attitudes. Which one of those… Which of these people gets to be in my story?" Then I pick one who gets to be in the story. The other three are now completely real to me. By keeping them real, by keeping those three real while the fourth is on the page, the fourth feels less like a stereotype to me. I don't know if it works for the readers, because I'm taking a comic strip.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It is actually something I think you do really well. When I pick up Schlock Mercenary, and I get different critters from all around the universe, I often… I will often associate the main character personality with that critter. Then they start acting different and I'm reminded, "Oh, wait. This is a culture of a bunch of different people who all act differently." You've actually really helped me to view this in a Good Way, Howard. So, good job.

[Dan] One thing that I am kind of, just now, really learning the depths of, is the idea that characterization is action. That who a character is has very little to do with where they come from and everything to do with what they choose and what they do. I think actually the hobbits in Lord of the Rings are a great example of this, because from a certain point of view, all four of those hobbits are the same. They're remarkably similar. But if you see one leaping recklessly into danger, it's probably Merry. If you see one screwing around and causing a problem by accident, it's probably Pippin. If you see one making a very grumpy, pragmatic choice, and planning ahead, it's probably Sam. So even though they come from the same place and they all like the same things and, given the opportunity, they will all sing a song in a bar, you know who they are, and they're all very different.

[Mary Robinette] So… I completely agree with you, that the actions are the things that we judge other people by. Since with secondary characters, we don't get to go into their heads. One of the ways that I make decisions about which character is going to do what is that I think about the axes of power, but specifically the way it affects… We've talked about axes of power on previous podcasts. But specifically, the way it reflects our self-identity. Which I find kind of breaks down into role, relationship, hierarchy, and ability. That we have… We are each driven by these things. Each person will have one of those that is kind of their primary driver. So if I have four characters that are all from the same background, then I make sure that each of them has a different primary driver. So, for instance, Elma, her primary driver is… She's very much driven by relationship and sense of duty. Whereas Nicole is very much driven by hierarchy and status. Even though they have exactly… Very similar backgrounds. They're both astronauts. They're both first… Among the first women astronauts. But they're driven by different things. Because of that, they make different choices and do different actions. So, for me, it's about the driver. That's one of the ways that I make… Differentiate… To try to make the world seem richer.

 

[Brandon] That's awesome. We are out of time. Dan, you have some homework for us?

[Dan] Yes. What I want you to do is a little bit of what I did and what I talked about earlier, writing Mirador. Is to take one thing, one kind of science or one kind of magic system, one aspect of your world, and just drill as deep into it as you can. Figure out what all of the ramifications are. I talked earlier about self driving cars. One of the recent discoveries, someone crunched the numbers and realized that it's actually much cheaper for a self driving car to putter around the city until you need it again, rather than park itself. What is that going to do to the city? What is that going to do to the traffic? When you really take the chance to look as deep as you can into one thing, you're going to find a lot of very cool story ideas you had never seen before.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/02/13-48-character-death-and-plot-armor/

 

Key points: When and why do you kill off characters? First, ask yourself what is the worst thing that could happen to your character. It may not be death. Character death should be the best move for the story, not just an easy way to make the reader feel loss. What are the consequences of the death? Do writers look at character death differently than readers and fans? Everybody hates it when you can predict a character's death. Make them care, but don't telegraph a death. "Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact." A death, like any event in a story, should be surprising yet inevitable. Set up a longer arc for the character, follow through on consequences, and make it pay off. Beware of fridging! Killing a character as inciting incident, as backstory… Make sure the dead character has a purpose beyond simply acting as motivation for the protagonist. When do you decide to give a character plot armor, because they are too important to the story to die? Consider ablative plot armor!

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 48.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Plot Armor and Character Death.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] [squeal]

[Dan] I'm okay. Don't worry.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] Well. That line… I'm okay. To kill off this season of Writing Excuses, we're going to be talking about character death. So. First question. When do you kill off characters and why?

[Mary] Chapter 6. No.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I've come back to…

[Oh, he's serious…]

[Howard] Any time I'm thinking about killing a character or threatening the reader with that as an option, I always come back to what I think Pat Rothfuss said on one of our casts years ago, which was there are so many things that are worse than death that can happen to your characters. I ask myself that question first, because I want to know that I am choosing character death because it is the best failure mode or the best success mode that this particular story can have. I can't just default to it, because I think that's the only way to move the story forward or to make the reader feel loss.

[Mary] I look at the consequences of the death, for exactly the same reason. Because the death itself, sad that that character's dead and all, but people who survive, those are the ones that I'm going to be traveling with. The consequences of that death on the plot, that… If it's just, "Oh, and then everybody's going to be really sad…" That's not a consequence. I mean, yes, that is a consequence, but that's not a unique consequence that's going to drive things, usually.

 

[Brandon] Let me ask you a follow-up on that, because it prompts something in my thoughts. Do you think we look at this differently because we're writers than readers and fans do?

[Mary] I started doing this because deaths in books as a reader annoyed me so much. It wasn't a structural thing. Because I didn't know why they annoyed me. I just… I hate reading things where I'm like, "Oh, that character's going to die." Or where they die…

[Howard] I hate reading things right can do that…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Where I can say, "Oh, they're dead."

[Dan] Where you can tell.

[Mary] I hated it when characters would die and I didn't feel anything. Because I just didn't care.

[Brandon] I would say that annoys me a lot in cinema. They do that sometimes.

[Dan] My brother and I came up with the phrase, "That character wants to live in Wyoming." Which comes straight from Hunt for Red October, where there is the one Russian officer who's like, "I would like to live in Wyoming." He's gone. You know he's dead as soon as he says that.

[Howard] Was that Sam Neill? Was that Sam Neill's character?

[Dan] Yeah. So as soon as somebody starts talking about how they're going to retire soon or they're going to go to this place, all their plans for the future… They want to live in Wyoming. It's hard, because the space that you're aiming for is in between those. You don't want to telegraph it, but you also want to make them care. Those were the two problems that you had. Finding that middle ground… This is a character I love and don't see their death coming. That's what I shoot for, basically, with most of my characters.

[Howard] But I don't want that death to feel like a cheap shot. This is one of the places where the argument for narrative-driven fiction versus fiction that feels real is often centered around that. Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact. That's probably not how I'm going to go. That's probably not how any of us are going to go. But when you look at deaths in stories, we always have… Always is the wrong word. But we very often have the narrative is shaped around that death. When it isn't, often I'm annoyed. When it is, sometimes I feel like it was too convenient. There's no pleasing me. Just stop killing your characters.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] See, I asked this question as a writer just because the thing that it prompted in my mind is how I will have people come through my line, and just really be torn up by a character death. Which, for me, this is kind of maybe seeing in my brain, I'm like, "But that was a really good death." Right? I'm like, "Why are you torn up about that?" It was… They fulfill their character arc, it came to a good conclusion, it… They sacrificed for something they believed in. This was a really good death."

[Howard] I respond… in that exact situation, my response has nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the person at the table in front of me. The person at the table in front of me is grieving, and what they need me to do is grieve with them. My response is, "I loved that character too. In fact, I may even have loved them more than you did."

[Mary] Now, see, I'm evil because my response to that is, "I am so delighted I made you cry. Thank you for telling me. I worked really hard on that."

[Dan] My usual response is, "That's why I killed the character, is because I knew you would react that way. If you wouldn't react that strongly, what's the point?"

 

[Brandon] Though, I will say… This is something that's maybe just a little pet peeve of mine. I remember… This is going to date me, it's a long time ago, but there was this TV show called 24. This had a really big cultural impact on myself and my friends when the first season came out. We watched it, riveted. In that scene… Spoilers for a 20-year-old show or whatever… The main character's wife dies. The whole plot is set up for we need to save her. He's going to save her. He's the action star. He gets there a little too late, and she's dead. I was… totally thought it was great, until I listened to the commentary, which was the wrong thing. Where they said, "Yeah, we weren't sure if we were going to kill her or not. Then we decided, well, what would the reader… Or the viewer, not expect." For me, hearing that, that is not what I wanted to hear. I did not want to hear you just said, "Well, what's going to… What's the most unexpected?" This may just be a thing for me, because that's good storytelling in some ways. But I don't want it to just be what's unexpected. I wanted to be what the story's pushing for.

[Howard] I don't want it to be unexpected. I want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. It's startling, but when you look at it in retrospect, you're like, "Nope, that's…"

[Mary] I'm really sympathetic to the, "Well, what would the readers not expect?" Especially when you are trying to decide in the moment. Because sometimes… Like, I mean, I have done things where I have plotted, planning for the character to live, and thought, "Well, maybe I will kill them. I'm not sure." It's not until I get there that I really… The story itself kind of… The shape of everything that's come up to that point makes it clear to me which choice I'm going to need to make. I have a… This is going to involve spoilers.

[Brandon] Okay. For?

[Mary] For one of my own stories.

[Brandon] Which one?

[Mary] The Worshipful Society of Glove Makers. Which is on Uncanny. I kill a character in that. I can avoid… I'll just tell you which one. I did not plan to kill that character. At all. I had planned for them to have the… We're going to try to work this out. There's… Trying to deal with the situation. The simplest solution for this problem character was to just… If they were just dead. So another character just kills them. I wrote it, and I was like [gasp]. Because sometimes you just… Sometimes you do just right things and discover it. I looked at it and I was like, "Oh. That… Huh."

[Howard] Surprising, yet inevitable.

[Mary] Because it's the simplest choice. But, because I had set up this longer arc for the character, people consistently tell me that they actually gasp out loud when they get to that death. So… That's why I'm like… I'm a little sympathetic to that.

[Dan] Well, I think the way to make that work is to follow that up. You kill a character on a whim like that, which I've totally done. But then, like you were saying in the beginning, you need to follow…

[Mary] Consequences.

[Dan] The people who survive, and follow through on the consequences, and you can totally make that pay off, even if it isn't inevitable.

[Brandon] I think it is good storytelling. It just didn't work for me, because I wanted to believe they were doing what was best for the story, not what would surprise me.

[Mary] But it worked for you until you knew their motivation.

[Brandon] It did. That's what I'm saying.

[Mary] Never asked the author why they did something!

 

[Brandon] Let's go to our book of the week.

[Howard] Ah, yes. Schlock Mercenary book 13, Random Access Memorabilia. I did two things in this book that I totally loved, and I'm totally going to spoil for you, because there's so much more going on in the book that's fun. One of them is that I killed Sgt. Schlock and brought him back from a completely… Like, from a backup. From a clone. He'd lost five days. At one point, he's watching the video of his death, and somebody says, "Are you… How do you feel about this?" He looks at her and says, "It's kind of cool." It was significant to me because one, it pulled plot armor off of everybody. I demonstrated that anybody can be killed, and can lose something. Yes, I may bring them back. Second was if this is the only consequence for death, if the reader doesn't have to mourn, how can I possibly threaten characters with death in the future? The second thing that I did was part one, part two, and part three were called Read, Write, and Execute. When part three aired, all of the computer nerds in the audience were like [choke] surprising, yet inevitable. Just by the naming of the chapters.

 

[Brandon] All right. So. Question for you. Can you kill off a character, as… Like a side character and have it provide motivation for other characters, but not simply fridge the character? Do you know what I mean by fridging?

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary] But why don't you define it? Or shall I define it?

[Brandon] I'll define fridging. Fridging comes from an old Green Lantern comic book, where Green Lantern arrives home to his house and finds his girlfriend stuffed in a fridge. Famously, without any kind of warning that this would happen. Simply to add more character to Green Lantern himself, to give him something to mourn over, to provide motivation. It's become a cliché of the comic book, and just at large, media industry, that if you want to provide motivation, for often a guy, you will then kill off a female love interest or friend, to give them something to mourn over. Yet, at the same time, we've just been talking about killing a character when it's completely unexpected, and the effect it has on the people around them. What is the difference between these two things?

[Mary] So, for me, this was the thing that I had to reverse engineer, because I was planning to kill off a character. For me, it's making sure that the character has a longer plot arc that is clear and obvious, and they're going to be fulfilling this all the way through the story. It usually involves something with the main character. Like not, "Oh, we're going to go be happy together," but "I am disagreeing with you about this thing." That there's a conflict they have with the main character. So that when you kill them off, that is left unresolved. Which is the way things happen in real life. That there's a lot of unfinished business that you have with the people who are gone. There's a whole that they leave. I think that that's one of the things that happens when a lot of these characters are fridged, is that they don't leave a hole in the plot.

[Howard] It's very, very difficult… Very difficult for… If you kill a character as your inciting incident, and that character has a close relationship with your protagonist, you're going to have to have done some miraculous writing to not be accused of having fridged that character. Because that piece as a motivation to start the story is very, very hackneyed.

[Brandon] Well, let's… 

[Howard] It's super hard to do right. I wouldn't try it. That's just the way I feel about it. At this point. And I work in comics. So.

[Brandon] You're extra sensitive to it.

[Howard] I just gotta steer away from it.

 

[Brandon] I mean, I'm going to push us on this one, just because… I do think this is totally a thing. I'm not trying to discount fridging as a cultural thing we should avoid, but at the same time, some of the best stories are told about people who wear loss as a motivation. If we look at… Just even Batman. Batman is a guy who lost his parents, and it changed him into this thing. That's like this archetypal story that has been retold and retold and we are fascinated by it. What's the difference between that and fridging? Is there a difference?

[Mary] Well, Batman, it's backstory. Which is, I think, a little different.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] The… I mean, honestly, you can fridge someone mid book. I think when… I mean… I keep feeling like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.

[Howard] That character needs to feel like they had a purpose beyond simply dying as a motivation point, as an arm bar for the protagonist, for the plot.

 

[Brandon] Okay. So, spoiler for the first Avengers film. When Agent Coulson dies and it brings the whole team together and that's like the pivotal moment of the whole thing. Agent Coulson? Not a fridge? Because he had had all these interactions with them before, or is he a fridge because he…

[Dan] Well, Coulson specifically sacrifices himself. So it's a very different situation. It's not an inert character being acted upon. It is someone making a choice.

[Brandon] So you think… That one you would say… That was a [big point]

[Howard] Well, Nick Fury even… Nick Fury knows that he needed something to pull these characters together, and so… To pull the heroes together. So he dials up the emotional impact by throwing the bloody trading cards at Capt. America. Coulson never did get you to sign these, did he? He staged that. He went and got them out of Coulson's locker, and made them bloody. So, yes, you can argue that this is fridging, but you could also argue that it wasn't because Fury… Fury didn't want this to happen. He used it. He used whatever he had to turn the team into a team.

[Mary] But Coulson is also an example of how you can give a character a sense of a life outside. I've pointed to this in previous podcasts. The scene when he's getting off the elevator with Pepper and he's… And she's like, "Are you still dating that cellist?" That's just… It's like, "Oh. There is this whole other life to this character." Whereas most of the time, you're like, "What can I tell… What can you tell me about the character who's been fridged? They really, really loved the main character so much. They just loved them."

[Howard] One of the reasons that Coulson works so well is that Stark really just does see him as… "Why are you calling him Phil? His first name is Agent." Then we come around to Ironman facing off against Loki and saying, "And there's one more person you upset. His name was Phil." We realize that yes, he liked… He had come to recognize that Agent Coulson, Phil Coulson, had a life that Tony Stark was now wishing had continued.

[Mary] This is an example… Thank you for bringing that up. This is an example of that thing I was talking about, about making sure that the… There is a conflict point that the dying character has with the main character. Because it looks like the arc that they're setting up is Ironman learning to recognize the puny ordinary people. Which is actually an arc that Ironman goes on. It's just Phil is not there at the end of it.

 

[Brandon] I appreciate you guys letting me push you on this one. It is something that I'm really interested in. So thanks for putting up with me on it. I do want to ask just a different question. We have very little time left. I want to ask when do you decide to do the opposite and give plot armor? This is the phrase where we say a character is too important to die in the story right now. They haven't fulfilled their plot arc. I'm going to prevent them from dying. I'm going to rescue them in some narrative way from the consequences of their choices. When do you do this? Why do you do this? Mary's wincing, so maybe she does…

[Mary] I haven't done that. I haven't done that yet.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, I did that in book 15. Lieut. Sorlie, who I had kind of planned for her to sacrifice herself heroically. I got to the end of the story and realized nothing she can do at this point will seem more heroic than what she has already done. The death would be a downer, and it doesn't need to be a downer. That's… I don't need that sacrifice in this story. So… She lived.

[Brandon] I've done it before. I have a character that their story isn't done and I feel it will be less sat… More satisfying to rescue them and continue their story than it would be to let them die there with unresolved major plot things. But I don't always make that choice. It's always a really hard one.

[Dan] Well, Howard touched on this earlier, but there is so many things that are worse than death. So if I find myself in this situation, I'm not going to kill that character, but I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to make them live through something, or experience something, or maybe even they get off scot free and all their friends are dead because they are the only one that lived through whatever it was. So that there are still consequences for the scene. They don't get off scot free.

[Howard] That's ablative plot armor.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Something hits them, it explodes outward…

 

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt instead of some homework this time. A good old classic Writing Excuses writing prompt. I've been thinking a lot about the story Mary talked about last month, where she had the people… The alien race where they went through a kind of butterfly-like transformation at the end of their lives and lost all of their memories and had to be reminded of them. I thought this is an interesting take on death. That a story where the characters die, but don't die. So your writing prompt is that. Do something where, perhaps fantastical, perhaps not, one of your main characters is going to go through a major transformation that is going to feel like death to those around them, but they're not actually dying. Write that story. See how it goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.